skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Effective? I doubt it. I haven't clicked a single ad or promotional item in FB, after using it for years.

I click on Google ads at least a couple times a month, because they tend to be relevant to what I'm looking for at the moment.
"PC" in this sense refers specifically to the hardware platform descended from the IBM-PC, and traditionally running some variant of DOS or Windows.
CityGrid Takes Stance Against SOPA and PIPA
An NFL Player Has A Startup, And He Has Applied To TechStars
Indeed they do, and if an English version comes through parliament I will appreciate protests from Wikipedia. However, as things are, this is disproportionate and unhelpful. Something like the HN approach of blacking out the logo would be far more appropriate for users outside the USA.
But a intermediate stance, such as "you should use more than just mass media to learn your issues: consider these five websites" could be an effective message (if people actually browsed those websites / got informed)
If your family members are destroying the OS, the best solution is to either run in a VM which is set to not persist changes (via VMWare or the free options), or to boot from a VHD file for your other members (keep a clean and activated copy that you can revert to).

There are many options to solve this issue (ex: the native VHD boot, VirtualPC, HyperV).

Telling Microsoft to remove activation is a knee-jerk reaction that helps no one.

You can even run Linux as the Host OS.

I write and sell software, and activation is absolutely critical and responsible for at least half my revenue.
You'd think that people "in need of Wikipedia today", would read, wouldn't you?
I think what they are saying is that while it may not be legal, it is at least ethical -- so long as you've paid for as many copies as you are using.
You can use Riak Smartmachines on Joyent's cloud that would get similar performance for an order of magnitude cheaper than what amazon is charging. If you are seeing 300ms response times, you are not using SSD's and you are not using a similar number of nodes that Amazon is charging you for.

I'm not hating on Amazon, it is a good move for them and they are doing some things that Riak cannot do, but cost and response is not one of them.
Sopa on a Ropa
Again who is talking about doing something for free?

Don't blame me for you lack of imagination that would have allowed you to see a world where artist could create without making money on digitally mass produced songs.

It is possible plenty of people are doing it.

So please spare me the strawmen.
Its working - Holden Withdraws SOPA Support
Yeah, those Congressmen are all trying to read Reddit and Flickr and shaking their fists at us all!

No, I don't see that happening.
It's at least an additional approach. If you have the time to call as well it's worth doing.
> Your trusting a .ISO image from a random website, how do you know there is not time bombed malware pre-installed?

You don't have to use torrents. You can get a direct download of vanilla Windows 7 ISO's hosted by Microsoft: http://www.mydigitallife.info/official-windows-7-sp1-iso-fro...

> Do you still have access to Windows update? If so for how long, I assume it can't be difficult for Microsoft to figure out who is using it illegitimately since some versions must be using either the same keys or keys that have never been issued to a copy of Windows that they have sold?

Nope, there's a workaround built into Windows because the OEMs strongarmed MS into adding it. You can get a piece of software called the Windows Loader that will activate Windows using this workaround with just one click and a reboot: http://forums.mydigitallife.info/threads/24901-Windows-Loade...
The music industry needs to learn how to innovate
Salon.com still not blacked out. (Neither is Slate)
Some sample tweets:

* so Wikipedia is gone forever? or what? somebody tell me please omg.

* Where's the fuck is Wikipedia ?

* omg why is wikipedia black

* Is Wikipedia gone forever or...?

I seriously fear for our next generation. The explanation is right there, "For 24 hours, to raise awareness, we are blacking out Wikipedia."

sigh
This: "One of America's most respected newspapers has come out on the side of copyright owners..." really annoys me. I am a copyright owner. I make money from that fact. I am against SOPA.

