skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
>I do see several posts dismissing the whole response as empty rhetoric that doesn't say anything, even though there are several measures they say quite plainly and unambiguously they won't support (and it is good that they won't).

I agree that there is rampant cynicism abound, but it is not without merit. Obama "quite plainly" (in fact, explicitly) doesn't support NDAA, yet he somehow managed to reconcile has lack of support with making the bill into law. The people believe the white house is full of shit.

>Sadly, level of debate here is more like Slashdot lite than anything constructive:

No HN post is complete without a smug jab at an inferior web community, great way to elevate the debate.

>yada yada. It's just rationalizing breaking the law

Another quality debate technique: aggregate every position enumerated by the silly neckbeards and broadly dismiss them all in a single rhetorical stroke.

>I would bet good money that most people doing so haven't got the slightest clue about how many people work in creative industries and the real economics of those industries

That is just insulting. Particularly on HN, many of those who take the positions you casually dismiss represent a surplus of extremely creative and successful software developers who endure the dubious menace of piracy on a daily basis. The reason these people say things like "do live shows" is because they responded to the reality of a digital world by creating value that is not intrinsically bound to a sequence of ones and zeroes (SaaS etc) instead of refusing to adapt.

>So, can we please try to have a constructive, balanced debate about this issue from now on? We have clearly reached a tipping point. There is potentially more public awareness and support for action from other businesses both large and small now than at any time in a generation.

I agree that a more constructive debate would benefit everyone, but we don't just throw all our ideas out the window in an effort to placate those who might just be on the wrong side of history.
I thought this is actually interesting but I would like to know if >4k misspellings is a lot or not. Here is one way to do it:

LANGUAGE #LENGHT #LENGTH = #LENGHT/#LENGTH
JavaScript 4252 2907459 = 0.0015
C 18981 2902857 = 0.0065
Java 7706 2348900 = 0.0033
Ruby 10789 1690604 = 0.0064
C++ 9458 1315552 = 0.0072
PHP 3116 1167924 = 0.0027
C# 1352 937647 = 0.0014
Python 3662 737292 = 0.0050
Ruby 1232 380484 = 0.0032
Perl 1239 258892 = 0.0048
Objective-C 679 238051 = 0.0029

P.S. There is something wrong with Github's language breakdown algorithm, sometimes it shows same language twice with a different number of hits.
I obviously am referring to the people that have not paid ("without paying the content producers"). I'm not making assumptions, I'm not trying to take some moral high ground as you're making me out to be taking, I'm simply starting a discussion point and looking for logical reasoning.

Your point has provided none, it's just provided some moral high ground.

You completely ignored everything I said about the uploader too, the focus of my point.
Different risk/reward ratios.

I'm much more certain that they aren't stupid than I am certain that they aren't evil.
Yes, but the average value of the sampled values will tend towards a Normal distribution by the central limit theorem, and I'm probably misapplying it by wondering whether the next sample tends to be from nearer the middle. I think skimbrel is right that as the sample being drawn from is decreasing each time the CLT will be invalidated anyway.
Yes, I should seriously consider this. Again I probably couldn't send very big bulk amounts without getting the recipient in trouble with customs.

Another reason I haven't done this yet is that I would need inventory control again. I was running an ecommerce store once and it does add a bit of extra work to make sure you have every item you claim to have and to be able to pick and pack them efficiently. Basically need barcodes and labeled shelves.
> Recently, a couple of Harvard graduates launched a program called Gym Pact based on the simple principle that if skipping the gym is a broken contract with ourselves, we ought to pay a penalty for slacking.

Hmm, this site does this for many years already: http://www.stickk.com/

Tried it once with some friends and it worked perfect, even without a financial penalty.
One of the articles the author links to is a lot more helpful and concrete [1]. The meat of it:

"Shaul’s guys out in Wyoming get massively strong and powerful on precisely three gym sessions a week, each lasting an hour and no more. Louie Simmons, the single biggest name in gorilla-style competitive power lifting, will tell you that 45 minutes is the max length of any smart training session.

