skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This wasn't a threat -- "you'd better stop supporting SOPA or we'll move our domains".

That's fairly useless, because the damage is already done (and anything they put now in a press release is obviously -- even to senators -- just GoDaddy's PR folks "managing" those excitable internet users and their cause du jour (secret: say whatever you have to today, let it blow over, and go back to business as usual next month).

Instead, it's more worthwhile to watch the history of decisions, lobbying, etc. by a company, and avoid them as needed based on that. A company can change, to be sure, but not through vague press releases -- only through building up new history.
2011 Redux
Also consider that their listing on Amazon has been flooded with "bad" reviews
On a related note, does anybody here use Gandi's VPS services? The pricing seems interesting but I don't know how reliable they are.
[In London at least, not sure about other places] Ranges from 20 to 40 mins of ads and trailers, although I've only heard of people complaining about the upper extreme and never personally experienced it.

Simple way out is to walk in to the cinema hall about 15 mins after the scheduled start of the movie - works for me every time.
alright traffic graph now implemented, yipee!
"Perhaps this is in response to Ghandi's similar offer?"

It's the other way around: Gandi's offer was posted on Dec 29 [0], while Namecheap's offer was announced on Dec 27 [1].

[0] https://www.gandi.net/news/en/2011-12-29/539-gandi_supports_...

[1] http://community.namecheap.com/blog/2011/12/27/move-your-dom...
I spent a great deal of my childhood with this game. They don't make them like that anymore really.
Unaware? Or not interested?

The problem with some of these things is, after a while, a universal assumption is developed: the assumption that people must know what you're talking about now.

Ask anyone about SOPA and they might now and be concerned, they might not. Ask someone about the act that has the real possibility of infringing on civil liberties in the name of corporate power, and you might get an open ear. You might not, or you might find someone who actually knows it but not by name.

It's like any *-gate scandal. Until it's historical fact, where you learn about it in reverse (what happened, to how it happened), you're not going to know about it unless you followed it from the start or read up.

Of course, the solution is to raise awareness as best you can, and educate people. Write to a tech blog or site and you're preaching to the choir; do that, or something more drastic, on a site focussed on an entirely unrelated demographic, and you might just get a few more people on your side. If you're Google or Facebook, then this could be the best gauge of consumer influence you can get.
German law enforcement agencies have been "pinging" mobile phones ... [and] they can be used to locate the cell towers through which the pings traveled. And thus, can be used to track the mobile targeted.

That is just so scary. I am watching the video this blog-post was based on here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YWdHSJsEOck&feature=youtu...
To be clear, I'm not trying to argue which stack provides more value. I was really trying to say that one should pick which stack provides the most value for them (using whatever metrics give you and your team value). And then most likely just go with it. The SW costs are relatively minor.

I have a hard time believing that a company looked and said, "The .NET stack gives us more value, but lets save a few bucks and go with this other stack." Except for early-ramen startups.

My major point was that BizSpark tries take this issue off the table in the early days when you might be cost sensitive. But no value judgment between .NET and other stacks.
A point to consider is that having .net or php on a resume gives a lot less information than say having ruby or python.

As a hiring manager I want developers who are interested in their craft beyond merely what they learned in school. Seeing experience with obscure tech or less popular languages is an easy way to spot this.

Assuming the candidate can back up what they say on the resume, it shows that they have enough confidence and ability to go off the beaten path.
Andy Rubin Didn’t Delete “Open” Tweet, Twitter Lost It, Then Found It
Blacking the background is enough to make it a top TV news story, and that's a medium politicians understand very well.

Whereas removal of functionality will irk uncaring users and may turn them against the SOPA opposition.
Media entertainment is one of those areas where inflation is hard to calculate, the price of watching a movie at home has been deflating from impossible, to $1000 VCRs, to $8 Netflix on a machine you have anyway.
Yep, you could do that rather easily with a web app + Dropbox API.
Update:

GoDaddy's page rank is now 7
NameCheap's page rank is now 6

My two sites puny sites that now direct "Domain Registration" to NameCheap are ranked 5.

