skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
DreamHost Hacked, Password Changes Made Mandatory
Hollywood threatens to withdraw Obama funding over SOPA
For this particular simple task, I recommend Pixlr. It was no where as polished as Picnik, but it is fast to load.
This was a good post, but I confess to being a little disappointed that it was not in musical form.
Groupon Buys Social Shopping Platform Mertado
Investors Bet On Social Gambling, $ZNGA Closes Up 6.57%, Now At $9.09 A Share
I agree in principal -- I'm not advocating that the whole internet be centralized to a few major websites. Having said that, integrating with a site like Gmail can be a good way for a small fish to get some traction.
I think the problem isn't inherently the class content (in 'soft' subjects), but how decent the professor is in letting students get by with weak arguments in their papers. I think there's some correlation between how much they actually care about the class, and how tough the class will end up being.

I took an English class in college that was probably one of my toughest classes in college (yes, about as tough as my math classes) - the professor and the TA's tore apart each paper ruthlessly, and judged them at a quality slightly below academic papers. I wrote a paper that was well formatted and had decent grammar in it, but it was summarily torn apart and was given a C on the paper, because my arguments in the paper sucked.

Also, I'd say that Philosophy is also a pretty damn tough subject in the 'soft subjects' of college. You're expected to be nearly as technical as a mathematician in your arguments, except you're writing essays/articles in prose, rather than with terse explanations and symbols. Philosophy took about as much time for me to study for as my math classes.
Home Depot looks to Silicon Valley for growth
Open source: Replicating TweetBot's Alerts and Action Sheets
Rails 3.2 released
I would have just pointed out that the phrase "Libertarian community" is an oxymoron, heh.
My plan for 2012: do things that children do
Thank you for responding. I notice that that page talks primarily about search terms (and in noncommittal terms about how much Google values privacy) and it doesn't seem to apply to the other parts of the expanding portal.

Just to pick one example, where does it say what you do with the data you collect on users when they click a link from YouTube. E.g., the page http://www.youtube.com/user/khanacademy has a link that displays on the page as

Website: http://www.khanacademy.org

But when you click on it, it actually goes to

http://www.youtube.com/redirect?q=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.khanacademy.org%2F&session_token=oJd2SDBY1T6kY0eXgYddT3firut8MTMyNzE5MDY5NkAxMzI3MTA0Mjk2

The information on users' link-clicking habits being skimmed from that little trick (and the many others like sourcing script from Google-controlled domains on most sites on the web), is it associated with the G+ identity? Or not? Where is this documented?
I know that ideas are easiest part, but it's also important we find a viable alternative to classic Hollywood studios and distribution. The solution is actually strikingly similar as to the one for piracy--provide a solution more convenient and effective then traditional methods.

What about a vertical launch platform for media--a combination of Kickstarter, LaunchRock, and more, specifically tailored towards media like music or video. Incorporated social aspects to publicize your project while you fund it. Provide reliable recommendations for resources classically provided by a studio. Allow artists a platform to collaborate and share resources. Etc.

Make it more effective then going to a classic label. Won't be easy, but it certainly seems lucrative.
Megaupload case proves we don’t need SOPA or PIPA
After a rough six months, Netflix marketing chief steps down
In terms of TV, disrupting the current measurement norms would be a great start. The current methods of measurement are horrible at recognising new media, the success of a TV show and it's ability to attract more funding to continue is far to highly dependant on a small number of users on free to air and traditional cable.
Also, I missed this before, but... ARE YOU SERIOUSLY ADVOCATING SLAVERY?!
And just to add to the "everything is a copy of a copy": the French New Wave was a reaction to Hollywood itself. Godard and Truffaut were infatuated with genre studio pictures, and most of their best work was a result of their passionate desire to tell Hollywood style stories. They told them with the resources available to them, which gave their films a particular aesthetic. You could call that aesthetic "enthusiastic budgetary disregard." Check out Shoot the Piano Player to see what I mean.
This is an example of poor refactoring. Also, "cleanest" is not better.
ESA calls for post-SOPA balance of “creative and technology interests”
I especially like this because it flattens series / preference. There's no "Series FF"-style shenanigans where founders can convert and cash out in later rounds while their VCs hold out for a fanciful exit, leaving employees high and dry, and there's no opportunity for broken preferred/common conversion that lets VCs exit with a much better deal than their founders or employees get - everyone owns the same shares.

Sadly, because it actually aligns VCs, founders, and employees in the same pool, I don't see this being accepted by very many investors.
The point being that one should compare both the pay and the hours of the two jobs.

Another way to look at it. If you get paid $100k per year for 40 hours a week, you might consider taking a job at 32 hours a week for $80k.
I left the engineering track after 2 years, although I still work in tech in a roundabout way. I am a GIS Analyst who also does various software testing and scripting tasks when required. We're a small shop that makes a GIS Tool for Windows.

