skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Most of the calls to boycott companies seem pretty poorly organized (even this article is just a list on some guy's website, albeit one with moderate internet popularity).

What about an app entirely dedicated to organizing boycotts? Users would suggest and vote on issues and companies to boycott. The end result would be detailed guides on which products/service to avoid along with alternatives. The site would only highlight one issue at a time to maximize the effect.

I've been toying with the idea for a while (there are plenty of sites/apps built around single issues, but I've only found one site that does what I've described... though poorly implemented: http://www.boycottowl.com/ ).
About as poor a post on piracy as the rest of them - not dealing with half the issues. You could have just posted this in one of the previous threads.
Honestly, on that issue I don't think it happened that way. They were doing great with stem cell research and abortion- especially late-term. In fact, I frankly think gay marriage took DC by surprise. At first it was, "Oh, that's just Massachusetts. I'm surprised California doesn't have it." And then they realized it was a "serious" issue.

My personal perspective, having lived in the DC area most of my life and moving to MA shortly after (or was it just before? I don't remember), is that yeah, I was a little worried about how to explain it to my young kids. Turned out not to matter. I personally don't think the government should give a rat's ass who you love.
> I already find myself losing motivation and taking 2-3x longer to get anything done.

> have had maybe 7 days off in 18 months

For me the most depressing situation is not designating blocks of time as work or play exclusively. It means you end up procrastinating when you should be working, and feeling guilty when you should be having time off.

I'm speculating based on the above two quotes, but are you experiencing something similar? I can imagine it would be hard to have any guilt-free play at all with the spectre of unpaid bills over your head.

Still, I humbly suggest that you schedule at least one day off (and plan it, like, 13:00 - 15:00 - play playstation, 15:00 - 17:00 - walk in the park etc, so your mind doesn't naturally wander to work or mire itself in guilt). This won't make you feel any less depressed, but might give you the emotional resources to rambo through any tasks you've been avoiding.

P.S. Have you considered hiring a VA to send your late paying clients a weekly polite and friendly reminder to pay up?
In Denmark it's 42 days ~ 6 weeks:

http://www.nationmaster.com/graph/lab_vac_min_vac_tim_aro_th...
Mind can control allergic response
A Boilerplate Builder for Three.js
I strongly believe that the following excerpt from the article directly applies to any line of work including software development:

"I don’t know if an artist can last by meeting the current public taste, the taste from the last quarterly report. I don’t think you can last by following demographics and carefully meeting expectations. I don’t know many lasting works of art that are condescending or deliberately stupid or were created as content.

Don’t tell me I’m a brand. I’m famous and people recognize me, but I can’t look in the mirror and see my brand identity.

Keep talking about brands and you know what you’ll get? Bad clothes. Bad hair. Bad books. Bad movies. And bad records. And bankrupt businesses. Rides that were fun for a year with no employee loyalty but everyone got rich fucking you. Who wants that? The answer is purity. We can afford it. Let’s go find it again while we can."
His point is that even if you, and all other households managed to get their waste to 0% (unlikely), that still only would make 3% difference in the total amount. Which is better than nothing but still only a drop in the bucket.
The only problem I have with this article is this line:

"since when does that suddenly mean that you can decide that you are no longer going to pay for products that both legally and morally you are obliged to pay for, yet still use them?"

Legally obliged to pay for? Yes.

Morally? No. I have no moral problem with piracy. Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. Those are the foundations of my morality. I would love it if people pirated things I made. That's my morality.
Twitter to uncap retweet_count
Yes most of the things written in this article is not based on facts. Your guess might be true.
Leap minutes seem like the simplest option to me, if keeping synchronisation with sunrise/set is really that important.
Perhaps this is not in response to Idan Gazit’s complaint http://gazit.me/2012/01/09/Twitter-documentation-fail.html, but the timing is certainly interesting.
"Kodak spent a century making the very best film it possibly could (for the professional lines, anyway) when it turns out the market is perfectly happy with a 4 MP digital with a mediocre lens and chromatic abberation out the arse if it cuts the feedback loop down from days to seconds."

