skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> The evidence speaks: it was clearly an extreme and urgent problem to some parties, hence the act is under serious consideration.

This is a non sequitur. The fact that something is under consideration does not mean it addresses an "extreme and urgent problem". For example, the Gravina Island Highway (the "road to nowhere") was not only under serious consideration, but was actually built despite the fact that it did nobody any good. And we've all heard about silly laws, like how it's illegal to tease skunks in Minnesota. Do you think skunk-teasing is an extreme and urgent problem?

The fact that an industry group is pushing a bill that would give it massive power does not indicate that there is actually an urgent problem that needs solving, much less that the bill is what's necessary to solve their problem. I mean, if somebody offered me a million dollars, I'd absolutely take it, but you would be wrong to infer that I'm a million dollars in debt. In this particular case, many of the numbers the industry associations have thrown out to show a need have been proven to be outright fabrications, and most of the others have been shown to be heavily skewed. So not only have they not shown a legitimate need, but they've demonstrated that their motive has nothing to do with need.

Now, don't get me wrong: I'm not saying that piracy isn't a problem — just that I don't see a need for drastic measures.

> Shoplifting is not only illegal, but much is dedicated to minimizing it.

The maximum sentence for shoplifting in most places is one year in jail. We're hardly taking SOPA-level countermeasures against it.

> To claim that SOPA is similar to a death sentence for shoplifting is excessive hyperbole.

I don't think so. Jailing people for song covers on YouTube is about as disproportionate, and SOPA essentially implements the death penalty for websites that don't have the resources to police user-generated content with 100% efficacy. But at any rate, the point of the comparison is that it is a drastic solution to a vexing but not-so-drastic problem.
Sure we could. But then what would be the difference between us and them?
Freedom of speech goes both ways and that's good. Without a good counterpoint constructive arguments can't come to life. In other words, contrast helps you see things clearly.
It's way too common to find porn on the blue boards and by extension the front page.
Sponsored stories will begin appearing in the Timeline. That was the intent behind removing the straight chronological river (newsfeed), to be able to place ads into your stream in a way that looks more natural.
Please don't take this the wrong way, as it is not my intent to be rude, but you represent a statistically insignificant amount of revenue. It's smaller than a percent. But the new technology stacks and the features and services they can deliver offer real and tangible revenue or cost savings. When factored in, catering to your use case does not make viable business sense. If that ever changes, we as an industry will have to re-evaluate the technologies choices but as it sits now, progress and momentum are behind JavaScript web applications.
Amazon's DynamoDB developer docs
There is a difference. Google and Facebook are not media organizations and are clearly stating that SOPA will hurt them. People go to media companies for news, and when they see op-eds like the one in the WSJ, are less likely to consider that the writer herself is a critically invested party in the issue.
Ok, so you can activate it but what happens if MS decides at some point to block your updates or track you.

I assume they keep a record everytime they issue a license either to an OEM or wholesaler etc and if your using a keygen they could simply check their database and find that such a key was never issued.

If you use a key that was already registered to someone else then surely they know because your computer name/username or a hash of your hardware config (I assume this info is sent to windows update) will be different.
Hmm, if you have an investor that dismisses a platform summarily because of his own biases, then the company is better off without that investor.

The investor should ask "and why are you using that platform?" and then make an evaluation based on the answer. Anything less and you have a pretty bad investor. Best to keep away from such people.
My personal message (I'm from California):

Both bills are serious threats to many of the companies that have helped usher our society into the Digital Age. As a resident of the state that is home to most of the world's most innovative and progressive digital companies, I would hope that my representatives too take pride in the fact that these companies find California to foster a culture conducive to technological innovation. I ask you to help continue the progress, and to vote against these bills.
IntellijIDEA vs Eclipse
This is a good reason not to rely on the courts to strike down the bad parts of SOPA & PIPA.

And it's also a good reason to seriously consider something like a Constitutional amendment that clarifies the tension between the First Amendment and the Copyright Clause. They appear to believe that the Copyright Clause gives Congress carte blanche to override any First Amendment concerns and that the Public Domain is not an important part of advancing progress.
While I agree with your sentiment that the Democratic Party isn't useful or decent, they are not "just as bad." Both parties are full of slimy politicians, admittedly. But if given the choice, I will continue to support the slimy politicians who protect a women's right to choose and start less wars in general. It might not be a grand ethical stand, but these issues matter to me.

