skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
People over-commit all the time. Whether they know it or not, most people are optimistic about the things they think they can do, especially if it is something they've been doing for a long time. I think new years resolutions are for people who wish they were motivated (like me [which is why I don't set these types of things]). The beginning of the year always makes me feel like I am going to get things done, though. I guess people just need to start doing and stop thinking about doing, but it is not always that easy.
5 Great Alternatives to MegaUpload
NTT wireless module transfers data at 15 Gbps with 50cm range
I've been around enough lawyers to get the gist of what they're doing, but am not involved in the profession. A really good friend is a corporate lawyer and my mom was a courthouse clerk when I was a kid.

The case was pretty clear cut; you can't carry a weapon as a convicted felon and once you cross state lines you fall under Federal jurisdiction. The guy was caught going from MD to DC and back to MD with two pistols during a police chase. He tossed one out the window while in DC and had the other one was on him when he finally wrecked his car just inside MD. The judge explained the law before we deliberated and also explained that his prior conviction had no bearing on him being guilty of this crime. Two people on the jury were convinced that he was just being made an example by the Feds. At the time there was pretty bad gun running between MD and DC and the local MD district attorney had a hard time getting gun convictions.

BTW. Federal jury duty sucks. It's not a one day deal like it is for most county juries. Instead you're listed for an entire month. I had to go in 4 times before I was on a jury.
Yep! We intend to use our shiny, well-organized REST API for future development and probably port existing functionality to it, too!
Twitter’s And What It Means For Online Reputation Management
There should be a level 5: doing stand-up comedy shows on software development.
...in the USA. That fact isn't mentioned anywhere in the article. You have to go to their source at neilson.com to find out that the market share they are referring to is confined to 4.5% of the world population.

So, these are USA numbers only. I wonder what the broader picture looks like?
A recommended read would be "Artisan Bread in 5 Minutes a Day". Describes how to make no-knead homemade bread in only about 5 minutes of active work a day. Rising is done in the fridge overnight. Take a portion out of the fridge in the morning and bake it while prepping for the day. Nothing beats the smell and taste of home-made bread. The only downside it that it is so superior to supermarket bread that I can't eat supermarket bread anymore, even as toast.
Matplotlib - python 2D plotting library
>Are you disturbed my Microsoft completely dominating the desktop? 90% market share for a decade and a half.

Yes, I was but I don't blame MS for that. There were no competent alternatives during the mid 90s. Apple was on the verge of going out of business and Linux wasn't ready for the average user yet. I don't blame Google either for dominating search. They (MS & Google) are or were the best at what they do. The problem arises when companies leverage a monopoly to enter another business.

>In Google's case, it's highly doubtful that they will ever dominate social.

With this news it is far more likely that they will (when this is about the number of users) if a user's only intent is to create a YouTube or Gmail account and have to accept all three.
For people who don't have local backups, it's going to bite you one day. Here's how to set up free, hourly, incremental, encrypted backups with minimal effort. I do it on my laptop:

https://grepular.com/Secure_Free_Incremental_and_Instant_Bac...
Google is the new Yahoo! now.
This is how I read it. He was saying it's alright to go with bleeding-edge technologies, even if they're a little shaky now. As long as they have a good dev community behind them, they'll get better.
I sometimes love Microsoft. This is one of those cases.

Software development tools, especially those meant for the enterprise, are sometimes too serious, boring and soul-sucking. Turning it into an RPG game is genius if you do it right: not only do you have some innocent fun, but it might make you learn some good practices in the process.
Celebrities are rockin rockabilly dresses
Use personal cloud services like Tonido with your public cloud services. That way you have a local copy as well.
Modi Fasts In Godhra,Activists Arrested || thenewsjockey
You can mark items in S3 as requester pays, which means you don't get hit for bandwidth.
I'm all for tight competition since it keeps both Apple and Google playing their A game.

That said, I'm somewhat amused that anyone is surprised with these figures. The iPhone 4S was 6 months late. There were literally millions of iPhone faithful that were sitting on their hands eagerly waiting for the 4S so they could upgrade. If you stretch this chart back another 6 months you'll see a considerable sag in iPhone sales as the 4S waiting game began.

