skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Washington DC Angel Group Invests in 8 deals (millions of dollars)
Except moral relativism is not any more defensible. Suppose the creator of a work asks you to pay for it, but a pirate chooses not to. Why shouldn't we call the pirate an asshole? They've disrespected the terms of use set by the author, as well as the author themselves.

It's that simple.
Present or build your startup at Startup Riot and win $10k investment
Not sure if I understood this correctly. If Quora chose to send a Location: some-url and Status: 302, it would have definitely worked as expected.
A proof that the Halting Problem is undecidable
Humans can't be — and aren't — trusted to follow their stated intentions.

This is why you implement systems that prevent humans from doing wrong (either intentionally or unintentionally).

A commenter named Trevor even pointed this out to 37signals in their blog post as to how:

Did you know that Oracle provides Database Vault.
What it all allows you to do is set it up to prevent
event DBAs from viewing or modifying data.

Idea being, DBAs should be able to “administator” the
database, but should not be allow to either VIEW or even
MODIFY customer/employee data (e.g. credit card #, SSN ,
salary data, etc..)

There is another product Oracle provides which is called
Transparent Database Encryption . What it does is encrypt
your customer data on disk, but then when a database
select is issued – it unencrypts the data on the fly
without needing to modify your application code.

Unfortunately, no such products like this exists for MySQL.

Given the size of your company now and how much
sensitive customer data you are now storing, might be
worthwhile for you guys to seriously consider using
Oracle now.
I think you summed it up perfectly. If your boss is no longer paying you, he has no right to your time. Just like with the pirated content, if you don't pay for it, you have no right to it.
Startups Renaissance or Startup Mania?
HTML5 Game: Forklift Driver
You are a Forklift Driver. Try to load the Truck as fast as you can but also try to work exact,half loaded pallets do not count!
Van Den Akkers Landscaping
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What if someone figures out how to make a similar factory very cheaply, and drives you out of business by only charging their marginal production costs for their widgets? The important difference, I think, is that they're using their own materials and electricity to make their goods, but people who engage in copyright infringement are too.

EDIT: And I'd note that many would would say that this second person is "Stealing the customers" of the first factory owner, but that doesn't mean what he does is actually morally equivalent to stealing.
>I love that you have a problem with people calling copyright infringement "stealing", but no qualms at all about calling it "piracy" instead, which is an entirely different affair.

Pirate, verb, sense 3:

The unauthorized use or reproduction of another's work - to pirate software

Steal, from the dictionary, first and only sense as a verb:

Take (another person's property) without permission or legal right and without intending to return it: "thieves stole her bicycle".

This is not that difficult to understand.
You have no idea what you are talking about, I'm guessing this is because you are too old to have grown up with tape trading, VHS copies of films and pirate cable. I have a contract with my employer, he is bound by that agreement to pay me. If he decides he doesn't want to, I stop working for him. If I write a book, no one is under contract to purchase and read it. I'd be happy if someone did, but I'd be foolish to assume that would happen when I started writing it.

I have created worthwhile things on which my livelihood depended, and those things have been cheerfully and rampantly pirated (piracy rates of video games estimated at +90%). And the company I worked for made great profits and paid me a nice bonus. Would it have made as much of a profit if those 90%+ of people who played the game, liked it, talked about it, reviewed it without paying for it, had never played it at all? I don't know. Would it have made more profit? I can't say. I doubt you can either.
It may be normal now, but it won't be for long. Sunir said it better than I could: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3471464
U.S. Charges Developer With Stealing "$10 Million" In Code
SOPA protests in NYC - Video
Keystone pipeline: How many jobs really at stake?
Apple reinvents textbooks for iPad, unveils iBooks 2
> sometimes the value is lost when a copy is made even though the original is not damaged in any way.