I guess I left because I didn't find the work interesting. All of these pipes and valves and pressures and volumes didn't really hold my focus very much. I tried computer science as well, but although I liked it enough, I didn't love it enough to continue (Probably heresy to the HN crowd).

Even though I don't have a degree in engineering I'm very glad that I took the math and physics courses that I did. I can have meaningful conversations with Software Engineers, which I enjoy. In fact I worked as a math tutor for 2 years in college to help pay the bills so it's not that I hate math.
I agree with your opinions, and wish to point out that your are using the word "union" when I think you mean "intersection".

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Set_theory#Basic_concepts
Push Pop Press vs. Apple
There are also those who would say Y Combinator is stupid idea and Paul Graham is a complete joke.

http://mankabros.com/blogs/onmedea/2010/11/03/y-combinator-i...
By that line of thinking ( warning: i would punch an evolutionary psychologist anytime ), Porn should be considered the highest and most effective form of art (or simply, like monkeys we could jiggle our junk instead).
Best way to find the content: don't use javascript.
Very interesting. A lot of people who suggest games as a replacement for video seem to be missing this point. Games require active interaction. Not everyone always wants to entertain themselves in a way that requires active interaction. Sometimes we just want to sit back, relax, and let the storyteller tell their story. Watching Bruce Willis blow shit up on a screen is a completely different kind of entertainment than blowing shit up on a screen myself.

Passive consumerism? Oh yes. But homo sapiens loves it.
Pictos Icon Font Server
GeoIP data is 99% accurate at the country level, so it's trivially easy to enforce regional restrictions on the internet, and some web sites have been doing it for a while. Sure, there are ways around that too, but most people are not technically inclined enough to figure them out. As one article recently posted on HN said (can't find it right now), we need to stop thinking only about technical solutions, and start attacking problems at the political and cultural level. After all, using a VPN to get around a restriction will only work until the authorities (government, RIAA, whoever) find a way to block it. It's a never ending arms race. We need to fix the political problem of censorship in order to achieve a permanent solution.
Busta Rhymes Backs Megaupload, Says Record Labels Are The Real Criminals
A wake-up-message that gets published every few years. Here's the last one:

http://news.cnet.com/8301-13577_3-10045321-36.html

Still relevant, though.
I couldn't agree more. Hollywood is creatively bankrupt and completely out of visionaries. They have all gone to Silicon Valley and will probably not return here.

http://mankabros.com/blogs/chairman/2011/09/28/hollywood-is-...
What are the most-played words in Hanging With Friends? (exclusive)
Microsoft gives a glimpse of the Windows 8 store experience
Windows 8 to manage your mobile broadband use for you
Those top grossing numbers are deeply affected by the entertainment landscapes of their eras. Movies played for much longer in the past and there were fewer other entertainment options. So it is not apples to apples.
It would nice to see other people start creating quality content or shows that could really connect with people. Heck, there is probably a lot of good content already online that I don't know about it. But, I really like what revision3 is doing by creating and I hope they can add more shows.
I love the simplicity. Are you guys using express on the back end? I noticed that there are no standard requests going through for submitting forms. How did you guys accomplish that? Keep up the good work!
Yep, that is what they're referring to. The term comes from newspapers, which are shipped folded across the middle, so that only the half of the front page that's "above the fold" is immediately visible. The web design community adopted the term with essentially the same meaning: the part of the page that's visible when you first get there. So yes, those ads are decidedly above the fold.
Delicious Takes Its Stacks Feature Social
It would also be very, very, very cool if Dreamhost (since they have a list of old passwords) would, say, make that list all invalid for future use.

We're doing some tough client love right now on security practices, and having a nice hard wall to push off of, namely, Dreamhost being assholes, in a good way, would be a very Good Thing[tm].
Settlement Possible in Facebook vs. Timelines.com Case
Tahoe-LAFS on S3
I'm not a web developer, but hopefully I can point you in the right direction. If you're comfortable with Python, then I can point you to the popular Django[1] web framework. Though really, if you've barely used Python, then it would probably be equally easy to get started with Ruby and Ruby on Rails[2] instead. Like I said, I'm not a web developer, but I know both frameworks have lots of support and information out there, including tutorials. I highly recommend following through with some tutorials first, just to get yourself accustomed to how the platform works.

As far as your actual idea goes, I saw the keyword "privately". Now when you first start out and it is just you and your girlfriend, then privacy is easy if you two are the only ones who can access the site. Presumably other people would also want to make sure that not even you, the site administrator would be able to view their uploaded videos. That is probably going to mean encryption, and the mess that comes with it. Colin Percival has a recent blog post[3] about designing apps and services so that the users don't have to trust the developers.

