skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
As creators, we can curb piracy by making it easier, safer and more reliable to purchase legally. As users, shouldn't we curb piracy by not pirating things?
Inside Google at work and play
Wow, that looks pretty well done. The iBooks App is in the App store right now too. The format is HTML-based, with some proprietary extension (	-ibooks-layout-hint: anchor; in CSS etc). But don't expect an Android reader anytime soon...
I do not feel that I am morally obliged to pay and I believe that the laws should be changed. We have IP rules when it comes to a musical composition and architecture. Why not in other areas such as hairstyles or recipes?
If the number of startups declines due to SOPA, the rest of the world™ will benefit, as many US based internet firms and developers will go elsewhere in search of better legislation.
I was in downtown Toronto on February 15, 2003, freezing my ass off in a protest march of nearly 100,000 people who were, in turn, part of a global march of between 10 and 20 million people protesting the invasion of Iraq. It was the single biggest protest in history, and it was against a war that hadn't even started yet.

Popular protest against the Vietnam War didn't take off until the war had been grinding for several years.
"We wanted to get started with partners early, so we're starting with high school textbooks priced at $14.99 or less. "

edit: source http://www.macrumors.com/2012/01/19/live-coverage-of-apples-...
That's one assumption. The other is that over the course of a 4 year high school or college run. The cost of a 499 iPad + 15 dollar books is significantly cheaper than say 6-7 60+ dollar books per semester.

Schools can loan out iPads that they get at a discount from Apple, or colleges can even include them in the cost of tuition. I know quite a few people in college right now that receive a Macbook Pro as part of their college tuition (with no option to decline it and save on tuition). So an iPad would be significantly cheaper than that, and arguably just as useful for most college curriculums.
Does anyone know of a link that explains this well, with pictures and in depth analysis that I can send to the headmaster of my old highschool? He loves this kinda stuff.
If Apple really wanted to improve education, they'd make the file format open. That way even schools without tens of thousands of dollars of Apple gear could benefit.
While this may be a 'debug' feature it sounds useful for when a fullscreen app locks up. If not these key combinations, what are you intended to do in such a situation?
They do it for all comments to have a protection when someone comes gunning for some comments.

This isn't about someone defending a champion of free speech or a hero of mankind. It's about, in most cases, liars who invent claims in comments to support their side. Such lies gain truth through repeated assertion (remember how RIM couldn't believe that the iPhone was possible? Retold endlessly, it was all based upon a quickly deleted claim on some random message board by some anonymous person claiming to be a RIM employee. The claim was absurd -- the iPhone used the same stock ingredients that RIM was used to -- but there you had an "insider" to support it).
I work 11-7. Oddly, everyone thinks you are working your ass off when you send out emails at 7pm and never even realizes you are never around before 11.
Maybe if you had to sign terms and conditions, you were unable to share it with friends, resell it and sometimes, sometimes you don't even get to eat it, because the wrapper wont recognize your hand!
Hollywood proposes theatre death as a justification for measures like SOPA. Any downward trends, and Hollywood will cry foul play.

To Hollywood, loss is political ammunition. To politicians who listen to Hollywood, loss is proof. They're hedged against box office losses. Those aren't a meaningful target for boycott.

Perhaps boycotting a single movie in a measurable way could send a message. Would news media react if The Dark Knight Rises became a huge flop because of a boycott? Could this open the debate to factors other than piracy affecting Hollywood's profits?
Asia’s Answer to Y Combinator, 500startups and TechStars
If you're talking about "Dr. Carter," that's probably my favorite hip-hop beat in modern history, but I've listened to the song it samples and you're right, he did almost nothing to it. It's still awesome though. Sometimes what you don't do to a song is just as important as what you do to it. ;-)
> Israel to have a secret extraction program for Iranian engineers

That's one very interesting idea. Offering citizenship and facilitating immigration will slowly brain-drain Iran which will, eventually, cause economic collapse a couple decades from now.

The only downside is that Iran's political environment already shows strong signs of brain drainage.
If he is, I hope he doesn't go to /b/.
But then again, not visiting a country is the tourism equivalent of a boycott. Thus why there are travel restrictions between the US and Cuba. So perhaps it isn't a “they could arrest me” (though it's not like Iran has never arrested foreign citizens and accused them of espionage), but simply an “I don't want to show any form of support for a regime like that”.

Naturally, there are counterarguments, like how visitors provide a view into the outside world, for example.
Hahaha genius. "...What??" Oh, and I have no idea what the bug is.
Property has the contingency of being owned. If it is not owned by anyone then it can be declared public property or non-usable estate.

