skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I was thinking the same thing ! I would actually go one step further. How can anyone OWN information (music,movies,software,etc) which is really binary which is really one big ass number (in base 2).

How can you OWN a number ? It doesnt make any sense to me, and I'm a software developer that makes products.

Its like saying, "I own the file represented by 23445353568893534534565767525454546422223346445646" and you have to pay me use that number. Sounds pretty dumb when you really break down this entire intellectual property issue
I don't have my copy of SICP with me at the moment. Could you explain what is covered in chapter 5?

Edit: Internet to the resucue: http://mitpress.mit.edu/sicp/full-text/book/book-Z-H-30.html...
Sometimes I wonder if the biggest reason media companies are pissed off about piracy, is because they can't add their own free political messages to any content they want. they are loosing the power of distribution, which is fundamentally more important that loosing a revenue stream.
You cant be blind to this, Piracy is different from stealing, but it is analogous and so the meme.
When you physically steal something from a store, the store faces a loss of value and that is why it is illegal.
Information is not valued in the same way as other goods and sometimes the value is lost when a copy is made even though the original is not damaged in any way. Its like the secret treasure map which has the value of the treasure if its a secret and has zero value once its made public and the treasure is long gone.
I did the same thing, some five years ago. But what if someone can't go to Linux or OS X because this person needs software that is Windows-only or doesn't have the time or knowledge to learn a new operating system? Just shouting "don't buy the frigging stuff" isn't going to stop them.
Right, that what I trying to say. Gay marriage has become a polarizing topic for a candidate to pick a side on. This is not how it should be, and it’s absurd. The same for any other politically polarizing issue.

I very much do NOT WANT this SOPA and any possible legislation after it to become a polarizing talking point in a speech. It’s a twisted bastardization of a real issue, which is how I feel the gay marriage dabate has become.
Global Dawn traces the history of social business
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> So you have no problem with the Secretary of the Treasury being the VC in chief for the US, deciding what companies are worthy of investment?

Nope, but the bank deals were much less evil than the auto bailouts, and not just because the auto bailouts are going to lose 10s of billions (or is it 100s) of dollars.

And then there's barney frank and chris dodd, the lead protectors for fannie and freddie (who we now know lied about their subprime exposure). The former will finally leave congress this year and the latter left in 2010, but is now pushing SOPA for MPAA.

Solynda et al is somewhere in here.

And let us not forget lightsquared, the folks who are trying to screw gps.
I enjoyed the post in a pitchfork waving sort of way but I really don't think publishing this guys full details and passport is fair game.

Xrumer spam is a huge problem for a lot of webmasters. It's the same level as email spam, only the people that pay for it seem to kid themselves into thinking it's not.

If you have a good quality site, play to your strengths. You don't need to adopt junk techniques like Xrumer.
Thanks for the insightful response.

I certainly want to be in a position to bring more than just ideas to the table. I am hoping that with my background of doing things will help in that. But you're right, as a career switcher, I need to build a specific set of skills that I can confidently talk about and deliver. I'll work on that.
The Day After the Blackout
CES from an Apple user's perspective
Times New Roman is very condensed, so IMHO it's hard to read on a monitor. Try something wider, like Cambria (Windows-only) or even Georgia.
Who knew you could take online drivers ed classes?
Legally obliged to pay for? Yes.

A technicality, but if you commit copyright infringement you are not legally obliged to pay for it, you either have commited a crime or you are liable to be sued. You can't just download and then owe the person money. This isn't like when you go into a hair dresser, sit down, get your hair cut and now legally have to pay them.
This explains why P-Diddy, Alicia Keys (his wife) and a ton of other Hip Hop artists did the Megaupload video.
The discrete and continuous transforms are closely related. DFTs and their properties were known before Gauss and his 1805 paper is about computing them quickly. I wanted to emphasize the difference between the problem of finding ways to quickly compute DFTs and Fourier's discovery of the continuous transform.
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>Blacking out a webpage is idiotic. "But it spreads awareness". So? What is the viewer of your webpage supposed to do with this new found awareness?

Most of the websites I saw participating in the blackout urged people to contact local congresspeople. Wikipedia, for example, featured a form that would show contact information given a zip code.

While not at the level of mass protests, it's certainly doing something.

Further, awareness does matter. In my local paper, the blackouts made the front page. That exposes the issue to a wide range of people that would never have been aware anything was happening.

