skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Senator Diane Feinstein response to request to stop support of SOPA
I received your letter expressing opposition to the "Preventing Real Online Threats to Economic Creativity and Theft of Intellectual Property Act," commonly known as the "PROTECT IP Act." I appreciate knowing your views on this matter.

The "PROTECT IP Act" (S. 968) gives both copyright and trademark owners and the U.S. Department of Justice the authority to take action against websites that are "dedicated to infringing activities." These are websites that have "no significant use other than engaging in, enabling, or facilitating" copyright infringement, the sale of goods with a counterfeit trademark, or the evasion of technological measures designed to protect against copying.

The bill does not violate First Amendment rights to free speech because copyright piracy is not speech.

America's copyright industry is an important economic engine, and I believe copyright owners should be able to prevent their works from being illegally duplicated and stolen. The protection of intellectual property is particularly vital to California's thriving film, music, and high-technology industries.

I understand you have concerns about the "PROTECT IP Act." While I voted in favor of this bill when it was before the Senate Judiciary Committee, I have also been working with California high-technology businesses to improve the bill and to address the concerns of high-tech businesses, public interest groups and others. I recognize the bill needs further changes to prevent it from imposing undue burdens on legitimate businesses and activities, and I will be working to make the improvements, either by working with Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy (D-VT) or through amendments on the Senate floor.

On May 26, 2011, the Senate Judiciary Committee passed the "PROTECT IP Act" for consideration by the full Senate. Please know I will keep your concerns and thoughts in mind should the Senate proceed to a vote on this legislation. As you may be aware, Representative Lamar Smith (R-TX) has introduced similar legislation, the "Stop Online Piracy Act" (H.R. 3261), in the House of Representatives.

Once again, thank you for sharing your views. I hope you will continue to keep me informed on issues of importance to you. If you have any additional questions or concerns, please do not hesitate to contact my Washington, D.C. office at (202) 224-3841.
Okay.

My account is plenty old, and HN is most certainly seeing a lot more reddit-like posts. Honestly I think the downturn started about the time we lost the ability to see comment points in threads.

I think dropping the comment points was a reaction to the downturn.
i'm playing with emacs + evil-mode for the better haskell support. so far it looks pretty good, and the thought of hacking up some elisp to fill in missing bits is a lot less offputting than hacking in vimscript.
Baby Boomers: The New Disability Market
Politicians and large corporations spend money to shape public opinion. People, when united, can change public opinion without spending a dime. Politicians and large corporations are given power by the public.
Software developers don't have to sell "digital goods". They can sell their work. Pay a developer to get the feature you want added next.
On the one hand, using a modern TeX like ConText can be maddening. On the other hand, there really isn't an open equivalent for dumping out high-resolution arbitrarily complex reports that I'm aware of; all the Jasper reports-inspired reporting systems absolutely suck in terms of printed quality.

Getting HTML to high-quality print status is easier than it used to be, but frankly, it just wasn't designed with printed reports in mind.

The SE comments note that while your colleagues may be impressed with the niceness of your reports, they will be annoyed when they need to edit them: this is my experience as well.
Only a few hours left to donate to #teamJS for Feeding America
I wanted to vote no, because it seems so Pyrrhic, maybe a little gimmicky: "See, we shut down a site you don't use!"

But if you're asking people to make a sacrifice you're not willing to make yourself, you're a bad leader, period. I'm not saying HN is the bastion of the tech world. But if we're upvoting the Reddit shutdown (at least I did), and we can't turn around and do it ourselves, well, we're not made of very tough stuff after all.
If HN going dark can inspire other popular sites to go dark too, then it would be great. Otherwise, we'll just have a tree falling in the forest situation.

I understand the solidarity point, but we need results here. The aim is to stop SOPA, not just protest against it in a private corner of the internet.
No, you raise your voice not go dark in protest
Every dollar raised provides 8 meals to someone in need!
Will 2012 be Thunderbolt's year? Devices arrive in force at CES
You missed my point. Of course it's dangerous if you want it to be, but so is a kitchen knife.