Setting up a false dilemma of "copyright owners" vs "others" is incorrect and evil spin. Everyone be sure to note that many of the sites and people against SOPA (e.g. Google, Tim O'Reilly, etc) are all major copyright holders and beneficiaries when you talk with people about this.
Regardless of the reason, I think this is the right thing to do.
I hit the activation limit on my family pack (3 copies) and was never given any instructions on what to do. My system would go black and eventually become unusable. Instead of telling me how to reactivate the copies I bought, Microsoft puts up a message on how to purchase another new copy of Windows.

I'm done with this company now. I bought a Mac, and I'm not coming back.
The evidence speaks: it was clearly an extreme and urgent problem to some parties, hence the act is under serious consideration.

Shoplifting is not only illegal, but much is dedicated to minimizing it.

To claim that SOPA is similar to a death sentence for shoplifting is excessive hyperbole.

We have drivers licenses and stop signs for our once 'open roads'. Clearly as a civilization we are capable of allowing oversight. Should it be as severe as removing due process? Absolutely not.

Should the world of the web gotten out in front of this with an elegant solution? Yes. It didn't and hasn't.

The reality is similar bills will be pushed until the problem is resolved.
If you don't like their product or policies, don't use it. If you use it then you should pay for it. Use Linux, a BSD Unix, or a Mac. People who pirate Microsoft products don't really hurt Microsoft, they hurt the rest of the competition.
iD Software bootstrapped themselves with a low budget, shareware, no effective DRM, and an audience that largely wasn't big on buying things (teenage boys, as far as I can tell).

The recent success of numerous "indy" games, smartphone app games, and in particular Zynga indicate to me that success in the market with a low budget (read: not making 'AAA games') is still not only feasible, but common.
My thought when I first saw it: This is what a Fischer Price "My first Website" would look like.
Whoops, ran out of bandwidth. Called my host and should be back online in a second.
How many of them will drop support because it's the right thing to do vs. the political thing to do?

This will crop up again unless we can get more viciously ethical people representing us.
Google spends dollars to increase the relevance of advertising. Relevance is a means to effectiveness. Some of Google's most effective ads are relevant, text only, in the margins of pages. Propaganda and changing behaviors is a leap away from ad placement and layout online.
https://img.skitch.com/20120118-etwh2gwu52isnn47fw2jpcir5p.p...

You could buy a lot of Riak or Cassie for that.
If you already have a windows license but lost your installation media, you can download it without resorting to piracy. The link below has the URLs for the retail ISOs hosted by Amazon.

http://www.mydigitallife.info/windows-7-iso-x86-and-x64-offi...
Right, the customer is the one in the wrong here, not the company requiring him to jump through these hoops.
Yeah, I was going to write about how the best ones tend to lack advertising or a blatant commercial purpose, and that's what makes them so sharable. People don't feel like they're just promoting some business's marketing campaign or helping some random guy make money off PPC ads.
The unified message should have been a simple 'keep the internet free' or some such simple slogan.
Reinventing the Chamber of Commerce
https://www.google.com/calendar/b/0/embed?src=OXM5YnM0cjgzaX...
Quite so.

But "s/world/high tech/g" (and maybe "s/smartest/some of the smartest/g") and the broader point still stands, even without the hyperbole: lots and lots of very smart people are channelling their efforts into getting people to click on ads.
Path came after Timeline.
I hope you posted that video on your Twitter/blog/etc. Instant Karma.
Pretty much cannot trust the position of the traditional medias, like WSJ, on SOPA. They have a clear conflict of interest since their owners underwrite the legislature.

Just treat them as propaganda.
No, not really. They can check the hashes against those of official ISOs from M$, thus making sure they don't come with extra "features".

As for updates, they can get those too. However, MS might be reading their mail and all they type if they use a "cracked" version of windows without an original serial number.

However, his point is 100% valid. The need for serials / activations is giving people enough reasons to skip buying Windows and pirate it or simply install Linux.

If Windows would've costed 50 USD everywhere and had a milder "security" system, they'd be selling at least 5-10 times more copies.

