skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
In my mind, an underlying problem hindering any bill that purports to enforce IP rights on the internet is the judiciary. Almost be definition, laws such as SOPA/PIPA and whatever else will be evaluated by judges, therefore changing (or, rather, more precisely defining) terms within the law. The vagueness and ambiguity within SOPA and PIPA was the big problem. But until our judges (and, frankly, lawyers) understand the ramifications that poorly reasoned decisions could have on the internet as a whole, this problem will continue, likely regardless of how tightly drafted the bill is. We have a separate bar, and mostly separate courts, for many IP law issues, so a focus should be placed on educating judges and lawyers in this realm--or maybe even creating a new court system for these issues specifically.

If our elected officials don't understand these laws, there is little hope that (often) elderly judges will be able to not only understand them, but interpret them in such a way that they effect their narrow purpose.
The Life of an Information Broker
Knowing how to research and look for things over the Internet or anywhere else for that matter makes you a researcher but not an official information broker. Sadly, due to lack of organizing body to set some requirements on how to become one and set specific certification or licensing schemes, there are now a lot of individuals claiming they are brokers for any information needed as long as they have computers and the online data for their perusal.
Heh. Early on in my software education, I asked a friend of mine about the difference between real time systems and normal. He said, "In real time systems, if something goes wrong, the Space Shuttle blows up." Seems like an apt metaphor.
What's really striking about this article is that, for all the missteps he acknowledges he made, he doesn't address the biggest fundamental issue - the bill was garbage.

It's also telling that he wants meetings with the tech industry now instead of, say, before they drafted and started pushing awful legislation. What a farce.
Clickable: http://pastebin.com/ATdDUStd
Important indeed.

Something I'm constantly reminded of is the haste Congress showed in trying to reach a final vote. I sat through 11 and 4 hour SOPA committee sessions (video), and if it hadn't been for strong opponents like Congresswoman Lofgren and Congressman Issa, who literally forced a count for each amendment vote made as a way to help put the brakes on, SOPA probably would have advanced another step.

I'm thankful for the time they helped buy, that ultimately gave opponents the chance to produce the response that we did. SOPA may not be truly "dead", but it's reassuring to know that our voice can have an impact.
That is a flawed reasoning. Campaign donations and revolving doors are the plague of democracy. Politicians are here to work for us and to listen to us - they are supposed to be our servants, with all due dignity and respect.

Today's politics is completely driven by interest groups, and this must end. This is not 1800's. We have information technology at our disposal and we can make the politics transparent, the democracy direct, and the system work for us. And so will we.
Don't underestimate how much people prefer to work with what they know. There's been plenty of times when I've gone with Apache on a server just because nginx's benefits aren't going to make a huge difference and I've been using Apache long enough to be able to configure it in my sleep.
Imputability? Close to 0
In practical terms how would you go about go about educating enough people to make a change? I ask this because while you're statements may be logical and internally consistent it bypasses the entire practical side of this whole debate. As soon as you enter the reality of the political arena the OP's points become valid. It's a negotiation.
Not to mention the rather dubious claim that puts millions of jobs at risk. If piracy were going to eliminate any jobs, then they'd already be gone, as piracy is easily within reach for nearly everybody that would otherwise be buying movies.

That is to say, if you can afford $30 Blu-ray movies and a player, or going out for a $50 trip to the theatre, you surely have a high speed internet connection.
The voice of concerned Internet users, you mean, not just Americans.
What are you looking for in life? You can pick the one with the most money. Or the one with the most risk but biggest reward. Or you can pick the one where you will learn the most. Write down where you want to be 10 years from now and go for the one you think will get you there.
That absolutely works to float things under media scrutiny, especially in cases like this where the media is all but complicit in the passage of the law.

I think they are going to find it much harder to sneak things past "the Internet", though.

They will eventually work out how to do it, given enough time, but I do not think "business as usual" will actually cut it. We have the many eyes that make bugs shallow.
I know what vundle is.