The one and only time this is true is when something is pirated pre-release, thereby causing an actual financial impact to the rightful owner. You'll also find that there are court cases backing this line of reasoning up.
So what should an app do if it wants ro track all outbound links and send the real url as referer to the outbound link
NYC Experiments with Street Sensors, App Showing Available Parking Spots
The Best Beer Gardens in America
"Not everyone is like us."

That makes me wonder, what are we? Why are we different from "the masses"? How can our differences be defined?
I've pitched at StartupRiot twice now and it gets better every year. Sanjay and his team put on an AMAZING event with great speakers. People like David Hauser, Andrew Warner, Robert Scoble etc have been there in the past.

It's a huge opportunity to meet people that can help you start or grow your company. DO IT.
A Military Cutback We Can't Afford: Fighting Tropical Diseases
I agree with pretty much everything you said, except for one thing: the sixties protesters certainly did change the world, just not the way they wanted to:

* They ensured Ronald Reagan's landslide victory in the race for governor of California, whose campaign promise was to shitcan UC president Clark Kerr and "clean up the mess at Berkeley," which I believe he fulfilled his first day in office.

* They ensured that Lyndon B. Johnson, arguably the most liberal president in US history and most powerful proponent of the 196[48] Civil Rights Acts, would not even attempt to seek reelection.

* They incited a riot at the 1968 Democratic Nation Convention, ensuring a landslide victory for somebody as unpopular as Richard Nixon.

In short, they empowered the opposition. Being a loud vocal minority only ruffles the feathers of the majority and calls them into action, which is why no political leaders are going to touch the "occupy movement" with a ten-foot pole.

The anti-SOPA movement on the other hand is a different because at the end of the day, it threatens a multi-billion dollar industry. Whether Wikipedia and Reddit can rally your "awareness" about it or not, the Googles of the world will still fight it tooth and nail to protect their own investments, and their money speaks just as loud as the entertainment industry's. For that reason, I never really believed SOPA or PIPA stood a chance.
I mean worldwide. Excluding the waste caused by production (in China, Taiwan, etc) of things consumed in the western world would be a more than a bit hypocritical.
China to extend controls over Internet microblogs
The Cancer-Causing Chemical You're Eating Every Day
Ask HN: Open source alternatives to beebole.com?
Looking for something simple and lean that replicates the functionality of beebole.com. Any ideas, pros/cons?
I'd say in those circumstances they should be phoning the FBI or the secret service rather than looking at the data themselves.
Saying that YC pushes people to do something 'beyond their reach' is fair, but saying that it extends their reach by selecting the right people is... not consistent.

Anyway, it's a good article, that's just a nitpick that jumped out at me.
This is why the tea party was born. Republicans that didn't truly believe in limited government needed to be removed.
My point exactly: Implement technical measures, not just policies.
I'm not saying copyright violation is not illegal. I'm just saying it's not theft. It's a different crime, with different characteristics, defined in a different section of the US code.
Easily Unlock Xscreensaver (for some setups)
California utilities unveil 'Green Button' system
Private Bankers Increasingly Target “Embryonic” Startups; Some are “Just Ideas”
I agree. Sadly, similar services don’t generate results even approaching those of Google Code Search. The interface was also a lot better than that of its competitors. That’s not to say that it couldn’t be improved, but if there wasn’t time or resources for that, then they could at least have left it running.

One of the best resources for ”programming by example“ is now gone and the world is worse of for it.
Could someone (knowledgeable) comment on his chances to win the elections? I'm not from US.
As Brian Chesky says, "If you can imagine it, you can create it".

