skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The BizSpark program has limitations (although still a fantastic deal!).

* AFAIK you are licenced to use the software for development and testing purposes ONLY. Not internal use (see the BizSpark FAQ, even though other BizSpark materials seem to imply otherwise).

* Except you do get a production 2 proc SQL Server licence, and Windows Server licences... However you may not be able to use the licences with some hosting providers (due to their licences with Microsoft, or just unfamiliarity or complexity overhead).

* The BizSpark websites are a time-wasting labyrinth whenever you must update anything (might have improved?).

* There are so many catch-alls to prevent "misuse" of the licence, that it looks as though you can't legally use any of the software... although in spirit you can use it and Microsoft isn't going to chase you... (at least that was how I read the licences last time I looked but IANAL YMMV).
This is ingenious, or else I am just really dense; I had never thought of this. I'm assuming that it wouldn't be trivial to write such a hack, but if you were able to, it would be a self-distributing botnet hack. You wouldn't be able to get the same reach the botnets that use exploits do, but you would remain pretty much indetectable. Thanks for sharing.
If they are using google a quick search will let them know how to gain access to Wikipedia. Hint, disable javascript or hit Escape.
You, thieves, are solely responsible for SOPA/PIPA.
In response to #1
If I'm paying you to watch it, there better not be any commercials ;)
The Century of The Self, a 4 part documentary by Adam Curtis, covers exactly what you just mentioned. Fascinating stuff, and available in its entirety on youtube.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IyPzGUsYyKM
I think that reddit would consider it stealing users as well as not wanting that type of user. I mean...can I combine those theories...am I allowed to do that?
How much can one representative do? I think you're overstating his power. He is one of 435, and while he does have influence over the law in the fact that he can vote against it, I don't think one representative has the power to completely block a bill if he doesn't have people standing behind him.

The best way to get other representatives to stand behind him is 1. passionate appeals on the House floor and 2. getting voters to make their voice heard.
R Cloud Services
To someone who has only just looked at Haskell (and not gotten very far) the syntax looks very similar. Can anyone speak to the differences between the two languages?
Xrumer spams peoples websites. As I understand it this is the main strategy employed by blackhates.

Email spam is illegal (CAN-SPAM Act). I hope that one day spamming peoples websites is also illegal.

So it's not criminal to use Xrumer but in my opinion people who use it are on the same moral footing as common email spammers.
There is some intersection as of late, largely in the form of "Why hack and deface a WordPress install with your script kiddie tags when you could instead deface several hundred thousand WordPress installs with pharma links, thereby getting tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars in affiliate commissions. It's like robbing a bank except you won't get shot and the FBI can't bring itself to care that you did it."
I agree. I think it's important to argue against the WSJ's actual points, not dismiss them because of conflict of interest.

Real quick, my reaction to their points: yes, changes have been proposed to the bill, but I'm not clear on exactly what has been removed, and I'm not confident that what remains would leave the internet's infrastructure intact; they conflate "open source" with people who are pro-piracy; they conflate people who oppose copyright with people who oppose censorship.
This argument evaporates when you consider services that offer all-you-can-eat for a flat monthly fee.

If you only have to pay the price of one day's lunch for access to a library of content, then downloading a title rather than watching it on its official outlet will reduce subscription fees and thus impact revenue sharing. So rather than buying less than 10%, there may in fact be no threshold at which pirating becomes more practical, once the initial monetary threshold (being able to afford the subscription fee) is met.

Therefore, copyright infringement can result in a much stronger loss in revenue than you presume, even though I personally agree that it doesn't constitute "stealing", as no physical good has been removed and appropriated illegally. However, what that copyright infringement can do is impede or obstruct certain consumer-favoring (IMO) business models from being viable.

It's possibly true, in my opinion, that sharing in a gray area of material whose market has not yet matured may increase visibility and have future benefits, but no company which deals with content producers and the platform to deliver content can afford to acknowledge this to the content producers or to the audience without risking legitimizing copyright infringement and therefore delegitimizing their own business (which is why I'm not disclaiming where I work, other than it is familiar with these issues).

Not that I'm arguing that there should be no such thing as sharing, but making the moral argument to justify it that stealing isn't putting the company in a worse position is a poor rationale. It's not true and it's not something that can be defended against in public.

Nor am I arguing that piracy will make or break a business. If it's big enough to be popular, it may be big enough to grow a legitimate market faster than the illegitimate alternative. However, this also relies on cooperative content producers and an audience willing to pay for the content. It's a tricky balance but the reality is that while violation of copyright may not produce economic devastation on its own, neither is it devoid of any impact.

tl;dr: Reasonable people should pay for content available to them that they enjoy, especially when affordable.
I don't think this is a good idea it's almost certainly passing off [1] which is illegal.

Not to mention confusing.