In the meantime, a quick and dirty solution would be to have a Dropbox account that the two of you share, so when you place a file in the proper directory, it automatically gets synced to the other person. You could even encrypt the videos locally before putting them in the Dropbox folder. (You'll probably have to move them from the Dropbox folder to elsewhere after the sync, or you'd quickly fill up the 2GB limit for free accounts).

[1] https://www.djangoproject.com/
[2] http://rubyonrails.org/
[3] http://www.daemonology.net/blog/2012-01-19-playing-chicken-w...
Things you didn’t know you could do with a SMS in Brazil
EA spent ‘only’ $200M to make Star Wars: The Old Republic?
and instantaneous hand off of each packet in as near real time as tuned with other devices, so as to not gum up the works subtly both down and up stream.

Wow. You make static HTTP-downloads sound like rocket science.

Honestly, this is as trivial as it gets in terms of scaling. No "512 core machine" needed whatsoever, unless they've started to fold proteins along with their downloads...
Exactly. And honestly, the answer to your question is not "youtube."
Google Shuts Down More Services, Open Sources Others
A well designed REST interface should allow the requester to specify how much information they want to receive.

By default, it's reasonable to assume the requester only wants the barest of information (along with links to related resources) when they access /hero/superman.

But it's perfectly reasonable to provide additional views for common use cases e.g. /hero/superman/powers/detailed or /hero/superman/friends/filter/powers/flight.
New visualization tool from Yahoo shows you how it decides to show content
You wanted to give them money on your terms. They want you to give them money on their terms. I think that sums it up.

It is the responsibility of the producer to meet the terms of the consumer, or else go out of business.
Awesome Subtle Patterns for Web Designers
News.me Welcomes Summify Users
Thank you for the pack target! I should have known Chrome would have a command-line flag for this, but never thought to check.

My extension is also on GitHub: https://github.com/cabin/linkhunter
That's a fair point. Mine was simply to point out that there was an idea that resonated with me, regardless of whether that point is muddled by hypocrisy.
is that really a problem with itunes? if your house burned down, you'd lose all of the movies you had on DVD. at least with itunes movies, you can legally make backups of the files.
This happened to me recently. I had nearly 2 TB of movies and TV shows on an external hard drive that decided to die on me when I moved it. After some messing around, I was able to coax the drive to boot up again and list files, but it takes hours for me to move the files off of that drive and onto another. Luckily, I buy my TV from iTunes, which lets me re-download everything onto another device, but those movies are lost forever.

I've been looking into other digital download options, but Amazon's not compatible on a Mac, and I enjoy watching movies in HD quality. I don't blame Apple for the restrictions that Hollywood puts on them, but I'm also not going to spend more effort than I need to to watch my movies. Downloading them is the most convenient way to watch, there are no ads, and the quality is amazing. I don't understand why this is so hard for the studios to get right.
Here's Mick Jagger saying basically the same thing last July:

"Before recorded music, incomes depended largely on the whim of patrons - meaning even Mozart and Schubert died destitute."

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/10581280
Question on Quora to explore possible market opportunities:

http://www.quora.com/What-are-all-the-major-discrete-parts-o...
This is somewhat circular. The government's influence over all these industries is partially a product of the fact that these industries finance the campaigns of the representatives.

Representatives without sufficient capital to finance their own campaigns rely on being in their financiers' (corporations) good graces. That means strategically putting their fingers in every industry.

There's no solution to the government industrial complex without campaign finance reform.
This brings up an interesting topic: can a rational person do anything that's not for the purposes of ego, or to be more polemic, sex? Hypothetically, if one were to be completely ego-free and also rational, they would have to reconcile that their work and their productions here on earth, are infinitesimal and perhaps negligible on the scale of galaxies. Surely, all human motivations break down at that level, and for a person to continue to be productive, they must admit to the level of "i'll produce something here on earth, that will a.) give me attention (and hence a chance at a more lovely significant other), b.) money (so that I may live comfortably and have a better chance in the future to achieve 'a'." To even claim altruism is to use the adjective to positively light one's ego, no? True altruism would have to function under "rather than doing nothing, i shall do something good, but 'I' do not exist", and under the course of 80 years, any person would succumb to a more aesthetically pleasurable life.
I don't know (and also don't really care) about US, but here in Germany there are several good providers. "Hetzner" and "1and1" come to mind.
I think this is the sort of thing that history will record as the true result of SOPA. Not the mobilization of the public, which despite how thrilling it may feel even today is still something that will not be easily replicated, but the fact that significant chunks of the Internet industry now realize they are in unavoidable, open warfare with the content industry. The Internet industry can no longer pretend to itself that it is neutral, or that the content industry is.

There's been a lot of concern expressed about the fact that the RIAA and MPAA will try again, and we can't count on public mobilization to save us. But I don't think that's the true backstop. The true backstop is that the Internet industry will hopefully become more engaged, and it will hopefully shortly become much less easy for this dying industry to push a bill through Congress.

