skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It seems to be a common idea that "the web" is opening the door of companies encouraging people to take positions, but this is simply not true. The MPAA and RIAA have been propagandizing people directly for decades, and have even made inroads into school curricula. What has changed is that "the web" is no longer pretending they can just float by, unsullied. It's not even as if "the web" particularly has a bigger pulpit than "the movie and music industry". It's just never been systematically used like this.

There is nothing happening today that SOPA advocates haven't been doing for decades.
And... XKCD
AT&T announces new data plans for smartphones and tablets
I think the whole point is they hope to generate future revenue from potential clients from this. It might be somewhat wrong, but at the end of the day they're providing a great free service that will do a lot of good. I think it's smart and fine.
and gambling sites..... dont forget them.
Ask HN: What Mailing lists, Google Groups, IRC Channels etc. do you frequent?
AT&T retools data plans: 300MB for $20, 3GB for $30, 5GB with tethering for $50
AT&T Launches New Data Plans
Sal Khan explains SOPA/PIPA
Personally, I think this is exactly what is needed. My girlfriend and I are home from work today because of a snow storm, and she wanted to check out thechive.com, but they are down protesting SOPA. I was explaining to her what SOPA is, and why I think it is a bad idea. She didn't want to read pages of material or call someone since we don't live in the States. I could have just pointed her to the 10 minute video and let her see for herself.
Sealand? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principality_of_Sealand (Be sure to research it before SOPA passes)
And the amazing thing is that they managed to do it again for Android. Except this time Apple is in a better spot than they were with PC operating systems.
The result has been the same for as long as Windows has had serial keys: Pirates find a way around them, they share keys, they disable activation, they patch files, they block hostnames in their hosts files. Regular users jump through hoops, have activation issues, lose their discs, need to phone in, etc.

I'm anti-piracy in general, but whenever I install Windows 7 I always bypass the activation because I've had too many problems going legit.

Likewise with Photoshop. At a previous company, we had a license that would let us install on up to five machines. At some point, we hit that limit and couldn't activate it. The confusing thing was that we only had three machines running it (the main user's desktop, her laptop, and another coworker's laptop). What we realized was that we'd reinstalled her laptop and the coworker's laptop recently, and both of those machines were still activated.

When we called Adobe, they pointed us to a KB article on how to de-activate a Photoshop install, but that requires that it still be installed and working. Adobe said that they couldn't actually de-activate those machines. After some arguing back and forth, they agreed to add another machine to our account (so now we have six machines registered, four with it installed, and two using it concurrently). Now, every time we reformat a machine, we have to call them again because no one remembers to de-register Photoshop before they reformat a user's machine.

iTunes lets you register five computers, and if you hit the limit, de-register them all to start over again. How hard is that?
You will be Alright Amit.
A couple of times, OA makes the point that the blackouts are meaningless to people who are not "digital natives". This is wrong. Driving to work this morning, the Wikipedia blackout was mentioned on the BBC Radio 4 news - just one line, but it was there. During the day, I listened to 6 Music where Radcliffe and Maconie were doing a light-hearted "we'll answer your questions for you because Wikipedia is down today". Driving home, the Media Show (Radio 4 again) had an in-depth discussion of digital "piracy", the blackouts, etc. Finally, when I got home, my daughter asked why so many sites were down and I gave her a summary of the whole thing. This has brought massive publicity for this issue, in a country (England) which might be assumed (on the face of it) to be unaffected by SOPA/PIPA.

I hope this is the new face of American activism, or any kind of activism for that matter. No rubber bullets have been fired, nobody has been arrested, no water cannon were discharged, real-life traffic has not been brought to a standstill. But the point is finding its mark in a way which might have been impossible just a few years ago.
I even went to Digg ! See what SOPA does !!
What real problem is Pinterest solving?
I think that's already happened, actually.

Mainstream news channel didn't cover SOPA/PIPA until very late; the press didn't know what they were about, and when they did they just kept mum out of self-interest. Nevertheless, a very large mass of people noticed, enough to make extremely powerful congressmen like Smith sweat cold -- that's a very significant number of people who clearly rely on "alternative" online sources for their news and entertainment right now. Are they majority? The next few months (and votes) will tell us.

15 years ago, the DMCA passed with no real opposition. Now, this bill could actually be defeated. The shift might have already happened, and if not, it's really, really close. One day we'll look back trying to find a turning point (the rise of Google? Wikipedia? Facebook?), but I bet historians will set it before 2012.
I have come to feel this is unrealistic... politics happen. Right and Wrong are mostly subjective..... they always will be..... an entire nation can slowly be turned to accept wholesale genocide as "right".
Whether they chose on their own or based on political pressure from constituents, the public at large needs to be more aware and engaged in what the people they elect are up to if they want to be heard. staying silent and expecting everyone to do what you think is right is not realistic.... though you, of course, try to elect someone who will.