[1] http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passing_off
Here's another thought: It's a piece in the opinion section. They publish a variety of people in the opinion section. Sometimes they publish Paul Krugman. Sometimes they publish Karl Rove or George W Bush (as ex-president). They do not present a unified ideological front.

That said, Rupert Murdoch has grandstanded in the past in rather transparently self-serving ways ("OMG google news is indexing my sites! but i don't want to make them stop, I want to make them keep doing it and pay me for the privilege somehow.")
Why I pirate
DuckDuckGo masks the duck in protest
Good intentions, but the garbled text looks awful. Took me 5+ seconds to find the stop SOPA banner to the top-right. A simple black-out, shadow, overlay would be better.
I'm hopelessly biased here, because I make video games. But do you not feel that the world would be worse off--culturally and technologically--without a commercial video games industry? And do you not think that the utility of games--faster and more ubiquitous computers--is self-evident when you compare it to a world without a commercial video games industry, but extremely difficult or impossible to anticipate in advance?

Maybe I'm making assumptions that you don't agree with--perhaps you think that a thriving video games industry could exist as strongly in the absence of copyright, or that the video games industry hasn't encouraged advances in computers--but both my claims seem fairly uncontroversial to me.
As a job hunter I've had people ask where I currently lived. At least once the reaction did sound like they were thinking "why would someone from South Georgia want a job with a popular website? They have the Internet?"

I don't think it influenced that exchange, nor do I suspect it ever has in my case, but I can see how cultural stereotypes could come into play, even subconsciously, positive and negative.
Word Frequency Count of Hacker News Front Page on SOPA Blackout Day
You should never hotlink off a site you don't trust (and given some spammy things Sahil has done in the past, I wouldn't trust it). If you use this, make sure you copy both the CSS and JS onto your own site (and change the JS to point to the right CSS file).

This doesn't mention two things:

1) You need jQuery already for this to work.
2) You should put the JavaScript at the end of the page, not the top.
the key word here is "Media": The licensing terms for every medium that you purchase are different. You may own the CD and not have "download rights". In any case, this is the line from the RIAA. They don't want you to copy, download or do anything that causes them a perceived loss of a sale.
This seems a bit obtuse and lacking in a strong call to action. I like Zach Johnson's anti-SOPA page better:

https://github.com/zachstronaut/stop-sopa

It's much more visually interesting than most, so it might actually grab people's attention.
Practical Garbage Collection in JVM
"new users are new and still learning from everyone else around them. When everybody is new, it’s hard to get a feel for the current culture and style"

More could be done to explain the culture in addition to what is now on newsguidelines.html and the faq.
It's very possible he's using more than one operating system.
Agree.

But, I am not convinced college tuitions will fall.

Demand is increasing. Just in the last 10 years enrollment has increased 30% and is still increasing. Any ranked university/college does not have trouble filling their enrollment goals with their current tuition. Although there may be some delayed price pressure from higher prices causing lower caliber students to enroll, thus decreasing the ranking of the school, and thus reducing what they can charge.

In addition, most american try to achieve a middle class lifestyle at a minimum. And culturally a middle class lifestyle entails the children having a college experience (and its associated costs).
> I count nine Republican initial supporters and four Democrat initial supporters. Where are you getting the "...illusion that the Democratic Party is at all useful or decent" part at all?

The OP's whole point is that the Democratic party is arguably less bad than the Republicans, but that they are still very bad and deserve no loyalty. Your pointing out that more Republicans initially supported the bill does not conflict with this.

Here is a list by propublica.org which lists likely supporters and opponents for SOPA/PIPA.

http://projects.propublica.org/sopa/

I count 37 Republicans and 43 Democrats on the list of supporters. I count 14 Republicans and 17 Democrats on the list of opponents.
What makes you think you have to be a pirate to be against SOPA? I spend $60+/mo. downloading movies from the iTunes store, to keep on the right side of the law. I'm still 100% against censorship, and especially censorship that serves no legitimate purpose.

And on a personal note, I think your response is even more generalizing and patronizing than the pirate's post. I'd sooner have a beer with him and try to convince him why he's wrong, than have to sit at a table with you for an hour.
http://matt.might.net/articles/best-programming-languages/

This write-up describes the basics of ocaml and haskell and some of their individual strengths. (along with scala and scheme)
TheOatmeal.com SOPA protest
Static Analysis isn’t Development Testing
See MetaFilter for an example of a community site that suffered a decline in quality (starting around 2002) and then recovered. I'm surprised that MeFi's "MetaTalk", which segregates talk about rules and norms in its own sub-forum, hasn't been more widely copied.
Several investment banks are using these languages in production (BarCap (F#) and Standard Chartered (Haskell) are the names that come immediately to mind).

And of course Minsky's employer, Jane Street Capital, writes everything in OCaml.