Some countries have all sorts of big and small taxes which drive the prices of the windows licenses up by 10-40% and some shops also add their own profit margins. Having them be so expensive in the first place doesn't help at all.
I wonder if there's a startup opportunity in helping online communities avoid the Eternal September effect. Some would claim reddit has solved the problem (subreddits) but others would disagree, citing front-page quality decline. So it seems to be an unsolved, universal problem right now.

Hm.
Sheesh, can we not catch a damn break?

I didn't read the brief because I don't speak Legalese, but if it is true I cannot fathom what the thinking was behind such a decision.
Login not required, I have FB login and widgets disabled and I can read it fine. Some of the commenters point out a good question here: why has Facebook not joined in with the blackout in some form? Or is it just US only, like Craigslist.
Without knowing the failure points of both products I am not sure how you can make such a claim. The glass failed in this demonstration and the ALON did not. Obviously the glass needs to be even thicker (making it a ridiculous solution in most cases) and the ALON might work even if it is thinner.
Ah, that's a fair point. The post is, in the end, imploring MS to change. And I suppose part of that point is the economic one that MS is losing sales because of this. Adding the premise that you want to send an economic message to MS as well, and assuming that the author needs Windows, it doesn't seem like there's a good way to satisfy all of the requirements. Still seems like the closest thing would be to buy a copy, install a pirated version, write a blog post like this one, and threaten not to upgrade or to switch to a competitor.
I agree with your point, but I think directing it at the White House program is somewhat harsh. Judging by its description[1], it seems to me more like a program to alleviate the problem of frictional unemployment[2] (something that even the most conservative economists would agree is a policy problem[3]). Sure, getting rid of regulations would increase the demand for labor (more businesses => more jobs available), but that still leaves the problem of whether the supply of labor is correctly trained/prepared/etc. for the jobs available.

[1] http://www.dol.gov/SummerJobs/

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frictional_unemployment

[3] http://books.google.com/books?id=-X6YnkmadD4C&pg=PA214&#...
FFFFFFFUUUUUUUUUUUU-

Edit: I’m happy to inform the HN community that your defense mechanisms at all superficial signs of redditry are in order and working. (One negative karma point per minute is damn impressive.) Whether those defense mechanisms also work against more subtle (and much more dangerous) redditry is, however, very much up in the air.
This is why Google is not blacked out completely, to avoid something similar with Bing.
Making a photo collection look interesting automatically is actually really straightforward. I think anyone who spends serious time attacking this problem will arrive at a solution.

Use the EXIF timestamp of when each photo was taken. Make a web page for each month, and group photos together by day to make it easy to skim through. Limit the number of photos shown on this page for any given day (put the rest on their own page) and you've automatically got variety. With those two simple organizational steps, viewers of the photo collection are set up for success in quickly finding photos that interest them, assuming there are some.
SOPA exposes the irreconcilable differences between old and new media
MS publishes MD5s of the ISOs so you can know that you're pirating the right thing. If you pirate it the right way you also get updates.
Looks pretty neat. Are these arranged based on any logic like openings available or just some order based on brand?

Looks good for a weekend project.

Throwing in some random ideas to see if there is anything that can be added to it to make it first place for people to start looking for a job. (understand you don't want another yet-another-aggregator).

- Location as a search option or location no-constraint as an option so I start looking at subset?

- Is it possible to just show short details like skill based filter or any other search option? The challenge then could be to tag each job & map to various search. Would there be simpler options using tag cloud?
AT&T throttling is a death sentence
iOS Vertical Synchronization
Well today, i feel great. I am essentially glad that the community can stand as a whole and keep aside their mutual competitive agendas. Today will defiantly be seen as a special day when they teach "internet history" to the next generation. And it feels great to be a part of it and witness it first hand. Plus seeing my non-geek friends posting about SOPA is not very bad either.
Is there any way to provide this over https? I really do not feel comfortable putting my contact details over http.

I love this idea and would love to participate :)
Am I the only one who has had no problem viewing wikipedia today? Main page fine looks normal except for the SOPA statement near the top. I've read several articles that I've gotten from google searches.

