skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
>"the smartest people in the world are working hard to come up with ways to get you to click on ads.”

I always chuckle at thoughts like this. If we want to rank on a scale of intellect it isn't clear that simply being a Google/Facebook/<insert tech company here> employee puts you in the 'smartest in the world' bucket.

There are PLENTY of people that aren't software engineers that are likely much smarter than anyone at any of these companies, unless we are to say that you can't be smart unless you are a software engineer, which seems silly.

It is in the same bucket with the clearly false 'we only hire the smartest people in the world' meme, also trumpeted by a lot of tech companies.
I find that if I work late (~11pm or so) I can't fall asleep for a few hours. Programming gets my mind wound up and wired in a way nothing else does, and I need some real relaxation time before I can sleep.

Unfortunately I find myself working that late all the time, which means I don't get to sleep until 1. Hoping to change that cycle soon, though.
Looks like hellofax couldn't handle the surge in traffic -- site is now down for me.

Whenever I see a site down like this due to a surge in traffic for a "free" opportunity, I always question whether it is in the site's best interest. For instance, if I was a hellofax customer attempting to send a fax right now, I would be unhappy -- I pay to be able to send / receive faxes, and an (perhaps from the customers perspective) "unnecessary event" has prevented me from doing that.

Brings up another question -- whenever companies do these types of "promotions" / "events", should they be hosted on a separate system to minimize impact on existing customers / site activity? I believe this year, Sparkfun use a separate system for free day to ensure the surge in traffic did not impact the main site (and paying customers).

(Edited to add further discussion)
SOPA/PIPA: More than 250k tweets / hr
Way to go making a comparison that makes no sense at all.

A lumberjack can't digitally mass produce cutting down trees. They have to actually be present at each tree.
That one-liner is awesome! But it also has some evil type conversions in the form of <array> + <array> = <string> hehe
"They are just hosting their own now."

^^ There's your game changer.
I started looking at Backbone.js over the last few days.

I started with reading the documentation[1]. It is very well documented and contains a wealth of information.

Then I took a look at the Todo example[2] referenced in the documentation. It is also very well documented and puts together all the basics of the documentation into one clean example.

At this point, I started branching out into other tutorials. Everything I read basically reiterated the documentation and example above. This was good in terms of drilling the ideas into my head more solidly, but I could have stopped after the Todo example.

There was one notable tutorial though that was very different. Backbone provides a framework, but does not specify a structured way to store or load files. I believe this is on purpose. Backbone concentrates on the framework and gets out of your way. This leaves some head scratching though. This tutorial[3] combines Backbone.js with Require.js and provides an intriguing solution.

[1] http://documentcloud.github.com/backbone/
[2] http://documentcloud.github.com/backbone/docs/todos.html
[3] http://backbonetutorials.com/organizing-backbone-using-modul...
It's so rare to find someone who thinks like me on this. There is a lot of bullying via downvotes when it comes to this. It seems you can't disagree. It becomes a big "let's pat each other on the back because we're all right" party.

But you're right. It seems like a lot of this bragging about piracy is a thinly veiled excuse and a thinly veiled justification of what they're doing. This a new phenomenon that I think people my age (20's) and younger are part of where we feel entitled to just get whatever via free downloads. It's so weird that a community all about business would have such an anti business view on this. It's one thing to be against SOPA-like laws and the growing power of copyright but why are we for totally abolishing it? It makes more sense to simply try to stop the overreach of power and scale back copyright.

Everyone is both a creator and a consumer. Those are two competing interests and business is all about competing interests and it makes the market go round. Swinging the power away from creators and giving it all to consumers is just as bad as doing the opposite. We should be fighting for the balance of rights and not trying to give it to any one group. Just because there are more of us than of them (in a sense) doesn't mean it's right. It's one thing to want to distribute income from the few to the many, to fight for the rights of minorities, etc. but this whole getting rid of copyright thing is strange. There's a part of me that sees it as a childish attempt to cry to get whatever you want for free.
Art – the kind you find in the museum – is entirely enabled by the concept of the "patron". Throughout most of history, patrons have been aristocrats and other wealthy peoples. Without wealthy people to support artists to make art, there will be no art.

At the moment we have many people making something equivalent to "folk art" and getting paid to do so. Folk art does not necessarily need support from a patron since it is typically fairly easy to make (i.e. it can be done in one's spare time). People will continue making folk art after they can no longer be ensured payment for their work, though to a lesser extent.
Remember that the throughput is per item, not per query. For instance we have an indexed query that returns ~1500 rows each time. Just doing that query a couple of times per second would create that kind of throughput requirement.
People don't read. That's the crux of the issue. My work entails dealing with people every day. 99.9% of the errors that we have to correct are directly due to people not following instructions if they did read them, or more often not reading the instructions at all.
Yep.

