skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I guess it depends on what you mean by "racist"? If this question is something that makes you feel bad, or feel like you're being excluded or thought of as "not one of us", it would be good to find a positive way to communicate that when people ask. If the question is whether people have an improper motive, that's hard to say. Some might, but there are also plenty of curious people out there who might be surprised that this question makes you feel bad.

When I've been asked about my last name, I simply explain a little of my family history (or what I know of it at any rate) and we go from there. I've never encountered someone who meant any harm, but that's only my experience. Yours could be different.

The only way to get people to see you as you, rather than $nationality is for them to get to know you. You can use questions like this as a starting place. If they're a jerk of any kind, you'll probably figure that out pretty quickly, so there's no reason to hurry to that conclusion.
Thanks for the feedback! I've edited the post to include your requests.
Microsoft’s Visual Studio gets badges, achievements and leaderboard
A good startup advice, by Dwight Schrüte
An engineer suggests an engineering solution to a bunch of lawyers who came up with a lawyer solution.
Don't let that picture discourage you. Read the first few paragraphs, it doesn't take long.

See, that's why I used URL shortener - if somebody was giving me a link beginning with domain "divinecosmos.com", I'd think they are insane, and skipped that link without even blinking.

However, sometimes, things are not what they seem at the first appearance. I don't think I can or should attempt to really explain it here. Just give the article a try.
An original .iso would be a great place to deliver keylogging software and backdoors for law enforcement and international espionage purposes. I'm sure law enforcement agencies are already well aware of this.

Not trolling: incentives and processes are basically the same for any entity distributing precompiled binaries, from MS to Symantec to Skype to Apple to Canonical. They don't do it because of the potential for huge reputation hits... exactly like most people in "the scene".
I bet a lot of them are unemployed. This survey should really be correlated with how many hours a day the person in question works. It's very likely those who can afford to sleep longer have to work less.
The point is that it shouldn't matter how the person chooses to put their thoughts into the world, they are their thoughts not yours. If they choose to do a private performance (a concert) and it gets pirated, that's not much different then if they are having a conversation and it gets pirated. The distinction isn't theirs it's the pirates.

Just because they are already granting permission to "read their thoughts" for money doesn't give anyone license to just do what they want does it?

I fail to see how the users choice on how to distribute files grants pirates license to go against the thought originators wishes.

Note I'm not saying I agree with this - but I find it interesting to think about the opposite viewpoint to my own as it helps me rationalise my position.
OSalt recommends PostBooks: http://www.osalt.com/quickbooks

No idea whether or not it's a good replacement as I've never used either.
But look at the price point. Originally $1.99 per episode to just rent it. Even $0.99 sounds a lot to me.

That's almost $50 for an entire series. What's the average amount of time someone would spend watching TV series per night? An episode of this, an episode of that, 3 or 4 times a week. Suddenly you're spending vastly more than cable.

That's more than a modern box set will cost you, e.g. Boardwalk Empire, just released is selling for $40 on Amazon.

Yet they spent $5million per episode, that's a lot of views to just break even, plus the server hosting costs and vendor marketplace cut to make.

The whole thing is overly complex, per item rental is too complicated, a fractured marketplace makes subscriptions poor, the time drip model that studios and channels used to use is dying, but they won't let it go.

I think it'll be 5 to 10 years before we finally see a decent resolution to this where actually paying is less hassle than piracy.
> and given some spammy things Sahil has done in the past, I wouldn't trust it

Dare I ask for context?
There are two kinds of stories that normally appear in a newspaper's opinion section: bylined opinion pieces and editorials. The former are written by various people and should ideally represent a diverse range of viewpoints. But the latter are written by the paper's editorial board, and represent the paper's official stance. This appears to be the latter.
Do our Congressmen care?
Cool map; but there are 4 submarine cables going to the Isle of Man that aren't depicted at all.
Haha -- well if the problem is in the domain of the internet, might as well go to the people in the internet world, no?
The talk at SODA is in 1.5 hours, I'm going to attend it.

Any other HNers at SODA?
As many have said: Don't legislate. Innovate!
The incredible quality of people that study there, and of the people that come out of it.
I'm feel the same as you. I pay 30 a month for espnplayer.com to watch NCAA football games for my college. I mean my wife thinks I'm nuts but there is a legal way to watch these games so I pay for it. Now I can't seem to find something like this for a lot of other things I enjoy. My wife has to resort to going around the web to get access to shows she enjoyed in the US. Now I understand that some channels in Canada both the rights to most of those things (As for the NCAA games they don't seem to broadcast them here at all) and are not implementing web streaming services for them which is dumb.
Buffet's letter on contribution subtly advises about budget
I think it's a good point. When Mashable creates articles to help people thwart the Wikipedia black-out, I personally find that despicable.