That being said, I understand people's frustrations with the system and wish there was a legitimate way to support third parties in a way that felt effective.
This is awesome! Now we can begin hacking on true P2P filesharing in DirtyShare: http://share.gun.io/
Disney Refused Invitation To Meet With Tech Companies Over PIPA/SOPA
Search on Google with javascript/instant enabled and view the cached version from the panel that pops up, when you click on the double arrows that come up to the right of the link.
Friendl.ee ‘Sell what you like, to who you like’
Why Should We Stop Online Piracy?
A personal experience [DMCA - UMG vs Veoh]
Zombo.com, where nothing is possible today, blacked out for SOPA
Incomplete Silence
A small mobile marketing company jumping into the wild wild west of real time bidding. It would be used more so for logging impression requests to be used later for further analysis. Our bidder would need to be able to handle upwards of 5000 bid requests per second. Though these requests can be throttled down, naturally the more data we can collect the better. This also doesn't include the associated costs with querying the data which would end up adding up quickly.

Now I'm not sure this would be the ideal solution for such a thing (in fact it probably is not), but it's just the first thing that came to mind. In the grand scheme of things sure that may seem like a trivial amount due to the use case, but we're still more in the realm of a startup where dropping ~$3k/month on the data store alone makes me cringe a little when we have other expenses to account for also. :)
Sure, it ignores actual gaming systems, a logrithmic scale, ignores the cost / unit, and glosses over flash games. It's still an interesting as a propaganda piece.
V8 is the catalyst, but it's only a small part of the bad news for Adobe.

There are many horses in the Javascript optimisation race. Chrome is the faraway leader, but all major browsers have delivered large improvements in Javascript performance over the past few years. Actionscript has hardly improved in five years.

http://iq12.com/blog/as3-benchmark/
More exiting than the datastore offering itself is that it is going to be SSD backed. I hope this hints at an SSD backed EBS offering in the near future.
in the US? almost certainly not, just like how ripping your own dvd's is technically illegal under the dmca.

also, based on my own experience, you can activate windows 7 on multiple computers with the same key just fine (got 1 key through msdnaa, wanted to get another to replace my academic home premium because i needed/wanted the backup functionality and xp mode. but when it took my schools msdnaa admin more than a week to respond, i just used the key i already had. at some point i'm sure i'll switch over to the new key that i eventually i got, but i don't see a reason to do that until windows starts hassling me).
Free programming resources readable on a Kindle
It's working PIPA Co-Sponsor Orrin Hatch drops his support of the bill.
Zombo.com blacked out for SOPA
SOPA Outrage is Breaking The Senate's Websites
It seems to me like this strategy does nothing but "replace the bastards with more bastards".
Agreed. You can't just say, "your product is too *, I'm stealing it."

Well, I guess you can, but you're stretching your ethical credibility.
"Use the mouse."

Scotty picks up mouse, speaks to it

"Hello computer..."

From the comments, it seems not many people got the reference. That's a shame, as it means people are either not a fan of Star trek (blasphemy), or are not old enough to get the reference, which makes me feel antiquated.
I'd never heard of System1/2 before, but it makes a lot of sense. Sites that are similar to the FB timeline, like Pinterest (which I recently signed up on to try it out), also give me that same sense of having to 'pay attention' more. It becomes more of a novelty instead of something that I'd want to use all the time. I think that is part of the popularity of sites like Craigslist and Hackernews, which present the information in an easily scanned format. They both fall into System 1. I think that as I do UX design for my site, I'll keep this in mind.
Don't get me wrong, Microsoft isn't helping themselves with this, but @melling has it on the head.

In the current climate, it's this kind of blog post that undoes a lot of the good work people are doing around protesting SOPA/PIPA. For those with a very simple view of copyright, saying you're going to 'steal Microsoft's IP' because you've been inconvenienced is just evidence that Something Must Be Done and the proposed law is a Good Thing.
I wouldn't call it stealing users. I mean if you knew the people from reddit and they asked you and you agreed then that's one thing. But in a true situation of a site being taken down this is exactly what happens. People go elsewhere. What would happen if reddit was taken down for real? Would you do the same thing and for how long?

What you are saying in a way is that a company or organization's competitor (if you want to call it that) can do something by free choice and decision, then you have to do something as well or you may be viewed as doing the wrong thing and viewed as doing something not politically correct.
At least for Parallels, if you read the instructions, it says the first time you start up Windows Boot Camp in the VM, do not activate until it has fully installed Parallel Tools and it's drivers. Something in those drivers, which I presume is legal, prevents the infinite activation loop.
In an effort to expedite your transition away from Windows entirely, may I suggest Pixelmator (http://www.pixelmator.com/) as a Photoshop alternative? It is a pleasure to use and has all of the core features of PS (compositing layers, tools etc).
First thought: "Well of course WSJ would be pro-SOPA".

Second thought: "But just because you would expect it of them doesn't make them wrong. What points do they make?"

Final thought: "Oh look, a paywall. Oh well..."

It seems their mission to overzealously block content on the internet was impeded by their decision to overzealously block content on the internet.
Testing is the wrong approach, IMO. It's, at best, a proxy for actual knowledge, and suffers from the inherent problems of all proxy measures (the same is true for grades -- if a class is worth taking, there's way too much material to boil it down to a single letter). We've used tests and grades in the past because we had no better option, but that's no longer the case.