I caught a BBC Newshour segment on it this morning, but it didn't cover the issue in-depth at all. Alexis Ohanian and an MPAA spokeswoman got equal coverage, with no mention of the fact the MPAA were the ones who bought the bill in the first place. I can't imagine what Fox will be saying.

Anyways, when I talked to family around the holidays, none of them had heard a thing about these bills. I think until today, the mainstream coverage consisted of a single 30-second CNN segment. Any coverage is better than what we had before (practically nothing). Hopefully, now it's being talked about by the media, some people will find better info online afterwards.
That isn't how the frontpage works, and if it did, we would rarely have news turnover.
That sounds like it's going to cut into my American Idol voting time.
Fastest Fourier in the West
He also seems to be trying to compare against past platforms to show that PCs are peaking and will soon collapse.

Of course ignores what you point out - that the PC market is saturated (everyone has a computer), unlike in the 1980s where there was tons of room for growth from new adopters.
Other than the rap music blogs, right?
Editorials are, as a rule, unsigned. That's what makes them editorials as opposed to op-eds or columns. They represent, ostensibly, the opinion of the newspaper itself rather than any individual staffer. The NY Times does the same thing.

(The WSJ could avoid a lot of confusion if it labeled its editorials "Editorial." Instead it labels them "Review & Outlook," a term only regular readers of the opinion section will be familiar with.)
Zombo.com Blackout
Good writeup Jason. I also clicked on the rejection therapy post by accident... ha, that was hilarious.
Joseph here, cofounder of HelloFax. The anti-sopa campaign produced a big surge in traffic. We'll working on resolving things now.
Stanford's Online Education Initative to be called "Coursera"?
If you seriously think I don't know how a work for hire business plan could work, then I have to stand by my assertion that you are in fact a troll.

Similarly, dhimes claiming to not know how a work for hire business plan for a song writer could work strains credibility. Hence my snark.

If you honestly believe the answer is not trivial, then feel free to respond to fabjan above.

I have responded briefly to your Valve Software point here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3481338
You missed one of my favorite porn sites.

http://xnxx.com
OS X is actually my primary operating system. There is some software I still need Windows for though, like Photoshop and Quickbooks Enterprise. I guess I could upgrade that software, but I am not paying thousands for new features I won't use. I had to reactivate because Bootcamp is a pain in the ass, so I removed the partition, installed VirtualBox, and installed on that. It activated fine, and has deactivated itself twice now, necessitating phone calls each time. I have probably been through this process 20 times now, with family computers, Windows XP reinstalls, and the like.
Enough Defense: Is It Time for an IT Security Offensive?
If anything, from my experience with Riak, Basho guys should be having an emergency meeting.

Not mentioned here - DynamoDB also has built in monitoring and management.
If you're activating MS products by entering "100-digit" activation keys into your telephone, you're already doing something wrong...

Or are a complete edge/outliner case.
Would Facebook and Twitter be expected to put G+ buttons on their respective sites against SOPA/PIPA? Oh, wait...
Thanks! Let me know if there is anything you think I missed or got wrong!
http://www.refblog.com/ blacked out - though not relevant to most HN'ers.
Unalienable rights can not be created or destroyed; the law only attempts to offer legal protection for them.

Furthermore, if an artist wants to sell IP ownership of his work then there's no reason he shouldn't be free to do so.

Your main point, however, is a good one. Disruptive distribution channels should be able to fix this by allowing artists to make good money without selling out to big media companies.
I wouldn't put an astroturfing campaign past the MPAA and RIAA. How many of those are newly registered or inactive accounts?
The popular e-reader formats are all HTML subsets. I really don't think the formats actually could render the equations faithfully, without just making images out of them, which means they are either going to be paginated awkwardly and generally be hard to read.

If you had a large format reader that could do PDF properly, that could handle it though.
This is getting silly.

I am telling you that even with the music you like whatever that is there is plenty of great music that you never have heard of and never will. That's how it is in all genres of music.
This is a key first step. Now that it has some real attention we have to work to get the right information out there. At the very least people are going to be curious, hopefully they'll be turning to nerds everywhere for an explanation.
Yes, I know that you can identify differences between abolition of copyright and a ban on all monetary compensation for lumberjacks.

What you cannot do, however, is find a difference that distinguishes them in a way that defends your argument that we shouldn't worry about a world where X is only produced by charity, since some people do X for free.

If you don't care that art would only be produced for free, neither should you care if lumberjacking only happened by charity. If you're not ready to go that far, you might not want to lean so heavily on the argument that "(some) artists create for free".
SEO for Assholes
I think that misses the point. The author wants MS to change and is attempting to get their attention via this post. Whether or not the author will actually pirate the software is moot.
Good work, Tess & Drew (and friends)!

