skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Thanks! I really appreciate that. Now I can add it as a submodule in my emacs.d git, and if I ever happen to use it in something I make public I can point people to your repo.

I hope it does not disrupt your workflow too much to have this in a seperate repo.
I have of late been grappling with Dunning-Kruger, which I'd like to apply to this topic.

How do I know if I have this problem? Because everyone filters advice through their brain in one way or another, right? How can I tell if my brain is filtering in such a way to conform advice to my preconceptions, or if I'm truly grappling with the advice?

And if I do have this problem, how do I fix it? Is it remediable?
The generated book contains Apple's code. It's definitely a derivative work.

That said, a person would be foolish to write the entire book using this. Write your text and create your graphics in your editors of choice, import them into this tool to create a nice layout for the iBookstore, then import them into another tool to create a nice layout for Kindle or whatever. You might have to do that anyway -- I've yet to see a tool that will generate a nicely-formatted ebook in both MOBI (Kindle) and ePub formats. Conversion tools like Calibre work if all you care about is reading the text, but the output often looks like ass if the original eBook used anything other than the most basic formatting (that said, a lot of commercially-produced eBooks look like ass anyway, so maybe that's not such a big deal).
I don't watch Boardwalk Empire because HBO won't sell it to me online. I'm sure as hell not buying cable, and I'm also not going to bother spending the time finding and watching some crappy rip online when there are other things to do.

Stick that in your pipe and smoke it.
People in the US don't have to comply with DMCA notices either. The safe harbor provision of the DMCA does not create new obligations, it creates a "if this then that" situation:

IF a service provider receives a notice of infringement AND promptly disables access to the content, THEN the service provider is granted immunity from liability for that infringement.

If you ignore the notice then this provision simply doesn't apply. You haven't "violated the DMCA" or anything like that, you simply don't gain the benefits offered by meeting the conditions of that section of the law.

Why would an entity outside of the US choose to comply with those notices? Because they may be sued in a US court, and when in a US court, the judge is going to apply US law -- including the protections of the safe harbor provision.

Why would an entity outside the US care about the result of a trial in US court? First, because international treaties mean they may be extradited to the US for violating these particular laws, and second, because the officers of the company may wish to be able to travel to the US -- at which point a sentence against them could be carried out.
Is there any doubt that sites like these* are simply exploiting a legal loophole? They recruit people to upload third-party content to their sites and then pay based on how many downloads/paid service signups the uploader gets.[1]

So, guess what they're uploading? They say they're compliant with a wink and nudge, but affiliates still get paid if they receive a DMCA notice against them. So yes, it is a conspiracy in that sense.

My personal views about copyright/'intellectual property'/'property' notwithstanding, these types of companies are the very cause of laws like SOPA/PIPA, which threaten the rest of us.

[1] http://www.wjunction.com/95-file-hosts-official-support

* Megaupload doesn't currently have an affiliate program, but it used to. (until mid-2011)
Terse Words: Get Real Data from the Semantic Web
I thought the same. There couldn't be an easier way to say, "Look at the lawlessness of the internet. These pirates have to be stopped, oh, and they're also a threat to homeland security."
Agreed. Pinterest, on the other hand, has the best "regular people" adoption I've seen since Facebook.
What does taking down a website like justice.gov actually accomplish for them? They respond like this all the time, and every time it gets in the press, and gets forgotten. And nobody misses the website in the meantime. Are there any functions on that website that the DOJ relies on?
Actually, he did this illegally. His publisher had the copyright to all translations, not himself. So he routinely asked "to see them" and then routinely leaked them on The Pirate Bay. Again, this is according to himself.
I know Denmark has been critized by human-rights groups for overusing solitary confinement.
What happens if everyone in the entire world only reads books from libraries?

This is not a new problem, nor is it without solutions.
Really? Really? Are you really that shortsighted?