Of course, the main difference is that allowing users to register would be a passive act, whereas Mashable is actively "profiting" on the SOPA black-out.
The fact that most of them seem to be completely ignorant of the reasons (which are spelt out right there on Wikipedia's blackout page, with a link to even more details) implies to me that these people are going to go on with their day in ignorance regardless.

Half of them seem to be angry at Wikipedia for taking away their free reference material the day before their papers are due, rather than angry at the government for putting a lot of time and money into destroying the internet.
Online activation works only a certain number of times, and then you'll have to make a call. In my experience, this call took more than 5 minutes, and they asked a few none-of-their-business questions that made me think that I'm asking for their permission to please let me reinstall Windows once again. This was a few years ago with Windows XP, in Russia.
Did someone hack this HN user's account?
http://windows.microsoft.com/en-US/windows/shop/download-win...
Good example. I liked your way of binding model events to views - which is usually not the most elegant part of Backbone. Thanks!
Web blackouts. Is this the new face of American activism?
My bad, then.

Anyway. Usually Mr. Murdoch is perfectly willing to put his name to shamelessly self-serving saber-rattling and rent-seeking pieces (e.g. "omg BBC. british media is government controlled. please get rid of my competition.")

The article itself, FWIW, is basically a straw-man argument saying that anyone against SOPA is a bunch of dirty Commies who think it's a God-given right to pirate everything for free. If you'd like to read it (ew), Google the URL and click the resulting link. Or hack your Referer: or pretend you're Googlebot. I regret that I was only the second or third person on the comments page to say it was a load of BS and not the first.

Postscript (2): as user mapgrep pointed out below, the WSJ has a bad habit of labeling editorials 'Review and Outlook'. Meh.
> Riak has the ability to select keys for processing via various queries, including range of the key.

Based on the resources I can find online, any select-by-range operation in Riak requires broadcasting to all nodes (or at least enough nodes to hit at least one replica of each record), and then performing a scatter-gather operation to fetch the matching records. There also doesn't seem to be any way to specify a sorting order. This is not quite what I would call a range scan: while useful, it presumably doesn't have the same cost or scaling characteristics. It's the difference between scanning a block of data that is stored contiguously, and filtering through an entire table to identify records meeting a criterion which happens to take the form "a <= value <= b".

This is not to diss Riak, which is a nice piece of work and does many things that DynamoDB doesn't.
This was my first reaction. People visiting the web and seeing all kinds of SOPA/PIPA hate, now will automatically assume these same guys support SOPA.

Better would be to redirect them to a page that says, THIS GUY SUPPORTS SOPA/PIPA.

Best would probably be to not squat on the domains.
This is the article that mentions the letters http://finance.yahoo.com/news/impressed-delighted-warren-buf...
Quora's position on SOPA/PIPA
Annual Android income report
Ask HN: Looking for a post about bad design of Twitter API retweet_count
There was a post about Twitter API retweet_count being "100+" (string) after it exceeds 100 and was talking about it was such an undocumented bad API design example. I think it was posted this week and was on popular page. Search didn't work for my keywords. Anyone remember?
I hope they can claim Fair Use of the soundbyte from The Price Is Right!
I think I know which speaker most of these points are targeted at, and I agree in reference to that specific speaker. However, the majority of people who went up to the microphone emphasized the first two points here. One of the best moments was when Alexis Ohanian asked for a show of hands if their company was hiring, and maybe 70, 80% of the people in the crowd raised their hand. Speaker after speaker made the point that the tech startup scene in NYC is a huge economic powerhouse and some of the only real job creators in the city. My favorite speaker (sadly, I can't remember who it was -- perhaps it was the former White House staffer?) talked about how what we need to do is have the tech industry work with media producers to come up with creative solutions to combat piracy. I think you may have just been there for one of the few speakers that didn't emphasize that point.
It seems to me like a gesture that Reddit will probably appreciate (though I don't know whether they'd say so out loud, politeness probably requires them to say something like "Why, PG, good sir, you didn't have to do that!") and so I see no reason to question the truth of PG's stated motive.
(thru whatever means conceivable, including compelling taxpayers to foot the bill)

This is the key. The day student loans are reigned in is the same day prices will fall.

I know someone who works in admissions for a small school. Oddly enough their tuition prices are almost exactly what the majority of students can qualify in a loans plus the lottery education money.

All one has to do is look at all the crappy for profit school that have popped up. There is big money in selling people on spending a lot of money on a junk degree. What's amazing to me is that many of these non-accredited schools are more expensive then the local accredited colleges. What they have though is much better marketing.
Maybe you could enable people to build their own pay-for-registration high-quality communities, like MetaFilter or Something Awful, and take a share of the registration fees? Though, I'm not sure how many such communities the market can really support.
You've got a point. That why Microsoft turns a blind eye on piracy in developing countries. Piracy is the only way they can get os market share they want. That's the reason why their copyright technical protections are so lousy.
Have you ever hired a contractor? They, um, don't always do what you want.
SparkFun and Censorship
Hard figure losses: 6 months running StrikeSapphire Bitcoin casino.
But if the demonstration is just for a day, why does it still have to be so wishy-washy? It's imaginary. People would take it more seriously if it was really out of their control.
I have read more books in the months since I've had my keyboard kindle than in as many years previously.