Are there other actions people could have taken to protest SOPA/PIPA? Sure, and some are probably more optimal than the blackout. Even so, I would disagree that the blackout was ineffective, much less "idiotic".
The problem with boycotts is that they perpetuate the same logic which led to SOPA - that people are consumers before they are citizens and that the persons who matter politically are corporate, not flesh and blood.
... Speed limits are laws that are set up by well-paid lies?

By whom? That all-too-powerful "Let's drive slow" lobby?

I'm with you on the "When the law hurts the very people it's meant to protect, it's the right and responsibility of the people to fight against it" angle...

But speed limits? That is your line in the sand?
To make this work, we'd need a pretty complicated system to distribute and manage those keys (and in a way they stay encrypted during transfer and storage). Furthermore, your client key pair would have to be stored on your machine, that means a service where you can't log in with just a password. Don't get me wrong, I think it's an interesting idea, I just don't see how this is not going to be a huge complexity and usability nightmare in applications that are designed for sharing data.
This architecture supported 1.5 million simultaneous users - with buddy lists and IMs, which means a full-mesh n^2 pub-sub system

Novadays I can hold 1.5M open sockets on single server ...
To quote you: "you don't have some God given right to the content they produce/deliver. Instead of pirating go without."

I don't understand how that fits with finishing making the list. If you can keep some pirated music around since high school, and now longer so that you can make a list, can't I download a little to see if I like it? If it's good, I'll pay to go to a concert or buy the tracks off Amazon. ":)"
If small businesses are spending time writing articles that only Google will read - they are doing it wrong.

I imagine the problem with most of these small struggling businesses isn't a bias in Google's algorithm, but rather they have entered a highly saturated market with a mundane/unmemorable/uncreative website that no one wants to visit.
I've only had two salaried jobs in the US, but both had an eight-hour workday in total with 30-60 minutes for lunch.

i.e. 9-5

I do pity fellow Americans working 8-5 or 9-6.
A Boomer rant and it's all about the "me" generation. Film at 11.
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How Google has lost control of Android
Is this really an open proxy? Or do you configure it to proxy only certain websites?
So when users purchase a device designed to consume amazon services they consume more amazon services...
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No one here even discussed the thought that musicians don't deserve to be paid. Wide-scale piracy is not a way to "stick it to the man." This is not a teen angst movement. Pirating is so massively done because it's convenient. There aren't millions of people out there who hate Sony or Virgin and download music/videos just to cause them to lose potential profits.

Juxtaposing a communication service (ATT/Comcast) to a "product" (music) is not even a valid comparison. You can't pirate ATT/Comcast; maybe you can pirate software they have developed, but that's about the extent that you can compare them.

I apologize if this is double post, my connetion cut out.
One can say that record labels brought the piracy problem on themselves by looking to create barriers to content while pirates worked to create access to content.

However, it's erroneous for an individual to argue that he has a right to pirate because the industry created barriers to their own content. It's counterproductive to the anti-censorship movement.

Instead, we should focus on the fact that the music industry has been anti-effective and is now using censorship to compensate for their reluctance to change.
Have a look at the about us page, Kaseem Dean aka Swizz Beatz is listed as CEO.

http://www.megaupload.com/?c=about
I wonder what part of this waste is from production of our cherished technological gadgets and computer equipment, replacing the gadgets of yester-year

If we're talking about waste produced in the US? Probably not a ton. There is a lot of high-tech manufacturing in the US but it's generally industrial components (airplanes, solar cells) that companies keep around until they no longer work. There's not much in the way of consumer electronics manufactured in the US.

Now if you want to talk worldwide...
http://www.megaupload.com/?c=about

Lists Swizz beats as the CEO. While to some it may seem a sound business decision, I would be hesitant to be the CEO (fall guy) for notorious criminal Kim Dotcom.
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You're absolutely right. But I made that mistake without even thinking. This is how most people work - we don't think long and hard about each word that we use, and we use (often leaky) abstractions and analogies.

This just reinforces my point - choosing to ignore people only because they use the word "stealing" is not a good idea.
And there are people using the term "steal" to carry that moral weigth into the true debate of "is copyright infringement wrong?".
How does Swizzy have the time for this? In addition to being CEO of Megaupload, he's making tracks for other artists, making tracks for himself, attending media and event appearances, touring, and maintaining a marriage and social life. It makes me feel rather lazy.
You all busy tonight? :)

I'm hosting the Hackers & Founders meetup tonight; but I'd be happy to meet and talk about this sometime soon.
This misses the fundamental difference between someone choosing to distribute their work for free, and working under false promise of financial reward.