It doesn't take much folks, but we really need site owners adding the link to their footers to have an effect. I think if 20-30 sites with even a slight page ranking joined in, it would work.

Please add this html to your pages:
<a href="http://www.namecheap.com>Domain Registration</a>
and share this post with anyone you can.
I think it's basically #5 in his list:

> 5. Competition from other forms of delivery.

If you look at the film industry as a whole, it's projected to grow over the next several years:

http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/film-industry-led-by-e...
that was definitely on top of my to-do list! is there an API somewhere for it?
I'd say "I just talked myself into upgrading my home theater setup", but we never go to the movies. We just watch them when they become available to download from iTunes. It's great. We make better popcorn, too (secrets: paprika bloomed in the butter, microplaned parmesan cheese, Spice House cheese powders).
Here's a nice explanation: http://ayende.com/blog/4435/map-reduce-a-visual-explanation

And a nice simple little hadoop setup: http://hadoop.apache.org/common/docs/current/single_node_set...
Mirror and Glass Inc.
At Mirror and Glass Inc., we specialize in custom materials and installation for commercial and residential and marine.

Bothell glass, glass repair in Bothell, Bothell mirrors, shower doors in Bothell, Bothell windows, Bothell door fronts, Bothell door repair, sky lights in Bothell, Bothell railings
I’d like to see something with more teeth, and less potential for antagonizing disinterested users (which most are). I fear that this would satisfy us emotionally more than it would effect change.

Which is an occasion for more creative thinking. The most important point, which the article mentions, is that Google et al have a direct relationship with users, and goodwill.

It needs to speak to users in non-strident tones, and engage on a level that users might care about. In turn, it must engage those users to do something that politicos will actually fear.

Perhaps something like “click here and Google will donate $1 to [politician’s rival]”. Or, Google simply gives $1 to an effective organization for every unique SOPA search.
Your Mileage May Vary
To anyone saying, "Hey, don't be vindictive! Don't we _want_ people to come around and be forgiven?"

I see it as the difference between what a politician says and what a politician does. (That metaphor is not really a stretch here.)

Saying, "We oppose SOPA," is not the same as opposing it.

GoDaddy participated in drafting the bills (SOPA, PROTECT-IP, and probably COICA and ACTA -- remember, GoDaddy is the de facto recipient of ICS/DHS seized domains).

GoDaddy laughed when their customers threatened a boycott.

Today is "transfer your domain away from GoDaddy day." And only today their PR says, "we oppose SOPA!"

If a politician says they'll bring home the troops* ... do you forgive them for the needless deaths when they say it? Or when they do it?

* I believe the USA has the best armed forces in the world, who then suffer the whims of both political parties shedding blood and treasure for pointless aims. Have we learned the lessons of Vietnam yet? I support the _troops_, but if you're not happy with my political metaphor, please use whichever political decision best fits for you.
Like others, I'm surprised that G+ is spending time solving this problem. Why don't they flip the switch on their safesearch technology on G+ and call it a day?
My point is that I would assume a 1.0 release would have a clear "right way". If I'm starting a fresh project is the new API the right one?
Do you believe this is real?
Upvoted for some honest-to-god, decent insightful writing. (not something I normally expect when I click a cnet link)
Awesome! An API is in the works, but in the meantime I suggest just grabbing http://underthesite.com/sites/<domain>.com and DOM parsing the simple markup. Let me know if you have any questions.
> “We have observed a spike in domain name transfers, which are running above normal rates and which we attribute to GoDaddy’s prior support for SOPA, which was reversed,” said Go Daddy CEO Warren Adelman.

Funnily enough, the people transferring domains made one decision, and most likely, will stick with it and be able to justify it.

And to think, there could have been a market niche for a pro-SOPA registrar. Imagine the features page for that.
Analytics for Restaurants
Why is it that nobody have made this? There are literally millions of restaurants out there - No service offer an analytic tool that will help you measure different sets of data in order to improve; if you can measure it you can manage it.

