skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
To be fair, I am not suggesting that schemes with no copyright would benefit or even have a neutral effect on individual companies or even industries. I think they could continue to exist, though quite possibly in a diminished state.

It is my thought however that the harm done to society by these industries becoming diminished would be vastly outweighed by the positive aspects. We'll likely have to agree to disagree there.

-

"Alternatives such as Zynga are, to me, unpalatable"

Oh trust me... I have no argument there.
So, again, we start to dig into some very deep taboos here, right?

Is it really that bad if somebody who needs a bed uses mine without permission while it lies unused, provided it isn't harmed and is returned to its initial condition?

We're big about virtualization and the cloud and shared hosting, right?

Why not consider something similar for worldly goods? It seems awfully inefficient, with 7 billion people, for everyone to have a unique, untouchable copy of everything.
Be careful what you say.

Eli Aliosi had a great blog where he talked about the kind of stuff that you're talking about... bluehatseo.com

He went a little too far and got done in by Russian Hackers, the FBI and a delusional hacker who couldn't tell the difference between anime and reality. His server became the most burned server in the world.
It's a great statement, but it does make me laugh a little to think that on a day when everyone is being urged to contact their senators... he has blacked out his contact details.

No need to call him as he's already on side, of course. But still.
A good deal of PIPA opposition is from Oregon Senator Ron Wyden. Makes me glad to live in Oregon!
It can't be "stealing" since Reddit accounts don't expire when one opens another account on HN...
List of US politicians that have reversed support for PIPA/SOPA
OK. The primary application that I need Windows for is Quickbooks Enterprise. I also still use my Windows Photoshop license since it was expensive, and not transferrable to OS X. My primary operating system is already OS X, and I only use Debian Stable on servers. I run Windows in a VM when I need those application, and only when I need those applications. How would you suggest replacing Quickbooks Enterprise? Do I just stop keeping accounting records? What about the 13 years of records that are already in the accounting system? Should I throw those out? What about inventory and accountant's copies? Will you train my customer's accounting firm to use some other package? What about the inventory database?
PG, once again a stand up guy. Cheers!
These are great points and a good portion of piraters do so for these exact reasons. There are always going to be people who steal content/apps instead of paying for them but I am sure more than a few people pirate purely because it is a better user experience than what is currently offered.

TV shows are a great example. I cut my cable about a year ago and haven't looked back since. I refuse to pay a premium for channels packaged together that I never watch.

Currently, I use a combination of Netflix, Hulu Plus, Amazon Prime, Apple TV, and Zune Marketplace to fill my content needs. They provide a great user experience but the pricing structure/availability is lacking. Most shows available on Prime, Apple Tv, Zune are only available for purchase. What if I don't want to purchase them? Why can't I rent TV shows just like I rent movies? I have never been one to purchase and own content since I usually don't watch things more than once. I pay to rent movies all the time from Apple TV and Zune via Xbox.

Hulu Plus is great, but they have a fraction of the content I would like to watch. Basically, there's not a perfect solution yet but I refuse to go back to cable. Here's what I would like to see:

1. Charge me per view, don't sell me the content to own.

2. If the margin is too thin for the rental model, throw an ad in there...I won't mind. (Hulu plus does this)

3. Let the content producers sell their content directly to me to increase margin. This can be done by the content producers creating apps for Xbox, Roku, etc.

4. Make all previous seasons of shows available to me for rental to increase revenue.

5. Use these awesome new technologies to create deeper experiences/interactions with the content, which will open up new revenue streams.
I was just watching Blumenauer on C-SPAN (deficit debates) - out of the 10 or so people I saw speak over the past hour, he was the sane one. (My own rep. was an embarrassment.) Same district Sen. Wyden came from, too. Apparently, Oregon's third district knows how to elect competent people.
"Corporatism" in the context of 1920s Italy meant something different than it does in 2010s America. Specifically, it referred to vertically-integrated sectors of public life, like heavy industry, or schoolteachers, or policemen, or banks.
he has blacked out his contact details.

His DC and OR phone numbers are still shown on the site (at the bottom in case you didn't scroll down far enough)
That's Earl Blumenauer, who represents Oregon's 3rd congressional district, which encompasses the east side of Portland (where I live): http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:0oD5oF4... (link to Google cache since Wikipeida is down of course)

I say this mostly facetiously, but being represented by Mr. Blumenauer and Ron Wyden in the Senate almost makes me feel left out of the protest -- I can't really write an angry letter to my representatives because they're both on the right side of this issue!