Ignoring the condescending tone of this comment, there are many 'creators' in the world who have no desire to personally profit from their work. That is not the issue being raised.
No you didnt if you made up the bits, wrote them, and didnt copy off from a star wars DVD, and in real world once you have written the bits there is no way to know whether you copied it or wrote it by yourself so we compare it with the original and if there is an overbearing similarity then it is considered as piracy or stealing.
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The law is just a thing I follow to avoid inconvenience, when necessary. It's completely distinct from my morality. And, my morality simply does not see copying as stealing, pirating, thermonuclear mass-murder, or whatever blood curdling words you use to label it. It remains copying, and is fine.
"The company has obscene profit margins from film, I've heard quotes of around 20%"

If you are talking gross margin that sounds closer to a marginally profitable product than "obscene."
It's possible he's using the photo sharing site along with Twitter or something similar and doesn't realise that images attached to private message are still become public.
I'm not convinced that such a strict approach to securing client data is always the best policy. The clients of 37signals are not the same as the clients of tarsnap. I would think that a client of 37signals is the sort that sometimes needs the help of an admin and that often that help would require looking at the client data.

My own company will never store sensitive data with an outside firm like 37signals but that is only because we have a great IT staff. For companies that don't have an IT staff, outsourcing to 37signals makes sense and is probably worth the tradeoff to trust them with data.
Piracy isn't as desirable as a straight boycott of the parties that are currently trying to break the Internet, but at least pirates aren't feeding the beast.
Those companies deserve complete destruction for what they have done
I don't think there's a logical flaw. I think (perhaps wrongly, as pointed out in another comment) that YC pushes people to do something way beyond their reach, but then makes up for the skills gap by providing them with incredible mentoring and connections.

So basically it extends their idea reach...
Yodle: From Idea To $100 Million Dollar Company – with Court Cunningham
When someone takes his goods, he doesn't have them any more.
You can configure it for any site, see some examples here: https://all4xs.net/uncensored-website/
Is Trademark Infringement Fraud?:

http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2012/01/is-trade...
Sure, but try convincing the lawyers of that.

Everyone's got their own brand of hammer, and they're absolutely convinced that it'll hammer any kind of nail you throw at them.
Having read the article, I for one am glad they're not leaping to any conclusions without a second thought.
Death sentence for Iranian web programmer
What have they 'done'?
Now I get it, thanks.
It's called the "8-hour day", and it was the result of decades of struggle (including a lot of deaths after police/national guard intervention) from overworked factory workers and employees, in many countries.

It was established to be 9-17, historically in most countries.

There had to be some compromise, in order to co-ordinate a lot of things: the start/end of the school day. The start of services such as buses and the subway. 9 o' clock was a nice compromise.

Probably it also had something to do with, well, electric light not being available at the time (not everywhere at least). And people of course has to wake up before 9 o' clock in order to go from their home to work.

The 8 hour day was before idiocies such as "my work is my life/passion" were uttered by mere employees. It was a time that people struggled to work less and have a more balanced life.

Hackers are especially bad at understanding this, because they tend to have little personal life (citation: judging from a lot of people I know, hacker's blog posts, the typical stereotype --which must have some basis--, and most hacker's cultural artifacts), and because they work with interesting problems tend to think that everyone must equally strive to work as much as they can and that "if you love your job, you won't have to work a day in your life".

Well, it doesn't hold for most people, the very people that provide all the infrastructure you use everyday. Few ticket collectors in theaters want to work more. Few burger flippers. Few mailmen. Few policemen. Few grocery store employees. Few gas station attendants. Few pilots. Few truck drivers. Few farm workers. Few nurses. Few iPhone or Android phone builders. Few accountants. Few office workers. Few garbage collectors.
FTA: Twitter had a service that would have a terrible GC pause every three days. Solution: just bounce the machine after less than three days.

That is not what I would call a solution. It's a work-around.

