skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think we need to be a little careful with this. The article talks about reaching the top 1% as a goal, but if that's a goal held by much more than 1% of the population, a lot of people are going to feel like failures. I don't know that we need to encourage any more of this kind of competition.

Far better, I think, would be to talk about the changing economy and what kind of education is most likely to give people a fulfilling career with a reasonably comfortable lifestyle.
Friends of mine who went the ivy league route could pretty much major in whatever they want and get a great finance/consulting career after they graduate. If you have some relevant internships and do well on interviews, they really don't care about your major, as long as you are smart and personable.
I have some free time today after work where I'm going to finish making the list and then I'll have it all deleted. :)
Isn't selling bootleg stuff ALREADY illegal though? I mean, ICE can shut you down for importing ripoff stuff if they find it already - why do we need SOPA/PIPA to make things even more difficult for regular people?
>Wow. I do not agree with this at all. When I've heard this sentiment before it's from people who, despite the fact that they think they are hyperlogical and despite the fact that I think I'm hyperlogical, don't in fact agree with me on all public policy issues.

Logic operates on premises - and because there is no universal/objective value system we all argue from different/subjective viewpoints - so it's likely that the person you disagree with doesn't start with the same premises. You can have a perfectly logical argument but if it's arguing for a different outcome or from a different viewpoint you aren't going to agree with the other person.
That's fantastic. Good luck Amit!
Great News indeed! Wishing Amit the best for the procedure. Let's make sure to keep up with the momentum to register donors from minority groups.
HP's Whitman lines up future scapegoat
> But if you are in the 3rd camp, it is bad for you, because in that case you are 99% producer and 1% consumer of these kind of goods.

I don't think that is ever true of anybody. A writer needs to read 10, 100, 1000 books before he can produce a book of similar quality. The same applies to musicians who learn from other people's music, painters who learn from other people's paintings, and scientists who build upon other people's work. Nobody creates IP out of a vacuum. If anything, creative people are even more indebted to other people's IP than simple consumers are.
Also mentioned by Boing Boing

https://twitter.com/#!/BoingBoing/status/159600157623713793
Quoting from the OP:

The US government only has to make sure that the US debt growth rate doesn’t exceed the growth rate of our tax revenue.

At what rate is the government debt currently climbing? Hint: hugely faster than our tax revenue.

Also, this ignores the fact that tax revenue is effectively limited by government spending, because when the government takes over something, it effectively crowds out the private sector.

World War II. Prior to the war, the US economy was in the absolute shitter. When the US decided to go to war, it borrowed money. LOTS of money. ... But the economy didn’t collapse due to our debt burden. In fact, the economy grew. A lot. US citizens experienced the biggest rise in income and living standard’s in our nation’s history.

There are a couple of problems here. First, as The Road to Serfdom tells us, this is easy to do when the entire country's priorities are aligned, as in an existential war. Such an incidence doesn't serve as an instructive example for more normal times.

But more importantly, the OP has the timeline wrong. In fact, at the end of the war, the Keynesians wailed that when the government stopped spending, the economy would wither. But in fact, when the government stopped its wartime borrowing, that is when our economy really soared. It was the end of the war and the end of the war financing blitz that brought the huge prosperity, because private industry was freed from the need to focus on materiel, and to build the products that people wanted instead.
Great news, nothing the internets can't do as humanity's collective conscience.
Zappos, Amazon sued over hacking incident
Working with clang and C++0x on Linux
Overall, 75% of AML transplant patients survive year one, 50% make it through year five.

Our thoughts are with you, best wishes!
The Windows 7 genuine advantage warnings are hostile, they accuse the user of stealing the software and as I remember the prompt was only to go ahead and pay for another new license of Windows 7.

In any case, it's not a problem for me anymore, as I now only run a pirated copy of Windows 7 in a virtual machine on my Macbook for testing on.
Last time I checked that only allowed you to set it to 'friends', as opposed to 'public'. There was no option to set it to specific groups of friends.
So is this some kind of meta-pirate joke? The source is ripped directly from the German Pirate Party website.

http://www.piratenpartei.de
You know just because you keep repeating the same strawmen it doesn't make them more true.