Pretty sure we can't be looking at the same repo, because as far as I can tell, these are git submodules https://img.skitch.com/20120120-jx8g6cpj8amdagh6dtfbyjtjbp.j... (screenshot)

Re: Keeping up to date

git submodule foreach git pull origin master --recurse-submodules
Not really. This product is aimed at large enterprises. The more or less expected behavior is:

- you call them, fill in a form, or meet them at an expo.

- their sales team contacts you to discuss whether you can
'help each other'/'find a win-win scenario'.

I have heard that second step described as "they figure out how much they can charge you for their product"

In some sense, this is the epitome of "do not price your stuff at what it costs, price it at what it is worth".
That's a good point. I suppose one way is to decide on the equity %, as opposed to the share e.g. first 5 employees get 2% each, next 10 get 1% each.
What's Killing Klout? What About Other Reputation Systems?
Check out the OPEN act. Ars links to their writeup in the article: http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2011/12/censorship-f...

It moves the focus on handling these things away from the DoJ and to the ITC.
Walks And Walking – Hertfordshire Walks Hertford Heath Walking Route
You've said this several times, but it's not true. Google hasn't changed their policy; and they still ban some users for violating it.
Note to companies: never send an email with the phrase "our gentleman's agreement" in it.
Great stuff. One of the best intro Rails TDD programs around.
Clay Shirky: Why SOPA is a bad idea
Hey Diego -- I checked out your article because I sympathize with your plight. This is totally off topic and unsolicited, but I thought I would give you my thoughts in the hope that it helps. I think my feedback might help, because I suspect that you're like me (you fail where I also fail).

It's a good piece, but I suspect that you didn't get upvotes not because the article isn't "sexy", but because it doesn't really conform with the format of content of the modern web.

Issues: can't tell what the article is about from the title, can't tell how i will benefit from reading your article from the title, first couple paragraphs don't grab me, "wall of text" feeling when you open the article, can't tell if I should give you the benefit on your thoughts because no biographical info or indication that you're important, and it's too long.
Meanwhile, Reuters investigation yields fresh evidence of bottomless corruption at the very highest level of the DOJ.

http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/01/20/us-usa-holder-mort...
I don't care how cars work, I trust the mechanic to fix the problem.

I don't care how the financial markets work - I trust my 401k to pay for my retirement.

Life is far too short for me to want to know about things that don't interest me. One of the points of an advanced society is that we can pay people to do things for us.

People shouldn't have to second guess every professional service they use. Maybe it's time to add legal guarantees to the cloud?
Well, I don't know how embarrassing that is, and that's pretty embarrassing already. I can say that everything I've done for school is probably a good candidate, and 1 out of 3 practices using CodingBat is as well.

I love learning!
BT's archive: Pictures from the vault
Via lip service, yes, but the actual legislation, no. Section 102 applied to sites not under US jurisdiction, and gave the Attorney General the right to effectively censor foreign sites. Section 103 applied to all sites and gave copyright holders the ability to take action against any website.
You know what Ron Paul would say about this... It's not campaign finance reform that's needed, its decreasing the power of the gov't to have so much power. That's the root cause, not the money.
This week a very powerful interest group killed SOPA and PIPA and HN cheered.

"Special interest groups" seem to always be defined as "any interest other than my own."

