skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Not always. The most common and reliable piracy channel for Windows 7 right now is by updating your BIOS with a SLIC signature, and then installing Windows as a valid OEM copy. The installation ISOs can be SHA1 and MD5 hash checked against the same versions given out on Microsoft's TechNet site, because it's the same disk required to install any version of Windows 7.

Granted, flashing your BIOS with random binaries floating around the internets is just as bad, if not worse, than installing random pirated binaries, but it's a lot easier* to check whether or not a 512KB dump is exactly the same as the version given out by the manufacturer's site with the exception of a section of non-executable address space than it is to check to see if the only modifications to a 4.2GB ISO are on activation-related components.

For tomorrows readers: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BIOS#SLIC

* Easier, for people who know how to diff hexdumps and BIOS firmware...
Yep, perpetuates for life. It's called Chimerism.

I'd be interested (obviously) in finding out what other implications this might have for me long term besides enabling me to life a life of crime. ;-)
Please use comments in reply to this one to discuss the actual text of the amendment and how to get it moving if you are interested :)
I wonder how many of those 1% actually work in the field that they majored in? For example, how many of the zoology "1 percenters" are actually working in the zoology field?
Maybe you could go further upstream? Consider integrating with POS systems, merchant account providers, or payment gateways.
Good catch acqq! I wrote the code for that essay first, copied it in my working algorithm (which is a bit more complicated than what wrote here), and after a few segfaults and other problems, got it working there by just using the max thread count. However, that fix didn't make it back to the essay.

I've updated the essay code, with commentary about the problem. Thank you for pointing it out.

I've updated the test so it says "starting N=110885 different jobs for the worker threads".

Also, I never reported the speedup of one core vs. four cores. What I reported was the speedup from computing across the NxN matrix vs. using symmetry and only computing the N*(N-1)/2 similarities. That's the factor of two time.

Raw data computed yesterday, for a threshold of 0.80 (and a slightly different problem), on an 8 core machine, using from 1 to 8 cores, is:

OpenMP pthreads
cores time scaleup time scaleup
1 0:02:00 1.0 0:02:01 0.99
2 0:01:06 1.8 0:01:06 1.8
3 0:00:44 2.7 0:00:44 2.7
4 0:00:32 3.75 0:00:33 3.6
5 0:00:27 4.4 0:00:28 4.3
6 0:00:23 5.2 0:00:23 5.2
7 0:00:20 6.0 0:00:20 6.0
8 0:00:26 4.6 0:00:19 6.3

This is a rented Amazon node, and I consistently found that 8 nodes using OpenMP gave poor results, so I suspect I didn't have access to 8 cores.

This benchmark also doesn't have the randomization which confused my previous benchmark run, so you can see that the two threading systems gave essentially identical timings. Looks like I'll need to update a previous essay.
Well that's probably why they're called Pirate Party :P
I'm sure it does cause potential complications to an extent. However, I know of at least two comparable situations that occur without medical intervention:

1) Pregnant women -- During pregnancy, and to some extent afterward, the mother's blood contains cells from the fetus she is carrying. Some of these cells migrate to other places of the body. Scientists hypothesize that this is part of why pregnancy may lower cancer risk -- something about how the mother's immune system deals with these foreign cells. This is called fetal microchimerism. http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=fetal-cells...

2) Chimeric people. In rare cases, a human can be born that is made up of two separate DNA profiles. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chimera_(genetics)
My only problem with your model is that it requires me to be already paying you a non-trivial amount of money (for a brand new app) to get started with your Inbound API.
Murdoch's Position on SOPA is rooted in blind greed
That is pretty funny.

Reminds me of the time I was working on a .net project and the lead developer wired up a call in the OnApplicationError method to log the machine name origin of each error to a database. Every week he would hand out an award to the person with the most errors.

The interesting part was when he did the same thing for the bug tracker, the list was inverted. Those with more errors in development had fewer bugs in QA.
Take your pick. There's:

Using unlicensed software

copyright infringement

downloading a torrent

pirating

..among others.