XBox is huge. It's becoming the media center for an American Consumer household. That means paying $60/year just for the "privilege" of watching Netflix in HD through your 360.

Wait 2-3 (or 4 or 5) years where a Windows Phone can play an XBOX 1 game or an XBOX 360 game in your hand. Wait until Microsoft comes up with something like Apple's AirPlay where Windows Phone apps can utilize a full 1080p screen.

Wait until they integrate more cloud services with the 360. And unveil their own Siri. Or make it so your XBOX 360 can message your phone every time a certain trend on Twitter is mentioned (agent based voice search).

Wait until an entire household of teenagers gets used to talking to their 360 to control it, having it integrate with their phones, and having it manage their social networks and cloud services, AND play some amazing games....

I have a feeling the 360 and the whole Xbox line is going to a very valuable investment and one of MS's cash cows. All of the "convergence" waves Apple is currently riding are also there for Microsoft to ride...
Barrett Brown is neither a pseudonym, nor an operative. He was, at one time, a self-described spokesman for Anonymous. He since has said that he is no longer an active participant, but that he hangs out in IRC to keep abreast of goings-on.
Or, people do really believe when their government tells them a person is guilty.
If you want to become more paranoid then look at it this way : German citizen arrested in New Zealand for breaking US laws.
I couldn't agree more. Complaining about the piracy rate of a successful game is like complaining about the "people who didn't buy it" rate. Just think of all the people who didn't buy World of Goo! There must be billions of them!
Why does your site not link to perl.org?
Never use an X11 screen locker. Use vlock -san. Problem solved, and several other problems with it.
Bridging the Gap Between Development and Design
That's irrelevant to the optics of the situation, however. SOPA's efficacy at preventing any of these acts wouldn't be a factor in its proponents' use of them to advocate in favour of it.
Startups Keep it in Your Pants
>"I'm looking for any guidance I can get with how I should handle this."

Read your contract.
That's something I suspect Apple doesn't have to worry about.
I'm finding code with regular Google Search all the time.

Yes, General Google Search is missing some neat features, but overall these features are not as important as convenience of using familiar general search queries, search speed, and the size of general google search index.

BTW, do you have your own explanation of why Google Code Search was cancelled?
Thanks for the link!

Not to try to highjack the post, but for those interested in resources for computer vision see my post from a few months ago: http://colinlea.posterous.com/on-self-guided-study-of-comput...
Are you a submission bot?
>It is intended to keep authors/editors artificially locked into Apple's products and distribution system.

There is no artificial lock in. They are providing a tool to produce content for their distribution system. That's its point.

The comparison to general purpose tools isn't relevant. Consider if this tool, like iAd Producer, had no ability to export in a format outside of Apple's proprietary one. Would you still be upset?

>And also Apple is leveraging their platform dominance in an uncompetitive and unfair manner and should be admonished for it.

What platform dominance is that? The same people who complain about Apple doing anything that benefits them, seem to constantly tell us that the Kindle is the dominant e-reader and that android is the dominant mobile OS.

How is providing new features for electronic books "uncompetitive and unfair"? How is providing a tool that lets you author books that use these new features "uncompetitive and unfair"?

As for competitiveness, this is the very definition of competition. They provided something better, and also provided a tool that lets people easily create content for this better solution. Isn't your real beef that this is competitive?

As for "unfair", it seems that you're the one who is being unfair. You are taking the position that they should provide you tools for free to do what you want in any way you want. You seem to presume an obligation on their part to comply with your arbitrary view that they should give you something for nothing, without restrictions.
Since you are a hosted service, you could periodically loop through all of the Quora redirect links you've received and resolve them. This might be against Quora's TOS, though.