Android, due to it's constant upgrade stream, doesn't suffer from this cycle. Let's take a look at some yearly charts before we call this race...
"Welcome to the cloud!(tm)"

Some heuristics for evasion of the observed colateral damage scenario:

* Store your files in several places. For example use Dropbox and link two machines with it. One at home and your laptop maybe.

* Rent a cheap vserver and install your own URL-Shortener (http://freecode.com/search?q=url+shortener&submit=Search)

* For files you'd like to distribute, put them into the Dropbox public folder. Generate your own short links with your own shortener.

* distribute the shortened links

* If Dropbox goes down, copy files to other webspace. Adjust URL-Shortener entries to new location.

If you don't trust Dropbox or any other file storage service, rent some webspace and sync your files there. There are a couple of 'How to build your own OpenSource Dropbox clone' recipies out there. (https://duckduckgo.com/?q=dropbox+clone). AFAIR they all suck in different regards. Simply choose the one that does the job and sucks least.

If you are not capable of doing stuff like that, then contact your friendly neighbourhood tech collective. Where to find them? Start here: http://www.hackerspaces.org . Don't ask them to do stuff for you. Ask them to teach you how to do it. Then donate. DONATE!? Yes, donate. And remember, with all the commercial services you have been cheapsurfing on, if you are not paying for it, then you are not the customer, but the product.

The interwebs have offered us the opportunity of an empowered, self organized distributed digital information society. But alas! we lazy bums are opting for the cheap consumerism solution. And on top we are whining and sobbing, when the freebies are being taken away from us.

I have little compassion for people who store their files in the cloud only.

/rant
I am much more risk tolerant than most, as I gave up a $100K job to join the startup I mentioned a few months ago. The difference between that startup and this one is that I know one of the cofounders well, and both are very intelligent and accomplished (my friend is ex-McKinsey, the other co-founder is ex-McKinsey, Google, and Microsoft with a Harvard MBA). I definitely prefer a more unstructured, figure-shit-out environment which is one of the main reasons I left Shell in the first place.

Probably the biggest reason I would join Google is for the brand name (and, I think I will enjoy the work and the people too). Having Google next to your bio gives you instant credibility (like the quick summary of the co-founders above). The cofounders already have that, but I don't. The question is is it important enough to hinge a big decision on?

And as for why I want to live in the Bay area, I spent the last 4 months in SF and loved it. The weather, the people, the whole vibe are awesome. Plus my brother is now working in LA so we'd be close, although my parents are in Richmond, VA so I'd be closer to them in Pittsburgh.

Looming question at large: Is a brand name like Google necessarily better than being the first biz-dev hire at a promising startup? The startup isn't "sexy" like an airbnb, but they're already profitable and are getting more incoming leads each week which is great to see.
It's a pleasure to see such straight-faced parody. Bravo to Ars, although I was kind of sad to see them include the disclaimer at the end for those who don't get the joke.

As someone who prefers to develop on Mac and Linux, I'm still a bit jealous of F# and the IDE integration it enjoys. And yes, I know about MonoDevelop.
Can Internet Protests Get Political Results? Yes, They Can
How hard would it have been to give people a warning and let them pull their legitimate files first ? There's a whiff of malice behind seizures of this kind.
git-annex can do this. Currently it supports Amazon S3, The Internet Archive, Tahoe-LAFFS, and rsync.net as cloud providers (with optional gpg encryption), as well as various options involving your own VPS, local hard drives, etc. Adding more cloud providers is a simple matter of haskell programming, or if you don't do haskell, shell scripting.
You are not putting forth an argument against my statement. I said "a fair price" and did not include $0.00. Louis CK charged $5. Radiohead and Reznor/Williams let buyers choose. These are very different experiments.