If you cant see the difference between a performance and copying the performance to re-sell it, then frankly there isn't much to discuss.
As a systems research guy - someone who implements the sorts of things you're using - I would recommend just calling it the "Python" version as the short name, and clarify that you are using Pthreads from within Python as needed. In that version, that you're using Python is the most interesting thing, since many languages have bindings for Pthreads.
One of the motivations for this article was coming across a link on a Blackhat forum (yes, I keep bad company) about 'demoting' a competitor's website by creating hundreds of thousands of fake links to it overnight.

While this tactic doesn't always work, the article's author was quick to mention that given a relatively young site, it can be extremely helpful in getting rid of the competition.

I thought that was a very dickish thing to do.

BlackhatSEO might not be illegal, but is ethically and morally wrong, plain and simple. And it makes the internet a crappier place. That's a good enough excuse to go on a BlackHat SEO crusade.
Riak is based on Dynamo, and the original paper by Werner (if I recall correctly?). This is just offering up an easy to use cloud service version of what's backing S3 already?
Many other Microsoft products will not install on a copy of Windows that hasn't been activated. This includes all the Live apps and I think Office. I think it also restricts access to Software Update to only critical patches (been a while since I tried without activation).
Sometimes I wonder how some people don't simply forget how to breathe. But mother nature is awesome that way: for breathing you don't have to think much.
I truly hope these aren't common people.

Based on those tweets it appears that the vast majority of them are still unaware of the legislation and the outrage has been directed everywhere but at SOPA/PIPA. Hell some of the most tweeted responses are about how Obama is ruining America and now he's taken down Wikipedia to boot.

Hopefully this is just a microcosm of the people who have been affected by the Wikipedia outage and most of them have made an attempt to contact their representative or at least talk about SOPA in a more intelligent manor with someone around them.
Are we sure this website is current? I don't see 2012 anywhere, and professors oftentimes forget to take down old course websites.

If this is true, though, that's great news. SICP is the perfect way to teach computer science from the ground up, assuming that you're dealing with a student dedicated enough to do things the 'hard way' (or at least, the way that's less immediately/obviously rewarding at first). This is harder to do at other schools where students are not yet certain that they want to study CS, and there is a need to 'sell' them very quickly on the merits of learning CS (which is why you end up with some intro classes designed around mobile app development, rather than fundamental CS theory).
Credit to Zachary Johnson: https://github.com/zachstronaut/stop-sopa
Green Peace is also using this, not sure whether the German Pirate Party ripped it off from them or vice versa.

http://greenpeace.org
Actually, apparently it's 12 months until you can no longer download the OS again:

"Be kindly informed that the availability of the software download, purchased at the Microsoft Store, is limited to one year.

Please understand that as you placed your order more than one year ago, Microsoft Store does not have access to your order and cannot reset the download link."
Mac sales growing faster for Apple in China than US
I am under the impression that media changing is considered to be fair use.
Quite a story.
There is a tough fight ahead for him.

Good luck Amit.
SOPA: GoDaddy Kind of Blacks Out
Even worse, introducing the WSJ as "one of America's most respected newspapers" automatically presents the paper in a very positive light -- "respect" is good, "America" is good, so good + good must be good, right?

What if a different formula was used instead, like "one of Rupert Murdoch's newspapers"? It'd be much more correct and impartial, technically (ownership can be proven; "respect", not so much), but the spin would feel quite different.
I'd like to take the same stance, but as long as the Dems stay more on the right side of Net Neutrality than the GOP, I'll still vote Dem over GOP.

Net Neutrality, and perhaps less tendancy to go to war, are about the only things keeping there though.
Republicans doing more to kill SOPA/PIPA than Democrats
I am not sure, but there is this: "Racket (previously DrScheme)"

Does anybody know if that rename was after MIT stopped using SICP?

