skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I wonder how being bought out, which is surely a far greater occurence in the online world than the offline world, plays into this idea? If you consider that perhaps the major players have bought between 10 and 30 other companies then the opportunities are still abound, just different. I would tend to think that to most people being bought out or absorbed is a suitable alternative to the more difficult task of rising through building a sound business which could take a half-decade or more. Thus I would agree that yes, the model is different, but one is not necessarily more nurturing to opportunities than the other.
I'd be quite surprised if they allowed write access.

(Yes, they mean "no downloads", but it's a rather ridiculous way of phrasing that. And if you can read it, you can save it for later.)
And even more unfortunate are the people who go to bad universities, and who then waste their time there. They don't get the good degree; they don't get much life experience; and they have a debt.
My point is that a fake pair of Levis being sold online isn't going to harm anyone aside from the people foolish enough to buy them from the wrong source.
Except in this case it's more akin to stealing the meal no?
That's what they're trying to do, but by forcing the users to adapt rather than adapting on the product side. Certainly doesn't feel like a user-centric approach.
look up pico-cells.
Your assumptions are wrong. When people pirate content (download without paying), that doesn't necessarily mean that they are not paying the content creators. A Swiss government study found out that people's entertainment budgets are relatively constant - what we don't spend for digital content, we spend for concerts and such. So, there is no real economic harm from piracy (if there was, Hollywood wouldn't be having record profits...).
Is this "passivity" a critique or praise of Obama? Not to go too far off-topic, but...

Despite the economy and foreign policy being by far the most important issue throughout his presidency, his administration has been quite active and successful on LGBT issues.

They've repealed DADT, changed the rules for LGBT in foreign service and passed Matthew Shepard hate crimes legislation.

He's done all this without making LGBT issues a public spectacle, with a Congress that hates him and a public that hasn't made up its mind. It's for these reasons that HRC provides its full-throated support for Obama.

Again -- I'm sorry for derailing the SOPA discussion, but we should keep our facts and impressions well-founded or our primary arguments will fall flat.
I think for context the full article needs to be posted.

(1) Everyone has duties to the community in which alone the free
and full development of his personality is possible.
(2) In the exercise of his rights and freedoms, everyone shall be
subject only to such limitations as are determined by law
solely for the purpose of securing due recognition and
respect for the rights and freedoms of others and of meeting
the just requirements of morality, public order and the
general welfare in a democratic society.
(3) These rights and freedoms may in no case be exercised contrary
to the purposes and principles of the United Nations.

The purposes and principles are defined in the preamble of the declaration.

PREAMBLE

Whereas recognition of the inherent dignity and of the equal
and
inalienable rights of all members of the human family is the
foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world,

Whereas disregard and contempt for human rights have resulted
in barbarous acts which have outraged the conscience of mankind,
and the advent of a world in which human beings shall enjoy
freedom of speech and belief and freedom from fear and want
has been proclaimed as the highest aspiration of the common
people,

Whereas it is essential, if man is not to be compelled to have
recourse, as a last resort, to rebellion against tyranny and
oppression, that human rights should be protected by the rule of
law,

Whereas it is essential to promote the development of friendly
relations between nations,

Whereas the peoples of the United Nations have in the Charter
reaffirmed their faith in fundamental human rights, in the
dignity and worth of the human person and in the equal rights
of men and women and have determined to promote social progress
and better standards of life in larger freedom,

Whereas Member States have pledged themselves to achieve, in
co-operation with the United Nations, the promotion of
universal respect for and observance of human rights and
fundamental freedoms,

Whereas a common understanding of these rights and freedoms
is of the greatest importance for the full realization of this
pledge,
RIAA Orders WhoisGuard to Identify Torrent Site Owner
My point was only that it couldn't be censored in the same way - if Google would remove Apple from suggest, it would clearly be viewed as a monopolistic/anti-competitive action.
> Perhaps a solution can be found so goods manufactures can have some course of action against counterfeit-good websites, without it destroying the internet. I'm not sure what that solution could be, but we shouldn't preclude the possibility.

The civil court system?
There are many examples of mature online businesess that dont have one winner. For example, think of online project management systems like campfire - hundreds of competitors with a very long tail.
I believe the Jak and Dexter games were written in a Lisp dialect, although I'm not sure of the success.
I Agree; this is often what happens to companies that don't have an executive team with tech knowledge or don't like hiring "Disrupting" people (Banks, Government, Law firms. Largely in "Old Business" sectors).

They often have an IT department that will buy anything that require more hires to maintain and makes them more relevant in the company.

"If you job depends on not knowing something..."

A great example of this type of enterprise software that locks you in proprietary hell is "MS SharePoint".
Maybe you can contact the person that submitted it: https://forums.aws.amazon.com/profile.jspa?userID=89792
"Any effort to combat online piracy must guard against the risk of online censorship of lawful activity and must not inhibit innovation by our dynamic businesses large and small."