Lastly, I was a huge Radiohead fan until their "In Rainbows" release. I thought it was horrible. After previewing the songs, I didn't buy/download it. I wanted to very badly, because I wanted the experiment to work. I think they did the experiment on that collection of songs because they knew they sucked.
Yup - they might tie it down so terribly, but I just have a dropbox accounts across a couple of computers - I have the same account on my personal PC, my office laptop and my crappy Jolicloud cheap linux laptop I use for surfing while watching TV.

So as long as I turn each on once in a while I not only have a cloud back-up, I also have 3 'physical' ones.

If one day Dropbox through the 'kill switch' - I'd just have to use one of the other devices without connecting to the internet first - as I don't like to leave machines running needlessly only one is ever on at a time.

In a way I think it's good that Dropbox limits the amount I can store - it makes me focus on the files I /NEED/ to have for a long time, and makes me do the work of backing up the other lesser items - like photos (that I care about but aren't going to lose me £££ if I lose them).
Sounds unlikely. If my hard drive crashes, how do I get my files back? (the whole point of the service)
Unless the Dropbox service sends a command to your Dropbox client to delete the files as part of its "death".

If somebody other than the people who made and run Dropbox were responsible for the action of shutting it down, this might happen accidentally. Or if the service was hacked.

It's still a good idea to have your own local backups.
Daily Mobile Minute #92: Are banks stuck in the 1950′s?
That's a reasonable argument to make, but there's a difference between a temporary inconvenience and permanently losing data. It's not yet clear which of those this will be.

Unless the MegaUpload business continues to operate somehow, I can't imagine how they would allow people to access their data once again. Would the police run the business so that people can get their data back? Hard to imagine them absorbing the cost of doing that.
Ask HN: Would you be interested in a free SEM class?
Hi there HN community,

A friend of mine and I were thinking about creating a free, basic Search Marketing class (limited to 20 students so that everyone can get the attention they deserver).

The goal of the class would be to teach you the basics of Paid Search Marketing for both Google and Bing/ Yahoo. The class would last 2 weeks and take about 10 hrs of effort.

We have not yet prepared the curriculum but wanted to see if anyone would be interested in this.

If you are interested or have any ideas, requests or suggestions please feel free to drop a comment or shoot me an email at myHNname AT g.m.ail.com.

Thank you!
I wonder if whatever censor approved the final headline didn't notice the URL, or just thought it wouldn't offend anyone?
Open Source Summit: Bootstrap
Yeah, it took me a long time to realise that that wasn't another demonstrative image

http://i.imgur.com/uOyZU.png
is there any legal recourse against the federal government available to those who lost property in the seizure?
The State of NoSQL in 2012
Fast Zipping in Amazon S3
IPhone user's take on the Galaxy Nexus Android phone
"What do you have to hide?" http://www.zerohedge.com/about
> How is this different than Microsoft giving away a version of their C++ compiler as part of the Xbox development kit which can only produce executables that can be sold via Microsoft to people having Xboxes?

You mean like this[1]? Applies to both Xbox and WinPhone. Apple also gives away Xcode, but you can't make iOS apps outside of their dev program.

[1] http://create.msdn.com/en-us/home/getting_started
yes, I know I can use POP to download my mail, but the thing I've found is that it creates a huge, fragmented multi-gigabyte mail file in Thunderbird, which is annoying to have to take care of. But yes, I realize #firstworldproblems :)
It depends where you live.
In a world where privacy is valued they should not open the other packages if they don't have a valid reason (backed up by a court order).
If you start thinkging that "statistically speaking" is a valid reason to violate someone privacy then you are opening a scary pandora's box.
Perhaps, though the iPhone 4 and 3GS are the 2nd and 3rd best selling current smartphones as well.

Additionally, with the iPhone now available on yet another US carrier (Sprint), there's more people who can now buy iPhones. I know a number of Sprint (and previously, Verizon) customers who only had Android phones because they couldn't get an iPhone with their carrier.
To be fair, although USA might be 4.5% of the world population they account for the largest amount of smartphone sales of any country with about a third of all smartphones worldwide being sold in the U.S.
Fair point. MegaUpload has been operating for years. A week extra so that legitimate users are less impacted would probably have been appreciated.
"Whoever does not re-invent JSON is doomed to understand it" ?
And remember, with all the commercial services you have been cheapsurfing on, if you are not paying for it, then you are not the customer, but the product.