If this is current, then it really is great news. This is probably one of the best times in quite a while to get into functional programming.
Correct. At first it annoyed me that I was paying Hulu Plus for content and then they also layered in advertising but after speaking with a friend who works there, the margin just wasn't great enough to make it work without ads. Content is expensive.
"I will be likely voting Republican (for the first time in my life) for at least some of the 2012 elections, out of my commitment to vote against any incumbent who supports or votes for SOPA."

You've got to try to understand the kind of message seeing more Republican votes sends the Democrats.

When they see the Republicans get more votes, their strategy over the last 20 years is to move more to the "center" (ie. more to the right). By voting for Republicans, you are helping no one but the Republicans/conservatives. If that's what you want, then go for it. But if you want a more liberal/progressive government, voting for the Republicans is counterproductive, even if you do help to vote a bunch of spineless Democrats out.

The real way to combat the Democrats' shift to the right is to vote for a more liberal/progressive party, like the Greens. This strategy has worked wonders for conservatives, when they started to vote en-masse for Tea Party candidates. Now the Tea Party, an extreme right wing group, is an influential member of the right wing landscape, even if there's no Tea Party president yet and the vast majority of right wing congressmen are not Tea Party members yet either. The Tea Party still has a significant influence on policy, and on shifting the Republican party to the right. A similar strategy can work for progressives who want to push the Democrats more to the left.
> At this point, my blood type changes to the blood type of my donor. And my blood will now have my donor’s DNA, not my own.

That's actually really fascinating. This perpetuates for life? This would seem to imply that a person who's received a transplant will, thirty years later, be walking around with two separate sets of DNA, as the other cells in the body presumably would not change.

Given that DNA is (indirectly) responsible for the way that cells communicate with one another (among other things), I wonder if this dichotomy creates any complications in other ways. (Not counting potential graft-host disease rejection - I'm talking about further down the line).
More importantly, to most of us Amit is just as much a stranger as the millions of other people who are touched by leukemia and cancer in general. Make sure you are donating in one way or another.
Speaking to your Choir about SOPA
Any thoughts about a Clojure translation?
Anyone tried the 'Rejection Therapy' experiment?
Seems useful for folks like me who think a lot (and act less) partly due to fear of rejection or failure.
Others were mentioning before today that "Twitter should black out because it's one of the few services the people in the government use, so they would experience the impact of SOPA."

Twitter is a sounding board for the internet, and I think by having it available, SOPA is getting much more attention than it would have gotten than if it was blacked out. 250k/hr regarding one topic sure is nothing to sneeze at!
You don't think that's how people vote anyways?
Yeah, relates to the difficulty of members of congress to have a proper argument on the DNS provisions in SOPA, probably entirely non obvious to most.
"Yet functional languages never really made it to the mainstream"

JavaScript development these days is getting pretty darn close to what I would consider 'mainstream' functional programming.

Heavy use of both first class and lambda functions, and closures have been standard practices for years now. And thanks to libraries like Underscore.js partial application and the use higher order functions like map/filter/etc are also becoming very common place.

I'll absolutely agree that what we see is not 'pure' functional programming but neither is a good deal of real world Common Lisp.

Anyone who has done a lot of programming in Lisp or Haskell has probably bemoaned the fact that many people are quick to dismiss so many great and useful tools these langauges provide. But I definitely think we're starting to see a trend where the most genuinely useful features of fp are becoming mainstream.
The link is better: http://tech.fortune.cnn.com/2012/01/18/inside-apple-adam-las...
Yes, I do remember when they shuttered TV show rentals. The only reason they gave is that users preferred to buy TV shows. I find that hard to believe although I could be wrong. Charging people $1.99/$2.99 to purchase an episode of a show means $20-$30 for a season (sometimes more). It makes more sense to just pay for cable at those prices, which I refuse to do.
>ripped directly

Author of the code: "I place this code in the public domain. I require no attribution." : https://github.com/zachstronaut/stop-sopa

Your research-foo leaves much to be desired.
This is appealing but not actually true. In the absence of copyright, no contract exists for downloading the game client, which means no EULA can be enforced. In the absence of a EULA, there are zero legal barriers[0] to people setting up private servers, which are protocol-compatible with the free game client, and hosting their own game, which destroys the business model of the MMO creator.