Politicians like the term because some people hear it and think "bankers" while other people hear it and think "gays and tree huggers."
This brings to mind this quote by Viktor Frankl:

"Again and again I therefore admonish my students in Europe and America: Don't aim at success -- the more you aim at it and make it a target, the more you are going to miss it. For success, like happiness, cannot be pursued; it must ensue, and it only does so as the unintended side effect of one's personal dedication to a cause greater than oneself or as the by-product of one's surrender to a person other than oneself. Happiness must happen, and the same holds for success: you have to let it happen by not caring about it. I want you to listen to what your conscience commands you to do and go on to carry it out to the best of your knowledge. Then you will live to see that in the long-run -- in the long-run, I say! -- success will follow you precisely because you had forgotten to think about it."
Looks like a bunch of NetBSD code was used in Sony PSP. Fun!
An Interview With A Google Search Quality Rater
This Is How You Disrupt Education, Not iBooks Author » Borasky Research Journal
Hear hear! The next step is NOT "craft an alternative", but rather define the problem. After that, let's see the step of demonstrating harm from the newly-defined problem.
Next time, please submit a link directly to the TED talk.

http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/en/defend_our_freedom_to_share...

The short blurb in that blog post violates the same principle that governs why you can't both submit a link and comment on it at the same time. Basically, the reason HN doesn't permit text and a link is so the submitter doesn't get to have his commentary privileged at the top, instead of being subjected to up voting and down voting by the community.

From the HN Guidelines: "Please submit the original source. If a blog post reports on something they found on another site, submit the latter."

If that is your blog post, submit your link like so:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3490994

... and then add your comment to the thread.
Why OnLive’s Windows-on-iPad App is Revolutionary | PandoDaily
Apple announces plans for Statue of Liberty Apple Store
Yes, and excellent. Bravo.
"Step 1 - Learn enough to get a clue." There is so much information available online today about anything you need to know. It's seriously mind boggling to me that people can't seem to figure out how to do things.

"I can't figure out how to sync my calendar with outlook" >> hmm, I don't know, let me google that for you: http://bit.ly/y3Zp0E

"How do I make this ad 'print ready'?" >> Ditto http://bit.ly/ABlo1I

"How do I remove the meat from a drumstick?" >> Ditto http://bit.ly/ynAvAb

"How do I build a realtime web app?" >> Ditto!!! http://bit.ly/xgZHix

I think the problem here is that many people have been trained by years of formal education to approach problems from a perspective that if you need to learn something, a formal process is required to gain that knowledge. What sets people who are "resourceful" apart from those who are not, then, boils down to a fundamental difference in the way in which they approach problems. Instead of assuming that they cannot do something until proven otherwise, resourceful people assume they can do something until proven otherwise.
"GCreep: Google Engineer Stalked Teens, Spied on Chats (Updated)"
http://gawker.com/5637234/

Not wholly sure what the outcome of the above was, but you could also fear google's employees if you were so inclined. Or anyone that had undue/inappropriate access to/sway with google's employees. They are only many thousands of humans after all.
What, like the 20-year old telnetd vulnerability was "shallow"? Do not underestimate the opponent. Embedding nasties in seemingly-innocent bits of legislation is what politicians are good at. This was the "brute force" attempt.
Awesome, congrats Michael!
A very good, 14 minute, talk about what it was really about:

http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/en/defend_our_freedom_to_share...
alias emacs=vim

Recursion++;
I have "jj" mapped to esc, caps-lock remapped to Ctrl.

jj only an issue if you are tying things like jj.Reddick or jj abrams :)
Not sure why you have the veiled threat in there, but we're not exactly hurting for talent right now and the staff we do have are more than happy with the arrangement.
I probably am misunderstanding you (please clarify), because what I hear you saying is: "in the political arena there will always be corrupt politicians, and there will always be large media companies paying them to re-introduce SOPA."

Yes, but it's easy enough to educate people about what's going on. Young people inherently understand the things I'd try to teach them -- but don't know what to do about it. Older people know what to do -- but don't care or pay attention to these issues. Networking with people can be rewarding and fun!
Do Great Things
I'm really excited about this new edition, which is not just a cosmetic upgrade. Today marks the release of the first five chapters, as experience shows that getting early feedback is very useful. (Hacker News readers have proven to be particularly helpful, so thanks!) The other chapters are in good shape, and I expect to be able to release them at a good clip over the next few weeks. Chapters 6 and 7, due out next week, are particularly fun, putting the new 'has_secure_password' method to good use. There's plenty of other good stuff, including a full update of the RSpec coding style, so there's lots to look forward to in the coming weeks.
Last I checked this was in line with the NetBSD license:

* Redistribution and use in source and binary forms, with or without
* modification, are permitted provided that the following conditions
* are met:
* 1. Redistributions of source code must retain the above copyright
* notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer.
* 2. Redistributions in binary form must reproduce the above copyright
* notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer in the
* documentation and/or other materials provided with the distribution.
Crowd-sourced "Star Wars Uncut" released & streaming
Yep, only Google's search results page gets to be top-heavy with ads.
Book Review : Defense against the Black Arts | The Hacker News (THN)
The controversial Razer Blade at CES 2012
Everyone with half a brain know that those jobs numbers are pulled out of thin air. Only problem is that there are a lot of people out there with less than half a brain.
Not this.

The truth is, there is a small group (MPAA/RIAA members) that can profit immensely from an act that is detrimental to the rest of society, and they pursue it.

It's about as "evil" as one basketball team can consider their opponent "evil"; the title is useless.

But just like on the basketball court, you have to do your best to defeat the other team, because they are doing their best to defeat you. And unlike the basketball court, they have so far had the upper hand every single time (e.g. DMCA, Mickey Mouse Protection Act a.k.a Sonny Bono Copyright Extension Act, government passes NBC commercials as official position, etc).

SOPA/PIPA is probably the first time they have had a real setback. I think they'll still win, unfortunately -- the overton window keeps shifting.
Ask: Beta testers needed for www.gyanfinder.com
GyanFinder (Ghee-an-finder), is developing a social training network to help trainers and trainees to collaborate and share Knowledge.

We are currently in beta testing phase. Could you please help us beta test this website and send your feedback to info@gyanfinder.com.

URL : www.gyanfinder.com
Minimum Viable Product vs. Minimal Compliance
Congrats, Michael!
Actually, it's interesting to do the math a different way. Based on Senator Reid's statement earlier today, Congress believes that

> Counterfeiting and piracy cost the American economy billions of dollars and thousands of jobs each year, with the movie industry alone supporting over 2.2 million jobs

Doing that math, for every 1000 jobs lost, the MPAA looses 0.045% of it's workers. So "thousands" could mean as much as what… 5,000 – (2.25%) of their workforce?

How are we wasting Congress's time!?
Cool, I didn't know about the browser sizing tool,

http://browsersize.googlelabs.com/
I hadn't thought of it this way before, but it sure smacks of Lycos/Yahoo/Netscape portalization of Google to me.
Really looking forward to it! I enjoyed the first edition screencasts and learned quite a bit.
Creating a $300/month Online Business in 2 Days
Whenever I hear "both sides...", I know a snow-job has begun.

There really aren't two symmetric "sides". Seriously.

There is one faction attempting to impose a draconian, repressive intellectual property regime at the expense of Internet functionality, free speech or whatever else.

And there are all the people who oppose this for whatever reason, whether to save the Internet, save free speech, prevent a repressive regime or even to preserve piracy. These are "a side". The mouth-pieces of the Hollywood rackets want to attribute some position to SOPA/PIPA opponents but you really can't. All you can say that they are opponent for one of the many good reasons for opposing it.

So just stop.
Let's closely monitor YouTube's rankings in that case.
This is ludicrous. How anyone can call MegaUpload a legit site is beyond me. Everyone knows MegaUpload has been primarily used for storing and sharing pirated works and while the site can be used for legitimate purposes, by and large it wasn't. I do feel for the people who honestly did have legit stuff stored there but I think TorrentFreak's attempt to spin this story like a legit site got shut down for no reason is laughable.

So every major city has one of those "massage parlors" that are really just fronts for getting a happy ending. I'd liken this story to a hypothetical "Massage Parlor/rub and tug shop" getting shut down and then having a major local newspaper like the Chicago Tribune run a piece on how we should be outraged that a legit massage place got shut down because of a few bad employees and customers.