There are plenty of commercial users outside the financial sector too but those users tend to be smaller companies.
> I hope that one day spamming peoples websites is also illegal.

Today of all days, be careful what you wish for.
Hmm, only 2 lessons and nothing more than I figured out before I even started them. Hopefully they'll expand in the future.
The nerdiest anti-SOPA sign
Their usage of JSON is just incidental to your usage of JSON. They use JSON as a REST transfer format. You can pretty much ignore their JSON if you use one of the high level libraries in the SDK.

You can define a table with 3 fields: yourKey, yourRange, and yourJson. Put your entire JSON data as string in the yourJson field.
Sal Khan explains SOPA / PIPA
I think the OP meant that there should be a 'buy' option with no commercials and unlimited viewings, and a rent option possibly with commercials and a limited number of viewings.
I see the anti-circumvention provisions of the DMCA as another really bad part of that law. Bascially the reason why watching legally DVD's on a pure opensource system is no longer possible in the US.
You listed PIPA twice.

But thank goodness "Assholes" made the list.
No, but it does mean that accredited hammers were only available for $100,000 and up, it would still make sense for you to buy one.

The problem isn't that you can't get educated outside of the university education system. It's that people assume that someone with a college degree is educated, and someone without one isn't.

I consider that no more accurate as assertions that grade school students haven't learned anything unless they can pass a standardized test, but I don't think there's an easy solution. For the near future at least, college degrees will continue to be the main criteria for guessing if someone's qualified for a lot of jobs.
Top 15 (Blacked Out) Sites And Screenshots
Those examples are good. Now that we have people's attention, it's time to go full "PR".

> No jargon. No big words. Make it relatable. Don't talk down to them but do educate them on the issues, not technology.

My take-away: tell stories about people.
Using the Clojure REPL to generate random alphanumeric codes
Am I the only one this does nothing for?
10 reasons the U.S. is no longer the land of the free
At some point, you need to decide that one candidate is better than the others.

So, you need some function that provides at least a partial ordering of your candidates (ie, a sort key).

Computing these sort keys is expensive. It can be optimized by (partial) precomputation. Maybe this is a letter grade from a school, or having/not having a degree, or a summary prepared by the candidate (a resume), or whatever.

You probably don't entirely trust whoever did that precomputation. So you'll want to check their work. You can't do this for every candidate since you still want time to sleep at night. So, you need to use that pre-computed sort key as a filter to throw out at least some portion of the applicants. But the ones that you don't throw out, you'll want to investigate further.

This could be reviewing their past work (github portfolio, etc). Or it could be in-person interviews, or phone interviews, or whatever.

If looking over a portfolio is less expensive than doing an interview, does it let you filter out enough candidates to be cost-effective?

But the recurring theme on HN is that people want to hire the best of the best. The best people are 10 times more productive, they say. It may be conjecture, maybe businesses don't want that kind of person at all, but selecting someone from a sorted list is almost never going to find you that person. For that, you're going to have to put in some effort.

The only way to find the best (or the "good enough") is from a (at least partially) sorted list. What varies is the quality of the sorting, and of the contents of the list. Given limited resources, how do you maximize the quality of the sorting (assuming somebody else is handling maximizing the quality of the list contents)?
This is why i will always save a copy of my windows xp enterprise edition cd. It's xp, which is still decent enough, and it doesn't require any activation, as opposed to the home/pro-editions.

In case apocalypse happens (ehum, my ISP goes down for 24h) i know i can still get a computer up and running without problem if i have to.
I don't think it can be passing-off without goods or services being involved. There's probably some tort here, though...
That just reminds me of Steve Yegge's rants.
Well, that all makes sense to me (at a first read). And I will and do opt-in / enable scripting on a site by site basis in order to engage such features.

I don't like having to turn on scripting in order to see anything and to form an initial assessment/opinion, e.g on a front page. In that respect, I still favor "degrading gracefully", or "enhancing gracefully" -- I've seen it described both ways. (And that's just one of the "annoyances" I guess I was referring to.)

Back around the time Gmail was first "oohing" people, I did a small bit of snazzy scripting for a prototype to enable a much more user friendly interface on an internal corporate system. (Unfortunately, the powers that be -- or were -- didn't know what to make of it, and it languished.)

In the wild and woolly web, though, I still have concern about opening the scripting door to compromises. I'm not sure what the solution is to that.

Anyway, thanks very much for taking the time and effort to write up the description. I take your points, and I like numerous aspects of the direction you're describing. It does seem at least somewhat more in line with the so called "web application" paradigm as an alternative and/or successor to the "web page" paradigm.

If I may ask a follow-up, what's your perspective on keeping the pieces and the integration "safe"?
But the argument is that it takes something away from the artiste. That it's not only like stealing but that it is actually stealing.