Or is it that I am not aware of any decent application that already do this?
Join in the Google Bomb of GoDaddy:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3393177
Damn, I forgot to add the #sarcasm hashtag.
Exactly — every GoDaddy "opposition" of SOPA seems like you could insert ", while we still think it's a great idea, " somewhere.

This is like one of those apologies where the miscreants "apologize if anyone was offended" or "are sorry that they were misunderstood" instead of admitting what they did was wrong.
I used them for a while and performance was better than Linode (I used baltimore datacentre) but what made me stop was the lack of automatic billing.

After that I switched to slicehost who's equivalent VM performs even better however I don't think you can sign up for that anymore now they've been assimilated by Rackspace.

Didn't have any unscheduled downtime over 6 months on Gandi.
Nuclear war isn't the sort of thing that usually produces winners.

I have a hard time seeing Google in particular starting a nuclear war over this. They value relationships with big content providers and have done a lot to build them. If a drastic action leads content providers to pull out of YouTube, Google Music, Google TV, etc., it would hurt Google quite a bit. Users care a lot less about YouTube than they care about what they can watch on YouTube, and the most popular videos are "official" music videos.

It is rare that huge consumer companies allow legislative fights to spill over and impact their core business. It usually just annoys customers rather than generating any sort of meaningful grassroots bump.
It's a finger for fuck's sake, so get over it.
If you've ever been there — which, if you have the chance, you should, it's great — then you would.

(So my answer is yes.)
WebCraft: Multiplayer Minecraft in WebGL and NodeJS
Systems monitoring with CollectD and EurekaJ
College App Tracker MockUp - Would you use this?
> this would be perceived as corporate blackmail, an attempted takeover of the democratic process by industry.

In that sense, any industry going on strike could be perceived in the same way.
"If a client says, “I’d rather have this conversation in our offices,” then listen to me: DO NOT EVER go to their office. Don’t go there ever again"

I'd love to hear additional detail about that.
WEB RANKING SEO SERVICE: Flights Where it is Accessible Online Connectivity
thats a really cool site you have there, once i get this implemented, i'll make sure to backlink it to your site to give credit where it's due :)
Your comment made the line "Now witness the firepower of this fully armed and operational battle station!" run through my head.

More seriously, Facebook alone doing a single-day blackout would be powerful. I guess its a question of how much money they'd be losing by doing it.
What Americans Keep Ignoring About Finland's School Success
Grinding the Antitesting Ax
The setup he's suggesting is cool, but it costs a lot of money is isn't easy to set up.

If you want a less expensive & simple alternative, try this:

MAC
- Connect: Skype
- Record: Ecamm Call Recorder
- Mic: rode Podcaster or Blue Yeti
- Edit: ScreenFlow (or iMovie)
- MP3: use the converter that comes with Ecamm Call Recorder

PC
Use the same thing, but try VodBurner for recording and editing.

What I love about Dan's programs is that he can get the people he has on to care about their sound because he has them on consistently. At Mixergy, the entrepreneurs I interview don't seem to have the same appreciation.
UMTS: Truly, you have a dizzying intellect
Have been there. Like it. But this is a bit... "perfect".
Innovating in Payment Technology: Plimus CEO Hagai Tal (Part 2)
Thanks to all the people who replied / will reply. Will check out the options mentioned.
The year's worst tech trend: complexity
Build a better marketplace. Listia (YC S09) is hiring talented developers.
Why not buy a few high quality microphones and have kits and instructions that you send out to interviewees with return shipping (or direct shipping to the next interviewee)?
The tl;dr on this one seems to be: Some things are different. Some things are better. Some things are hard to find. Is there any unique insight in this submission that I'm missing?
I think most folks do not aim to just scrape by.
Watch Out Edu Profiteers: UK’s Open University Ideas Are Coming To America
US Mainstream Media Refuses Op-Ed About TSA Eroding Civil Liberties
Kasey Kahne apologizes for slam
Kasey Kahne apologizes for slam
Kasey Kahne s adaptation around image wise to make sure you Hendrick Motorsports will be away and off to a difficult get started.
The Great Wireless Hack of 1903
Tom makes a great point here. Policies are policies and the difference is that this policy actually has action behind it. Oh well. Social networks don't really hide their policies and this one isn't all that radical at that. If you don't like it, find another service or comply with the rules, (or if you're really that stressed about it make your own social network).