The point is, stuff eventually gets regulated because of how it might be used, not because of how it's normally used.
A blackout would suck because I love checking HN throughout the day.

That's exactly why we should have the blackout, because that's a small taste of the nonsense that could come from SOPA in relation to many other sites we all check daily.
Open Data *wince* it’ll take a while… Open Education – next September? No probs
Who is Pauly Ting. Brilliant self-marketing campaign.
Mafia uses violence. That's different.
Absolutely. HN's effectively dead if SOPA passes. I know that there aren't a lot of SOPA supporters that use it, but as I said elsewhere, the point of a blackout isn't to punish supporters - it's to motivate people to get involved against SOPA. If your favorite site is inaccessible in protest of SOPA, it might get you more involved in fighting it, which is the whole point.
contact me at karan@notewagon.com. We're hiring in downtown Toronto.
Kayweb Angels opens applications for start-ups
Missing the Point of WordPress Entirely
Lead or follow, but above all — get things done
The Hub launches Startup Weekend-style competition
"Set in Earth's utopian future..." If I recall correctly, the earth society and government was actually pretty dystopian. Does that mean that Hollywood is altering the story for the worst??
"2) Perhaps a blackout will give some HNers the final push (and time) to make some phone calls to their representatives."

Besides, it'll give us something to do!
> 50 light-years is a really long distance.

Compared to what we can wrap our brains around generally, sure, but in the scheme of the universe, not so much.
Fallout MMO rights revert to Bethesda
Lets not forget China's economy is overwhelmingly export driven; so the fact that they might decide to build towns and not use them- whilst seeming really odd- doesn't seem to me to be predictive of any kind of an economic crash.

The difficulties that western economies are having would seem a much greater threat to China's economy than this.
Excellent search engine for mails, which retrieves mails with in no time. I love it :)
We're not quite there yet with predicate dispatch. However if the pattern matching benchmarks are any indicator, it will be plenty efficient. Definitely excited about it, but it might be some time since it will require some well considered synergy between core.logic and core.match.
It's fixed now. They splitted the main circle in circles with 999 people each.
What a boring lineup of devices ... it's basically just external hard drives, I find it pretty hard to get excited about them.
The original quartet is epic, Xenocide and Children of the Mind get a little bit off the cuff, but I really like them. Even the first few in the "Shadow" series were ok, but then quality dropped off. Now there are dozens of books set in the universe.
If I remember the book correctly, the 3D parts were actually games where the participants as people move around without gravity in 3D. In this particular case--much more than for an aerial battle with airplanes or space ships--I also think 3D would help with immersion.
Yes. Or simply just posting comments online.
NewsGator Has Quietly Built An Enterprise Social Networking Business
Open Source Unity-Apsalar iOS Plugin Now Available
The headline reads even better if you imagine Carl Sagan saying "billion".
What Went Wrong With The 360 Dashboard?
We don’t really know how many 1,500 is, because we’re missing a lot of the variables we need to have even an order-of-magnitude estimate of how common intelligent life is. It could be practically inevitable on planets with liquid water; it could be one in a million even given “animal” life. Qualified experts disagree.

And 50 light years is a long distance to travel even at a tremendous speed like 0.01c, but it isn’t that long to send postcards. If we’d sent out a bunch of reasonably good questions in 1912, we would still be interested in the answers today. (More interesting, I think, is what they would ask us.)