Which is exactly the same phenomenon that occurred with music. The industry kept moving to better and better formats, only to be confounded that people didn't mind lower quality lossy compressed mp3s with swishy sounding hi-hats.
Wall Street Journal calls Eric Ries a cult
That is indeed exactly what Fin is. The first n natural numbers is a finite set of n elements after all.

Ah, right! I must admit that it feels like an odd definition to me indeed. I see how "the first n natural numbers" is a finite set of n elements, but I don't see how the reverse is true. I mean, look here, a finite set of n elements: {1, 1, 1, 1}. 4 elements, and they're all valued 1. They're also not ordered. So your concept of taking an element from a finite set (in this case, let's say, 1, or maybe 1 instead) to uniquely identify an element in a vector sounds a bit odd to me :-)

Clearly, I'm the noob here, and maybe in this stage Idris just isn't meant for people not on Lambda the Ultimate, but if not, it's good that you intend do something about it :-)

Cause once again, I love the concept, and I'd love to program with this.
35 hour working week where I am at the moment. I've also worked a 37.5 week and a 40 hour week.

Looks like average is 37.5 in the UK. Some stats about Europe in this article:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/markets/2795641/Britons-w...
Congrats! Looking forward to seeing more great things from your new company!
The STOP SOPA ribbon
Woot! Congratulations, good things to come!
Explain what to your young kids? People loving eachother should be allowed together or why your government is sometimes quite insane? I would think the second one is more of a worry to explain to your young kids... But dad, why do we live here if you think 'those morons cannot do anything right'? :)
Internet Addiction Shows Up In the Brain
Work Your Proper Hours: A Campaign Against Unpaid Overtime
Relativism and Language
Problems in life are typically not math problems - they usually are complex situations with multiple solutions that have numerous impacts with degrees of good and bad.

Like maths problems.
Startups: How To Get Started
"Paralympics will be this exciting human-machine sport like race-car driving"
Or commercial in general. Offices, small businesses, etc.
Why, How, What: A Brilliant Model for Success
The set {1, 1, 1, 1} has only one element, 1.
Peecho Lands $750,000 For Its ‘Cloud Print Button’
Former Google CIO Raises $73M To Reform Payday Loans w/Startup ZestCash
> you're deluding yourself with semantics.

Please elaborate. Where does my statement conflict with reality?

> It's the real thing

It's already a copy of a copy of an edit of an edit of a copy a magnetic tape in someone's camera.

> and I took it.

You copied it. If you insist on calling it "take" or "steal" you must accept that you took or stole games from steam after purchasing then.

> but if you think the pirate bay is about 'imitation'

I didn't even mention Pirate Bay.

> When I download my series of the pirate bay

You don't. You download them directly off hundreds of other people across the world. TPB just gives you the list of people.

When you go to a restaurant, do you say that you sit at the waiter and eat forks?

Clean semantics, and not confusing the medium with the object, are crucial for discussion.
Cataract in a gravitational lens may be a tiny galaxy
It is easier to steal a Twinkie than it is to wait in line and have to pay for it, and then wait for your change. Then you have all those damn coins in your pocket...
Science Online: how to deal with science going digital
Amazon launches NoSQL-as-a-Service with DynamoDB
You missed his argument. What is it when someone steals his (extremely cheap to produce) goods?
tl;dr: the patriarchy.

For the real reasons you'd want to look to the industrial revolution and Taylorism.

PS. Women we're allowed to work when we standardized start times so everyone would arrive at their station at the right time. You can't run a mill with only half the workforce, so during the industrial revolution it was extremely important for everyone to show up on time. That's the real reason and it has nothing to do with men's inputs and everything to do with the needs of the means of production. Before that you started work as the sun rose because we had no need for standardized start times.

The 9 to 5 thing is more an evolution of a whole bunch of inputs, the final input being primarily Henry Ford and the 8 hour day / 40 hour work week that finally allowed everyone to actually consume all the goods they were producing. That is up until now when production has again outstripped consumption.