Online censorship is anti constitution, whether the activity is lawful or not. This whole thing is a mess.
To a certain degree this is true. I think the major reason for why we see a "winner-take-all" effect on the internet is because of data persistence. Usually the usage pattern for brick-and-motor stores is that you visit it, get what you need, get out. With online services, however, the more data a site has, the more useful it becomes (e.g., social networks or Amazon's recommendation system). I think people subconsciously realize this and start to focus on one attractable service over another.

On the other hand, the ease of dissemination of products/services to users via the internet makes it so that niche markets are more efficiently served. This is usually harder to do with brick-and-mortar stores due to locality constraints. So even though, there might be "one big winner" there seems to be a growing market for niche products.
It wasn't real clear to me what the URL was, so I'll post it:
http://www.ninjavideo.net/

It's not even listed on the Wikipedia page [42], and can't easily be found in google anymore. The NinjaVideo.net page now has a huge image explaining that the domain has been seized. I'd post the text here, but it'd probably be a copyright violation (and it's embedded in the image).

[42] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NinjaVideo
Why must they be squashed? I'm all for an open internet, freedom of speech and our rights in general. But it still remains that piracy is absolutely rampant on the internet. The other side is not going to back down and they will keep fighting this, indefinitely, and with a very large budget to boot.

It seems to me finding a compromise we can live with is a more realistic solution.
Four Windows Phone Starter Kits Available
That is happening almost in every country in the world. Privacy, freedom of speech, you name it. Blood was spilled to assure we have rights. Even though, most people are consistently waiving them and they seem not to care about it. How is it even possible? I'm perplexed by this.
Show HN: Weekend Project - Finding Random Imgur Links with JavaScript
DHS is the poster child for mission creep. The White House suggested last year that they could help track down "circumvention devices" such as game console mod chips. From the Office of White House's "Copyright Czar":

“[It] is illegal to import or traffic in devices that can be used to circumvent technological measures that control access to copyrighted works,” they wrote. “When DHS discovers the importation of a potential circumvention device, current law does not authorize DHS to share a sample with a rightholder to aid CBP in determining whether it is, in fact, a circumvention device. Allowing DHS to provide a sample would aid enforcement efforts.”
Definitely useful. In the past, I have fetched DBPedia manually and put it on an EBS volume to process - now I can save a little money.
Fred Brooks' No Silver Bullet (1986) [pdf]
"It appears that lawmakers are beginning to realize how much damage their anti-'piracy' bills could cause to the Internet and to Internet-related businesses,"

Actually, it appears lawmakers are beginning to realize supporting it will put them in jeopardy of being voted out of office.
Seems nice, but not terribly stable, i.e segfault after giving my connection details
No, not at all. This is exactly like SOPA. A totally non-infringing activity (serving food in a restaurant) becomes criminal when someone starts playing an infringing song. Now, there is a bit of a hedge here - the rightsholder would technically have to ask you to stop, and you would have to refuse, before the feds came.
Compromise is appropriate and necessary when advancing civil liberties and protections that have traditionally been ignored by society, not when compromise involves abolishing existing protected liberties.
Use the SOPA as a weapon to destroy competitors 
If somebody in some other country fails to figure out how to weponize these bills, then those of us that are hurt by SOPA should figure out how to weponize the bills and use it against the very supporters of that bill.
What am I missing here? This statement and your response seem utterly unrelated. This is what I read:

targeted only at sites beyond the reach of current U.S. law

A gap exists in current law, and new laws should be aimed at that gap instead of at increasing penalties for existing law.

cover activity clearly prohibited under existing U.S. laws

The new law should not criminalize things that are not already illegal.

with strong due process

It shouldn't give the government the right to take away property without trial.

focused on criminal activity

Rather than, for instance, speech the government doesn't like.

You can disbelieve the statement, but I don't see a way to read this as an implicit reservation of the right to China-style censorship. It is in fact claiming exactly the opposite.

I'm not saying that I totally trust the Administration's motives, or that I believe they will necessarily do the right thing, but I don't think this sentence has any sinister undertones. What do you see in here that says otherwise?
Fast Break
Politics isn't a compromise, it's a ratchet. The laws the entrenched interests want are rarely repealed - they are only passed. So we get the DMCA, but we never compromise and eliminate some of the bad parts. We get SOPA (perhaps watered down), and once it's passed, we'll never eliminate the bad parts. Then they try again.

In much the same way, the emergency of 9/11 is over, yet the patriot act still lives. Similarly, bureaucracies get created, but never seem to get destroyed.