None of them roll off the tongue as nicely as "steal" or "thief", but copyright infringement is just as illegal as stealing.

The industry groups have been campaigning for years (with great success) to ensure they mean the same thing. They do not.

Please don't fall into their trap.
It depends. If the cancer relapses it can be resistant to chemotherapy I've been exposed to before, which makes the prognosis a lot worse. There are alternative chemotherapies though and they can repeat the transplant. But yeah, if they can eradicate all traces of the cells now, and if the donor T -cells succeed in fighting off any cancerous cells that remain, the odds are a lot better.

It is difficult to deal with, or was definitely so at the beginning. But I guess people are really adaptable -- I've a list of things I want to do and try when I get out, and right now I feel like even if I only had another year I wouldn't be too bummed.
Ah, thanks! I've fixed the problematic text.
Intellectual property enforces a monopoly over the mind
"Copy". I can't speak for the previous poster, but to me "steal" implies denying the owner of a possession. A copyright isn't a possession, it's a grant of exclusive rights.
UChicago offering online Climate 101 class
More Anti-Piracy Bill Co-Sponsors Bail
Nothing. They call those "universities".
Honestly this is pretty straight forward wishful thinking. It certainly isn't Keynes (who believed in paying debts down during upswings). Here is the article's point in his own words...

"The US government only has to make sure that the US debt growth rate doesn’t exceed the growth rate of our tax revenue. As long as we take in money faster than we borrow, we can always meet interest obligations and grow faster than we owe money."

Interest is, by definition, paying money for nothing. You received money in the past and are now paying for the privilege of having enjoyed whatever that money bought you back then. But in the present tense Interest is money for nothing.

The author foresees a world where we are constantly paying more and more money and getting nothing in return (because the previous generation enjoyed whatever that money bought them). While our debt continues to rise because we're putting nothing towards the principle and in all likelihood still spending more than we take in.

That doesn't sound like a good future to me.
Rack app to serve deployed git commit SHA
Annoyingly, this also includes the codex and extensions gallery.
You can avoid the wsj pay wall by typing or copying and pasting the article title into google.
Wow, I had no idea haxe was still around. I looked at using it about 4-5 years ago and dismissed it as not ready for prime time, but that looks like a reasonably active community.
I think ultimately the worst thing will be the unintended consequences, but those are hard to predict before they happen - and don't fit conveniently into a sound bite.
I was gonna say, walking around with someone else's blood sounds like it'd make for an entertaining crime drama episode.
Stop American Censorship – SOPA & PIPA Are Not the Right Choice
So, none of the examples given so far convince me.

I remember a couple of bits where you get multiple levels of nested indentation, to the point where the text started half-way across the page, and those would be difficult on most e-reader screens.

You would lose something when converting to ebook, no doubt. But the convenience might also make it worthwhile.

(Stretched analogy: I have heard that Pink Floyd's vinyl album Atom Heart Mother was cut so that at the end, it just kept playing the inner ring in a loop instead of finishing, so you got the repeating sound of a dripping tap. That would be lost as an mp3, but I'd still rather have the digital version.)
For one: linking should not be a crime, under any circumstance, even if we're dealing with child pornography. If that's the case then their job should be to actually catch the people making child pornography, and not just take down their website, which would be easy to move anyway.
ICE has no jurisdiction outside the US. As I understand it, they can seize US domains (.com) but not other countries' domains, nor can they force an ISP to block access to a domain. So what legal recourse is there?
And there is a precedent for lottery systems like this in the form of juries.
We didn't feel we had the traffic/audience to make a blackout effective, so we did the next best thing, and wrote an article trying to help inform any who might be following our blog.
Wouldn't it have been easier for them to redirect everything to a static black page instead of overlaying this with fancy CSS magic? Not to mention the fact that every page still gets loaded before the banner pops up, which is not only visually jarring, but also puts completely unnecessary load on their servers. Doesn't serving content cost money?
This describes the verge vs engadget, I like the content on the verge more but on engadget it's much easier to tell where I left off from my last visit. On the verge I always feel like stories have slipped through because the content is so non linear.