PPS. I really get annoyed with revisionist feminist history.
Road Safety Agency Is Urged to Add Expertise in Electronics Systems
Lessig: Republic, Lost: How Money Corrupts Congress—and a Plan to Stop It
Oh fuck. Bags and sets.

I'm an idiot!

And that only 3 years out of university :-(
If you're using bootstrap, it's even better to use less; it includes a load of mixins for things like border-radius etc.

Just @include "bootstrap.less" at the top of your less file, add your rules below and compile just your less file using lessc. Easy.
Here's how you explain it to your kids: "Mummy and Daddy love one another very much, and so do lots of other people. Men love women, some men love other men, some women love other women. And when they love each other enough, they commit to being with that person for the rest of their lives and get married."

I'm not totally sure how a conversation like that means - as some same-sex marriage opponents seem to think - that one has to start describing the intricacies of sex, anal or otherwise.

I do think it's utterly disappointing that the primary reason people seem to think that denying same-sex partners from getting married is because they are too much of a pussy to explain to their kids that gay people exist and can love one another.
Running Mongodb on Azure and connect from a node web app
Huh. Looking at statistics from Germany, the total waste is seperated into four categories: waste from building demolition and construction, waste from industrial processes, waste from mining, waste from private households and offices. Waste from demolition and construction makes up more than half of the total waste, the remaining three categories are split about evenly.

I'm surprised that the construction waste is that high. Apart from that, it seems that manufacturing and construction waste is less dominant over here than it is in the US. Odd! Maybe I'm reading the numbers wrong or they're counting really differently. FWIW, Wikipedia says that the per capita waste amount is about 500 kg, referring to just the category of private households/offices I assume.

Ref: http://www.bmu.de/files/pdfs/allgemein/application/pdf/abfal... (German)
They started as a consumer comany, indeed they invented consumer photography with the box brownie. So moving away from that was hard.
It's unfortunate that the companies he outlines to boycott (the ones marked in yellow) are the ones with the most legitimate complaints about counterfeiting.

The word "piracy" is unfortunate, mixing up Hollywood's complaints about bit-for-bit originals being available, and, for example, Chanel's complaint about fake Chanel being manufactured and sold "mail-order" online through offshore commerce sites.

Chanel and the like do need (but already have) protection by the law against counterfeit sales. They don't have a right to be protected for legacy distribution models. For example, Chanel shouldn't have a right to a law that says since existing Chanel stores only ship UPS Ground, any store shipping FedEx Overnight should be taken offline.

A bill for "Stop Counterfeiting" would be better focused on the actual problem, instead of stigmatizing the medium or channel ("online").
Your math is right, except you missed a factor for Dynamo - Unit size.

http://aws.amazon.com/dynamodb/#pricing

If your txns are all within 1KB, your math holds good; otherwise, you pay more. Interesting model, but I suspect it'll average out to similar costs.
I think the issue is actually harder to explain when homosexuality is seen as wrong. I mean, if any two given people are allowed to be married, then you just explain it as something that two people do when they love each other very much. If same sex couples aren't allowed to marry normally, then you have to get into the why of the issue, which eventually would boil down to some people not being okay with what same sex couples do with each other in bed.
To Catch a Spammer
My thoughts exactly. You can't force a privately-owned company to sell you the product the way you want it to be sold. It's their right to make money the way they see fit, and if they decide it's okay for them to lose some of the clientele over DRM, it's their choice.

Piracy in the name of protesting against DRM is borderline hypocrisy. As others already said, morality is subjective, but here are two other ways I'd personally support :

- don't use the product,

- pay for the license, pirate the product, get it touch with the company to explain your problem to them.
That's a disheartening story.