And not a very good one.
What an odd and misguided rant. It's like the assholes who tell you if you don't like the laws, run for office. "What makes him "your" congressman?" Whoa. Deeeep, dude.
Whenever I see OCaml brought up, it is nearly always by Minsky. Is it that very few people use it in general? That it is particularly well suited to the problems a private hedge fund faces (oxymoron I know, but I don't know how else to describe Jane Street)? Or that Minsky just happens to be vocal in the internet circles I tend to gravitate toward?
The solution to that isn't to not fight now in hopes that more people join later in outrage. It is to use current success to push the debate onto the opponents' turf. Counter the lobbying to (over)extend copyright protection schemes with lobbying to reduce them (more narrowly tailor them), which easily reads as increasing individual freedom and the scope of the public domain. Push back.
Can you do

<span id="whatever">&nbsp;</span>

and then set width, height and background-image in the css using media queries?

I don't know whether clients will download all the images or just the one needed.
Last time I read this article, I remember my perspective of Courtney Love shifted from "Possible Murder Suspect Courtney" to "Underdog Courtney" in only a few minutes. I found the psychology of it pretty fascinating.

At the time of writing, Napster was still very much in consciousness, so, if you've become famous for something negative, get known for something people care about. She should have hammered at this drum a little louder and for a lot longer.
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Why don't you see it as immoral or stealing? These companies spend millions on these movies, countless people work on them and depend on them for their wages (not just the actors, but the support crew, the caterers, the make up artists, the lighting crew, editing, post production, script writers, casting agents, location scouts, etc etc). They then charge people a small price for the right to view their work (either in the form of a subscription to Netflix, a movie ticket, an iTunes sale, or a DVD). Yet you think it's moral and fine to have this without paying the authors?
Check out the error page :) https://all4xs.net/repress/news.ycombinator.com
I agree - I think that part about "swinging for the fences" waters down the article's message. "well of course my idea for Facebook for cats is a great idea - I've got to swing for the fences!!"... Which could be the take-a-way for some people from this very down to earth article.
He writes the descriptions, but the number is a hit counter. You'll notice that it increments over time.
Awesome. Now this is biz-dev:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IB03UBYpOFk
At first I thought: "How dare they, I'll never use Grooveshark again." Then I realized Groovshark probably has an inkling that the anonymous comment from a "former employee" is in fact some sort of astroturfing via the company suing them, so as to strengthen their case. Just my thoughts on the issue. We shouldn't be too quick to judge here, big media co's are devious bastards, no?
Comprehensions
And as always: I am around to answer questions around PyCon!
Recording companies have a monopoly on the artists they cover.

And that's the artist's choice. The artist could choose to distribute their work in some other fashion. So, if you want the artist's product, you have to buy it via the means chosen by that artist.
I agree with you but I'm voting down. There's no need to use violent rape analogies when talking about someone requiring you to activate over the phone. Turn it down a notch please.
It's not an arbitrary number - it is the hit count.
The Importance of being Connected
Thanks for the intelligent reply, Batista. Just a few nits...

The "war" ended in 1975, long after all the protesting has slowed to a crawl.

The war "officially" ended in 1975, but it really ended with de-escalation and the ending of the draft years earlier by our activism. Make no mistake about it, LBJ, one of the most powerful presidents ever, was brought to his knees, not by his political opponents, but by us. March 31, 1968 was the beginning of the end of that war.

Furthermore, people mainly protested not because the war was "illegal and immoral", but primarily because of the draft and how it affected them (or people they knew).

One of many counter-examples: the My Lai Massacre. Do you remember how aghast the American public was that things like this were happening on television almost every night "for no apparent reason"? People have always really known right from wrong. The difference is when they decide to do something about it.

Now, how about the societal change regarding the treatment of blacks? Well, that was due to their organized protests and political action (from the action around Rosa Parks to the Alabama march)

I imagine there are quite a few who would disagree with that, from the urban infernos of the late 1960's even up to today.

It was when they were actually organized, agitated, and fought (often to death)...

I think we need to sacrifice more, but I don't suggest sacrificing our lives. Ironically, mine was a generation that did sacrifice the lives of our martyrs. To this day, I often wonder how different the world would be if the opponents of change hadn't murdered JFK, MLK, RFK, or Malcom X, or crushed the lives of countless others on college campuses (Kent State, 1970), Stonewall, or in the streets of Newark, Detroit, Watts, and a hundred other places.

...to gain their labour rights...

Kinda ironic that one of the worst cripplers of today's economy are the entitlements won by the overextension of organized labor (see auto industry or almost any local government).

I'd stay and debate more, but a client just called and I'm already 27% behind quota this week. (Oh how times have changed.)