I will never understand why people seem to view digital content as different from physical content. The only difference is it lacks a sense of tangibility. You can only consume it with your eyes and "touch it" with your input devices.
I believe as humans we tend to err on the selfish side far too often. If you found a $100 bill on the street you would quickly pick it up and walk away. If you found a $100 bill on the bank floor would you follow the same discourse? Of course you wouldn't. You might rationalize it is the right thing do to or you fear reprisal for taking it. The barrier to entry on any endeavor is the most substantial factor on whether you will commit. Meaning, people would steal and kill at a tremendous frequency if we didn't put consequences in place for such actions.

Pirates (us, me, you) are simply children getting away with theft, in the infancy of the internet.
Samwers getting Burned in Germany  Of Air BnB Vs Wimdu Fame
This is stupendous! I've done these kind of car searches many times and this is a huge improvement. Seriously wish I had this for my last car search. Well done!

- The lineup and grouping by price, sort order and "worse deals" are all done right. This is a pretty big deal. Congratulations.

- The "generations" are excellent data to have. Great value for the user.

- It would be nice to know that there is a real picture awaiting my rollover or at least a disclaimer on stock photos if that's possible.

- It's not clear that I should click on the car for more information. I wanted at first to click on the bluish price on the rollover. Maybe just put a little "click car for details" at the bottom of the rollover window.

- Rounder mileage levels would really help. If there were tick marks on each row for 25K increments, that would be the most help.

- It would of course be nice to refine the search.

- Sluggish like crazy at the moment, which I understand.
I tried this on my very recently installed Fedora 16 desktop at home, and it worked. All of my applications were accessible, alt-tab and other selection methods worked, etc. The only thing that was missing was the panel at the top, and I couldn't be bothered figuring out how to bring it back so I just rebooted. Good thing I don't rely on that feature too much.
Sorry to all who are having issues using the site, our server is getting killed right now. We're doing our best to keep the site running, here is a screen shot in the mean time:
http://minus.com/m5EvCsoTv#1
I think in hindsight it was a good move. Probably not the best move possible, but certainly better than letting a total collapse happen.

Regardless of what I think, my point was that your phrasing made it sound like it was a gift when in reality it was a very profitable transaction for the treasury.
Explaining the Singularity to your co-workers? Try this podcast.
Multiply is the key on the numpad that only does *.
Played everywere in Berlin right now.
Well, as usual, fuck religion
> It seems like it's all about "me", not "us".

You really don't see the connection between the baby boomers's rebellions and the fact that their grandkids have this attitude?
Ask HN:  Is it time for submission rate limiting?
There's no mention of what the filename was. Neither the basename, nor the extension. They say confidently "(It was a picture of a cat!)"
from the first paragraph of the article: Even though it comes in a giant directory full of junk, it runs standalone. should be ok, no ?
Knowing the percentage of waste that is house hold waste is extremely important. If it's 50%, then getting people to recycle is essential. If it's 3%, maybe there are better things we can be concentrating on to reduce the overall amount of waste.

In tech, we call it premature optimisation.
How to stay focus while working
Virgin Mobile Will Soon Throttle Unlimited Data Users
How Andy Dunn built a 9M/yr fashion business without a storefront
unable to view the site
OP: Please note that you can fit a line that predicts price based on the mileage (linear regression). For any car that the actual price is smaller than the one predicted is a good deal - that's what you want to have most visible. Obviously, you can use more variables for predicting the price, but the point is that cars that deviate from the fitted curve are either a bad deal or a good deal and that's where machine learning gives you monetary value on your web service. You could make even one step further give API for other websites to use your "bad deal"/"good deal" prediction engine and set your revenue this way.

[EDIT] The more variables you add the more accurate your model can be. You could even use NLP to extract the narrative about the car. You would disrupt KBB, by providing more user friendly interface. It does not have to be the visuals but just the fact that you can boil down the number of all cars that sell down to a hand full number of cars that deviate from the fitted curve. Even if you are not able to tell whether the deviation makes it a good or a bad deal, you are selecting a smaller number of cars worth looking at than any other website. At least you build a time sever which is worth money, too.

[EDIT2] I think I had an epiphany. The distance from the fitted curve is a buyer's risk. Someone comes to your website and you ask what car and what risk. Some people don't want a good deal, they want a fair deal; they want a car that is priced just right. Others might venture to get cars that are outliers, maybe those car have an engine modification or someone is in a rush to sell. In any case you would have a criteria for searching cars that no one has. KBB gives you the sound and fair deal prices but yours index could be calculated in near-real-time and thus more accurate. All depends how you implement regression model.

Note to self: excellent data mining application with interesting visualization
Does anyone have data on how he was arrested? Was there some investigation of Iranian names in porn web sites or was he arrested because he was a Canadian resident visiting Iran and the porn accusations were pinned on him after arrest? The article says authorities spent a year assembling a case before any accusations were made.