I need to print T-shirts with this quote.
Could be, but how do you explain the (nearly) 10% who never used their iPads?

>> The iPad is also mentioned: 9 per cent of respondents claim that they are yet to use their new device because they "haven't gotten round to it" or because "it isn't fully charged".
How iOS can lose: the independent developer as a canary in the coal mine
Sonia Gandhi
The Congress is unique. Our uniqueness arises from several basic features of the Congress s history, its character, its ideology and the legacy of its leadership. I am convinced that the time is ripe for a massive renaissance of our political culture so that we build that society which combines compassion with competence, equity with excellence.
Lobbying Power Shifts from Hollywood to Silicon Valley | Swampland | TIME.com
"Here is advice: Don't make goals and find happiness!"

Then, further down the article:

"Do this regularly: Get up early, practice generosity, over-commit, talk to strangers".

Ok. What did I miss here? How are these things not "goals" or "plans"? "My goal is to get up early from now on". How is this not setting a goal?

I hate articles like this.
No, you're just asserting it without backing it up again. "[Creators] have a right to decide how that work is given to others." You just state this, as if it's a universally held fact, and then base the rest of your post off of it. Clearly a whole lot of people do not believe that creators have a right to decide this.
Yes, Kim "Kimble" Schmitz is a name I remember from 90's. He was quite often on TV in Germany, showing off his luxurious life-style, girls and cocktails at a pool, that sort of thing. And then he was jailed. He is indeed a convicted criminal.

The german Wikipedia has a nice overview over his former activities:
http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kim_Schmitz

This guy has never been a modern Robin Hood.
Oh yes, I agree with this!

But that's the case no matter what the technical implementation is.
I think he meant removal from Dropbox inadvertently causing local deletion rather than intentional local deletion.
As has been said time and time again, you should have at least 3 copies of every file you care about. One local, one local backup, and one remote backup.

If you need to restore a file quickly or the remote backup goes down you have your local backup. If your house burns down you have your remote backup.
I'm 53, my parents were teenagers before the end of the European second world war. My Dad would have loved all this stuff. My mum's best friend was a telex operator in a large shipping company the 1950s and they had this thing called operator net. Facebook for 20something sweater girls, it sounds a hoot.

Here is my thought: the Internet (e.g. the IP/TCP protocols and http) can support either large centralised systems (Facebook, Google++, Twitter &c) or atomised individual 'presences' (shivaplug server next to your router and rss as microblogging tool). I suspect we are going in the centralised direction, and that our various governments are happy with that...
I think it would be uncontroversial to say that optimized GHC Haskell (statically typed, compiled, optimized, native code) is always faster than current Erlang implementations (dynamically typed, interpreted, lightly optimized).

For example, the fastest Erlang programs on the benchmarks game are all slower than all the GHC Haskell programs,

* http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/u64q/benchmark.php?test=al...

Median slowdown relative to GHC is 7x.

GHC is aiming for the high performance computing world of late, as well. The Erlang language just doesn't have the facilities for raw number crunching that's needed.
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And that no one downloads your files.
My recent version of Firefox defaults to a limit of 15 connections per server. So there is some defense built in.
JanRain's auth/capture system runs on Haskell's 'snap' web server: http://corp.galois.com/blog/2011/4/22/tech-talk-video-haskel...
What large organization is not associated with illegal activity?

People save their money at banks associated with illegal activity. Microsoft, Google, Apple... all associated with illegal activities.

Our governments are associated with illegal activity. Strike that. Our governments break laws. Cops break laws. Judges break laws. Legislators break laws. Soldiers break laws.

We just observed Martin Luther King day. He was associated with illegal activity and broke many laws.

How do you avoid association with illegal activity?
I think you mean that if you enhance the software or sell it then you have to provide a cut. In general, you don't have to give a cut for works that have been produced with said software.