But you can’t spend the first 15 minutes watching CNN from the treadmill and the last 15 “warming down.” Every second has to count, and it all starts with understanding the four basic muscular aptitudes: strength, power, muscle mass, and muscular endurance. [...]

The whole trick to athletic training — and this is true for everybody from bodybuilders to marathoners to noncompetitive athletes just in it for health, or even vanity — is timing each subsequent workout so it hits the middle of that so-called supercompensation peak, when a muscle has already bounced back even stronger than before but hasn’t yet returned to baseline. [...]

It can be hard to believe a true strength coach the first time he tells you that by pressing and dead-lifting on even days, squatting and doing chin-ups on odd days, avoiding all other exercises, and adding a little to the bar each time, you’ll be stronger than you’ve ever been in only a month’s time. Thanks to the fitness industry, we’re so conditioned to equate sophistication with complexity — and to think we’ve got to “work each body part” — that our gut just says, No way; that can’t work. But it works like magic, and the entire body hardens up in unison.

Finally, keep it simple; understand that variety is overrated. Variety does stave off boredom — it’s fun to mix in new exercises all the time — but a guy who hasn’t trained in a long time, if ever, will get stronger faster on the simplest program of squats, dead lifts, and presses, three times a week."

[1] http://www.mensjournal.com/everything-you-know-about-fitness...
This is silly, is it really that hard to go to the gym?

I mean, you just go the first time. Then when it is "tomorrow". You just go again. Then the next day ... again. It's not that difficult a concept, the only thing you must take care of is that you don't break the cycle.

When I was still going to a gym I was there two hours every evening, at the same time, no matter what. When I suddenly couldn't afford it anymore it was horrible ... all that free time and nothing to do with it. Sure, eventually new habits formed, but it was hard as hell.[1]

Really the only thing it takes is a bit of stubbornness, all these silly tricks into making yourself more stubborn are just that ... silly. You don't need them.

There's nothing easier in the world than making the same default decision every day. Doesn't even require much thought.

[1] this was a few years ago, got into boxing when I had the money again, then became broke and am finally getting back to boxing this week ... money's a bitch like that, luxury-ish expenses are the first to go

edit: why all the downvotes? Picking a habit and making sure you don't break it is one of the most effective ways of sticking to something ... http://theclosetentrepreneur.com/seinfelds-secret-motivation...
Well put. Take a look at this (one of the first documents regarding futurist "noise" music):

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Art_of_Noises
SOPA, we are turning out the lights Jan. 18th.  So fuck you.
Been going regularly for the past 2 years or so. Finding what motivates you is the key. I'm doing strength training and so my motivation are a set of goals for weights I can move. For others it might be weight, stamina and the like. I have to tell you though strength training without a partner definitely tests your willpower, its damn hard.

Working out takes discipline but also keep in mind that skipping a day to simply hang out with your friends is ok. Treat the workout as something you want to do rather than something you have to do. That's what worked for me.
Meh, using an environment variable named VERSION isn't too bright, and if it's for a single command then it should be a command line argument. RAILS_VERSION may not be appropriate but it's more intelligent than using an extremely generic and common name like VERSION.
Hmm I don't think that was the point of the article, did you read the entire article?

The article is not talking about art per se about music or maybe more precisely about harmony from a technical point of view.

Don't think noise as meaning bad, dissonant or non good.

Instead he says "Music is sound with a discrete structure. Noise is sound with a continuous structure."

The article isn't trying to make a value judgement here.

It simply talks about tones as a designer would talk about how colors blend together.
Also, copyright was created to foster communication. However, these days it is often used to hinder communication. Media companies and publishers sit on large catalogues that they refuse to (re)publish.

Anecdote: My mother is/was a huge fan of a rather popular U.S. TV show that ran many seasons. It's disappeared from cable reruns, and the studio has refused to issue DVD's. So, my mother can no longer watch that show. (She, and many others, have been waiting patiently for the DVD's for some years.)