I think what you are describing works in certain mediums, but not well or at all in others.
Windows XP launched more than 10 years ago. What I said was true for Vista (5 years old) and 7 (2 years old) and is true for Windows 8 afaik. I'm not sure what your point would be - that you'd pirate Windows 8 because you didn't approve of the ease of use of an activation system they deprecated 5 years ago?
By that logic, if you work a day for me and then I decide not to pay you, you aren't any poorer than you were before so no harm right?
Google+ Gets Video Status Updates
Show HN: Startups: Cut Up to 90% of Your Online Marketing Expenses
As a Python guy, it's an API layer on top of POSIX threads organizing calls to a shared library extension written in C. Most of the time is spent in the C extension (max 10 seconds out of 130), so doesn't seem right to call it the "Python" version.

In any case, the section is "using pthreads from Python" and the chart lists "Python/pthreads", so I think I labeled it well enough, and won't be making a change.

(The point, after all, was to compare an OpenMP version to something which doesn't use OpenMP.)
Is There a SOPA Alternative Both Sides Can Live With?
SOPA and the New Gatekeepers
Hmm...interesting. I see the difference you are trying to illustrate but to me, obtaining something illegally that was intended to be purchased is stealing. We're talking about the same thing though:)
Thanks a lot for the reply, i wish you well in your hard journey.
I find it strange that a method of protest appears to be an opportunity to see who can make the nicest looking one.

Given the title of the thread, are some considering the blackout less of a political manoeuvre and more of a portfolio addition?

Obviously they need to be attention grabbing enough to highlight the cause, but as a metric surely effectiveness is better than impressiveness?
The unexploited opportunity in the obvious
Apple doesn't like rental services because unlike purchases of proprietary drm content rentals don't provide long term lock in to the platform.
Ask HN: WebApp Creation System?
I'm thinking of creating an app that would make it ridiculously easy for the average Joe or Jane to create a web app - like graphical creation of input forms and output reports, automated creation of main menus and database structure (but can be done manually), pages which run user code on the data etc.
Is it possible? Or does it already exist?
They are like the Terminator, they will not stop. Wait and see, there will eventually be a bill very similar to SOPA that will pass. The population is made up primarily of dumb primates.
Wikipedia Italy protest against SOPA
You are correct; I misread it.
As far as I understand it, if you have a website with a non U.S. domain name and not using a U.S. or U.S.-treaty-based payment system, there is no way to block access to rip-off items (material or digital) to be purchased in the U.S. For material goods, customs have the ability to confiscate these at the borders. There are international treaties in progress, where the U.S. partners with other countries, but the internet is a big, wide-open place and it's easy to move elsewhere or get safe harbour.

(For the record, I believe that only innovation will solve these problems, not suppression).
YouTube Displaying video in 3D
It's actually public domain: https://github.com/zachstronaut/stop-sopa
He is saying that there are a lot of sites that offer services which could enable or facilitate pirating, because the terms 'enable' and 'facilitate' are not particularly limited in scope.

It seems clear to me.
"Policing" requirements on links that are unsustainable for small businesses. Something that might have hit home on an NPR interview I heard earlier today: how many people do you have to police your own blog comment section? The usual response from shills is to say that the bill doesn't target those sites. But the point is that it's so poorly drafted that it's likely to sweep them in anyway, by abuse of process.

Speaking of which: Prior abuse of DMCA process against sites like veoh, which got painted as pirates, and subjected to legal or government action, when they weren't. Including at least one fraudulent takedown which was used to censor a news story about a prior fraudulent takedown: http://www.theverge.com/2011/12/14/2636680/universal-has-tec...
This Horror Story Shows How SOPA Would Be Bad News For Startups
I'm pretty sure it was. Racket was renamed just a little over a year ago (though the previous name was actually "PLT Scheme" — DrScheme is an editor that became DrRacket).
> It's odd to think of people being more rational in the long term, but rational ideas are simply more stable.