If some random 16 year old from Middle-O-Nowhere Indiana complained on his blog about the same thing we wouldn't even read past the first paragraph. But MG Siegler does it and it becomes a real issue? The only difference between Siegler and the hypothetical teenager is that Siegler is well known and can write so his tantrum gets play.

Really, the issue of the offensive profile picture shouldnt be the issue at all. The issue should be whether Siegler is allowed to use his notoriety to dupe us into thinking this is an issue worthy of discussion.
The security implications (which dropbox do not take seriously) of this are a nightmare. I feel sorry for all of the network admins and security people who have to deal with the fact that all of their employees are unintentionally exfiltrating everything.
Wells Fargo ... I use their Billpay service to pay vendors (I have lots of subcontractors ~1000 and I pay ~60 of them every week) it's almost free and the checks have a MEMO field! They also have a DirectPay (kind of like direct deposit) which kind of sucks. I do NOT use their merchant account.
7.89 for movies? What? Where? I'm guessing this data is skewed by the low prices of rural and suburban centers that are underpopulated. Here in the urban world where most of the population lives, movies start at 11 or 12 dollars and then there's a 3D surcharge of a couple bucks.

They seem to be calculated by taking the box office takings[1] and dividing it by the number of admissions[2].

I suspect the big influence on that price is "family" tickets and children's tickets and other concession tickets which push the average price down.

[1] http://www.natoonline.org/statisticsboxoffice.htm

[2] http://www.natoonline.org/statisticsadmissions.htm
Firmly? So did they start actively lobbying against it?
I've been working on http://ktype.net for 18 months now. KType is an iPad app to improve communication for individuals with speech & motor disabilities. When I talk to people, I actually mention Hawking as the most famous use-case and that while he can have the best engineers and computer scientists work on his device, very few devices are available for my late grandpa who had stroke or cousin who is paralyzed from an accident and can't talk. I'm making KType for them. Kinda funny to see Hawking looking for assistance with improving his systems. Wonder how I could show him a demo of KType :)

My end goal is to turn KType into an integrated box like Hawking probably has but make it easy enough that anyone can set it up. I've seen old specs of his system but that was long ago. I wonder how good the word completion/prediction is. I built my own standalone prediction algo based on data-mining 10m tweets and can search through 1m words and phrases on the iPad in real-time as the user types (you can see that in the demo video). Here's how I mined the Twitter data: http://ktype.net/wiki/research:articles:progress_20110209

If anyone's interested, I could write how my algo works. I'm quite certain that it is significantly better than typical smartphone auto-suggests and it was quite an engineering challenge to make it work on the iPad (bit-counting and bloom filters and tons of optimizations). I've thought about making it a standard C-library that you call from your code - pass it a 1 to 3 word phrase and it will return 3-7 potential word matches.
Mailgun is great!
The market was different back then. There were a lot of choices, like PC-DOS, and even other computer systems like Mac, Atari, Amiga etc. MS-DOS itself did not give them a monopoly. It was an advantage of course, but not a "competition killer". It could have been IBM's OS/2 that would have "won", or a world with more cross platform development.
Maybe he should stop to think that more than one person could have reported the photo. It would then be google's obligation to remove it because at that point you could not justify NOT removing it.
RapaNui: New Lua framework for game development
This high-level open source lua game framework is built for the lower level open source game dev platform, Moai. 2 minute video shows it off nicely.
Instapaper is fantastic.

• The "Read Later" bookmarklet is handy and even works inside Google Reader. (You're using http://fulltextrssfeed.com/ for your feeds, right?)

• The Instapaper iOS client is amazong on iPad. Reading is nice and, if you share via email or EverNote, it queues up email if you're offline.