Still an act of procrastination for me; but I really like the e-ink screen.

A huge plus for me was world-wide free-3g internet (?!?!?!?). It is a terrible UI to be sure; but traveling around South America it is a godsend. Everywhere I am has at least edge network connectivity; fer frickin free. Only really use the internet for email; but I really love my kindle.
Copying Is Not Theft (video)
MMORPGS, or any game where the community counts, don't need copyright to be profitable.
Better then Erlang posts, I guess. Also having this as the most voted post kind of ruined the subtlety of the gesture...
> I don't know how to estimate what values of n would be relevant for today's applications, but n=2^22≈4M doesn't seem like such a big number for images or video (if signal length roughly corresponds to number of pixels). Any thoughts?

Transform codecs for video typically don't transform an entire frame at a time, but rather blocks of the frame. This is for three reasons. The first is efficiency - most of these codecs date back to a time when huge transforms (FFT, DCT, etc) were very expensive. Possibly the most important is the local artifacts are less noticable than global artifacts in video, and using blocks is a nice way to bound that. Finally, the point of using a transform is to be able to extract some 'structure' from the data that can be used to encode it in a more efficient way. Small blocks make this easier to do in a perceptually acceptable or transparent way.

There are absolutely applications for large transforms, but video encoding typically isn't one. Incidentally, many modern approaches are based on other transforms, like the discrete wavelet transform, or approximations to transforms like the DCT.
Privatize profit; socialize risk. That's just another way in maximize profit and minimize risk. Pretty consistent with capitalism.
I was unable to find a source which explained what is the current state of SOPA. Do you have one? The Wikipedia page (yes, it's still up) didn't explicitly say what was still in it, and the NY Times articles I read were equally unclear. This is the best I have, from the Wikipedia page that should be easy to get to today:

After the first day of the hearing, more than 20 amendments had been rejected, including one by Issa which would have stripped provisions targeting search engines and Internet providers. PC World reported that the 22–12 vote on the amendment could foreshadow strong support for the bill by the committee.

The Committee adjourned on the second day agreeing to continue debate early in 2012.[11][151] Smith announced a plan to remove the provision that requires Internet service providers to block access to certain foreign websites.

Oh, and the full article is available if you access it through Google. I assume that's an above-board way of reading it.
SOPA sucks, but so do Wikipedia and Google
I believe this is the main reason Microsoft never really went about pirates in China. Just imagine if they were fighting it so hard, that most Chinese would use Linux now, which could've caused other users in other countries to use it, too. That would pretty much mean Windows would have only 50% market share, perhaps less. I mean, I'm sure a big chunk of that 90% market share they have now is with pirated licenses.
Ever walked into a department store like Macy's? It's all ripoff from designers. There is no copyright on clothe design yet that hasn't killed the designer clothing market.

Counterfeit goods to my knowledge fall under trademark laws.
This would create a great opportunity for non-US search engines.
I'm pretty sure they already use this software and that's how they automate finding youtube videos. But then people speed them up, add little watermarks, etc. to make them harder to find.
btw I'm a happy redditor too, so I'm not against them. Closing registrations this late just seemed slightly odd, maybe even impulsive, to me, and I pointed that out. And I certainly do not wish to kick anyone out from here just because they registered today.
That may be true, but the last time I checked stats college grads unemployment rate was half or better compared to no college.
LabGuru Offers Project Management For Science People
Damn Cool Algorithms: Quadtrees and Hilbert Curves
Free Skype in (Free international phone numbers that ring on your skype)
I've read a few paragraphs in and so far it sounds like a stock conspiracy theory ("They burned this guy's house down for leaking information, just like they didn't with the WikiLeaks guys"), very much in line with what the logo would suggest.
For instance, many event systems “call” a method in another module by sending an event and expect a “return” from that method via a similar event mechanism. In order to understand the application, the programmer must mentally match these call/return pairs, even when they are in different parts of the code.

I somewhat disagree with this assessment. Just as there are different threading models, there are different event models. What the article describes is a pub/sub model of which I am not a big fan. I prefer an event observer model where an event as a very defined namespace and method signature or interface. Observers must conform to that interface to observe the event, therefore to find code relate to that event one only need look up what implements the events interface. I find that the way event based systems deal with control flow reduces a great deal of control flow programming which is where a lot of spaghetti gets implemented. Choosing the proper event model is just as important as choosing the correct threading model.
You do realize that reading in general you have to move you eyes 'all the way to the left' constantly.
Kit.. kit... kitty...?
If Flash weren't a pile of shit. Adobe might have a leg to stand on.