Interestingly, I read this paper not too long ago:

http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v477/n7364/full/nature1...

It's just a toy model... but that does underscore how easy it is to come up with a set of assumptions that lead to irrational ideas being more stable than rational ones.
Accreditation is a barrier to entry, but it's not insurmountable. The supply can still go up, particularly if prices are expected to rise.
And some work in no field, having inherited money.

The interesting statistics would be, what skill sets did people apply to make large amounts of money?
Fortunately the reddit front page is customizable for registered users, and at the same time the additional users mean more ad money.
And with the recent retweets, the latent homophobia present in the general public.
SOPA / PIPA has nothing to do with copyright
Although I don't find MS to be the worst of all suppliers, it is yet an other prime example how companies fail to grasp that the only way they will ever compete with pirated content (be it right or wrong) is by service and by service only. The pirated price is already unbeatable and shamefully, its service is arguably better.

A bit of a rant, but I am getting a bit tired that, still as we enter 2012, what does the paying customer get for his troubles? You don't live in country xx? You can't see/listen/buy online content yy. Although definitely in music and games there has been progress, I could still add hundreds of more examples.

And what currently is the envisioned answer to this flawed business model? A set of laws that will inevitably alter some of our more dear democratic principles. Not to mention the economic fallout.

On a side note, I can't help wondering my thoughts to the teen-sex debates in the US, where some people hopelessly cling to abstinence measures which in theory, work fine. Whereas in practice, there seems to be quiet some empirical evidence that young people, well, just do it.
wonderful news! i'm glad he motivated me to sign up for the registry too.
A great article that explains why "intellectual property" is not really property, because nobody really owns an idea. This is why both the patent and copyright laws only gave "limited time" ownership to the creators. Well, we can't really say that's true for copyright now with life+70 years terms + adding another 20 year extension everytime it's about to expire. I like this quote:

'Property rights arose to grapple with natural scarcity; “intellectual property” rights were invented to create scarcity where it does not naturally exist.'
"This is science fiction stuff. I can hardly believe it’s even possible"

This was my reaction too. I literally had to get up from my chair and marvel at what science has wrought.
Note that if you sign up with the donors.marrow.org registry in January, American Express is covering all the registry's costs (about $100 per new donor candidate), so it's a particularly good time to sign up.
"Would anyone happen to know why they dropped the course originally?"

http://www.wisdomandwonder.com/link/2110/why-mit-switched-fr...

http://danweinreb.org/blog/why-did-mit-switch-from-scheme-to...

http://mitadmissions.org/blogs/entry/the_end_of_an_era_1

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=530605
This technique is simultaneously cool and depressing. Remember all that cool stuff you learned in computational geometry? Throw it out.

Just associate geometry with a set of well chosen ids, and you can stuff it into really simple, conventional data structures and do all of the spatial operations you wanted to quickly and simply in practice.
Wikipedia App for Android
En.mobile.wikipedia.org isn't blocked?
Not really.

It would only lead to "government sanctioned search engines".

See: China + Baidu.
That's one way to do it. That's fair. If it were me I'd only bring up piracy if they did and I wouldn't repeat the word piracy, I'd call it file sharing but I wouldn't go into it more than what's absolutely necessary. We have to do like the Republicans. Pick a slogan and hammer it hard.
I'm curious about the long tail effects of this. I wonder how many people in need found a donor match from all the people that got tested for this campaign?
The problem is actually with the definition of infringing site: "The term 'U.S.-directed site' means an Internet site or portion thereof that is used to conduct business directed to residents of the United States".