What a silly thing to say. A quick glance at pretty much any sci-fi novel proves that. Go on, go build me a light-sabre, capable of cutting through metre-thick bulkheads. Once you've finished with that, I'd like a time machine so I can go back in time and look at dinosaurs, and also a perpetual motion machine. I leave the order of the last two up to you.
Photos Of The Best Signs At San Francisco's PIPA/SOPA Protest Yesterday
This whole story reads was interesting as a reminder of what public information people leave on the internet unconsciously, and how to find it. More interesting than most crime stories :)

And best of all, blog author didn't do any wrong, except maybe violating SOPA. He just published information that is already publicly available all over the internet, and thus can't be accused of harassment.
Facebook registers mysterious fBoriGin domain names
Spam-squirting hole found in McAfee antivirus kit
Ok, so I'm a little sketchy on where I heard it originally, bu I think I was watching some sort of space show that said that hydrogen and oxygen mix together to propel a rocket but they capture some of the emitted water vapor and turn it back into water for other uses. I can't find specific reference to this recycling on the internet, but liquid hydrogen is a commonly used rocket propellant.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liquid_hydrogen
yeah, when it came up, I did. And it wasn't a big deal. It just doesn't come up often, there are gay people around, and nobody cares. It's actually exactly the way you would hope it would be.

In fact, I may be the only male in the house that uses 'gay' as a reference to homosexuality. I think to the kids gay = wimp and FWIW fag = asshole. I think. It's hard to figure it out sometimes. I just caution them that there are plenty of people who find certain terms hurtful still and they should be mindful of who is within earshot.

But that's how I've always treated profanity.
VCs shower WhipTail with cash
Rand Paul promises to filibuster PIPA
> Pick one - security, or an admin who can save your account.

There's a simple way to eat your cake and have it too, though: put a copy of your passwords in a safe-deposit box. Passwords don't strictly have to be private to protect you from would-be attackers—they just have to only be accessible to people who have absolutely no incentive to help any would-be attacker.
Sea Change: Apple Guts Textbook Publishing
Apple announces iBooks Author tools to help make textbooks
He was living in Canada for several years and apparently made some free open source software that was subsequently used in a porn site (without his further involvement or knowledge), as is oft the case and the reason FOSS exists.

He then was arrested on a visit to Iran.

Disregarding the ridiculousness of this specific case, it sets a dangerous precedent: anyone who has written open source code that is used by sites, and possible porn sites, could be just as guilty as this guy according to Iranian law.

I think I'll skip Iran on my next vacation for now.
Apple: 20,000 Educ iPad Apps Dev'd; 1.5M Devices At Schools
Wikipedia is back up, and its article on the chemical

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Methyl_iodide

has some back-and-forth about the occurrence of the chemical in nature, and about what evidence has been brought forth about the balance of risks and benefits from using this chemical as a pesticide.

An EPA document from the year 2000 has some additional information, sourced to another organization,

http://www.epa.gov/ttn/atw/hlthef/methylio.html

and an op-ed from a California newspaper

http://www.sacbee.com/2011/07/31/3804625/stop-crying-wolf-me...

comments from the point of view of farmers there.
No. They're not the police or the court, they have no business playing ones.

Attitude like yours gives us stupid privacy-violating terrorism and "protect-the-children" laws.
Why Can't We Unbundle Cable?
Someone mentioned 3D printers in another post and got downvoted for it. But think about it.

You invested a lot of time into creating an object everybody likes. People can get it in a online shop and it will be send to there address.

Now a clever guy scans the object with a 3D scanner and is putting the model online. Everybody can now downloading the model on The Pirate Bay and print it at home.
And they all say: "fuck that online store, it is way too much hassle and costs too much".

It's a difficult discussion. Therefore I think it's way to easy to just call making a copy not stealing.

Edit: the post by randomdata: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3479581
Reminds me of Viacom/YouTube. I wonder if this is going to have a similar ending.
Also, relevant tweets for New York and San Francisco are already pretty easy to guess for anyone following technology news or national news. Chicago, Atlanta and Miami had much more diverse results and organic feeling results - provided tweets that felt characteristic of those cities.
Apple launches iBooks 2 digital textbooks
As someone interested in learning to code who ultimately signed up for Codeyear instead of Codeschool or Team Tree House:

-Codecademy offers to teach me how to build an app
-Codeschool offers to teach me how a bunch of different programming languages (which is the easy part), with no clear instructions on how to put that together into an app
-Teamtreehouse does offer to teach how to build an app, but they're full of videos. Their introduction to HTML lesson is 30 minutes of video!