I believe Twitter does this with URL shortener links posted in tweets.
There are no "rights" at play here. There is only what the law allows or does not allow and since that is the very point being disputed, to say that breaching the law is not allowed because that's what the law says is completely circular.
It's true I didn't write this as a source of advice for founders so much as just a report on a surprising (to me) connection I'd discovered. But it's not useless. It should be very useful to investors, for example, because it offers a quick way to detect which startups will succeed. It even helped me understand the procedure we've evolved for YC interviews. What we do during YC interviews is essentially to start YC right then, as if we'd funded them. Now I know why that works so well.

It should also be useful for founders, as a warning sign to look for. People can change, and they can also stand outside themselves to some degree. So some founders will probably be able to read something like this and ask themselves "does this happen with us?" and if the answer is yes, to try to be less timid.
It's been shown that if you upload a file to dropbox with a hash that already exists in another userspace, the upload takes place almost immediately. This implies there is really only one copy of the file on their servers. This was maybe 6 months ago so who know what now.
Online Ad Spending to Surpass Print for First Time in 2012 [STUDY]
"The arrests were carried out by Organised & Financial Crime Agency New Zealand (OFCANZ) and police, following a mutual legal assistance request from the United States"

NZ Herald has more: http://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&obj...
Search Rankings are Dead: Long Live Search Placements
Anonymous has never had the firepower to take down those three sites simultaneously using LOIC, so I'd be interested to see what the mechanism is. I suspect it's one or more of the Sabu-types firing their botnets. If this is the case, to what extant can this action be attributed to Anonymous? I'm sure there's likely broad support for it, but if it is just the actions of one or two botherders it makes attribution a bit of a grey area.

Edit: Add mpaa.org to the mix, as well as an attempt on fbi.gov. They'd have to have several gigs worth of bandwidth available to be able to hold all 4 sites down simultaneously. With average upload speeds in the hundreds of kilobits, that's a reasonably large botnet (50k-100k, as an pulled-from-ass guestimate).
Anonymous strikes back: takes down DoJ, Universal, RIAA and MPAA sites
<i>&gt; A lot of companies even larger than Kodak have emerged from bankruptcy though.</i>

I'm curious as to which?
But with Burn Notice, they don't expect you to concentrate on just one of the scenes... instead, you look at both or all of them at once, and you get a pretty good idea about what's going on in all of them. This is possible because meaning-wise, video is usually very sparse; lots of people "watch" shows while doing other things, and still have a sense of continuity about the story the show is telling. I also find this a bit distracting, but many people I know seem to use this as the default paradigm of watching TV.

However, the thing I find interesting is other people in the comments here have mentioned that they just look at the center and take in what's going on on both sides, which is exactly the same technique, and Facebook timelines are sparse in the same way that video is. It's easy to get a sense of what your Facebook friends are doing with a quick skim, without fully concentrating on any particular post. During this skim, your attention might be drawn to a specific post, but if it's not, you've absorbed a high-level overview and moved on, without having to read each post individually.
i'm just amazed when i read about hacks like this. i can't help to think that these guys really know their shit and seem kinda "powerful."

not because they did it, but because they know how to. i wish i understood the web's infrastructure more.
I can't really stand up for Megaupload, but I'm frightened by the power wielded by labels. Perhaps it's time to start a movement of only consuming local and independent art.
A graphic designer was one of those arrested...

I have a lump in my throat, I thought down in the pacific we were safe from your batshit crazy FBI.
Mercurial Queues are different from git branches, not just "worse".

Mercurial Queues are bolted onto Mercurial and you can often see the cracks. Merging is my pet peeve which I've already mentioned. I think it's not controversial to say that it's a pain? I think that, in true Mercurial tradition, there's an extension in development for it now...

So why do we need to deal with this bolt-on and the resulting pain? Because Mercurial branches aren't good enough, or at least can't adequately support the workflow people need. Compare the amount of Mercurial users using mq to the amount of git users using quilt or equivalents.

I don't disagree with the abstract principle of operation of Mercurial Queues. I disagree with Mercurial as it is.