Yes English language, yes I'm in the USA.
This happens six hours after reddit blacked out. I'd guess the most eager redditors ended up here already, for better or worse.
For papers you would just do what NIH requires, which is "upon acceptance for publication." Upon further reflection and discussion data would probably be more reasonably published in an open format no later than 1 year after the grant ended. That would allow multi-year studies a little more time to collect all of their data and write it up.
As much as I want to like it, I don't even try to read people's profiles anymore.

If Facebook wanted me to pay 100% attention to the Status feed, they've succeeded. And by Status feed, I don't mean whatever that thing on the right frame is. Who reads that anyway?
This is not a feature of the american mind. People just don't like reading.

People will not read anything! People are governed by laziness and habit, because they are effective strategies. Modern technology only makes it worse. Being a teenager makes it even worse, and living in the richest and most 'advanced' society in the world is probably the nail in the coffin.

Lots has been written on how you can't get people to read simple instructions. That's why windows and it's cryptic dialog boxes and Yes/No questions caused so much consternation for all those years, until apple forced them to sort it out and start labelling the buttons with verbs. People might just read the headline and the verbs, but they sure won't parse the whole paragraph and decide whether they want to accept or decline the action as phrased.

The same thing goes for politics and it's obsession with soundbytes.
Jotly Releases API to Compete with Instagram
It certainly highlights one downside of using a paid-for shared service over your own self-hosted version. Flickr could be blocked due to another user, whereas my own hosting can only be blocked due to me
> The author claims that he hates the music industry and won't miss them, yet he admits he's willing to break the law to get their products.

He's not breaking "the law". His breaking some law. You surely broke some law in your life? You can't be sure that you didn't. You just try not to inflict harm on other people and get by.

"Their products" spam everything everywhere. Their billboards litter public space. Their music litters radio waves. Their silly cliches litter minds.

If you dangle a carrot in front of peoples faces you shouldn't complain that someone will eventually eat it without paying you a goddamn thing. Especially if he can do that without you even noticing.

I think if piracy stops Hollywood from shoving their crap in everyone's faces it will be a good thing.
It was a business intelligence app; the front end rendered graphs and charts based on data over Zend.

We staged out of that architecture by implementing a REST endpoint on top of Zend, and moved our graphing over to the (now-superceded) protovis library.

Our engineers weren't used to worrying about data transfer, so we had to do a little bit of engineering work on the JSON side once we switched out, but the graphs, charts and rendering are VASTLY faster.

That said, it could well be the Flex runtime that added all the badness; flash games definitely render faster than our app did.
I assume he wrote it between the lines to be less offensive. It's not that we want to push people away, just signal that they should think before posting more than on Reddit.
Lost installation media not at all the point of the post. Read it first.
Never mind. I read the FAQs and you can read it just fine if javascript is disabled, which I do by default.
This was a nice surprise to be able to implement on some of my sites this morning. Well done.
I would have thought that while the effect was due to Reddit (and others) being down, it was more a case of existing users refreshing for fresh content, rather than potential new users coming to register.

Is there really that much crossover? I need to spend some time seeking HN-esque subreddits perhaps.
I agree. In any debate it's important to frame the issue carefully and to avoid letting the opposition choose the terms that will be discussed. If most people view this as "rogue sites/thieves vs. legitimate copyright holders" or something similar then the debate is already partly lost.
Yes i guess that was a wise move but i think i would consider myself to be what you would call "Reddit crowd". But not all of them are like that. Its about culture and it usually takes some time for people to adapt to a new "culture".
Microsoft Store officially tells you that your download time has expired after you purchase a Windows license, and wish to re-download / re-install more than 3 months after your purchase.

The official solution is to buy an additional copy of the Windows license which will provide you with a new download URL.