In retrospect, I’m assuming we’re taking a finding-intelligent-life perspective here. But if you’re thinking in terms of human expansion – terraforming and so on – then I agree.
Hmmm... I don't know. My Flickr account is associated with my Google account, and I have pictures of eczema on my flickr account that someone requested permission to publish, yesterday, but when I search personal results, those pictures are nowhere to be found.
it's not even a necessary condition. it has, however, made my life a lot more comfortable and pleasant, given the amount of time i spend entering text into a document and then editing it in various ways. there are things that i can do almost without thinking about them in vim that would involve effort, tedium or both if done any other way.
I think that DNSSEC is more concerned with preventing DNS poisoning and man-in-the-middle attacks than with using NXDOMAIN to block access.
Okay, here's a better way to say it: A photographer's job is to put this shit into pictures. If it was easy to put it into pictures, it wouldn't be a job. Just like if a designer could just sit down and bitch all day about how hard design is, then he'd be an amateur, not a designer. Just like a philosopher, or an historian can't just complain about how unfair philosophy or history is.

If this is your art, DO IT, don't do a shitty generic & interchangeable version of it, and then complain about how hard it is on HN. Period.
To be perfectly honest, that's a great way of describing how he feels about homosexuals (or anyone that breaks his heteronormative ideals).

More importantly, though, making an incredibly inane distinction over how much he hates a group of people misdirects readers from the fact that OSC has some incredibly harmful views on society that should not be tolerated.
get lots of exercise too! hit the gym at least 3 times a week, one hour per session.
I get your distinction, though I don't see how it's relevant.

Work that one does out of pure interest and passion, in their free time, is still valuable. I have a family friend who's retired, and intensely interested in woodwork. He has a workshop you wouldn't believe, and honestly doesn't need the money - and yet we always pay him for his work, custom or otherwise. And by this we don't mean simply covering his costs, either.

I'm going to specifically object to your characterization here: "you shouldn't be throwing a hissy fit when you aren't making immense profits from it"

That's just plain disingenuous, misleading, and putting words in the original blog author's mouth. He never said anything about charging immense sums to license his photos. His objection isn't being lowballed, it's that advertisers, magazines, and other for-profit entities value his work at $0 - zero.

The second thing he complains about is how advertisers only offer "exposure" in return. This is, of course, a line of bullshit. Either the people trying to license his photos are ignorant, or they're deliberately trying to take advantage of him. Being credited in the fine print of an ad, or worse, at the very bottom of a page in the back of a magazine, far from the actual photo itself, is worth zero publicity, especially when your photo is being used stock (as it is, in this case). The magazine/advertiser knows this, the photographer knows this - simply putting that on the table shows extremely poor faith, which is probably what triggered the rant in the first place.

> "He took it himself, because he wanted to, in his free time. And now he's complaining that he put it online and people want to use it. That's where I call bullshit."

So, again, if I am reading you correctly, you're saying that anything you produce in your free time out of personal interest is worth no monetary compensation, even when being used by commercial entities?

Disregarding the fact that, as a professional freelance photographer, everything he takes a picture of is a source of income. One does not have to be specifically commissioned to be on the job.
> HN's effectively dead if SOPA passes

How so? I'm having trouble recalling offhand anything posted to HN that would cause HN to run into SOPA trouble.
> because Foxconn employees have a history of killing themselves

This isn't true. Foxconn employee are less likely to kill themself than the general population.
I think this news delegitimizes banks and the government more than it legitimizes the Mafia. It goes to show you the theft inherent in lending with interest, which is a sin in many religions. It also highlights the continued existence of the mafia despite the elected government supposedly having a monopoly on justice and the subset of justice imposing forces.

Is it possible that the mafia is more just than the government? At leas their is no illusion about the source of their power and who they must answer to and those who they control.
Blame the Internet: London's burglars won't even steal CDs, DVDs
You make a great point and I changed my vote because of this. Thanks for being a voice of reason.
This blog entry makes me want to write a similar entry: "Why coders should try their hand at marketing and BD." The subtitle would be "A real life lesson in understanding your customer base."
What's the probability that major websites join the movement?

One one hand a 24-hour outage would result in loss of a couple of bucks, but on the other, they in fact participated in the IPv6 day, so I'm not sure.
Are there any decent open source applications that I can launch to create pretty API docs?

I see that GitHub says their API is Open Source, but is that the actually contributing to the API examples, or the actual
code?
Stormtrooper Motorcycle Suits
Thanks for posting this, Devon!