They
As far as I know Xrumer creates member profile pages on forums and adds a link to the "promoted" website to the profile. At what point do you see the criminal offense? By creating a profile and posting nothing on the forum? By adding a link where the form gives a legitimate linking-home option?

Even so I feel a bit like playing devils advocate here, but Xrumer profile creation seems to me one of the least annoying activities in comparison to blog comments or other "visible" activities.

Plus the "illegal" argument is always a double edged sword. Just imagine someone else Xrumer'ing your own website and the consequential explaining you have to do afterwards. As soon as Google (or law...) declares a specific tactic as bann-worthy people will use it against their competitors.
I find it really disappointing that the informational response to SOPA has been quantitative and not qualitative. Everyone and their dog have made (1) an infographic, (2) a video, and (3) a black-out or banner script.

This only serves to underscore what so many people don't get most of the time: the availability of information is not binary nor an issue necessarily aided by a proliferation of resources on the matter.

We see the same thing when we are teaching ourselves and others programming and git(!), and we would do well to see our failure to educate people on something so many intelligent and affluent people in technology oppose as a wake-up call in this issue and all other issues that depend on our ability to explain them and bring them to people's attention.

It's a perfect coincidence that we needed Sal Khan of all people to show us this - once again.
Yup, that's great. Thank you.
Julian Assange: The Rolling Stone Interview
Shows how effective khanacademy.org is when, after watching the entire video, I discovered I wasn't logged in and was disappointed I wouldn't get my points!
You can change the visibility of all the past posts easily; select " Limit the Audience for Past Posts" in Privacy Settings.
Quite. CDs filled an important need at the time they came on the market - quality music reproduction that did not degrade with repeated use like vinyl or tape does. Sure, digital delivery would have been nice, but back then modems ran at about 1200bps and mp3 encoding was a gleam in the eye of someone at the Fraunhofer Institute.

Two wrongs don't make a right; saying the service isn't good enough is a cheap excuse. Pirates should articulate what they do pay for, not what (they say) they would pay for. Talk is cheap, distribution and marketing do have costs associated with them.

Edit: my point is to defend the basic idea of copyright and content distribution as an economic good, rather to support any particular distribution model or SOPA itself. Coming from a film background, it costs a great deal of money to bring a high-quality film to the screen, and to reliably recoup that investment, distributors usually spend 50% of the film's budget on marketing. Films are sort of like startups insofar as each one is a little self-contained business, and the same is true of alnums, TV shows etc., but discussion of the economics from the content production side is often sorely lacking in debates about piracy.
Eh, the author wants to pay MS money for the product, but also to be able to use the product without jumping through a bunch of stupid pointless frustrating hoops.

MS insists these hoops are needed.

The author, after years of giving MS money and jumping through hoops decides to stop giving them money, and stop jumping through the hoops.

The author is trying to tell MS, in the post and with the lost sale, that the anti-piracy measures are totally counter-productive, and have pushed a paying customer into a pirate.
Legal solutions don't work online, technical ones do.

CAN-SPAM didn't stop spam. Bayesian spam filtering did.

Every little annoyance in life shouldn't be subject to federal regulation.
The type systems is one major difference. OCaml as the name suggests supports objects. Haskell's type system is more expressive. I believe OCaml's type inference system is fully decidable Haskell's isn't. The evaluation models are different Haskell is lazy default, Ocaml is eager default. Ocaml doesn't support multiple native threads(green threads only.) Ocaml isn't pure.
This page has been taken down.
edit- at least that is what I am seeing when I try.
MinCaml compiler crash course
SOPA blackout leads co-sponsors to defect
If FFTW were invented today, it would stand for Fourier For The Win
GoDjango
Get in the Game (Center)
Thanks, I had never heard of geohashes before, but it sounds like they might really help with a problem I've been having lately.
Honestly, I think these organic responses are valuable and eye-opening. They are coming from "common people" who don't heavily involve themselves in internet issues/browse reddit and therefore hadn't heard of any of this. I am so used to reading about SOPA on HN that I sort of forgot that most people who use the internet don't visit these corners.

I understand the point of that twitter account is to be funny (and it is) but I do think it holds value as proof of:

A) The public unawareness of this legislation

B) The potential public outrage were it to pass
Mark Zuckerberg asks his 11M Facebook subscribers to stop SOPA
That sounds terrifying really. You'd undoubtedly end up with people only bothering to vote for things they feel really passionately about, which usually falls on the wrong side of rationale.
I used to do something similar just to see what would happen.