EDIT: Thanks all for the prodding. I just sent a note to both Blumenauer and Wyden and thanked them for their stance on this issue.
These sites believe that they face an existential crisis due to this proposed legislation. Slightly impacting the service today to save it for the long term is clearly worth the tradeoff, if it's necessary.
Thirty Years Before SOPA, MPAA Feared the VCR
Salman Khan on SOPA and PIPA [Video]
The CAP theorem is boiled down to you choosing whether or not you want consistent reads.
At least one of those activities is blacking out his website on SOPA blackout day.
Wyden was originally from the same district, in fact. You guys are good.
afaik, pre-orders give you access to the "beta" version which is still very playable and will also give you access to the finished version when it is done.

All you get for free is an older version where you cannot do multiplayer or save your game. Basically a demo.
[RIP] World's youngest Microsoft Certified Professional has passed away
I think Facebook timeline differs in a fundamental way from, lets say, newspapers.

Newspapers work well with multiple columns because there's no inherent connecting features. Sure a page from the sports section will all have sports related items, but in general all the columns stand by themselves.

Facebook timeline is united by time. As in, what I say at the top of my timeline might be directly related to what I said before, and that might be directly related to what i said before that, and so on. So as humans, we want to read objects in the way they were chronologically presented. But on the new timeline, in order to do this, we have to zig zag from left to right, to left again. This isn't engaging the user just as making me do jumping jacks while I read isn't engaging -- yes it is spicing up my reading experience, but that just forces me to relearn something that is harder than what I was doing originally.

If the timeline was broken up into pieces, I could deal with that. Wall posts on the left, images and polls on the right, etc. Give my eyes some logical way to focus on only a part of my screen. But the exact middle of the screen on Facebook is a dividing line between left and right that presents almost identical information, and I have to form a structure from that.

Taking another example, in movies, it makes sense that the movie makers try to confuse and sex up a movie -- our brains want to be stimulated. But there's a difference between spicing the content of entertainment and spicing up the delivery method that content is offered -- imagine going to the movie and having two videos on the screen at once -- both showing different things. I'm pretty sure you wouldn't be happy.
I've never had any problems with the copy of windows 7 I bought from the microsoft online store. I've had to redownload it two or three times now, and it's always been there (although the page is near impossible to find). I had a screenshot of the page, but imgur is down today so I can't link it.
The email address field is a bit too short for the email address I wanted to use. Some universities force students to use cumbersomely long emails addresses; e.g., California State University Long Beach makes its students use firstname.lastname@student.csulb.edu.

May want to tweak your validation to allow a bit more breathing room.
Mega Man 2's Soundtrack Played Live, To a Live Speed Run [Video]
Exactly. They've already won in the press where SOPA and PIPA are referred to as "piracy bills". We need an alternate term. Unfortunately "skip-due-process bills" has too many syllables.
I am having the same experience. I even bought a copy of this book for my cousin who is interested in programming... although I'm afraid the mathematical concepts involved in lisp and other functional languages might mess up his mathematical development for a few years (at least until he gets into high school)
Improvement On Age-Old Mathematical Principle Could Yield Improved Images, Video
"I hear there are rumors on the internets..."
I explicitly acknowledge the difference between scarce and non-scare goods in the above post if you could bother to read the second paragraph. The part you're leaving out in your 'improved' anology is that it might cost 10 years and ten million dollars to develop this $200 car.

Basically the great-grand-parent is saying that there's no rational or moral justification for someone profiting from innovation, because it's in someone else's self interest to take that innovation, and these two parties self interests cancel each other out to the exclusion of all other factors. I find that to be an extremely naive and simplistic argument.
No it wasn't, that's a lefty myth recently invented. The word "corporatism" didn't exist back then.

Mussolini referred to corporativismo, which he defined as a large number of people working together, not specific to the modern corporation.

You shouldn't relay bad information if you're actually ignorant of Fascist history under Mussolini.
That sounds noble, but it's really about what the students are purchasing, right? The most popular major is business. (Though IMO it's not a very useful major.) Psychology is #2.

http://www.princetonreview.com/college/top-ten-majors.aspx

I think there should be a major in "applied psychology" because so much of success in the white collar world is understanding and motivating co-workers.
The two party system is an inevitable outcome of the election system we have. The game theory dictates it. Switch to approval voting(http://www.electology.org/approval-voting) and we'll have a much more responsive and ethical government.