"You can know the name of a bird in all the languages of the world, but when you're finished, you'll know absolutely nothing whatever about the bird. So let's look at the bird and see what it's doing — that's what counts. I learned very early the difference between knowing the name of something and knowing something." — Richard Feynman

I guess the effect you're describing could've been multiplied if SOPA had been a backronym too. "USA PATRIOT Act? How could that be bad! Just look at its name!"
Same for the two weeks notice before leaving. In France it can be up to 3 months notice.
Ex-Apple boss Sculley sets record straight on Jobs
<BabyBoomerRant>

I love this post and I'll tell you why...

I understand that my age puts me in the minority here at Hacker News, but anyone who has ever followed anything I've said here knows that I really believe that's just a detail, not a real issue...I don't care as much about who you are as what you do and how you treat others.

I grew up in the U.S. in the 1960's and it was a very different time for all kinds of reasons. The biggest difference of all had little to do with money, technology, or superficial lifestyle; it had to do with state of mind. Like all young generations, we were confused and didn't understand why things were the way they were. So, with lots of energy and spare time, we took action...

We protested, we marched, we did whatever we thought it took to affect change. We took the side of the oppressed: blacks, women, gays, the poor and homeless, the environment, and most of all, we protested an illegal and immoral war. We ended the war and we changed the world.

It's great to see that some things haven't changed: young people still find a way to channel their resources to try to make things better, but here's the problem: All I see with this worldwide Occupy movement is people complaining, "Where's mine?" It seems like it's all about "me", not "us".

That's why these SOPA protests are so refreshing to me. It's the first thing I've noticed in years that reminds me of my youth, not so much in action, but in spirit. People have taken a few minutes to stop worrying about themselves to do something about the greater good for all of us.

But the spirit of modern times prevents us from doing enough. We will take action so long as it doesn't cost us too much. Where is the sacrifice? Where is the "put your money where your mouth is"? I love the way OP points this out.

I'm proud of Wikipedia. Craigslist came close, forcing its users to work to get to their local pages. But too many, like Google, just wimped out. All their black banner said was, "We care, but not that much."

Listen to OP! For just a few minutes, fuck the "stake holders", the "money managers", the "players", the "metrics", the "ROI", and the "bottom line". Can't we just once pretend that it's 1968, and stop giving a shit about ourselves long enough to realize that a couple of extra bucks today will soon be worthless in a world going to shit if we don't do something about it? Only when we demonstrate the passion that comes from true sacrifice will the "normals" really take notice.

</BabyBoomerRant, TimeForMaalox>
I'll pick mild bugs once a century over milder bugs every couple years.
Well, you don't really have an alternative for that (short of writing your rendering code with the NDK, as I ended up doing).

The overhead of all the crap I had to do just to get coordinates from Java to OpenGL was downright ridiculous.
Agreed. The problem is that the proposed changes are really big changes considering the size of the infrastructure you are trying to change. Like most things, change requires time to cultivate and raising awareness is just as important as taking active action. There is after all strength in numbers. One person vehemently protesting is not better than thousands of slacktivists.

It more or less comes down to a numbers game. Not everyone will proactively go out of their way to take action (or will only do the very minimum, like changing their profile picture). To expect everyone to be proactive is unrealistic. The advantage that awareness gives is that it reaches out to the masses potentially hitting those who have the aptitude and attitude to take firm action. You reach enough of those people and over time influence starts to propagate upward throughout the entire structure -- but again, that takes time. People and the structures they live within are not changed over night.
Streaming Video Fills Hole Left by TV in China
I live in Rochester, and have had the chance to speak with several people who worked for Kodak (and some still do) about this issue. The company has obscene profit margins from film, I've heard quotes of around 20% and higher, and there was a belief that film would always be around. However, many people within the company knew film had a limited lifespan and that with the advent of personal computers, it was only a matter of time before digital took over. They also knew there was no way Kodak was going to be able to make the same profit margins on digital as it did on film. With that in mind, it made it a hard sell to get leadership to really focus on the long term..
SOPA Bill Faces New Hurdles as Hollywood Loses the Story
Stopping SOPA isn't meaningless. Hopefully it'll give people pause before they try again.