However, if you use git to rewrite the history of your branch as part of your development process, AFAIK there is no way to go back in time and instantly see what your branch looked like at time K in the past, because history has been rewritten.

1) It may be possible to do this with reflog. I don't know for sure because I haven't needed to do this yet. (I think the main problem is that by default reflog purges old history at some point)

2) You can simply create more branches as you go. i.e. replace qcommit by git checkout -b etc. Then push the final ones.
Hah, and I was downvoted a couple of weeks ago for pointing to the HK company registry and money laundry

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3344512
Seems like I'm not allowed to change it anymore..?
Isn't that exactly what Quora is doing?
I don't think url shorteners really hurt referrers at all. They typically use 301 or 302 redirects, which preserve the original referrer.
I am not saying "Because he had drugs as an option, he wasn't bored". I'm saying "He was constantly amped up on something, so he wasn't bored".
It's probably Finn, Kims favourite designer who works for K. since forever.
I can't resist pointing out that this is exactly what Grooveshark is currently being sued for.
>They are not in it for the eduction, they are in it for themselves.

These are not mutually exclusive. They're in it for the education, and they are in it for themselves.

You're in it for yourself too. I think that's the problem that trips people up. They want companies to act a certain way because it benefits them. But when the companies do something that benefits the company, somehow they think that's wrong.

I'd love it if my favorite gave me free food all the time. If my restaurant offered me free food if I'd put a gaudy sign on my car advertising the restaurant that's a choice I could make.

If I didn't like the sign and didn't take their offer, I wouldn't then say "well that's just wrong of them to offer me that!"

> I would be perfectly happy with Apple selling it.

I think when it comes to software, people are so used to getting things for free, that when they see something encumbered by a restriction they think that this is somehow immoral.

Its not, its just a different way of selling the software. Just like the restaurant, rather than selling me food for money, selling me food in exchange for advertising.
and yet I would still rather have a book.
Similar questions should be raised regarding all other companies boasting their engagement rates. Hit a site with Facebook widhets and comments? Do they consider that engagement? shrug
Agreed--not a good design decision whether intentional or not. This works for logotype sometimes, but your eye needs the capitalization to make the reading easier and to help you identify where you're at in the text (especially longer text).
Windows drops to No. 3 cash-cow status in Microsoft' latest quarter
I guess I missed the press release that the announced the FBI's change in sponsorship. Are they adding the the UMG logo to their uniforms and vehicles?
On sites where there's private information in the URLs + links to external sites, overriding the referrer is necessary in order to protect users' privacy / identity. See https://www.facebook.com/notes/facebook-engineering/protecti... for why we do this at Facebook (I work on that system).
It's disgusting that you chose to reappropriate that quote in this context.

If you read the indictment, it's clear that this was the purposeful monetization of pirated material. It wasn't a few users who uploaded some things. It was a criminal site, operating in bad faith, committing a multitude of crimes.

You should seriously be ashamed of yourself for comparing those famous words to seven criminals (who have strong evidence against them) who are about to get a jury trial.
As Russ points out in his earlier re2-related blog posts, these regex engines still perform non-linearly on inputs which don't involve look-around, look-behind, etc. There's plenty of room for improvement even if they want to keep these features.
This is another case of: http://xkcd.com/932/
It's just brute force. It's not like they're sneaking into the site and disabling the web server. They're just assaulting it from the front until it cracks under the pressure. In other words, they're taking down the site, but they're not gaining access to any of the source or data in the site, or gaining control over the servers.
I encourage you to read the article! I'm one pg-down click through and:

"The British Supreme Court will hear his extradition appeal on February 1st – but even if he wins, he will likely still remain a wanted man. Interpol has issued a so-called "red notice" for his arrest on behalf of Swedish authorities for questioning in "connection with a number of sexual offenses" – Qaddafi, accused of war crimes, earned only an "orange notice" – and the U.S. government has branded him a "high-tech terrorist," unleashing a massive and unprecedented investigation designed to depict Assange's journalism as a form of international espionage."