The web lets us assemble large-scale portfolios of our actual work and transmit them to potential employers with a link. As an employer, would you rather see:

a) A transcript showing that the person got an A in his CS senior design project (or got some specified score on a test).
b) A link to github which lets you see the actual code that the person wrote for the project.

I know which one I'd rather see.

There's no real reason why a student couldn't deposit all of his work in an archive (with perhaps some sort of vetting/certification by the professor or institution), then grant access to the archive (or selected parts of the archive) to potential employers.
>> "When information is organized in a list, it’s trivially easy to scan it, but with Timeline your eye has to dart around and try to combine the layout into an understanding of what the person’s been up to. It induces cognitive strain"

Well, the whole idea is to engage the user. They hang around a lot more when they engage. If you give somebody a list they will trivially take the head the second time onwards ( they will pop the stack, for any imperative folks out there ). That's because the very first time, you actually traverse the list. From then on, the head tells you if the list has mutated. So your brain will save you the cognitive load by simply taking the head of the list and then saying to you, look, there is no need to engage further since there hasn't been any destructive update since the last time you looked. So you will log off.

To prevent disengagement, all creative media ( magazines, newspapers, movies, comics, TV etc. ) will assault you on multiple fronts. So you don't get a list anymore. So Time magazine will have multiple columns on the same page, with each column corresponding to a different topic. One of those columns will have a picture, another an ad, the third an infographic, the fourth some text, and so on. I took a bunch of semesters of screenplay writing where this stuff is actually taught in some gory detail - how to keep the viewer hooked. Never be linear - the viewer is smart and will simply (and often correctly) guess where the movie is headed. So confuse the viewer by presenting information in a non-linear fashion deliberately, and occasionally throw interesting but unrelated bits of filler/second unit stock footage into the plot. Spice things up. I believe it was the british who came up with the more accurate term "sex it up".
That's what facebok is doing.
Frankly, it works very well - for the non-programmer types. Lets be clear, your life isn't all that interesting. If I just show you status updates in a list, you will be bored stiff after a point. But if I introduce a tiny element of stochastic displacement in your timeline, you will wonder, hey, where did this come from , when did I do that, etc. That'll keep you engaged, and that translates to a longer duration on the site => more $$
Senator Marco Rubio (co-sponsor) and Roy Blunt also drop support of PIPA
One of the greatest features of the Mac App Store is the ability to download the latest version of OS X Lion and then make a bootable image of it.

I upgraded from Snow Leopard to Lion the day it came out but then had to do a clean install a couple of months later.

Instead of using my out-of-date installer I downloaded the latest version of Lion and did a clean install. No waiting hours fro system updates because my install medium was old.
Introducing Wavelength - Mailchimp
In many cases, like downloading movies, I agree. But with Windows, I couldn't disagree more. I used to pirate every version of Windows I owned, back in the days of Windows 98 and up to Windows XP it was a breeze. Starting around Windows XP SP3, it got a bit more difficult. It was easy to pirate, but after a few weeks/months of use, you get the Genuine Advantage warning. With Windows 7, it is even worse. So I decided to purchase my first legitimate copy of Windows. I haven't looked back. It is so much easier and I don't waste my time re-cracking my Windows installation every month. It is well worth the price. Since then I have also acquired a legitimate version of Office 2010, even though I got it heavily discounted for students, back in the Windows XP days, I would have laughed at the thought of buying $100+ software.

And anytime I upgrade hardware or even want to move my install to another computer, the activation is so fast and easy. I don't see how anyone could make the claim that pirating Windows is easier than installing a legitimate copy.
Oracle says each day's Android activations generates $10M in annual revenues
Certain applications that professionals need are only available on Windows. Most games are as well. Even for software with Mac/*nix versions, a person may have quite a bit of money tied up in Windows-only licenses.

I'm not commenting on whether pirating Windows is ethical. I'm just pointing out that sometimes you'll have to ditch a lot of software to ditch Windows.
He's not dealing with Microsoft's anti-piracy activation system as much as he's dealing with issues about family members.

And your point about MS not knowing what it's doing...

If the activation system was useless, and had no effect on revenue, it would be gone the next day.

I've been a legitimate customer since Windows 3.1, and I've only had to activate by phone 1 time. It was painless.
I may have overreacted, but the rest of the comments are all about PIPA and the Senate.
This is the fundamental problem with democracy and a free press. The banks help their cronies consolidate the media, the media defines the terms of the debate and what people know about. The people process the limited amount of inputs they receive and basically do what they're told to do.

The internet disrupts this, so it is a threat. Even so, for the most part, it's still amazing how deaf dumb and blind the conversation on the internet is in that the mainstream media, who define the terms and scope of the debate, are the only link to the world outside of immediate perception for the participants.
I more or less agree with you. That said:

< When people propose that copyright be abolished...