Some argue that copyright should not be a means of removing previously publicly, if commercially, available content from public discourse.

In this specific case, I would suggest stripping the rights holder of the copyright and placing the show into the public domain. Publish, for reasonable compensation, or lose the monopoly.

That's what copyright is, a monopoly. Granted by society -- the public, in the U.S. And subject to limitations that public may impose.

I'd suggest the public is increasingly in mind or reining in the ever more extreme monopoly rights that politicians have been corruptly passing in their name.
Federal Contractor Monitored Social Network Sites
This is another recent retraction scandal from the US: http://retractionwatch.wordpress.com/2012/01/12/resveratrol-...
avoid feature creep! github's platform allows for bots to run, a bot is a perfect way to implement this instead of it being "built-in".
The Internet will not remain the Wild West of the world forever.
Viruses stole City College of S.F. data for years
Sorry to be blunt, but you're confused.

The average of the sampled values will be normally distributed, but the values themselves will be uniform.

If you sample every number once from [0,100], the average is 50, but that doesn't imply that the distribution of the sampled elements is normal - it's uniform.

His question of whether "on average, does the next card come from the middle" (which it doesn't) isn't the same as "is the mean of the next sampled card in the middle" (which it is).

The language was a little misleading - he said "on average" when he intended "most frequently".
The same pattern is widely used to test whether an array-like object is empty. Since a length of 0 is also "falsey", it evaluates as false when the array has no elements. A typo in this case would result in the tested array always being "empty".
> So presumably, Kenyans have neither normal standards of ethics nor acceptable backgrounds?

I don't know if you are trying to paint him as a racist or if you really are ignorant of Kenya's crime rate
I have enough information to tell that children in this case are forbidden to ask their question unless everyone in the group has the same question, because that information was explicitly given. This is not the same rule as one which allows an individual child to freely ask the teacher whatever he likes, whether his groupmates want to ask or not, if he still feels like asking after trying his peers first.

The former process is controlled by the group; the latter, by the individual.
I agree, if the intent is for pedagogical purposes (as in this case), the use of pre-increment and post-increment operators should probably be avoided. A good rule of thumb is that if you find yourself having to say "and" too many times when describing a single line -- then it's probably doing too much.

In fact, I was actually thinking more of this example:

i = Math.floor(Math.random() * n--);

when I stumbled across your comment.

Otherwise, that's a minor criticism and it's a good page overall. In fact, it was one of the interview questions I was asked when I interviewed at Microsoft a long time ago. At the time, I didn't realize the algorithm actually had a name.
> It seems to me finding a compromise we can live with is a more realistic solution.

No one has ever been able to identify a reasonable legal solution. I, personally, don't believe that one exists. No, I'm not really a fan of OPEN. I don't believe it would actually do anything to end piracy, not that SOPA/PIPA would, either.
Did you write to them as "superblock.net" or from another address? Common mistake to write as someone who has rights to the name. That will completely spook them because the way this thing goes it can be used against you.

my emails were always from another address, if only because i didn't want them to know what i'd be using the domain for and possibly raise the asking price.
They haven't joined the skeptics ranks. They're just playing kabuki.

"[The Whitehouse] will not support legislation that reduces freedom of expression, increases cybersecurity risk, or undermines the dynamic, innovative global Internet."

The problem with politics is that every point in this one sentence can have a particular meaning. For example, the Whitehouse may feel that PIPA doesn't reduce the freedom of expression or increase cybersecurity risk; so unless they say "we don't like SOPA/PIPA" what they wrote isn't a stance, but yet another PR statement that spouts rainbows and unicorns while saying nothing during election year.
And this is why we have testing frameworks.
What makes you think the bathroom practices are unrelated to communism? It's called totalitarianism for a reason...
My software engineering professor in college uses the "broken windows" theory to teach students about technical debt.
Introduction to Strong Cryptography – p2.1 – One Time Pad
10 years since the Bill Gates security memo
two hours every evening

Bodybuilders don't work out that much, you know.
Again, like all my opinions above I'm going to get downvoted, but I still can't comprehend how you can justify that it's not wrong to download it just because they're "ephemeral" digital goods.