So what is it? Is it taking something away from the original creator (and the creator before him/her) or is it not.
Actually it is an editorial, which is the opinion of the paper itself.

The language mirrors Murdoch and the piece is not well written, there's a stench of editorial interference here.
In case you missed this...
There's a branch in the tree of replies here that I open "I recommend you think about this: where does property come from?" I recommend reading this.
And financial requirements. Because public universities have subsidies and donations coming in they can afford facilities required by some of the more arcane standards. Private Universities have to charge an arm and a leg and basically bury students in debt they'll likely never pay. If you aren't willing to do that you have a hard time succeeding
Senator Gillibrand pledges to make "important" changes to SOPA/PIPA bill
Disclaimer: I heard the Editorial via my Audible subscription this morning and sometimes those editions are abridged. Though normally not in the Editorial section.

I thought the article was pretty fair to be honest. It called out the DNS issues as being egregious and they highlighted the constitutional basis of copyright which most people forget. They also highlighted the difference between individual piracy and piracy for business as an important point (the exact sentence is "This isn't college kids swapping MP3s as in the 1990s. Rather rogue websites set up shop overseas and sell US consumers bootleg [media]"

My main criticism is they made SOPA seem a little more benign than it is. They say...

"The notion that the SOPA dragnet would catch a stray Twitter Link or Facebook post is false"

Well, I don't see how that is false. My main issue with SOPA (now that the DNS part has be taken out) is it could be used to allow media companies to shut down legitimate indie products because they resemble commercial offerings. Because the bar is set so low as far as initial proof is concerned.

Anyway, the bottom line is the article is worth reading and it isn't just "Murdoch Henchmen Towing the Line". I wish they'd let it out of the paywall so you could see that.
> Sure, the web an awesome medium to sell music/movies on, but there's no reason why you can't use iTunes.

I don't know about music/movies, but there are many reasons why it's difficult to sell apps on iTunes.
It actually looks like somebody hacked "ugh" account. Seems a little out of character.

http://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=ugh

Edit:

And this one as well:

http://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=suyash
Oh really that's what happened to him? No wonder his blog hasn't been updated for awhile. Smart, cunning guy
Advice for Lean Startup Machine Participants
Visual Studio Achievements
This is retarded and flardinois is retarded.
In your case, any mistakes you make is unlikely to affect a third party. But should a third party be involved, they'll try to pin the blame on the pharma, not you, the pharma has the cash. In which case, they'll be arguing to the judge that the way you work makes you more like an employee than a contractor, even though you don't enjoy the benefits of being an employee.
The best techniques make it hard for any human to detect whether any blackhat was involved. Such as scraping content that is NOT already indexed and putting it on your own site.
Working for Apple isn’t as dreamy as the company’s devices
Sal showed up at our weekly company picnic/lunch today and said something like, "All these sites are down cuz of SOPA, but everything I read is still so hard to understand," so he dove in and made this this morning. Pretty cool.
Instead of SOPA, why didn't they just...
> the internet is a medium of interstate commerce

Only in part. Only downloaded goods use the internet as a medium for commerce. The rest of the time, it's for communication (speech).
I moved here from Russia, and I don't mind people asking. I also ask people where they're from if I'm curious - and that's all it is, curiosity, and a chance to learn something I didn't know before.
SSD are pretty safe in general. Amazon also makes replicate of your data. It's the same if not safer than other NoSQL solution. Definitely safer than those RAM-based NoSQL approaches.

The "back up to s3" part is for archiving data, like periodic snapshot backup of your data so that you can get back the old data in case they are deleted by app/human.
Who's to blame for the necessity of such methods?

Is it Google? Is it the spammers themselves? Is it the software makers or the SEO specialists? Maybe it's even us.

The fact is, if you want to eat, you need to know SEO, most of which exists only to please Google. Why does an ecommerce site selling socks need 200 blog posts and an empty, keyword filled forum? because it works.
Is it really that bad if somebody who needs a bed uses mine without permission while it lies unused, provided it isn't harmed and is returned to its initial condition?

Exactly. It's YOUR choice to allow someone to let themselves in when you aren't home and take a nap. BTW, can you post your address and schedule? Just in case anyone reading this thread needs a place to crash for a few hours.

Giving me the right to not have strangers wander into my house while I'm gone does nothing to prevent you from letting strangers wander into your house. By making it ok for people to wander into my house without my permission, you obliterate my property rights.
No there is no hope here. It's like being asked to do a painting. You do it once and sell it.
Rekindle my love of reading
Feeding a troll: Copyright infringement is not stealing. Sellers of movies etc are not entitled to profits. My download of something I would not buy, does not cost you anything - you don't lose the ability to sell copies, you don't lose any $, because I would never have spent any $ on it. When actual losses are $0, no theft occurred. Learn to use grown up words and thoughts if you want to make an argument that doesn't sound like a spoiled child ranting.