Its a great cause, and there has been a huge outpouring of support from JS programmers and other web devs. I'd love it if TeamJS could meet our $25k goal. We're at $22.4K right now.

You can learn more about Feeding America here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8l-ojOoFSCo
And by throwing away you mean "donating them", right? :)
Yes, so I can get some work done on the 18th (..and it makes a good statement from us as a community!)
The level of homophobia that he has shown and some of the things in some of his book, might be construed as a mental disease. The effort that many homophobic people go to to "hate" (or whatever you want to call it) homosexual people tends to seem "diseased" to me.

OSC: "I will act to destroy that government [that recognizes gay marriages] and bring it down"
Say someone posts a link to a website that shows a technical description of how to crack some form of DRM, which is something a good portion of the HN audience would be interested in. One of the companies that use that DRM could get HN shut down.
Some anecdotal references to it in this article from 2006 http://www.gamezebo.com/news/2006/05/26/interview-paul-thele... I'll let you know if I come up with more.
When we talk about going dark we are talking about US viewers only right? I have no power to change SOPA so there is no point protesting to me.
I too agree with your view point. While it may seem like it would be a loss, it may be a first step in getting larger sites on board. It would seem impossible for sites like TechCrunch not to cover a Reedit blackout, as well as HN. If more momentum is gained perhaps the attention of congress could be reached and we can feel like we stood together.
It (i.e. the book) was more utopian than dystopian, but neither "utopian" nor "dystopian" are really appropriate terms here. The Earth-wide government wasn't much more than an UN (that changed after Peter got put in charge), but there was international peace and harmony since the Buggers were the primary concern, so one could say that that was better. But no significant oppression, etc.
Yes because a lot of wealthy people visit Hacker News. Angels, VCs, startup founders, hackers who had good exits, etc. If politics are owned by wealthy corporations and individuals, then let's throw some money against SOPA.
We play a forum version of the game (Mafia):
http://mafiascum.net/wiki/index.php?title=Main_Page

Lotta fun.
List of Websites Monitored by Homeland Security published by Cryptome
I think the effect of people being aware of HN would be quite different from that of HN being available whilst reddit wasn't. Essentially HN is not as 'good' at doing what reddit does (because it's not meant to), so increased awareness isn't likely to shift people from reddit. Take away reddit and things change. It will be interesting to see the effect on the web without reddit for a day. With no serious Digg these days, HN would be high on the list of alternatives (even though it is not aimed as such), and there will no doubt be a lot of SOPA posting that day.
How about loading the gplus:// link in a hidden iframe. Then continue to load the page in the browser. If they have the app installed, it will redirect, otherwise the page will just load in the browser.
Do you guys not remember the blue ribbon campaign?

The practice is to blacken your page. Force someone to read a "WTF IS THIS ABOUT?" and then pass them through to your usual service (still themed in black)
Show HN: My "split-panel" display styled text renderer
The Google Plus app suspiciously feels like a Webkit wrapper.
Yea pretty sure it is. David Fetterman gave a talk at F8 about how they approach it. I think the vid is online somewhere, but here's the transcript. http://www.readwriteweb.com/mobile/2011/09/how-facebook-mobi...
It means it's some writer for Variety offering a summary of how they see the story.

Entertainment journalism is not known for its accuracy.
I think you got it backwards. Just displaying a notice is "telling." Actually shutting down is "showing" by doing.
FWIW, I think if Google, Twitter, and/or Facebook joined, they'd just put up custom messages (maybe with a link?) to an anti-SOPA page.

Of course, the question is, how do they define their political neutrality after this?
There is a mindset of used being bad in China. Don't interpret "never lived in" as "not sold". Many of these cities have been sold but no one lives there because if the house has been lived in the value will drop. Some houses being flipped now as new are actually 10 years old but no one ever moved in.