In a winner take all system, if there are more than two candidates, the dominant effect is the spoiler effect, where having more similar candidates makes it less likely that any will win. This means that anything more than two parties is degenerate, which implies that only the dominant eigenvector of political opinion will ever be reflected in an election. (Which in the US is typically the culture wars/identity politics, unless the economy is falling apart.)
Also, as far as lack of copyright crippling music, I am sure that would be astounding news to Vivaldi, Bach, Mozart, and Beethoven, among many others.
In professions where the portfolio is more acceptable or possible, you see a higher percentage of corporations willing to hire candidates with no university education. You see it in software and in graphical design and other creative fields. In other fields not so much.
Interesting, I am not in the US, so perhaps that is the reason. Slightly odd though, because I can darken and see darken pictures in other streams.
Any word on when boto will support this?
Ah, I hadn't seen that. I take back my little laugh.
Cassandra is a great project, as it is Hadoop, MySQL, etc. The issue I am raising is that it is not so much which project is better on a feature basis, but the fact that Amazon is able to offer it as a service, in a scalable way that no other vendor is able to do (with the exception of Google and, on a good day, Microsoft). Most other "traditional" cloud vendors, such as Rackspace, do not have anything remotely comparable to this, EBS, SQS, RDS, etc.
pg, I'm curious why you haven't blacked out Hacker News today. Would love to know your thought process.
Ugh, no. Just because you disagree with them is no reason to ban them.
It also shows just how powerful the blackout is. I much rather these people asking what's going on, then going on with their day in ignorance. Maybe a few hundred will learn what's up and phone their representative.
The author took the link down.
> They're starting to see "internet people" as a significant voting block.

I'd say "they've started" more than "they're starting", I remember having seen a few AMAs and campaign presence on reddit in the last 6 months or so, mostly by kind-of-internet-aligned challengers.

On the other hand, if the current efforts fail it may significantly set this trend back.

Still, it's pretty great being able to witness a transition of this magnitude (if it succeeds). We truly live in interesting times.
SOPA for Non-Techies
> The messages are delivered into a PUSH (publish) ØMQ socket (ala Mongrel2) ... Backend subscribers use a PULL (subscribe) socket to process the SPDY stream

I might be fuzzy on my 0MQ knowledge and Mongrel2 but I thought PUSH/PULL are distinct socket types from PUB/SUB...
The last paragraph made me laugh because it reminded me of when Google started to discount the power of link directories years ago. All the cutting edge SEOs just moved to new techniques and the exact same thing will happen again. It's a cat/mouse game and the people who continue to win are the ones who continue to innovate new ways of gaming the system.

The guys who were really successful were the ones who were doing forum and comment spamming before someone decided to write a program that allowed absolutely anyone to do it. You can be sure none of them are lamenting Google Panda ... they'd moved on to new techniques long ago. Stuff like this is just one very basic example - http://www.buzzfeed.com/awesomer/the-truth-about-infographic....
Websites of SOPA-supporting congressmen redirect to Protest SOPA
"I suppose it's possible there are a lot of intelligent people with the emotional maturity of a 10 year old."

I think this sums it up correctly.
Congressman Has Police Confiscate All Cell Phone Cameras | Vision to America
I couldn't agree more--I browse both HN and Reddit. I think the purpose of the two boards are different and I'm fine with that.
You will have to create an attribute for your json, where you'll store the json utf-8 encoded. If you want to index on parts of that json blob you'll have to pull them out into their own separate attributes and the recombine them into a single json object on read.
The first time I saw the timeline, my first thought was "Wow, that's roughly as cluttered as MySpace. We've almost come full circle."
For now, any way. As soon as it's out of the news, after the elections, they will almost certainly try to pass them, or another similar bill, again. It's a never ending game of Whack-A-Mole. Eventually, one will get through.
As they saying goes, you get what you give.

There's nothing wrong with picking someone that way, but you're essentially selecting someone based on random chance. You'll probably find someone who is adequate at the job, and if that is what you want, who am I to judge?

But the recurring theme on HN is that people want to hire the best of the best. The best people are 10 times more productive, they say. It may be conjecture, maybe businesses don't want that kind of person at all, but selecting someone from a sorted list is almost never going to find you that person. For that, you're going to have to put in some effort.

Anyway, it doesn't matter how you do it. The benefit of the open market is that the one who does it right will find greater success with their hire.
Yeah, a totally shitty world with those crappy pre-copyright amateurs like Shakespeare and without the great art of Justin Bieber. The horror, the horror.
This good feedback, there is a definite risk of muddling up messages. The #1 takeaway is that we need to speak in terms of what this act WOULD do if passed, not what it was INTENDED to do. Because the road hell (you know the rest)...
Wow, you guys are much classier than I am. I've just been hitting Google's "cached" links for Wikipedia today.
MPAA Hits New Low In Self Pity Over SOPA
The problem with selling to Metallica is that you are selling something that you don't "own." Said another way, the value changes when you can offer exclusivity. It'll be worth less to the company producing the music if someone else can (legally) take the music also.

Now I wouldn't cry if the era of multi-million-dollar entertainers is over, but I think that it would be a mistake to throw all copyright out. Rework it maybe, but keep the idea that mental creations are assets just like physical creations are. The concept of copyright arose because there appeared to be a need to protect those rights when that protection was absent, so I would be very hesitant to throw the baby out with the bathwater when it comes time to reexamine our IP laws.