BTW, Blender is pretty standard in this regard.

"Anything you create with Blender - whether it's graphics, movies, scripts, exported 3d files or the .blend files themselves - is your sole property, and can be licensed or sold under any conditions you prefer." [1]

[1] http://www.blender.org/education-help/faq/gpl-for-artists/#c...
Try http://www.bayfiles.com/. Run by the same guys as The Pirate Bay; it's a thousand times better than most of the other file hosting services.
That isn't a reasonable argument to make for regular (non-techie) users. How are they to know backup best-practices any better than you or I might know about the best-practices of a field that we haven't studied?
Do you really – honestly — believe that there are millions of iPhone faithful?

There are people who buy smartphones and people who, when given the choice, will pick an iPhone. There are not millions of iPhone faithful. Those have to be a tiny minority.
Reid Postpones Tuesday's PIPA Vote
The backup mantra I was taught: Files that don't exist in three places don't exist at all.
This is not a welcome to the cloud, this is a welcome to the crappy legislature. Dropbox provides 2gb free, how much time will it take to have a megaupload v0.2?
A quick search for "imap to maildir sync" shows up several free apps for syncing between IMAP and Maildir. That way, each email would live in its own file. Might be more manageable.
The 10 social news reader apps you need to try
Battery Patent Application Hints at Thinner Apple Devices
German Court Shoots Down Samsung Patent in Fight with Apple
GOP Candidates Respond to SOPA (Clip from Debate)
The answer is in their documentation.

We generate a new 2048-bit RSA public/private key pair when our client is installed, store the public key on the local disk and transmit the private key to our datacenter via https. Then, for each backup session, we generate a new random 128-bit AES symmetric key which we use to encrypt the user’s data. We secure the 128-bit AES key by encrypting it with the user’s public key and transmit the encrypted file along with the encrypted key to our datacenter over https. We destroy the unencrypted 128-bit AES key at the end of each backup session and never write it to disk. To decrypt a file, the user’s private key is used to decrypt the 128-bit AES which is then used to decrypt the file.

http://blog.backblaze.com/2008/11/12/how-to-make-strong-encr...

With pictures and everything. I'm not one of their users, but that page was interesting to read.
Use personal cloud devices like TonidoPlug. Allows you to keep copies both local and public cloud: still you can access from anywhere.
It's not me I'm worried about but the expectations of the people I commit to. For example I've done a lot of humanitarian work and once you are seen working for 'free' it's hard to have that conversation about how your time is actually limited. I'm probably still learning how to set boundaries however so my advice (to myself) is 1. set boundaries, 2. commit.
I don't quite get this either. They weren't that stupid to have their servers in the US where everything is illegal, were they? And what about similar sites like Rapidshare? How do they get to be still up and running, yet doing quite the same thing for decades?
For all the gory details about TC-39 work to possibly get rid of this restriction in ECMAScript and support full Unicode, venture to the TC-39 wiki:

http://wiki.ecmascript.org/doku.php?id=strawman:support_full...
Rock And A Hard Place: What To Do With Concordia
I'm not sure if this is what he means but I think to many people, a goal is a checkbox that you can check, like "make $100,000" etc.
Because they need to understand medicine when they make drug (the prescription kind) or other medical related laws, or chemistry when they make environmental regulations? Please. Only a superficial understanding of technicalities is required to legislate sufficiently effectively, understanding that can easily be supplied by staff who make high-level summaries.
Dear Content People, Please Let Me Pay You - Zatz Not Funny
BeOS could have been an alternative in the middle to late 90's.
If only Microsoft hadn't utterly kill it by threatening hardwave vendors who considered offering it with cancelling their OEM agreements.
Why not just use torrents?
11 telling charts from 2011
Cloud storage providers can go down for different reasons. Crappy legislature is one of them. If you entrust your valuable data exclusively to one provider without having copies and/or backups somewhere else, you are doing it wrong.
You can mass share a file with a link on dropbox. There are some bandwidth limitations, but we use this feature every day.