How does that make it any different?

How about this: famous dress maker designs and creates an extravagant dress and then you, with your fine sowing skills replicate the dress entirely and wear it. Is that not wrong in your eyes?

The above isn't the best example, but I still can't see the reasoning as to why it's not wrong.
Seems the Mercury News piece has now been taken down, although the comments remain.

http://www.mercurynews.com/ci_18730079
Serialization is very expansive compared to shared data structures. Even if not everybody is affected by that, it still makes serialization unsuitable as a general solution in this case.
Youngest Microsoft Certified Professional Arfah Karim Randahwa Died
First why would he want a domain that is now linked to spam/scams ?

Second, what is his legal claim, has he trademarked his commercial name?
Don't hinder the communication, just prosecute the offender. Jail time and fines is sufficient.
British student may be extradited to US on copyright charges
Attaching the name doesn't even tell you who came up with it, in general.

Unfortunately, it can be hard to generate names which are a) descriptive, b) distinct, c) short. But we've done pretty okay with sorting algorithms, and I definitely feel that more is possible.
No, I don't need to precommit. There is nothing really preventing me from doing this.

I want to say yes to this experiment, but immediately come up with more stuff that this would require that holds me back from adding it right now.

With tiers you will eventually have people who want to upgrade / downgrade between the tiers (of course I can just say you can't do that). I need to change my scripts that scan PayPal to support these tiers and still correctly figure out who to send to.

Need a tier selection page and this will also complicate wording on the main page. Not missing out on those customers who only wanted one envelope a month seems it might make this worth doing, agreeing with you there and hoping to find the time to add this.
India OKs censoring Facebook, Google, Microsoft, YouTube
On the traffic and subscribers front, I'd recommend reading everything that patio11 has written about Bingo Card Creator: http://www.kalzumeus.com/
Thank you RIAA. I didn't know of the existence of this torrent site before you made a big deal of it. It's way better than the torrent site I used before.
Ok thanks for clearing that up. I hadn't appreciated the difference between the two.
"Are you a small business with questions about your FDA-regulated product? Or, do you wonder if your product needs to be approved by the FDA? Contact us!"
http://www.fda.gov/ForIndustry/SmallBusinessAssistance/Small...
I've been trying to tackle precisely that problem.

Would someone please help me out and point me at a way of efficiently exposing a read-only block of memory to Python?

EDIT: Looks like "MemoryView" introduced in 2.7 is the answer.
Google purchased YouTube and THEN entered into those content deals. Before that, it was very touch and go for YouTube-- they couldn't afford their bandwidth, let alone licensing deals, and many commenters said that Google was stupid to take on YouTube's copyright liability.
Ow. I'm not one to patrol grammar but attempting to read that article hurt my brain.

It's one thing to use the wrong syntax occasionally, but it's altogether a different thing to publish an article that reads like a core dump of your brain. For a moment I thought I was having a seizure.
twitter bootstrap makes another appearance!
Nope, since I am not the one importing them. Recipients do not need to pay either, since the envelopes are small and fall under the customs limits.
I was wondering about this, too. We haven't been able to get Puccho Grape around here for months now.
Two hours a day is a lot of family time to lose for many parents, and more than an old bum knee may take.
Yes, I understand that. What I meant is that math is a tool in the same sense a programming language or methodology is a tool--it's something we ultimately use as a means to an end. If our only goal was math, we would actually be mathematicians ;)
At the bottom it notes that this series of articles is written while drunk.