I wouldn't be too quick to call a crash. Large cities become self-sustaining after a point. Except for Detroit (where the 'city' was mostly divested of wealth in favour of surrounding suburbs), there are few examples of modern cities failing without something catastrophic causing it.

Ignoring scam developments, because they happen everywhere, there isn't much chance of a crash unless everyone rich leaves China. Look at places of very significant development, like Chongqing, has a population of 20 million and housing for about 30 million at the moment. It's marked as one of the four 'direct-controlled municipalities' and it's likely to grow further because there are few other places for young educated people to move to out of the rural areas of Southern and Central China.

This isn't a defence of China, I'm no fan, but there are realities that must be considered. Urbanization is a real process, people will move from the country to the city seeking wealth. When you start with a huge rural base, like India and China, the urbanization process will send property markets berserk.
The fun part here is that since it's being made by Summit, it's being funded at least in part by the insane profits from the Twilight series.

Of course, Summit and Lionsgate are in merger talks, and if that happens all bets are off.
As much as I loved Ender's Game when I read it the first and subsequent times, I lost all respect for the man and his works after finding out what a homophobe Orson Scott Card is. He's so full of hate.
I proudly join my fellow protesters in the US, despite living elsewhere. The ideals they defend are mine and I stand by their side.
I get queasy watching 3d shooters. I don't want to imagine how bad that could be with Ender's Game in 3d on the big screen.
What led you to that conclusion? No, seriously, I want to know. Why don't you feel welcome?
The most telling part of this experience was the discovery of how good open source mapping has become lately.

While it's the money that's forcing developers to look for alternative mapping solutions, it's also unleashing a wave of interest in open source maps. Those will undoubtedly get better as time passes.

I do believe Google will look back on the decision to start charging for their map products at the levels chosen as a bad one for themselves, but a great one for open source.
As noted above, the lack of men in nursing is something that the nursing community worries about.

What I do think anyone who wants to see more women programmers can do is this: if you hear that women (or a woman) is discouraged from X for reason Y do not dismiss their concern. First, reason Y is probably a symptom not the main reason. Second, dismissal is in itself a discouragement, as it implies that their opinion is not worth anything. It would better to reflect on what the main reason might be (or what assumption are you making that may be false).
I said a 3D space, as in volume, not outter space. The story spends a great deal of time illustrating how Ender has a mind for assymetical battle, denial of ground, and other things prevelent to battle in zero G. Adding an increased or heightened awareness of dimensional depth to the film would be very valuable.
One of the proposals I saw was not a complete blackout but for a interstitial notice to be inserted for 30 seconds (that can't be cancelled). I prefer such a proposal because if you need to look up critical info, you still can.
The Best Thing You'll Watch All Day
I briefly had a painful bout back in 2000 - was working full-time and was taking classes too. Luckily, had a good physiotherapist and went for ultrasound. The nerve damage was minimal, and the following helped:
1. Get some rubber squeeze balls - they have different strengths (indicated by color). Remind yourself to use them every 30 minutes
2. You can substitute the above with Chinese medic(Baoding balls). They are extremely effective
3. DO some hand stretch exercises (yoga helps here). A basic exercise is twining your forearms around each other and stretching them gently.
4. Keyboard setup - make sure that your fingers are positioned as in playing the piano - that is, they should not raise the wrist but lower the wrist to the keys.
5. Give regular rest to your hands - go free of mouse/keyboard.

These worked/are working for me - YMMV - I luckily avoided having surgery (not fun)
It's not about HN users. It's so HN users can say to other people, see this forum of entrepreneurs is offline in protest.
Interactive Fiction and Free Software
But then you have an extraneous page loaded.
I might be misremembering, and some of those folks may have moved on, but Comcast inherited a large portion of the '@home' cable modem network, which was, as far as I know, the first network to run out of RFC1918 space due to size and not horrible management.

You can't grow a network that large without knowing your stuff inside and out. The netops folks at comcast are fairly active in NANOG, etc. as well.
Communication Devices of the President