For instance one day I decided to hand out roses to random people to see what happened. Another time I spent a day complimenting people on their footwear (well, only if it was worthy of a compliment).
You can compare SHA1 hashes using this TechNet page for reference:
http://technet.microsoft.com/subscriptions/downloads/default... (click "Details" to reveal the SHA1 hash).
I totally disagree that we should leave piracy out of it completely. The bill is called the Stop Online Piracy Act, if we don't mention piracy at all it will look like dodging the issue. We need to say something like

"It claims to be about piracy, but it won't have any effect on piracy because tech-savvy people like pirates can easily get around the restrictions, it will only harm legitimate internet users like you."

From then on the person is inoculated against the "but piracy!" argument.
You don't have to use Windows. The best way to protest is by using another product.

Claiming that you have the moral authority to pirate it is just wrong, doing so re-enforces the need for MSFT to have even stricter anti-piracy measures.
I would like to see how the representation changes within the "top 1%". Maybe in a little while I can put the data into Excel and see.
It's a complex question and you can model it in many ways based on different assumptions etc. However, if want to go with the traditional economic idea:

People have internal utility functions that provide an internal value. They can also guess how other people value a good and if that's higher than their internal value they might buy it with the intent to profit. It's the second line of thinking that can create bubbles, but it's a finite world with finite resources so over time speculators tend to run out of money at which point market price tends to go back a market price based on an internal value of people who actually use the good and the cost of production.

It's odd to think of people being more rational in the long term, but rational ideas are simply more stable.
What comes after SOPA/PIPA? 
On this day when the focus is on demonstrating the bad effects that unjust and censorious laws would have on the internet, our freedoms and our livelihoods. I would ask that you, my fellow creators of businesses and software; take a few moments to contemplate the positive steps that we could push for that would bring us greater freedom, prosperity and knowledge in the years to come. Both in this country, and the world over.

A few minor suggestions:

1. National bidirectional broadband universally available. If every electrical outlet in the US had a colocated network endpoint capable of a minimum of 10MBPS symmetric; how would that change your world, your scope of potential creations?

2. Digital currency infrastructure. One of the functions of government historically has been to guarantee the safety and integrity of the currency. What could you do if there were a safe and universally available method of digital payment that did not suck 2-5% of every transaction out of your income stream?
Do you have encyclopedia? how old?
SF Goes Dark to Protest SOPA
Hi scott_s. Taking your points in order; by "pthreads" I mean "built on top of the the POSIX thread library API, and available from any language which supports the API calls."

While gcc may use POSIX threads for its implementation, they are not necessarily inter-compatible. For example, I found on my Mac that OpenMP dies with a segfault when used from a pthread. OpenMP also works with Microsoft's C++ compiler, while the available pthreads support for that OS is built on the actual native methods.

I lack a better way to distinguish these two types of threading libraries, hence the confusion.

Thanks for the corrections! I am indeed missing the count++, now fixed. My actual code, which I used to generate the numbers, was a bit more complicated and using it would obfuscate the points of the essay.

You are absolutely right about how the second critical section is not needed! That could should only be executed 110,000 times, while in the worst case the other critical section is executed N*(N-1)/2 = 12 billion times, so I decided to not redo the timings.

I've updated the document to point out that those were not needed, with a pointer to this thread.
OCaml is strict and impure, Haskell lazy and pure. Syntactically they're pretty different, but since they both make heavy use of the H-M type system you see pretty similar semantic operations across the board. Probably the first thing that sets them apart is that IO is a lot more direct in OCaml, a direct implication of strictness and impurity.

Extensions to the type system are really different, OCaml's is more flexible and specific, but Haskell's is very convenient, but by the time that becomes an issue you'll probably know a lot more of how the languages differ.
I bet if you actually counted the ratio of progressive vs corporatist editorials, the latter would be the overwhelming majority.

Let's not kid ourselves, the WSJ does have a pro-corporations agenda, it's owned by Rupert Murdoch; in Europe most people consider it a far-right paper. The Financial Times in comparison looks almost like a socialist rag.
I looked as well but it seems like reduction only works for scalars and not for arrays.
> Bayesian spam filtering did.

Really? Not taking out some big botnets? Not a move away from email and onto social networks? This article suggests that email spam, at a three year low, is still at 70% of all email.

(http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9222447/Symantec_says...)
The word you're looking for is not "stupid" but rather "spoiled". People in first-world countries are spoiled to their bones. They take EVERYTHING for granted. Which is why they don't have the patience to read explanations why Wikipedia is down. They just want Wikipedia and they want it right now.

This comedian, Luis CK captures it much better than I can: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8r1CZTLk-Gk
PayPal Mobile Payments
All the blackout banners should link to this video.
I understand that they are about equally as bad; I don't understand the conclusion: "vote republican because those democrats are bad." If anything vote libertarian or independent to show disapproval. Vote against the people in your congress/senate that support it.