This is more-or-less an impossible problem to solve technologically at the moment: MMO servers are (by definition) too contended to do more than act as more than glorified packet switches for authoritative clients. The only lever to pull is to put more functionality on the server and off the client, but for a variety of reasons this leads to a less satisfactory user experience.

[0] http://wow.joystiq.com/2010/06/07/the-lawbringer-the-history... -- a quick history of the action by Blizzard against the maker of an in-game bot, legally identical to running a private server. Note the claims were all either copyright-related, won by the bot-maker, or involved "tortious interference"--i.e. incentivizing the buyer of Glider to break their EULA with Blizzard, which would no longer exist.
I find it disturbing that even though I am still against SOPA and the likes, that the opposition seems to be willfully ignoring this portion. Unless I am totally misreading it, it would be very difficult for the likes of Youtube or Facebook to be included.

The language is still dangerous though, because the designed for clause seems to open things up. I can easily see BitTorrent being brought in to be "designed for" downloading illegal movies, because judges aren't likely to think downloading linux distributions is very significant alternative use. The thing that concerns me is that smaller companies or companies outside of the mainstream might not get much credit for having other purposes. Imagine if reddit had r/stealmovies, a judge might not care much about the rest of it if there are thousands of people using it to talk about infringing.

There is enough wrong with this bill to oppose it without resorting to hyperbolic threats.

edit: Thinking about it more, youtube might be a great example. Current youtube won't be brought down with this, but youtube in it's infancy very well might have been stomped out. Imagine explaining to a Judge, "no, you don't understand. Right now it might be used for mostly unauthorized music videos, but showing home videos of cats is going to be HUGE!"
Minor niggle, but please stop misusing "steal". We need to get that meme killed.
I don't understand the leaderboard aspect of it because, if I'm reading the article correctly, each of the achievements is a one-off, which means that the leaderboard will quickly be dominated with a few developers who happened to hit all of the achievements.
The Project 1 handout says it was due yesterday, so I think it is.
My bad. I thought the public domain code was just the mousehandler at the bottom, not all the CSS tricks above.
The WSJ's point, that Wikipedia has never blacked itself out on any other political issue, is factually incorrect - odd that a newspaper can't take the time to do its research, but Wikipedia blacked out in Italy after passage of a similar law there making it responsible for user content. Oddly enough, Italy backed down as well.

Wikipedia takes action when the Internet is threatened - that's just common sense. Which may be why the WSJ editorial page can't grasp it.
What's not at all surprising about this is that the WSJ is positioning SOPA as an anti-piracy bill and not as a bill that gives tacit acceptance to the assertion that government controls of information channels is acceptable in a free society.

Also the WSJ being One of America's most respected newspapers hasn't been true since Murdoch purchased it and started inserting opinion into front page news stories.
This website is current. I'm one of the alumni involved in this version of the course.

To give some more context, this is a course taught by a group of MIT alumni over MIT's "IAP" January term (http://web.mit.edu/iap/). As such, it's only 8 lectures over the course of a month, not a full semester-long class. It's partially sponsored by the EECS department and worth 6 units of P/D/F credit, but is not affiliated with the official EECS curriculum in any way, and does not fulfill any department requirements.

It's mostly just an effort by a few of us who loved SICP to give students these days an opportunity to be exposed to some of the Big Ideas from the class, that we feel haven't really found their way into the revamped curriculum.
WalmartLabs Crowdsources WM’s Product Selection w/“GetOnTheShelf” Contest
$1.99 just to rent? It's $1.99/$2.99 to buy them currently, are you sure about those prices? I can't remember the rental price so you could be right, but it doesn't seem likely since they charge the same amount for purchasing now.
I decided to sign up to donate my stem cells because of Amit. I did not realize how little it cost me to save a life and after that I felt irresponsible if I didn't sign up.