By this definition, a Youtube channel of people posting rickroll mashups and served, say, under a .fr domain, without paying Rick Astley, would make Youtube an infringing site as a whole. A Google group dedicated to memes based on captions of The Hurt Locker and served under the .za domain would make Google an infringing site as a whole. A subreddit dedicated to... you get the idea.
good point, adding to the readme.
Not stealing, but it is profiting from goodwill. Attention is the currency of the web, and while you can't stop people looking for alternatives, you can be respectful about not profiting from it.
If You Support PIPA/SOPA, You're The Socialist
Technology in Education: College before Grade School
Hofstadter cares a lot about form, and thinks it is intimately connected to function. I believe in the end of "I Am a Strange Loop" he said that he edits every single line of text so it fits evenly and aesthetically across the line. In other words, each line must stretch to the far right of the page, but the letters can't be stretched out/separated too much. This must be extremely tedious to accomplish.
It's so that English Wikipedia is still accessible in some way.
If I recall correctly, we sent a daily feed to Upromise. I don't know how often or when they updated their totals.
An honest outlook of a Flash Dev with limited options
Hmm. I don't think I've seen this as a twist/trope on TV procedurals yet.
The article didn't mention the fact that student loans are not discharged in a bankruptcy. There are far too many students who go to school, find out it's not for them, but are stuck with students loans that must be paid.

There was an article on here a few months ago with a graph showing the growth of administration versus faculty in the University of California system. Starting from a low (5-10%) ratio of administrators:faculty it's now reached at least parity.

Imagine being able to buy a house where you don't have to pay for it until you move. And offering that only to 18-year-olds. What kind of purchase decisions do you think they'd make?
One thing that might be skewing the results- this chart is based on regularly-taxed income, which would exclude gains made from things like stock options and grants. I would hypothesize that a good chunk of CS and Engineering majors have done very well for themselves, but not from earning salary alone.

However, age is probably the single biggest factor here. Older people tend to be much wealthier and earn far more, and some "tech" degrees like CS weren't even offered (or offered widely) until relatively recently. I would also posit that the rise of very wealthy engineers is a relatively recent phenomenon, compounding the age issue.
Backlash against Microsoft's "Avoid Ghetto" GPS feature
The crux of the matter is that "steal" implies you've deprived the owner of something. (Actually, the us supreme court ruled on this a long while ago and clearly delineated the two..)

The only reason for the tap on the shoulder is the effort by the industry groups to get people to conflate the two things. I hate seeing people be tricked, especially by such an odious organization :)
Im sure CSI Miami have it covered.
The goal was to reduce spam in inboxes, not to send people to jail and disrupt bot nets (which I presume are already illegal in most cases). So, judging by it's original goal, it has not been effective. (See other links in this thread.) Which is fine, because we have better solutions now anyway.

Not that I don't share your frustration. I run a small wiki that was so overrun by spam I had to install reCaptcha. Now the few people that still try and spam are actually doing the public a service by transcribing books. :)
(SPOILER) this is the twist in a novel I've read:http://tinyurl.com/6r6hkhn
(edit: tinyURL'd so the link text doesn't give tell you what the book is if you don't want to know).
Jerry Yang resigns suddenly from Yahoo
Peer to peer production and Google's threat to intellectual property
To thats more of a reason to link to have more and more people go to Wikipedia today. Wouldn't change anything by linking here though as most of HN traffic is already aware of this.
"To bypass a government-granted monopoly"

It rolls right off the tongue.
Given that Visual Studio underlines all your compilation errors and lists them in the Error List as you write your code, I don't see how this would work.
There's also a huge demand for flights to the moon. Nobody supplies it because it'd be too expensive. Same thing for a LOTR that you couldn't charge for.

Where do you draw the line? Commercial entities? I'm sure I could raise funding for a non-profit that offered every ebook ever written for download. That would single-handedly destroy the ebook industry.

I never said movies would go away, but you wouldn't have Transformers and you wouldn't have LOTR. As you said, you'd have movies that are more locked-down in their distribution and you'd have more ads and product placement in films. All for what? So that you can freely share those films to lower your entertainment budget? So that indie films can take more market share because you prefer them? Because copyright law is already largely unenforceable?

I'm all for more lax punishment for piracy, lower fines, etc. I'm not for eliminating IP law.