So he's more wanted than Qaddafi. If that doesn't make you think about the political motivations behind this a bit more, I'm not sure what could.

I don't know if he's a horny dude or not. Probably. But that doesn't mean his case isn't being blown far out of proportion for political cause. How many other Swedish strict-legal-definition-of-rape cases have Interpol flags out more severe than those of known repressive dictator madmen?

I bet not many.
Anonymous takes down DoJ, UMG websites—attack on Whitehouse.gov underway
I don't think the question of what should be open vs secret is a very interesting debate, because the bulk of that answer is largely agreed upon. I think the more interesting discussion is answering this problem: How can a government have the ability to keep secret those things that are necessary, in a way that disallows (or minimizes) the ability to abuse that power to keep other things secret as well?

I agree that having an explicit statement that there may exist military and diplomatic secrets that are legitimate would help convince the people (like myself) who think his positions are too extreme to be useful.
What's happening to the Megaupload databases? Are they being confiscated?

I never used the service much myself, but can you imagine the amount of people that could potentially be indicted by their download history?
Measuring User Retention with Hadoop and Hive
Given the nature of both organizations are not too tech-savvy, I wouldn't be surprised if the sites in question were running an unpatched version of Apache and were susceptible to this:

http://www.infoq.com/news/2011/08/apache-killer

But that is pure speculation. What I'm trying to say is there are far more tools than LOIC to pull of a DDOS attack.
Does this make any sense without plugging an external keyboard?
Hey - one small bug I found, when I suggest a resource, i can upvote my own suggestion.

You do allow only one upvote, though. Seems like the error is that the initial suggestion doesn't count as an upvote.

This is a nice start. Are you testing any assumptions with this first version? Also, may also want to add something that auto finds urls and auto changes them to links.
Google shares tank as Q4 sales, profit miss forecasts
>What he's talking about is if you produce a thing, no matter how you produce it, you have the right to determine what you want to do with that product.

The thing produced here is a derivative work that contains Apple created code and content.

Taking your words and changing the context produces this:

"if you produce a [some software], no matter how you produce it, [or who elses code you include with it.] you have the right to determine what [license agreement you use]."

See how that doesn't work?
If I remember correctly, the GPLv3 license prohibits creating DRM'd content. Or more insidiously, a GPLv3-licensed compiler (e.g. recent GCC) cannot be used to produce an executable that contains DRM code without being in violation of the license, despite the fact that the executable itself is not covered under the GPL.

Someone please correct me if I'm wrong. I'm not willing to wade into the sea of legalese that is the GPLv3 right now just to verify this.
We probably have extradition treaties with those countries. And if those countries signed the Berne Convention, those jurisdictions must uphold US copyrights.
Your link says the state of Virginia is claiming jurisdiction because some of the servers were there. The lesson I guess is if you're going to run a site like this, don't host it in America.

There's no indication that any laws of New Zealand were broken. The NZ cops simply cooperated in enforcing U.S. law.
If you consume the product, you've achieved the same goal as if you had legally paid for it.
A site to learn to program games in Javascript.
Why I'm So Conflicted Over Teach for America
I'm pretty sure that the Feds didn't get copies of emails from Eric Schmidt saying that they need to fix the audio/video synchronization on the Sopranos... or that they need to rate-limit DMCA takedowns so they don't interfere with growth... or that they should ensure that when they do takedowns that they don't take EVERY copy down.

It's a specious comparison, made possible only because almost nobody on HN bothered to read the indictment before they got mad.
Not to mention that your analytics code won't fire if the user opens a link by any means other than a standard left-click (e.g. middle-click, right-click -> open in new window/tab, or keyboard navigation)
Is it just me, or is he talking in a roundabout look-ma-I-invented-yet-another-term way about document databases?
You are (unconsciously) giving me far too much credit.