That's a big if.
Yes, but you don't read a book by looking at the spine first, then reading the left page, back to the spine, and then the right. We read everything to the left of the spine (the dividing line, if you will), then read all the content to the right of the spine.
The best advertisement for a Startup
that's good to know, bluehatseo.com was an incredible blog, got so many ideas from reading it.
I agree that shows are generally overpriced but you've selected some bad examples - Boardwalk empire had 12 episodes so even at $3 an episode (premium content or HD) that's still less than the $40 you'd pay on Amazon.
From just a "users dont read" UX perspective, the wikipedia blackout page does the worst job of communicating why they are blacked out.

There's only one sentence at the end of the paragraph explaining why: "For 24 hours, to raise awareness, we are blacking out Wikipedia. Learn More"

The more page has a very detailed explanation in a FAQ format, but noones going to read this much text to figure it out: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:SOPA_initiative/Learn...
http://gazit.me/2012/01/09/Twitter-documentation-fail.html

Discussion: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3444429
Ha, well, it's a losing argument if you have to unpack our basic economic, political, and legal system. The solution is not proportional to the problem.

I think parking is a similar problem at a similar societal cost. People need to park. If you provide no way to park legally, they will park illegally to get on with their business. And indeed, fines for piracy, like fines for parking infractions, and a better distribution model from the market, like enough parking lots, have been a winning solution.
Wow. I do not agree with this at all. When I've heard this sentiment before it's from people who, despite the fact that they think they are hyperlogical and despite the fact that I think I'm hyperlogical, don't in fact agree with me on all public policy issues.

Moreover, at least when it comes to the two dominant parties, carefully controlled and dishonest messaging is already the order of the day.

Logic is not the only, or even the most important, factor which undermines productive debate. It's the failure to recognize that a lot of what people believe about public policy is rooted in unprovable assumptions. If two people start with separate premises (e.g., different vision of what an ideal world looks like), all the logic in the world won't make them meet.

I don't believe the answer is more dishonesty. I believe the answer is new tools that are somehow captivating while simultaneously inoculating against the well-known human mental frailties. I sometimes idly imagine a new type of news show with built-in checks and balances to root out logical fallacies, explain assumptions, and guard against cognitive biases. I'm not yet sure how to make people watch it though. ;)

The state of public debate sucks, but I think we've made progress. Just because we have further to go doesn't mean we should start going backwards. Also, when you're so certain your "side" is right that you start wanting to cheat, it's time to check your own premises and cognitive biases and see if there's any way you may be giving your policy opponents shorter shrift than they deserve.
SICP is being taught again at MIT
An analysis of SOPA and PIPA Protest "Blackout" HTML and CSS techniques
Amit Gupta has found a 10/10 matched donor
As a political protest, this would likely be protected speech. Free speech is after all supposed to be the rule, not the exception. I am surprised though that a professional politician and his staff could be so out of touch with the web that they never registered their names as domain names.
Most pirated ISOs I've seen aren't activation-cracked. I've had to download a few legitimately for systems that only came with a 'recovery partition', and whose hard drive failed or needed upgrading. I try to only download 'legit' ISOs (OEM or regular), or at least ISOs that look legit. It would be nice if I had some way of verifying them against each other to see if they've been modified.
Postscript. While the WSJ may be pro-SOPA, it appears its readers aren't falling for it. Polls show anti-SOPA sentiment leading with an 80-point margin: http://online.wsj.com/community/groups/media-marketing-267/t...

(This is linked from the front page of wsj.com also, so it's not just an obscure corner of the site.)
Even without DNS provisions, SOPA and PIPA remain fatally flawed
Amit Gupta likes you(update from Amit Gupta)
Impressive SOPA blackout
I am blown away to see that Art History cracked the top ten on this list. My mom was an art history major, while I insisted on studying computer science, even though apparently there's no money in it. What a rebel I am!

Then again, in part knowing the people my mom went to college with, I can't help but suspect that art history is what you major in if you're a bit aimless, yet are expected by your very rich parents to graduate from college.
slightlymobvious, but the us only has two neighbours, canada d mexico. canada is no more a source of illegal immigration to the us than the us is to canada (it happens in both directions, nobody cares.) which leaves mexico. osmsure, people sneak in because life for them is better as an illegal in the hus than legal in their own country.
this happens all over the world, not just to the us.

further, just because a country is better than many (it is) is no reason for complacency..... if things are going so great, why not khelp out your suffering neighbours more? and if they arent going so great, how can one say its the best place on earth?
Yes, it's very loud. Every buckling spring keyboard I've ever used is loud, but I can type so much faster on it that I can't stand anything else.