Compromise slows things down, but it never seems to stop it. And compromise always goes one way. That's why we can't be satisfied with compromise.
Ask HN: Best Consumer Hosting
Hey all, I'm looking to upgrade hosting that can handle a decent amount of traffic. I can't really spend a whole lot of monthly money, and am curious what you all think is the best at handling traffic for the price.

Media Temple, Midphase, DreamHost, Name.com standard hosting, HostGator, etc. Any input appreciated!
Reading Code: In praise of superficial beauty
There is no official source on that which I could quote. But it is what I have been told by people involved.

There is another aspect, a lump sum of 5-15$ per unit might look like a lot of money for M$, but over a 2y period thats not much. All that such a deal would do is to make the phone a bit more expensive, same as if another earthquake hit and some parts like CPUs or RAM became more costly. Carriers would easily swallow that for subsidized phones. All the search revenue, App store revenue etc. would still go to others like Google. And most important, the customer would be lost to M$ - If M$ wants to take a significant market share in mobile, collecting royalties on Android is not the way.
As someone who has watched the US from outside, I find it difficult to understand how Obama has become the biggest sell out in history ever. This man is now seems the slave of the corporates that run the American congress. He seemed to represent hope, a new page and so many other things, and here we are in 2012, with the US wanting to gag the internet with despots and dictators from around the world waiting on the sidelines for these tools to be available.

How did this happen?
I have heard good things about http://linode.com/
I agree with the spirit of this comment. It's a freaking huge world and you can go broad or go deep but most people can't do both.

As an aside, why do we beat ourselves up so much over this sh*t? We're the most self deprecating group of professionals I've ever met..
PyPy: Transactional Memory (II)
The author never bothers to explain why SOPA and PIPA are still bad without the DNS provision. Instead, he takes an unyielding position and uses propagandist language to make his point.

It's good to see the EFF explain why the bills are still bad here (last paragraph):

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2012/01/signs-progress-interne...
And anything that starts with "Look...".
Obama Administration's Official Response to Stop SOPA Petitition
Oh, wait, didn't Obama claim similar concerns over NDAA? Good that he vetoed that bill.
Ask HN: How to Business Manager and be a decent Developer both?
I work in small web development firm. Since we are just starting out with our product / service aside for bootstraping, I have to take care of all the responsibility of business aspects (searching clients, communicating with them, managing projects etc) and my most day hours are involved in working as a developer too.

I'm getting tired of this double role. But, one thing is sure most HNers were once solo founders and have got pass these sentiments. Any suggestion to keep oneself motivated in such ? or should I quit working double roles and focus more on development, which i enjoy most ?
LOL, that was my first reaction too. What if people did have write access though? I guess it would just become another Wikipedia.
There are two separate issues with a fake pair of Levis. Does the customer know they are fake? And do the friends of the customer know they are fake?

The first is an easily solvable problem - Levis Corp could create a registry of verified vendors, which customers could check before buying.

The second one is the problem the law is trying to solve. People often buy a bag with a G written on it that they know doesn't come from Gucci. They get the status benefit of Gucci without actually paying $1000/bag.

I.e., it's basically a back door way of bringing back sumptuary laws: it's illegal to display status unless you have status.
Network-based business models have always tended toward monopoly (AT&T, ConEd, and Western Union, to name a few early US examples). The internet doesn't change this dynamic at all; rather, by providing the first (more or less) open network in history, it simply removed what used to be the greatest impediment to a networked business: the construction of the transmission network.

The internet hasn't "changed" economics, it's just enabled a specific type of business model.
As someone who voted for him, it is beyond frustrating to feel the same way. I'd vote for Santorum before Oboma (not that I would ever vote for Santorum).
Koliko
The UK's largest, simplest, most reliable price comparison website. We offer our users completely un-biased price comparison from over 60M products and 1000's of merchants.
Airports aren't subject to higher scrutiny than buses for the sake of the airports' customers. 9/11 would have been unremarkable if people had stolen buses and driven them into the same buildings. Airports are subject to higher scrutiny because their planes can potentially become missiles with a high-power payload. In a totally free market, most of the airlines could probably absorb the loss of a plane every year, but that plane would be flown into someone who has no connection to the airport.

Although, airlines would probably still cause less damage to people in the US than cars.
Shipping $36000 worth of Japanese candy
I agree with you. While McDonald's can be the "winner-take-all" for food on the highway, being able to serve smaller and smaller niches due to larger distribution means that there may be only one winner for a very particular product. This niche may well open up entire new markets for further products and services. Instead of trending towards oligopolies I would argue that the internet allows what would otherwise be a tiny unprofitable niche to develop into an entire market on its own with related services.
Primarily because there's a tremendous amount of evidence that piracy is a distribution problem, not a legal problem. The issue here is that the media cartels would prefer to buy legislation to let them keep running their antiquated businesses without innovating and use legislation to just squash any challengers. If it was a purely legal problem, iTunes and Netflix wouldn't be kicking ass and making the music and movie/TV publishers so nervous.