I notice that this is choosing the correct senators for my location, but where it is supposed to be naming my location it says "0"
Great idea to write about/give a strategy for this, I've never seen this addressed before. What's unique about these sites is how rarely they actually do anything - they tend to be viral jokes, but they don't function towards any sort of business goal besides a nice add to the design portfolio. Part of that is cause that's simply required to get these to go viral - any sort of business mention causes it to crash and burn. But minimalism and a rough themeatic connection can serve to help, but we really haven't seen it consistently done other than for the purposes of a very cool thing to add to the resume, which can indirectly make a few people some coin.
Daily motivation: 50 Lessons I Wish I Had Learned Earlier
Why can't I just enter my product key and download an updated ISO with slipstreamed service packs?

This is especially odd, since you can do exactly that with a one-year TechNet subscription. https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/subscriptions/buy/hh4429... So it's not like they don't have the infrastructure ready.
They should have linked to gopher...

http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc1436.txt

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gopher_%28protocol%29
WebRTC (p2p) now available in the Chrome dev channel
The non-rival argument is popular, but not very robust. There is an economic harm by an unauthorized third party increasing the supply and diluting the value to the creator.

Another rough equivalent to criminally using without depleting physical goods is someone who breaks into your house to sleep in your bed while you are on vacation. Even if they are clean, and the bed remains the same afterwards for all reasonable inspection, they have trespassed on your property and guilty of a crime.
I am surprised you would think of it as 'stealing' users. More likely you are trying to avoid too many of a certain type of user that is only on HN because reddit is down.
Dear Tech Community, We Have A Communication Problem
There is compelling evidence that Prussia's explosive progress in the 19th century was due to the lack of copyrights. At the same time, England's progress was smothered under strong copyrights. The historian Eckhard Höffner has done a lot of research in this area. Here's a taste:

http://www.spiegel.de/international/zeitgeist/0,1518,710976,...
I wouldn't recommend you try this at your startup. Some day, a potential investor or partner is going to audit your licenses and it'll be pretty embarrassing if you're way out of compliance.
Kahneman and his research is fascinating. Vanity Fair had an short article that serves as a goodish introduction to him that is worth a quick read. (http://www.vanityfair.com/culture/features/2011/12/michael-l...)
Says the guy that doesn't have any family members that persistently fubar their systems, necessitating enough reinstalls to trip the activation limit.
My one issue with this mod (and most amazon mods for node) is that they don't include S3 support AND SimpleDb support.
The node app I'm writing needs S3 and SimpleDB and thats it. But the only library that has that doesn't work with my system. Fortunately i found two separate mods that do what I need really well.
Interesting, thanks for the perspective - he definitely made it sound like a sweatshop, and that's not the sort of environment normally associated with this kind of innovation.
Though if you believe their parliamentary testimony, James apparently had no knowledge even though he authorized million-pound payoffs to victims.
On a related note, if you just want something tiny to interact with s3, check out Knox (https://github.com/LearnBoost/knox). I used it on a recent project and it was very easy with a clean API.
...and if that content prompts insightful discussion that is appropriate for HN, what exactly is the problem?

It sounds like you're more concerned with censoring WSJ than maintaning the quality of HN.
Just think how you'll feel if the SOPA or PIPA bills pass and there is no "Show my website anyway" button... 'Cause you can say that all you want, but if one of these bills pass and if the idiots deem it necessary, your content will get "darkened" regardless of how much money you paid to host it somewhere (maybe not the same way flickr is doing it, but still... to the same point).

I think everyones photos shouldn't be exempt, including the whitehouse photos! This is just a small taste of what is possible.
My biggest complaint is that it's not easy to automate blacking out every photo of every SOPA supporter.

It is, but it involves YQL, API keys and more time than I want to dedicate.
[...]

"You're trusting..."

[...]

I agree with that line, correction added. :-)
Fun fact: fascism wasn't the first name Mussolini wanted for the Italian political movement of the 1920s-40s. Corporatism was the original name.
Rather than block those submissions why not automatically annotate/decorate them in such a way that users on the site know that the site's owners support SOPA/PIPA/Damaging the Internet
Genius marketing. I love this - I think faxing is actually a better approach than calling,too. I'll never use FaxZero again.
Agreed. I find it visually frustrating to read two columns simultaneously (going back/forth from left/right sides of the timeline). It's so cluttered I don't ever find myself visiting my own profile anymore.

About the only thing I use FB now for is the feed, but then Twitter serves the same function w/ better control over who I want to follow.
I think this article misses the point. The problem with our University system right now is they have a monopoly. A correct market price can only be set if competition is allowed and that only happens when everyone is allowed to compete. That's the not the case right now.

The bar to gain accreditation is so high that only large universities and (relatively) dishonest private corporations can get accredited. This puts an artificially high barrier to entry for competition.