I encourage everyone to consider becoming a stem cell donor and I thank Amit for teaching me about it. I am relieved he found a match. He certainly deserved it.
He's probably referencing this line: This is likely the cost of starting N=110885 different worker threads in Python.

That's not actually accurate, but it's just a terminology problem. When you say "thread," what people like me think of is the actual operating system kernel thread. In your Python code, you only have 4 of them at any given time. (I know this from "max_workers=4".) What I think you mean by it is "indivisible work unit I'm supplying to my threading library," and I think you have 110885 of them.
Also, a lot of these rely on analysis of the code. In that case, will every team member who has the code checked out receive every award that is unlocked by the project?
If you follow the link to the "SIAB IAP page", it's pretty obviously for 2012.
It's a little difficult to assign blame here. Blackhat SEO works, that's why it is so popular. Google's algorithm is far from perfect. There is little reason for an eCommerce site to market itself with blog posts, but the imperfect algorithm and the sheer scale of the competition makes it imperative to do so.
Ask HN: How does Upromise track my credit card use?
I am trying to get a start up off the ground. I need to track my members credit card use similarly to Upromise to make business plan work. I have tried to contact Upromise, Visa, MasterCard, and a new start up Linkables that tracks CCs but everyone seems pretty closed lipped about it. Does anyone have any ideas how this is done. If you are not familiar with Upromise here is their “how it works” page. http://www.upromise.com/welcome/how-it-works
Vets Need Employment. Jobvite’s Apps For Heroes Helps Them Find It
If I buy a movie ticket, that doesn't give me a right to download the movie, or get a discount on the DVD, even though I "paid for a license" to that content. (to view it once, in a movie theater). Likewise when buying a CD, you are purchasing a license to experience that content in exactly the way the seller intended. Again I emphasise, this is not necessarily the law, this is just how the MPAA/RIAA seem to view the situation.
Thank you for posting this; my dev tools cut it off when I looked for attribution (terrible excuse, I just thought it was impressive).
Linking is not a crime. If we'll ever make any "Internet Freedom" laws or Constitutional Amendments, that definitely needs to be in there.

The 1st Amendment should already cover linking as speech, but apparently MPAA/RIAA and some in Congress disagree.
Well, you misinterpreted. The conclusion of michaelochurch was decidedly not to "vote republican because those democrats are bad." He said

> I will be likely voting Republican (for the first time in my life) for at least some of the 2012 elections, out of my commitment to vote against any incumbent who supports or votes for SOPA
There is something wrong with software vendors abusing their customers, however.
Wikipedia Unblackout Bookmarklet
As much as I support the blackouts, I have already contacted my representatives (though I think all the ones in the bay area are anti-SOPA). I think that earns me some Wikipedia time :). Turns out their blackout is just some CSS/JS added to the page (was probably the easiest way to implement it). This bookmarklet removes that (though it must be clicked on every page):

javascript:(function(){$('#mw-sopaOverlay').hide();$('#mw-page-base, #mw-head-base, #content, #mw-head, #mw-panel, #footer').show();}())

Save that as a bookmark URL, click, and Wikipedia away on a non-mobile site.
Censorship bills?
There are a lot of people using this, I am at http://jenius.me as well.

This was posted 3 days ago and rose to the top of hacker news when the original author released it, I don't understand why some other site is now getting credit for it or why a duplicate link is on the popular page of HN again...

Here's the link from 3 days ago, with over 170 upvotes: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3468386
Eater and HowAboutWe launch dating service for foodies
Why Ron Conway is fighting SOPA
P.S.: How ironic is it that a blog post about spam comments invites tons of spam comments? I've already deleted 10 from my Akismet queue!