Give me a break, everyone knew what MegaUpload was doing and while I don't doubt the possibility that some people didn't know and really were using it legitimately, overall stories like this only give the pro-SOPA people more ammunition to try to make our side look like a bunch of entitled, unethical, lawbreakers. Or, as they like to say, "pirates" except when they say it it implies something totally different than what some of us see it as.

Only the most pedantic of the pedantic could not pick this story enough to try to make a case for defending MegaUpload. It's not like MU were hiding what they were doing very well. They only had plausible deniability with their cute disclaimer in the FAQ and the fact that it could be used legitimately but largely wasn't. There's no shortage of affordable, popular "file locker"/sharing sites that are legit out there.

When you try to defend MegaUpload and say "this is what happens when laws like SOPA take effect" what people outside this community actually hear is:

"look how SOPA can stop those law breaking pirates" and it actually makes us look bad.

Instead, the message shouldn't be supporting MegaUpload but actually beating the opposition at their own game by framing it as "look, the Feds can shut down pirate sites just fine as it is so why do we need SOPA-like laws?" then go into the dirty details of how SOPA is bad. Definitions and opinions on piracy, copyright, sharing, etc. are irrelevant in this case. The fact is, it's illegal right now and so it got shut down.
I try hard to stretch my imagination and see things from other's viewpoints. To me it seems the majority of people view piracy about "someone obtained something that wasn't theirs." We tend to look at it as "I still have what is mine."

I guess if we look a bit deeper you could stretch the issue to one's worldview. Are you more concerned with your belongings or what others posses. Is there a larger inclination to worry about another's success over your own? Seemingly they're threatened by individuals possessing their products. I'd like to believe their fight is against commercial pirates but they've shown too many times that they see individual "pirates" as a threat to their industry. Public support might weigh in on their side if they weren't so eager to make average joe a poster boy for their legal matters.
Yes, it is following the letter of the law, but the NetBSD people are also free to complain about it.

OpenBSD does the same: they list a bunch of vendors at [1] but they note on [2]:

> In the 10 years since the inception of the OpenSSH project, these companies have contributed not even a dime of thanks in support of the OpenSSH project (despite numerous requests).

1: http://www.openssh.com/users.html
2: http://www.openssh.com/
I don't mean to be crabby, but the infographic explicitly mentions that some of the jobs are from the service industry. If you look at the infographic in context[1], it lists the source[2]. Also, while I generally agree with your point about this meriting a very detailed and thorough analysis, I do not believe that it was "intentionally" misleading any more than my disagreement with you indicates that you are also being intentionally misleading. IMO, that comment (along with your guess about what is and is not "quality") is not helping in your goal of making this a constructive conversation.

[1] http://maddox.xmission.com/
[2] http://www.bls.gov/oco/cg/cgs038.htm
Yes, very true. I apologize.
It's a little unclear initially from the graphic design, but as I read it that section of the spreadsheet that is called out and enlarged relates to the section of text that follows the overall job count. That section reads:

Some of those "motion picture" jobs include food prep workers, concession stand jobs and janitors. In fact, 25% of all "motion picture" jobs are comprised of fast food workers, ushers and other service occupations.

If you look behind the callout, you'll see that the background spreadsheet image represents a partial view into the total count and breakdown.

Again, I had to do a double-take, myself, to see this. So I'm not saying the infographic couldn't stand some tweaking.

Two comments I'll make.

1) I take the point of the infographic, but I don't mean in my own observation to discount nor demean those particular jobs.

2) It would be nice to have some links to information backing this up. However, I see a web site address clearly provided at the bottom. Looking there, while it's hardly the most structured web site design, if you look for the portion of the page that begins "Update (01-20-12)", you'll find at least some linkage.
There's law and then there's social pressure and shaming. Not everything has to be legislated or written down in a contract.