But, yes, Americans, you desperately need to fix your money-in-politics problem. That's the underlying issue for all this shit.
Supreme Court rules Congress can re-copyright public domain works
All good until your clients want it to behave the same in IE. Then you have to do ten times the work (hash changes, jQuery animations to replace CSS transitions, etc.)

http://www.nma.gov.au/av/portmacquarie/

Still, the end results are sweet.
Agree, but Amazon's CTO said something different, hence my question.
Looks to me like they're all base64. Jsdo allows file uploads, so I'm assuming that (outside of novelty), the animations may not execute properly if the images aren't loaded. Using base64 ensures the images are loaded before the keyframe anims are rendered.
I hit exactly the same problem in an old job I had. We had flexi-time and most people would work 10am - 6pm or so yet I decided to work 7am - 3pm.

The same hours, the same amount of work but you should see peoples faces when you walk out the office at 3pm...
RePress - Uncensor Any Website With This Wordpress Plugin
Well, Wikipedia is a non-profit and is limited in the political action it can take. We're also non-partisan, and endorsing particular candidates is bad.
Nice sentiment, but I think boycotts are way less effective than many of the alternatives he discards. In this system, you change a congressman's mind and there's only two ways to do that: pour on the outrage, or contribute more money.

Tongue in cheek, I think there is another alternative: the tech industry could simply buy the movie companies. Some of them are certainly sitting on enough cash.
Syracuse U. Won't Expel Grad Student Over Facebook Posting
This, besides websockets, is probably the coolest thing I've seen yet. I can' wait to get my mind wrapped around this so I can experiment with this concept. Perhaps, I can make something useful.
In the UK and most of Europe it's usually 9-5. The US likes to stretch out the workday to get more out of its wage slaves :)
The 6.001 lab didn't have color monitors, and the software was only available in the 6.001 lab -- not even on Athena. Well, in 1988, anyway.
If you went directly to each site, there was no indication of a SOPA protest. The Google+ version of the logo wasn't even blacked out.
Switching from dlvr.it to ifttt.com
It's theft but extremely cheap is not the same as free.
SOPA/PIPA and If only Ted Stevens were still with us.
Evan Ratliff of The Atavist – Building Software to Tell Stories
Nice. Any reason you're setting "Cache-Control: max-age=0, no-cache, no-store"? (or that could be the proxy server here)
NY Sen. Gillibrand Has Heard You on SOPA/PIPA, and …Doesn’t Really Care?
Viral Video of You Being Stupid in Public: No Violation of Privacy, Court Rules
Fortunately, I was not encumbered by any feelings of "wrongness" or "immorality" or any fear that my kids would "catch it." That's why it totally turned out to be a non-issue. In fact the kids probably ended up explaining it to each other, in the very few cases where it occurred that somebody in a class had same-sex parents.
Hm.. this article is mental slavery.

Also it misses the point that some laws are passed being backed up by well-paid lies. So breaking the law can no longer be any moral issue.

Example:
* speed limits
* never-ending copyright
* exporting cryptography
The Occupy movement is about exactly the opposite of "me." It is primarily about the growing disparity in wealth and power, and how that disparity hurts everyone (including the 1%). A little disparity is fine. It gives us something to aspire to. Occupy's message is that the balance of wealth and power has shifted too far away from the reach of aspirations.
What surprised me most about the article is that Lawrence Golan, one of the plaintiffs, implied that his orchestra had not been paying licensing fees for works by Prokofiev and Shostakovich. Are they really playing from unedited copies of the original manuscript?

For those unfamiliar, in the classical music world, musicians almost always play from editions of the original work. Those editions are eligible for copyright protection as derivative works of the original. As a result, if you perform a Kalmus edition of a work by Bach, you would owe Kalmus royalties, even though the original work by Bach is in the public domain.

Obviously, since much of the classical music repertoire was composed before 1923, anyone is free to make their own editions of popular works, provided they have access to the actual original. In practice, however, very few do. This is because creating a definitive edition of a musical work without misprints is painstaking work that requires considerable amounts of time and expertise.