At least for now, consumers will win. We should keep our eyes peeled for when that changes, because it is only a matter of time, but this should buy us some years.
College students raise awareness about wetlands restoration with Facebook game
This is a slippery slope - when can you actually "identify an infringing file?" Can I identify an infringing file because I match the filename against the names of popular movies? Probably not. Can my startup recognize infringing files because it calculates the checksum of each block of each file for use in deduplication? Sort of, with a lot of technical build-out, and never with any certainty...

If I see "OMG WAREZ.rar" in a news feed on my homepage, should I remove the file itself, all access to the file, or just the link to the file? What if I have a strict do-not-delete policy for user data? What if I have a strict do-not-download policy for user data (even public user data), to prevent me from accidentally possessing child porn on my work PC? Do I just make an arbitrary and capricious blacklist of file names?

It's absolutely not a valid point against them - their system for "identifying infringing files" was more like a system for "identifying bad-looking file names," which is tangentially related at best.
I skimmed the article, but I didn't see at what arbitrary line Google considers "the fold"
Creativity is about pleasure.

Of course, for some that reduces to the motives the parent comment is highlighting. For others, it is self gratification. And yet for others, it is to touch the divine.
This is true, but you have to understand that there is a phenomenal amount of talent locked up in Hollywood. I'm not necessarily talking about directors or actors, but camera men, DPs, best boys, set dressers...the list goes on and on. These people have skills that require many, many years of on-site training.

(Don't forget about producers, line producers, production managers, site scouts, and all of the logistics people who find a way to make a huge movie happen)

Making a small, Blair Witch Project/Little Miss Sunshine/indie whatever doesn't require an army of people with these skills. You can get away with some rough edges and end up looking good.

But making the next Avatar? That's not a problem that will be solved solely with technology. You have to find some way to extract these guys from an industry that already pays them pretty well.
I'm working on a bachelors degree in cognitive science so I end up taking some classes related to math and programming, and some softer classes related to psychology. And I like to choose liberal arts subjects when I can for general ed, for the sake of being well-rounded.

I find non-hard-science courses to be a little easier in general, but not much easier and not always. You sometimes get professors in a subject like art history who have very specific ideas about how an essay should be structured and what elements are legitimate topics of discussion. Being grammatically correct is often not good enough. There can be quite a bit of intellectual challenge in figuring out what type of essay will result in a good grade, and being able to do this sort of thing may translate into increased chances of success in terms of dealing with customers, coworkers, or managers.

At this point I consider it easier to write a program than an essay. At least with a program there is a standard for the language, and a compiler for me to test the outcomes with before I turn it in. The absolute nature of discrete math can be a comfort, not a difficulty.

I think some CS Engineers get a biased view of other subjects because they only take the introductory or elementary versions of other courses. Some English major may have to stretch his brain for many hours to decipher the meaning of something written hundreds of years ago, in a different dialect and with the context of a different time period; it would be wrong for him to dismiss electrical engineering just because he thought that applying the power rule in calculus 1 wasn't that hard.

And philosophy majors get this type of "soft-major" criticism the most, but let us not forget that our computers are philosophy machines.

Edit: I add this to note that cparedes made similar points as I typed this
"Some of the best ideas may initially look like they're serving the movie and TV industries."

Somehow, I think it'll be difficult for your startups to partner with or serve movie and TV industries if they've been funded under a "Kill Hollywood" RFS :-)

Although leadership in Hollywood may be cruel and tech-stupid from our standpoint, they have a tremendous amount of talent at their disposal. Seems like a production system for what comes out of Amazon Studios could threaten their system if it was stocked with Hollywood-level talent -- actors, editors, cinematographers, etc -- and coupled with a smarter distribution system.
"I'm guessing that Hollywood sees piracy and filesharing as vast amounts of unrealized profit for the work they're already doing"

right, but the fact that they are chasing it implies very clearly that they believe there is more money in chasing free cash for work they have already done, than there is in creating new work.

That is the sure sign of an industry (or business) that has stopped growing.
This is how a good API would handle the change. Deprecate the first URL, do a redirect to the new one for a period of time, then remove the original endpoints.

Same concept as deprecating code. You don't wipe it out straight away because you have no idea what else might rely on it or how fast they are to react (within reason).

As for the arguments about not using HTTP request methods - they're standard, and are implemented uniformly everywhere (for the best part). Your API isn't standard, but if all APIs use HTTP and its request methods correctly, you only need to learn the general HTTP spec to generally understand all APIs.

Resources and URL structure afterwards is a matter of opinion. What may seem RESTful to me might not be to someone else.
Isn't it just slightly over-the-top to hint that the solution to annoying, stupid, misguided SOPA legislation is violent revolution?
[1] http://www.shirky.com/writings/group_enemy.html

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