If we made one simple change and accredited testing facilities instead of Universities the cost of education would plummet. What I mean by this is we as a society say...

"This is what a [Insert Major Here] should know. We don't care how you get the knowledge. At University, Online, Divine Intervention, whatever. Anything is acceptable as long as you can prove you have the knowledge at an accredited testing facility."

So the tests would be the same because they would be the tests students take at University now and testing facilities would have to prove they can administer those tests properly. But you could get the knowledge wherever you choose. So if you can pass the tests for a BS in Mathematics by watching Khan Academy videos that's fine.

I can't even imagine how fast the cost of an education would fall if that happened.
Refactoring Methods with Recursive Combinators
Ok I think I understand now, so I can't link to copyrighted material in any way or my site will be pulled, but I can hack into peoples mobile phones right?
I agree. I can't see how anyone would imagine that Facebook aren't working hard at their job, which is, in fact, delivering ads and making people click on them. Or that all that investment is spent paying smart people to have fun and sow the seeds of happiness worldwide, and every once in a while pay a little attention to the business model as an afterthought.

I would really, really appreciate it if someone could explain to me why we ever applied the term "conspiracy theory" to the common-sense assumption that a for-profit company's business decisions are motivated by (gasp, shock) profit.
OK, but a new media company wouldn't face any hurdles that established ones don't. It's not like, say, the market of PC operating systems or social networks where you need network effects. What you describe is simply a limited pool of customers.
Terribleness is in the eye of the beholder. I would posit that 4chan's post quality is actually extremely high. People there don't complain afaik.

If you were to transfer the posts to the hep-th mailing list or something, it'd be very bad content, and vice-versa. As it stands, I imagine when people go to 4chan they tend to get exactly what they want.

I would also guess that the average 'smartness' level is a lot higher than you might think.
Laws are for poors, chap.
> because the hen made the fucking bread, and the cow didn't

Yes, we could say that work justifies payment (very simply and roughly). But that is not in dispute. It is that it does not justify payment by a particular means -- one that restricts the freedom (to copy etc.) of others. And -- you will forgive me if I am mistaken -- I am afraid inclusion of the word 'fucking' does not quite cover that.

Does payment depend, necessarily, on restriction of copying? No, it does not. It is possible to be paid in other ways -- that do not impose on other freedoms. Then in the most general sense, that sounds like what we ought to be doing (i.e. that is moral).

Again, in so far as it turns out most practical to pay by copyright, that is how far it is justified. Not in some other ethical way.
While you are correct about him being a Representative, I don't see anyone saying he did PIPA. He is, however, the one who came out with SOPA, being the House Judiciary Committee Chairman.

Anyhow, I tried to bump you out of grey. It is important to have our facts straight.
Horrible stance.
Entrepreneur-perspective explanation of why SOPA is so bad
The app gold rush may be over, but now it's the golden age
Would you replace copyright with "terms of use" or something in a contract with the performer?

I see the value of copyright (or other intellectual property protection, such as the "terms of use" I mentioned above) in this case, for two reasons.

First, the value for the creative doesn't scale. Suppose a conductor commissioned some music to be written for six summer evening performances. How should the music writer value the work to be written? The negotiations would probably consider how much revenue the performances will generate, and result in a (presumably) fair compensation for the writer.

But suppose the conductor, after the piece has been written, uses the it for eight performances? Or switches to a much larger venue that generates much more revenue? If you don't allow for a way for the writer to be fairly compensated you run the risk of not being able to attract good writers to the field. We could argue that geniuses and top talent would still be there, but it would be difficult for merely talented to make a living (or for the unknown to start out).

The second reason I see is to protect the reputation of the writer. John Williams is a brilliant composer who has written some of the best and most-recognizable movie themes. He wrote, for instance, the theme for the movie "Jaws."

Suppose someone took his music and used it as a soundtrack for a movie that he found very distasteful (a porno, or a movie advocating the rise of the Aryan Nation, for example). He would then be associated with these other ideas, even against his will. You could argue that his ability to use music to conjure emotions could be used to rally people for causes with which he vehemently disagrees. Copyright can help protect against that (but can't completely stop it, of course).
Huh, seriously? I purchased a laptop with a genuine Windows 7 version because of this particular issue. I'll spend weeks to find a relatively good Windows copy.

The average seeded copy of Windows on the pirate bay or the likes is crappy. Cracks sometimes doesn't work. Sometimes the copy comes with a load of crappy software. Sometimes the cracker changes the Windows theme (not sure why he is doing so). And sometimes everything goes smooth until some day I get a problem because my version is not genuine.

I don't install my OS on a daily basis. My average Windows OS install keep up with me for 3-5 years. I wouldn't be bothered to spend some time activating the software. So far, the activations for my MS products was easy, fast and simple.
This seems fair, but I'd bet Eternal September was on the minds of the people who decided this.