A shame really, I'm sure this could have a point behind it, perhaps about any decline in video game quality, but as it is I just don't know.
I've always found that if I just put on my workout clothes, It's really hard to convince myself that I shouldn't be going and take them off. So, to get myself to go, I tell myself that I'm just putting on my clothes, which seems like way less of a commitment when I'm sitting on the couch. By the time I've laced up my shoes, I'm in the workout mindset.

Really, vI know I can trick that part of myself. Trying to swallow a bitter pill whole is difficult and can be counterproductive to positive reinforcement that will get you to go again. Break down that commitment into pieces and the initial energy threshold is a hell of a lot lower. You'll see the positive results more easily and expect them less because you've broken down your "I should be getting in shape" personal investment into smaller pieces, so it seems smaller overall. It stops being a matter of "I better see some results for all my trouble."

Without the self-guilt trip you'll be reinforcing a positive feedback loop, which is the only sustainable way you're going to get in shape--if you enjoy doing it.
Exactly. The only thing that I got out of the article was that they are opposed to making themselves look bad. The only politicians and companies that can be trusted when they say that they oppose SOPA are the ones who opposed it from the start. If normal citizens hadn't started the SOPA awareness campaign then SOPA would have been passed already. The rest of these people are just jumping on a bandwagon to save themselves some bad publicity.

People need to realize that every single politician who decided to oppose SOPA only after the public applied pressure is a liar. These people supported SOPA with full knowledge of what it would do to the internet. The Obama administration has a ton of people who got to where they are because of the entertainment industry lobbyists. The next administration will too.
I hate squatters just like the next guy, but target taking over target.org is just wrong.

They are purely a commercial institution. Stay in .com and be quiet.
Interesting...

And agreed. A non-technical partner or non-technical founder will definitely benefit from investing in their technical education for so many reasons.
I disagree wholeheartedly with that statement. From my post http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3464849 in another thread on this:

It reads to me like a lot of agreeing with SOPA opposition: "We must avoid creating new cybersecurity risks or disrupting the underlying architecture of the Internet."

But then tries to jam in:

"That is why the Administration calls on all sides to work together to pass sound legislation this year that provides prosecutors and rights holders new legal tools to combat online piracy originating beyond U.S. borders"

No! The internet has no borders. American laws and "rights" don't apply outside of the United States. That's why the United States tortures people outside of the US. You can't say that US law applies to copying MP3s, but not torture.

That's why if you read between the lines, the response is not saying "We agree with you.", it's saying "I'll get you next time, Gadget, next time."
Craigslist puts up front page SOPA/PIPA banner
Just go at it and see how well it works out. You can always send out one email a day to a news outlet or blogger and tweak it as you go along. As an example, it could be this:

"Dear Blogger,

Are your readers still looking for that unique Valentines day gift? Candy Japan has the answer. We sell candy subscriptions filled with fun and delicious Japanese candy.

How does it work? Every two weeks, we select some surprise Japanese candy and mail it to you directly from Japan. Prices start at $23.95 per month for two candy deliveries each month, or you can buy a single delivery for $13.00.

For more information, visit www.candyjapan.com

If you would like any more information, you can email me directly at [email]. I can also provide further images optimized for blog posts an emails.

Sincerely,

[Name]

Obviously, its directed at bloggers or websites who talk about gifts, gift giving or valentines day. You would tweak it depending on who you're trying to reach. After Valentines day, you would direct it to people looking to give fun gifts. With your prices, it would be best to concentrate on hip, urban websites or bloggers.

I just wrote that quickly by the way, maybe other people here can improve on it.
I'd advise specifically against using Protobuf -- Google's support for Python seems to be pretty bad.
Most of the mainstream languages support these operators and programmers are encouraged to use these operators since they make the code much more elegant and readable.
Even an average programmer would be able to understand the nuances of post/pre increment/decrement operators.
The local hospital did that for employees at the health club they developed. People signed in and then hung out drinking free coffee and socializng in the juice bar.
For an instructive example of really good code, I'm a fan of the Go standard library:

http://golang.org/pkg/

It's remarkably clean and well-written.