I knows this because I complained to the @microsoftstore twitter account: after purchasing 2 copies of Windows (the crapware-loaded OEM version, the clean one from MS store) I had no intention of purchasing a third.

For some reason they simply couldn't allow me a second download, and sent me a physical disc, which arrived about 6 weeks later, by which time a pirated Windows 7 was working fine.

However
I doubt that most "bullet-proof" glass could stop a 50 caliber round at all. The thickness required would be ridiculous.
I knew, but decided to lump NIH in because it doesn't require any open access to data collected with taxpayer monies.
Devil's advocate: Where does civil disobedience fit in with "Multiple wrongs do not make a right"?
The fundamental problem is the US government has essentially unlimited power (despite the legal basis for its existence, the constitution) and has manipulated the courts and the elections process such that there's little anyone can do about it.

Many of these really egregious bills are unpopular with the majority of americans, but their opinions are not represented by the actions of government. There's little they can do to get real reformers elected because the "two party" system focuses on immaterial differences between the parties and on these issues the parties are pretty close. Most democrats and republicans voted for the PATRIOT ACT (and its renewal and extension under Obama) as well as NDAA, etc.

I'd love for someone to find a way to make democracy work. If there were a way to keep the US government constrained to the powers enumerated for it by the constitution, then we wouldn't have these problems.

But the only "checks and balances" on the government are all part of the government, and thus have long ago been compromised, there's no real oversight.

That's the fundamental problem.

If SOPA is "defeated" it will just rise up under another name in a few months.

SOPA itself is only the latest attempt to do this- they've been attempting to gain this level of control over the internet using the excuse of fighting terrorism for several years now.
> The bar to gain accreditation is so high that only large universities and (relatively) dishonest private corporations can get accredited

What stops an honest private corporation from getting accredited?
On the flip side, the WSJ could say the exact same thing about Google, Facebook, Ars Technica, etc. Just because they offer a different viewpoint doesn't mean you should completely write them off. Instead, it is useful to read these types of pieces to see what the opposition really wants.

If there is to be any sort of compromise, we can't just shut our eyes and plug our ears when the traditional media says what it needs in a law.
I wanted to look up Eternal September - but hit the Wikipedia anti-SOPA page for about the 8th time today. If nothing else, I bet a lot of people have learned how much they depend on Wikipedia today.
That font is too awful to be an accident.
People have made music for thousands of years. We've only been able to record it for 135. I don't think music would go away if you suddenly had the ability to record it but not to prevent others from copying the recording. As far as I can tell, you can't stop teenagers from forming rock bands. Music will survive.

The fundamental point is that I don't think that you have a right to make a living as an artist. If you can find a way to get people to pay you for it, that's great. Just don't take away people's rights in the process.

It's the same in software. I'd love to be able to get paid for every little thing I ever wrote, but that's not reality. I only get paid for things that can be packaged into some kind of product, something with a business model where people feel like paying me.
Rep. Earl Blumenauer (Ore.) to black out his Congressional website
Should we be expecting in a few years, that web sockets will be advanced enough for us leave HTTP/1.1. behind? Aside from chat/messaging I'm not sure how web sockets can provide additional functionality from what we have now.

Edit: I confused web sockets with SPDY. I have to go read up on what these things actually are.
Interesting. I didn't know this.

I understand that actually getting speed out of JS for binary data is still quite 'hacky' though, for instance Fabrice Bellard used Typed Arrays extensively implementing his Linux-on-Javascript project: http://bellard.org/jslinux/tech.html
IANAL, so talk to one if this information is of more than theoretical interest to you, but the Psystar case makes me believe it would not be legal. Courts seem to take a copy-centric view of things, so an illegal copy can only make more legal copies and a legal copy can only come from a legal copy.

So the pirate version would always be pirated in the judge's eyes, even if you had paid for a license for a legit copy as well. They won't let you use the legal license you acquired to cover a pirate copy. Or something like that, anyhow. There are always lots of funny little details that can make a big difference when dealing with law.