So Codecademy has a massively better first impression than its competitors.
Kraft on Taylorism and BPMt
No, this is no longer the case.

Encryption these days only adds 1-2% extra load.

Regardless, even if the load was higher like it use to be before current modern hardware, you are still essentially informing your customers that "speed is more important than securing their data" - which is a terrible approach to take.

TL;DR: If you are given the privilege to maintain a customer data, it's your obligation and responsibility to do so with the most care possible.
The plague of plagiarism: A university's reality check
Flaw in Oracle distributed databases
Madden NFL and the Future of Video-Game Sports
I see they're upping the ante in the War Against the Poor [1].

By ensuring that all restaurants have higher operating expenses, they can see to it that prices stay high. And if every restaurant has to do it, then there's nowhere left for a poor person who doesn't even own a wifi device to go.

Bravo! Now we just need to wait until the poor starve.

</sarcasm>

OK, I'm being hyperbolic, but the point remains that they're ensuring that prices will be higher than they otherwise would, and are taking away the consumer's ability to choose what attributes they want to pay money for.

[1] as opposed to the War on Poverty
I think the real thing to take from this story is never travel to Iran (until the people of that nation replace their totalitarian government with something respectable).
Disruption: Coming Soon to a University Near You
The best way to do it is probably to track clicks on outbound links using javascript.
That's deplorable. So basically, anyone who has code on GitHub that a pornographer (or other Islam-insulter) could use should never visit Iran.

Seems like a clear case of a coerced confession -- he confessed to something that isn't even possible. Why isn't the Canadian government going bananas for him? They've got their own damn oil, right?
Google Chrome reveals all saved passwords in plain text
Minor clarification: it said he was a Canadian resident, not a citizen.
Are we paying for a Premium or are we paying for the thing we actually want?

They're taking things into their own hands by installed junk- and malware on my product.

They're assuming I'm a thief before I've even walked through the door. Why should I pay for the time they wasted to deal with people who do purportedly "break the law."

Moreover, it's not like with the music or software industries, these people lock themselves inside ivory towers and come out with a genius idea. Granted, there are genius ideas worth protecting, but those ideas protect themselves by their own internal integrity and passion of the thinker/creator/etc. Copyright law gives creators an artificial sense of entitlement, and the idea that their content is privileged somehow. That's the _default_ for a majority of the products we buy. And it simply isn't obviously true. There's too much clutter in the market as it stands for people to argument from absolutism like with in this article.

A majority of this copyright discussion has an unrealistic assumption about _the state of things as they are now_. There's no transparency in these products. No sincerity.
Senator Leahy mysitified
Good, that guy wasted your time, bandwidth, annoyed your real customers and users. This amounts to money out of your pocket, it's only fair he see some sort of money out of his, hopefully the release of his info will cause this. But more likely you have trained him how not to get caught the second time around. I doubt he will face any penalty, as he is in LATVIA!!! If you really wanted to stop him you should board a plane and show up at his door.
you won't take 2 minutes to read the article for what it's worth, but will take 3+ minutes to write that you won't read it because he didn't capitalize his first word? haha.

edit: removed all capitalization so you can reply to me about how you won't read my comment because i am too lazy to capitalize a word.
My Mind Was Blown in Haiti
Yeah I think I'd agree there.
Every Linux screen locker bypassed with a keypress
If rules are made to be broken then by admission I don't think there will ever be a rule that states you should throw out the steering wheel if you're playing chicken.

Even though I completely agree that systems we build should have the least possible level of permissions required to do their job.

But the temptation to leave a backdoor open to peek once in a while, "just in case," is tempting and has it's own benefits...
> You can't judge the morality of practices from the past from your present point of view.