• ReadNow is a $5 client for Mac which looks as nice as the iOS client and has the same feature set and lots of keyboard shortcuts. The only cons are that images aren't saved for offline reading and sending links sometimes fails silently.

• EverPaper (~$5 or so) is a decent client for Android.
On the Fifth Day of Xmas: CoffeeScript
I have to recommend The History of Rome podcast anytime I have an opportunity. Mike Duncan does a great job "storytelling" the history, and is very up front about what should be accepted as relative fact (strong sources) vs. the more uncertain elements from the more questionable sources. It's great if you're driving a lot.

http://thehistoryofrome.typepad.com/
Can Google Maps Save You from Nuclear Holocaust??
Heh, no; the "started but not yet finished" section was meant to be independent of the "fiction" and "non fiction" headings. :-)
There are plenty of metrics for traditional e-commerce, to which I think ordering online is becoming more and more similar.

I like to chat up local resteraunteurs because I'm looking for someone to give me access to raw small business data I can use as real fodder for my R programming learning (the idea is someone gives me data to play with and I see if I can find any insights).

One thing I've heard about data is either non-electronic or they are locked up by vendors who tie software to hardware and make everything sell-up and add-on.

That said, OpenTable is a relative newcomer and seems to be in the best position to offer those services. From what I understand one of the big pillar of OpenTable's business model is the software/booking suite that runs on a terminal in the resteraunt (which is how they can book availability remotely). Unfortunately, OpenTable doesn't have an API yet and since it's a public company we can probably assume they will be very cautious about API development that they might perceive as a revenue cannibalization threat (see Twitter).
The entire retail business is already constrained by demand. No one is demanding that "scalable" mean "scalable without bound".

For most durable goods there's a never ending supply of used goods already; the supply of new goods a couple years later. Once you solve the business problem of building a good funnel for used goods to come into your operation, you can probably boost or create resale value for used goods, indirectly pressuring the original suppliers.
This is an honest question: why are people so concern about privacy when it comes to their government? What is the issue with the gov listening to my phone calls if I am not doing anything illegal?

Note: I was once followed by the FBI because they were following someone I was spending a lot of time with. I ended being asked for a coffee by the agent. I was not worried because I had nothing to hide.
It might be a question of how much money they would lose by not doing it. SOPA enforcement would be insanely expensive for a site with as much user generated/linked content as Facebook.
Here in Vietnam where the yearly average income is still under $2000 USD everybody wants an iPhone. Perfectly capable Android phones are widely available but the iPhone is the public status signal everybody is chasing. Maybe this is a cultural thing but if people in other developing countries are similarly willing to buy such an extravagantly expensive device just to keep up with the Joneses next door the value proposition of cheaper Android phones may not be so strong. By all accounts Apple still has a lot of room to cut prices but stay in the black too.
I am in a similar situation, my answer is to take as much of the Stanford db class over the break as possible, and take the alternate at school. Although the deadline for all the exercises have passed you can still watch the videos and do the exercises / quizzes. http://www.db-class.org
I could build a Dropbox notification app in an afternoon or two, and sell it to you and a few thousand friends for $5/mo :)
Where would they go if they pulled out of YouTube etc.? Do you think they are there because they like Google? No matter what product you have, if you don't market it, it's the same as if you didn't have it. Marketing is Google's other name, they are a marketing giant. There's an awful lot of extremely talented people floating in the wild, who are not under mega-labels because the mega-label business model only allows a handful few. Imagine what could Google do with its marketing power and this available talent - they can literally create a new mainstream music industry almost overnight.

Regarding annoying of customers - when fascism was on the rise in Germany, lot of people should have been annoyed but they were left in ignorance, and that's why eventually Hitler succeeded in the takeover, before turning the country to ashes.

When your government breaks the law, and then under the disguise of copyright infringement they take down any website that reports about it, the last working piece of the responsibility feedback loop is completely destroyed, the citizen is fucked, and the country eventually ends in ashes.
That is the true danger of SOPA, and that is what SOPA is all about.