I am not going to argue here which one is less bad because that's pointless and off topic. I am merely pointing out the logical disconnect that I saw.
I'd like him to elaborate on this as well. That's a fairly damaging thing to say about someone who does these sorts of things (publishing products and services online). All I know him for is Gumroad.
A very nice video, except the particular passage referred to has the clause "designed for..., has only limited purpose or use other than, or is marketed for..." violating various laws. I don't think any of his examples would fall under any of these categories.
No, he's not. He is simply saying that they have made the product unpalatable so therefore he is not going to consume it.
The Technical Challenge of Building Votizen
>Again who is talking about doing something for free?

The guy that cracked your account and used it to make these comments:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3480634
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3480674
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3480761

>Don't blame me for you lack of imagination that would have allowed you to see a world where artist could create without making money on digitally mass produced songs.

I'm sure, that, just as with making music, there are revenue models for lumberjacking that don't involve charging for lumberjacking services. For example, they could broadcast live video of themselves chopping down trees and charge for that. Or maybe trees should only be cut down by their owners so they're not technically earning money from chopping down a tree.

Or, you know, we could just bypass the whole charade and let people charge for the lumberjacking/artistic creations that they were responsible for (if they so wish) rather than stick to some ideological belief that it's somehow wrong to do so while hoping they come up with some convoluted way to accomplish the same thing with more restricted means.

It's great that there are ways to produce good X without invoking exclusivity rights in X; but for those (many) cases where X wouldn't otherwise be produced, I would like for that model to be an option.

That doesn't mean the current copyright regime is optimal; far from it. It just means that the mentality of "IP sucks and everyone will produce valuable stuff for free" is looney.
It's not that spammers have stopped sending it; it's that, for most people, spam is not 70% of what makes it to their inbox.
And the worst thing is that they still don't know why Wikipedia is doing it. They just see the blacked out screen and their immediate reaction is not to read but to go complain on Twitter.
Wow. Front page of Hacker News.

I can tell you from personal experience that it has become far harder to game Google after the Panda update. The SEO rats are coming out of the woodwork screaming for a solution.

True, there is still a massive amount of spam on the internet, but Google is learning how to filter it down.

The ubiquity of Facebook comments, Disqus, etc. is cutting down on the amount of comment spam. Not to mention that Akismet is becoming really good at its job.

Spamming forum profile links gets you nowhere these days. And Google can somehow sniff shit content from a mile off.

There will always be spam on the internet, but as long as it stays hidden beneath the carpet, Google is doing a good enough job.
The Vision of the Gamepocalypse is coming true. :)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9NzFCfZMBkU&t=2m10s
And to think my friends all chided me for not getting a CS degree and going with Economics instead!
that would be interesting to see in the span of the last 50 years
What awesome news! Just yesterday, I was wondering if he found a match. I'm really happy for him and glad that his drive made me sign up for the registry. Here's wishing you a safe and healthy recovery, Amit.
If I may ask a follow-up, what's your perspective on keeping the pieces and the integration "safe"?

For me, I would like to see the browser sand boxed completely away from the OS, with the cloud this may be a ever closer reality, have drop box like functionality for the browser where if you want to upload a file, you do so from the cloud not your local device. So say I want to send you a picture, I choose the picture from say Picasa or Flicker as opposed to going to my local drive.

I would like to see something like SSL certificates for web providers that want to be able to step past that sandbox. So providers prove their identity to get a certificate that lets browsers access files to upload or native apps are utilized to get content into the cloud. Cutting the filesystem away from the browser is the first step.

Second with HTML 5, there are browser based data stores available to developers. This should be the first option when a developer wants to keep file information on a users system. From there they should offer to save files to the cloud providers. With the way the web is moving, there are less and less legitimate reasons for a web provider to access the native system. If they do, they should be able to justify that reason for a certificate or they should be able to write a native app and supply it via an app store.

Naturally some providers will not like the thought of using an app store, in which case they can offer it for download with a certificate or via a whole lot of security exceptions on the part of the user. Much like Firefox does with a expired SSL certificate where they user has to basically insist that they know what they are doing. I would like to see enterprise controls on that as well, where an IT department can override the user and not allow acceptance of the risk by the user.
"The seizure of rojadirecta.com was part of Operation In Our Sites, an aggressive anti-piracy operation authorized by the 2008 Pro IP Act."

Interesting. I wasn't aware Pro IP existed and it's what's allowing ICE to do that. I thought they were just abusing other existing laws. So if we're going to go on the offensive after we kill SOPA/PIPA, Pro IP is probably a good target.
Steve Jobs - Inspirational Life Speech