Is this a risk any Iranian citizen returning from the West faces? To be arrested and have charges fabricated after the arrest? Are there any other cases of this?
It's the * numpad key, Ctrl-Alt-Shift-8 doesn't work but if my coworker turns on numlock and does Ctrl-Alt-* with the numpad key the screen lock turns off.
iBooks Author gives teachers the opportunity to create and update their own textbooks, which has been a common desire for teachers. They'll finally be able have their textbooks match the curriculum they have in mind. It might not fix America's education problem, but it's a step in the right direction.
SOPA would only work if it interrupted the things that normal people care about. If Facebook was taken down for an extended period there would be a major rise in discontent. However, the censors know doing something like that would be suicidal, so they will let the entrenched players like Facebook go and kill every Facebook Jr. as soon as someone posts a link to a Daily Show clip from YouTube instead of comedycentral.com.
Global Social Media: There’s A Whole World Out There
Probably, but that's not quite the same thing:

"YC is able to extend founders' reach by... selecting founders" says nothing about YC actually doing something to extend founders reach, merely that they're good at selecting long-reach founders.

I do believe that they extend the reach of founders that they have selected, in any event.
I don't understand pirates that think downloading the content is a form of protest.

If you want to make a change and win then you have to think like your opponent. This is how the greedy suits think:

"Our product has sold X copies, but Y people downloaded it. That means there are X+Y people interested in my product! We must make it so X+Y people buy it and 0 download it!"

NO! Stop! Bad pirates! By downloading the product you're telling the company you want their offerings but are too lazy or greedy or whatever. Vote with your wallet and avoid the product! That way when the suit looks at his charts he can figure out why no one wanted the product in the first place. If his inbox is chock full of "drop the DRM" then maybe he'll consider it.

You are not making a stance by stealing it. You're reaffirming their decision to put on DRM and pass anti-piracy laws. You're giving them the excuse to invade your rights/privacy. Stop it.
This announcement in particular stood out as meaningful to me, because it seems with the iTunes U app, Apple is taking on Blackboard.

There are few products that, as a student, more directly inhibit education than Blackboard. Ripe for disruption? More like rotting on the ground.
Alex Gaynor: Why I Hate the Django ORM
Switch to one of the consoles and kill the app.
which makes juggling family, career, relationships... difficult for women.

Working 9-5 makes this hard for men too.
Cloud Computing – Myth and Reality | CloudTweaks.com - Cloud Computing Community
Cloud Computing – Myth and Reality | CloudTweaks.com - Cloud Computing Community
The apple specific nature of this new authoring platform is a departure from the eBook ePub standard, presumably because Apple thought the UX of eBooks could be way better. A similar rationale for why they introduced iOS apps, how it outperforms mobile web, to the ire of many developers who prefer to work with build once, run everywhere environments.

If you make a killer textbook in the new iBook Author tool, you can't publish it for the Kindle Fire. Contrast that to ePub, a file you could deliver to B&N, Apple, Amazon (they require some weird conversion process), etc, and it would be more or less available to all.
Show HN: Blackhole takes over where PostSecret choked
United States of America

That's interesting. We are still united, but I think most people would look on the US as a single entity, not co-operating states anymore. States have lost most of their sovereignty. But then again, at the time we came up with the name, it was more fitting.

I wondered if North Korea had a similar history, but it appears they were always a communist dictatorship (since 1949, just after Korea split). [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_North_Korea]
Five+ years of Kiva loan activity visualized.
"it is not your decision"

I disagree. It is. Free will is something you still cannot remove. Sorry.

Even doing the most horrible things are still your decision. There might be consequences, but that's another story.
They clarified this in a comment to the original post (http://37signals.com/svn/posts/3076-i-heard-you-like-numbers...):

Razvan Tirboaca 12 Jan 12

And a Basecamp user uploaded the 100,000,000th file
(It was a picture of a cat!)

Are you looking at your users photos?

And the response:

Taylor 12 Jan 12

Razvan, absolutely not. The file was named cat.jpg and
that was logged, which was what we saw. We do not look
at user’s files.
I frequent travel discussion boards, so I am familiar with this point of view, it's a common topic (should I travel to [insert your favorite opressive country]). However, I'm on the side which doesn't share this way of thinking. Contrary to what popular media makes us think, countries are made of citizens, not politicians. Citizens who are by general usually nice people and happy that you came to share your interest in their culture, common life, and leave some bucks in their stores/restaurants, not only seeing them through foreign interest of their governments. Iranian people have an awesome opinion of their friendliness to travellers, btw.
> I'm not saying at all they support SOPA, I am saying that I'm sure most of them would like you to pay for their music instead of downloading it for free

No, then you really seem to have never met artists. 90% of these bands have albums that are downloadable through SoundCloud or other mediums. They share they stuff very openly, and are huge pirates themselves, and support the Remix culture in multiples ways.