For me, the SOPA/PIPA issue is about due process. Taking a site offline can be damaging in ways that may be hard to quantify, so the standard of proof should be pretty high IMO.
That's a very fair point. I would be very interested to hear from anyone whose company was greatly hindered by DMCA provisions.
Not Everyone Gets a Seed Round
Islamic Law Comes to Michigan | Vision to America
TheOatmeal.com blacked out in protest of SOPA / PIPA - The Oatmeal
Uggh. All this is is another reminder about how close Commodore Business Machines was in the mid-late 80's at revolutionizing the PC industry and how they then dorked it up inexplicably.

Not seeing a whole lot of "falling" in the current PC industry, but then again a lot of companies in the early 80's were on top of the world.
Post a comment. Include a link to respectable content. Tweak target page to SOPA-contrary content. Goodbye, WSJ.

Might that wake 'em up?
Whether strictly legal or not it's very unlikely to cause any complaints. For instance this would pass a BSA audit with flying colors as all they'll be interested in is installed_copies < licensed_copies.

Though it's very likely to be a very bad idea anyway. As has been pointed out elsewhere a large majority of such activation disabled software is loaded with rootkits and other malware.
Joshua Morse did a wonderful Mega Man album on OC Remix, I recommend it: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FqaiuA776Mo

That said, I wouldn't consider this HN worthy, but thanks.
JQuery UI Bootstrap 0.2 Released
Funny there is also a "Eternal September effect" with regard to domain names. To this day we always have someone contact us and want to know if they can register a really good domain for the base reg fee because "it doesn't come up when I type it in".

The truth is though that the effect is the way many of us make our living. By what we know that others don't.
Windows activation is shockingly easy. Enter your key and when you go online it verifies it. If you're not connected to the internet make a 5 minute phone call. If you don't want to do that, no problem - there is no need to activate for up to 180 days. Really don't want to activate? No problem - it'll just turn your screen black and announce it's unlicensed software.

It seems the author's only significant complaint is that they don't provide him with updated slipstreams to download. It's true - he'd have to make them himself with the free tools they provide. Maybe they should provide public updated slipstreams, but this hardly seems like a valid reason to refuse to pay for the software.
#7 on the front page of Hacker News. And there's confusion as to why SOPA is being considered by Congress.
I'm sorry you're feeling frustrated with this discussion. I'm afraid I just don't understand what your "main points" are supposed to be, if you think I'm only picking nits with the details.

I started this subthread with some fairly black-and-white statements about the relative timing of good practices being adopted, Agile taking off, and less proven practices entering the picture:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3476171

Since then, you have accused me, repeatedly, of being wrong about the history of Agile. Is your objection that early versions of a few Agile processes already existed, albeit in relative obscurity, before the Manifesto was written, but I talked about how 'concrete examples of "Agile" processes started to appear' after the Manifesto was written?

If so, I'll happily concede that point. I don't think it really matters whether you define Agile as starting from the evolution of the general approach/abstract philosophy (which had evidently started by the time of those initial processes) or the writing of the concrete Manifesto and popularisation of the Agile moniker. Nor do I think it really matters whether you define processes like XP and Scrum as appearing as "Agile" processes when they were popularised and given that label (around the time the Manifesto also became widely known) or from when the original processes that became what we now call XP and Scrum were first used anywhere. Any way you cut it, we're talking about the same groups of people, the same general period of time, and the same end results.

My main point is simply that many of the good practices that were adopted by those early Agile processes and are often considered to fall under the Agile umbrella today did not actually originate during that period of time or with the people who worked on those early processes and the Manifesto. However, many of the Agile practices I consider unproven did originate during that period of time and with those people.

While you may wish that no-one in the Agile community claims otherwise, unfortunately that is not always true. While I was researching my post with sources, I found a comment on Martin Fowler's personal web site claiming that Kent Beck coined the term "refactoring" in the mid-'90s, for example, and numerous comments from various posters on other forums suggesting that Fowler's book was the definitive original reference. I think it is important to debunk such claims and any attempt to paint Agile and Waterfall as some sort of dichotomy. That just isn't how software development works, and being "Not Waterfall" is not an argument for switching to any given Agile process.
This. This is exactly the point. It is a really safe bet that in a few years I'll be sitting at the telephone activation screen after paying for another version of Windows and upgrading a motherboard, cursing as I enter the sixth block of digits into the IVR for the forth time. And that is bullshit.
I can think of a bunch of reasons why people make the claim seeing as how the article is about that.

1) You will always have an outdated installation disc so whenever you want to do a install you're stuck with hours of system updates.

2) Losing your install disc means your SOL.

3) The activation process is not always painless. Whenever you have to call their activation line you are wasting time.
Contact them and tell that you're a voter in their area, and you are damn proud of what they are doing. After all, they took a risk, and if they think no-one noticed it then they are unlikely to do it again.

One should criticise when politicians do things you don't like, but complement them when they do something you approve of.