I pay for Netflix (and it is responsible for >95% of all my TV/movie consumption) because it's the most convenient way for me to watch movies and TV shows. It's certainly not cheaper than torrenting movies, and I'm a programmer - there's no technical barrier that prevents me from torrenting movies. But I still pay for Netflix rather than torrenting movies because it's convenient, easy, legal, and satisfies my needs. If you can hit the "easy", "affordable", and "satisfactory" points in your distribution scheme, you'll manage to capture a huge number of sales that'd otherwise be lost to piracy.

The issue isn't "piracy", it's lost sales. The two are conflated way too often, and to our collective detriment. Literally nobody is hurt simply by the act of someone making an unauthorized duplication of a series of bytes. The problem is introduced when someone would have otherwise purchased whatever content they just copied. Simply copying files doesn't actually cost anyone anything - otherwise, I could just set up a couple of machines that transfer MP3s back and forth between themselves all day and put the RIAA out of business. The focus should be on "how do we capture lost sales?", rather than "how do we stop all unauthorized copying of our byte-sequences?"

There are a lot of very smart, very successful people in the industry who believe and state that piracy is solved by modernizing distribution, and providing a legal way for people to get your goods that more convenient than the illegal methods. There's a lot of economic data and anecdotal evidence to suggest that they're right.

There is a problem with the sale of counterfeit physical goods on the internet, though, which is an entirely separate problem, which probably needs much more targeted and specific legislation to address it.
If you're comparing shared hosting companies you're not really comparing anything at all. They all have the same business model -- stuff several hundred to several thousand sites on each server, advertise unlimited resources but terminate any site that uses more than the average. If you want to handle more than a trickle of traffic, you need dedicated resources -- that means $20 a month or so for a VPS.

Once you switch you'll never go back. Having your site operating at the whim of some resource checking script will seem ridiculous. The idea of paying for "10 domains" or "20 mailboxes" or "100 subdomains" will make you laugh since you now realize these things are nothing more than few lines of text in a configuration file -- not actual scarce resources to be portioned out at different fees. The idea of not being able to upgrade your language versions or install your own packages will seem appalling. It's worth the couple extra dollars a month.
To me, bullshit indicates that the speaker does not actually believe what he says.

Is it possible that Obama just has different values from you? The way I read it, he very plainly is in favor of prosecuting copyright violators, and simply wants to eliminate some of the more egregious provisions of the currently proposed law.

I don't think Obama is trying to obfuscate that view in any way, and is being very clear about it.
I remember 2011, wasn't that the year when don't ask don't tell got repealed?
CES and the Kindness of Strangers
Some of these are just notional and don't exist; e.g. "petroleum dataset" https://aws.amazon.com/datasets/2900
You know what, taking all of that man's money away and putting him on probation for the rest of his life is probably just as effective as a deterrent. Being forced to work at Walmart to make bills pay, that sort of thing.

Probation is actually pretty shitty, and in some cases totally effective at ruining your quality of life.
Most of the anti-SOPA companies like Google would agree with the sentiment of this statement. Look at their statement during the SOPA hearings.
http://judiciary.house.gov/hearings/pdf/Oyama%2011162011.pdf

"While we have serious concerns with SOPA as written, we look forward to working with the Committee to find focused mechanisms that effectively target foreign rogue sites. Already, Google and other companies are engaged in voluntary, industry-led efforts to attack the problem. As detailed below, we believe that legislation guided by common sense principles and focused on eliminating the financial incentives for rogue sites – while avoiding collateral damage – would receive wide support from the technology sector."

Not everyone who is against SOPA is also (publicly) OK with online piracy...they limit their arguments to the logistical problems introduce by SOPA enforcement
Why is it "suspicious?" Yes, the administration has a stance on this issue, one that is not popular amongst the readers of this site. But I don't think they are denying that stance or pretending to believe anything else.
Dont forget the history of that. In Germany, many US-Startups don't work. US-Startups often are damn US-centric. Many won't even allow registration from other countries (google music, netflix). Others have or had no german interface (Facebook got one 2008, before that was a big hurdle for a social network targeting not only young and educated people). I remember predictify, it had a large section of predictions of US-politics, but no area for politics of other countries (and so no such questions). Heck, Youtube is almost unusable here because it gets censored and Google don't seem to care (imagine that in the US-market).

In all those cases and in many more, you will find imitations of these sites as the service isn't accessible here (at least not as good as possible). That is surely a foundation of that copy-culture.

Those copycats are clearly an annoyance. But even such a clone of an unrestricted site can serve it's purpose: Target a specific market (someone pointed out that a difference between those sites are the amount of pictures of woman, which could be caused by cultural difference - USA censors sex, Germany censors violence).