This isn't what the linked piece is about. The author's arguments are mainstays like:

1) IP laws mostly protect big corporations, not creators, since these corporations effectively leverage their control of distribution against creators.

2) The measures these corporations take to protect their IP succeed only at annoying legitimate customers. Piracy has never been curbed by anti-piracy practices.

3) Et al.

Abolishing an exploitative industry that preys on copyright holders and abolishing copyright itself are two very different things.
I love this. This not only speaks to their values, but to their long-term vision. Lots of companies speaking out against SOPA/PIPA would potentially be threatened by the bill, I doubt HelloFax would operationally [I may be ignorant though] but they have the foresight to still stand against it, and go as far as to enable others to effectively protest by providing their service for free.
One of the main value propositions doesn't seem to be mentioned here;
maintainability.

DynamoDB is schema-less and tables can be created/deleted on the fly.

Cassandra schemas are a royal pain in the ass and poorly documented. Depending on the cassandra version all schema-changes require cluster-restarts and/or various magic incantations that you better get exactly right or you may incur service-outage and data-loss.

DynamoDB is generally "pay and forget". Keeping a cassandra ring healthy is a major undertaking.
How much would Facebook, Google or Twitter lose if they shut down for one day?
The Story Behind Rupert Murdoch's Rants About Google and SOPA
All these positive comments are surprising. I find this to be a very bad idea. Flickr is a service (unlike HN) that some people depend on, and that some people pay for. So Flickr is saying that, even if I pay for their service, they might deny it to me, at the whims of other users?

Flickr is showing themselves to be untrustworthy -- and possibly in breach of contract. I would suggest not relying on them.
It's important to keep in mind the scale of Facebook's user base. At nearly 900,000,000 users upsetting 1% of the users with a change creates 9,000,000 angry people.
Building application sandboxes with libvirt, LXC & KVM
Are there ways to measure how much of the traffic is actually due to reddit being out. I bet there are other reasons for the growth in traffic, like the fact that HN has been making a great job at covering SOPA/PIPA for the past few weeks, I wouldn't be surprised if part of the increase is due to natural SEO. I'm sure one could find other reasons too.

I'm not doubting pg's claim. I'm simply interested and curious: What are the tools available for the analyst/engineer/community manager to analyze the increase?
>traditional in philosophy.

It's use in GEB is a tribute to Lewis Carroll's discussion of Zeno's Paradox, What the Tortoise Said to Achilles. This is itself a homage to the platonic dialogues.
SOPA loses 3 cosponsors following protests
Facebook released Timeline so people want to publicize more of their life. More data = more advertising. I think business people use simple equations to justify their decisions.
First of all I have had plenty of my ideas, designs etc. copied. I don't care cause at the end of the day it doesn't matter.

I don't know why you guys keep arguing the same misguided argument.

Here is the difference.

When I design for a client I put in the work and design specifically to to them. I am in other words a performing artist.

I don't just send them a CD with the same design I did for all my other clients.

Are you really telling me that you can't see the difference here?

I am not saying artists shouldn't make money so there is no need to repeat the same tired claim.

This is about whether it's a right to make money on mass-producing CDs?
I think the point is a bit clearer if you imagine each song having its own market.

I am not a member of the market for dubstep.
I am a cheapskate in the market for Taylor Swift songs - I'd never pay full price, but I could be tempted if they were twenty cents each.
I am a paying customer in the market for old blues albums.

So any one consumer is not always a cheapskate or always a paying customer. Every consumer is a cheapskate in most markets.
As wonderful as this is, we've got to remember that tweets are only a symptom of success. We've got to continue translating virtual action into actual action, like the NY Tech Meetup did today.

Even with that, I'm familiar with at least one SOPA agnostic who walked right by without noticing them. This still doesn't feel life and death to the Bobs and Marys around the country.
Does the DMCA really work well or have we just been browbeaten into accepting and even embracing it so as not to appear as if we support all out piracy when we oppose SOPA and PIPA? This is the second time I've seen someone speak in favor of the DMCA as an example of the law done right when opposing SOPA.
I used to read the WSJ regularly, but stopped when their editors came out so obsequiously in favor of the bailout in 2008, after years of rejecting government intervention. Even this editorial is a farce. How often does the WSJ use the phrase "rights" in a positive way outside this context?
"an excellent example of diplomacy"

I don't know whether it was for diplomacy or not (it could be but only pg can answer that). But if it was done for a reason other than the stated "stealing" what's wrong with just saying "we have heavy volume today because of other sites that are down including reddit so I decided to turn off new account creation".

That's honest and avoids any chance of double speak.

Edit (based on comment below which I can't reply to):

Saying that my statement is honest is not the same as saying what was done is not honest.