CDs for them are merch. Their money come from playing in venues and holding day jobs. And there's nothing too terrible about that.
Intentional or not it makes people look upon his content as immature. You're not trying to win the opinions of like minded individuals, you're trying to sway opponents and to do that you have to work on their terms (formal, coherent writing)
Protests and boycotts are not necessarily the same thing. History has shown that protests are usually ineffective. I believe however that boycotts can be effective, because essentially you're speaking with your wallet, and money talks, and unfortunately it's the only thing some people will listen to.
It sounds like it is open. HTML-based with a couple vendor-specific properties that anyone can interpret if they like. Anything I'm missing?
Windows Phone OS costs $23-$31 per copy
genius from kim dotcom to get someone from the music business in the boat ;)
You can usually either get to a tty or ssh in and kill the offending process.
People are bad about rumors, but there's still no reason to try to block anonymous commenting. If someone wants to make themselves anonymous for a single post, they will, barring blatant mistakes. We should not expect server logs to let us snoop around a comment made with exactly zero reputation or trustworthiness.
Well, virtually all eBook formats are HTML based (EPUB and Mobi definitely are). EPUB3 even supports embedded JavaScript.

It wouldn't have been impossible for Apple to push the CSS extensions to {CSS3}+1 and be using an open format. But no, it has to be Apple-branded and proprietary..
You're checking for a null local variable value in the third conditional, but appending to that same variable in the first two, which would either cause a runtime error in most languages or never pass the third conditional.
If its "available" in the UK in the same way that it is "available" in Canada then you're lying to yourself.

They gimp the offerings on the foreign netflix due to licensing issues and it really hurts the service. I tried netflix but cancelled because the catalog of things aren't worth it.
I have the same problem sometimes. I run a small wiki and wikis are pretty popular with spammers since there are lots of abandoned wikis at well-ranking domains that can easily be spammed.

I followed the links and they obviously didn't care much for their privacy either. Using a combination of Whois and some private information database I could easily figure out the people behind it, including lots of their private information, pictures of them and their family members, etc. But now what? They are operating from the United Kingdom and Poland and I have no idea how to proceed.

Anybody who does this (chasing spammers) more often know what to do after you have all their private information?
Why Companies are Terrible at Selecting, Retaining and Motivating Their Talent
MongoDB Cost Breakdown
I had an idea for a book that optimizes itself for your skill level by asking you questions about the subject and asks how you want to learn. Video, audio, lecture, song, reading, interactive, puzzles, writing, talking (listen and repeat).

Books are going away sooner or later for optimized and evolving learning systems that morph to keep the "reader" learning.
nice..saves lots of my time getting a good car :)
Well, those "assholes" might just say it to discourage you from attempting anything, but in the whole, they are right.

If you don't like the laws, do run for office, or at least, run to ensure that someone who shares your dislike for the laws, get's into office and gets the job done.

Without that, all the blackening of blogs, symbolic ribbons etc don't change a thing.

In fact, the very meaning of a republic is that of the handling of things/issues that belong to all and affect all ("res publica", public things, in latin).

Politics weren't supposed to be some specialized profession, for professional politicians, but the duty of the citizen of a democracy.

Same for ancient Athens, who invented all that democracy thing. Public officials there were chosen at random, as to better represent the majority (this incidentally solves the funding problem). So you could end up a congressman (or something equivalent for the day), like you could be chosen for jury duty today.

(Incidentally, Athens and Rome declined when their citizens stopped caring about the "public things", and demagogues and dictators seized the power).
I have no love lost for the publishing industry, but the death of printed books is one of the most tragic large-scale events in my lifetime (actual human suffering excepted, of course).

I'm still young, but I never thought I would see this day come. Go back to 1990 and tell the average person on the street that in the next few decades, bookstores would all go out of business and the only way to buy a book would be to read it on a digital device. They'd either flatly refuse to believe you, or be frozen in horror. Yet that's where we're headed, not so far in the future, and as far as I can tell, there's nothing we can do about it.
Google missed a huge opportunity by not doing anything seriously disruptive themselves, too, when they entered the e-book market. Did they really expect to take anything from Amazon by just competing with Amazon head-on?

When market leaders are so entrenched, your only hope to beat them is by disrupting them and changing the game forever. One way they could've done that is by trying harder to bypass the middle-men and enforce self-publishing. They're sort of trying to do that with Google Artist Hub for music artists, but I doubt they are taking that very seriously, either.
Well, not always. There are legitimate reasons to ring the "patriotism" bell: Pearl Harbor, 9/11 (spare the theories please). Drumming up patriotism to join the forces to defend the country is the original reason for patriotism and it can still be applicable. Just not in most of the cases you may hear on TV.
Are you referring to the fact that the browser will interrupt your tracking request because it already started loading the linked page? I haven't really tried, but I believe this can be dealt with if your server-side code expects it to happen.
A specification?