Cultural relativism is certainly a valid school of ethical thought — one with which I happen to disagree. On matters like piracy, which is certainly less detrimental to society than slavery was, the consequences for believing what is popular and what is right are relatively low. But to suggest that you can apply this principle across the board, in all situations, is, in my view, absurd.

You're suggesting there that we cannot judge anything that has happened in the past because our views on the matter are now different. But that means we cannot judge ANYTHING that has happened EVER because, by definition, now is different from then.

> You shouldn't be convicted that your morality is absolute and will always be the only correct one.

I'm not. I'm just not convinced that, because a certain activity is widespread, it is therefore morally correct.
Heh, is that why I can't get it to run?
I think the piracy "analogies" are getting out of control here.
Apple Unveils New iBooks Author Tool, Not Just For Textbooks
I don't see how this could be a result of simple mistake. There doesn't seem to be any reason to do redirects this way except hiding the referrer.
I'm perfectly okay with the "Pirates are assholes" stance. I am an asshole. I admit this.

What I'm not okay with is when industry groups distort facts by trying to get one crime confused as a completely separate crime.

Make no mistake.. both are crimes, but the attempt is to bring the loaded meanings of one term to a completely different word.

It's factually incorrect, and it needs to stop.

It's that simple.
No, I'm pretty sure I can blame spammers and people that employ them for spamming. It isn't Google's fault and it being their "only" option to make money is not an excuse either.
It's always said that one of the huge advantages of programming compared to other disciplines is the extremely low barrier of entry and the extremely low cost of taking a risk. You can develop something and all it costs you is time, so scrapping it is far easier than in any physical design situation.

I don't think it's possible to discount how critical to this point of view our freedoms are. When you have a certain faith in the justice system (one generally corroborated by experience) and in the law, you have one less thing to worry about. We innovate because we not only don't fear wasting $N in materials in addition to our time, we also don't fear being dragged off to prison. Indeed, even if we did fear being dragged off to prison, I can't think of any situation where you could unintentionally get the death sentence for programming. Programming!

Yes, SOPA and PIPA are bad, and yes, we should oppose them. But sometimes it's good to take a step back and look at what “bad” really looks like. And take a minute to think “Wow. We are fighting such minor battles in comparison.” Just a minute. Then it's time to get back in the fight. Because the minor losses slowly, imperceptibly, take you to the major battles.
I think it depends on his ability to raise money.
Eating the seed corn
I've got several legitimate Windows licenses. I tried to install it on my dad's computer but I had to leave before the installation completed. I returned a few days later to activate it but somehow a virus managed to infect it. I removed the virus, but Windows just refused to activate with a LEGAL KEY. I tried activating by phone and I received an activation key but it didn't work either (permissions error or something). So I just did the sensible thing and installed a version that I found on TPB.

Seriously Microsoft, drop the activation scheme. It's not necessary and causes nothing but frustration for your end users.
Air Force's Top Brain Wants a 'Social Radar' to 'See Into Hearts and Minds'
Considering how consciously-designed his site seems to be, I assumed it was a deliberate choice.
Show HN: AutoGlance is the Hipmunk for Used Car Searches
This societal passiveness isn't accidental: it has been deliberately engineered in North America. The documentary "The Century of the Self" breaks this down better than anything else I've seen/read. There is also, within activist circles, the belief in a mythical version of history in which pacifism, isolated from militance, is what catalyzed change in the past.

Regarding the self-interest of the young, it's a rational thing. If young people today weren't saying "where's mine" then they'd be stupid. During the baby boom there were decent jobs because globalization hadn't happened yet and corporations still had to rely on domestic labor. Reliance on domestic labor also means the elite values having decent public institutions, which strengthen the labor force. Now not only do we have globalization but also systematic looting. Young people get to look forward to having it significantly worse economic prospects than their parents.