skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Just like the GPL, copyright puts conditions on the disposal of a work. There are no physical restrictions in either case, just the idea that you honour these terms.

Would you feel comfortable walking past an artist trying to graft a living selling paintings/prints in a street stall, then against his wishes take a picture of them and tell him you're going to share these with your friends so they don't have to buy his work? Does that seem honourable to you?

Also consider a situation whereby two parties had a contract dictating the terms of how some artistic work could be used. There's obviously nothing wrong with this since both parties have agreed to the contract. Then say some third party illegally acquires the work and makes it available elsewhere. Seems fair that at this point we can rely upon copyright to protect the work of citizens. Just like you have privacy rights and defamation rights and so on.
Because the US and Germany care about each others business and SOPA would make a lot of people wary of dealing with the US.
On SOPA and PIPA
I had a similar problem when doing support hosting. Static routing wasn't set up on cluster of servers and two ones with almost identical software configurations were colliding. It was particularly nasty because once you had logged in to both, you couldn't really identify which machine you were hitting.

The solution ended up being to drive to the DC, plug a monitor into the machine, and see Windows' "IP Address Conflict" dialog box on the screen >_<.
You wrote:

"Unfortunately, if we take your idea to its natural conclusion, a lot of industries that create and distribute valuable works are going to change direction or possibly split several ways."

This is not a strong argument. I could equally look at the time of the enlightenment and say "if people weren't forced to give their money to the Catholic church, think of all the lovely buildings and choral music we'd be denied. Therefore - people should be forced to give money to the church!"

In the case of copyright, you need to consider this opportunity cost. i.e. things we don't have because copyright has made them impossible. As with the church example, there is also a significant cost of freedom.

There is no demonstration that an economy with copyright is superior to an economy without copyright, and plenty of current and historical annecdotal evidence to suggest that copyright is strongly detrimental to economic success.
It was a product for IBM, a platform for NATO and the UN that consisted of several JavaScript platforms.
Could you clarify what you mean by "cold response time of 300ms"? Cold as in requesting data that hasn't yet been cached in RAM? How good does it get once the cache is warm?
Amazon DynamoDB - Internet-Scale Data Storage the NoSQL Way
imgur announces that "The Internet is on strike" https://imgur.com/
It couldn't find the representatives for my zip code, that's too bad.
>If piracy goes unchecked, over time, the perceived value of that item will go down

Do you have any evidence to support this? Both the movie [0] and gaming [1] industries are making record profits.

>Many newspapers are going out of business because you can get the exact same info for free from many other sources.

Well, not exactly. I assume you're referring to consuming news online, which is supported by advertising -- it's not "free". The decline of the newspaper has nothing to do with piracy and everything to do with the advantages of online distribution.

[0] -- http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2011/02/piracy-once-...

[1] -- http://arstechnica.com/gaming/news/2008/06/gaming-expected-t...
To use software as an example, it's much easier to improve upon someone else's work when their work is open source. You fork it and improve it -- much easier than building it from scratch. This process also aids in learning how to write good software, by becoming familiar with other people's techniques.

On the other hand, if you're afraid that using someone else's work can result in a huge fine, then you're less likely to do the project at all. If you choose to do it anyway, you'll have a lot more work to do. There is a higher barrier to entry.
https://twitter.com/#!/herpderpedia
█████ ██ ████ ███████?
> However, one could make the same argument for C++: Why Python is not a worthy competitor. Sounds silly? It is, just like the original post.

Not quite. Nobody claims that python will completely eliminate the need for C++, but there are people claiming that JS will replace flash.
NYC SOPA protest live stream
They actually point out a specific comparison to FFTW in the paper: their "preliminary implementation" is faster than FFTW for n=2^22 and k<=2^17, and they point out that this performance is a distinct advantage over previous algorithms, which were faster for only k<=2000 or so. In other words, it seems that this algorithm is faster than FFTW for a much larger number of non-zero frequencies than was previously possible.

I don't know how to estimate what values of n would be relevant for today's applications, but n=2^22≈4M doesn't seem like such a big number for images or video (if signal length roughly corresponds to number of pixels). Any thoughts?
> No, it's not.

I think you may be right, but only if you consider piracy to not be part of "the economy". My understanding at least is that it very much is.
I like this feature.

I changed my Gravatar, g+, and FB images to black squares today to solicit whys from my networks.
Seems to me the much more likely scenario is that Timeline was created to give a better (and prettier) interface for users to access the information posted to facebook - not some kind of secret psychological advertising conspiracy.
Or the Facebook Timeline is their New Coke--they can roll it out, then in a few months roll back to something similar, but not exactly the same as, the old layout.
Whats your zip code?
Brake the Internet Pirates (WSJ Op-Ed in Support of SOPA)
...and after the AOL acquisition, nothing of value was lost.
Better link: http://www.allthingsdistributed.com/2012/01/amazon-dynamodb....

This actually explains the difference between SimpleDB and DynamoDB. Interestingly, (among other things) it seems that developers complained about the need to account for eventual consistency in their application, so they're providing a consistent data store.

Doesn't that just sweep the latency tradeoff under the rug, or is flash making up the difference? What about the availability tradeoff? (I like the formulation here, consistency vs availability and consistency vs latency, as opposed to CAP which never made sense as a 3-way tradeoff: http://dbmsmusings.blogspot.com/2010/04/problems-with-cap-an...)
I have to tip my hat to any company giving away its product to support a broader cause.
I just ran across this, Lamar Smith pretty much echoing the RIAA --

Rep. Lamar Smith (R-Texas) called Wikipedia's protest a "publicity stunt" that promotes "fear instead of facts."

"Perhaps during the blackout, Internet users can look elsewhere for an accurate definition of online piracy," he said.

Full article here: http://thehill.com/blogs/hillicon-valley/technology/204749-w...
Why? Just in case, like I said. I thought I would keep record of some of the most frequent sites I visit, plus, given that my host file is pretty small nonetheless, then I would assume that DNS lookups would be faster since there will no network round trip (but I might be wrong on that one and I'm sure people will point out that it's slower, for some reason).
http://grooveshark.com not a black out, but urges you to write your representatives.
Sending faxes is a complete waste of time. Offices don't look at faxes, they are normally discarded. Send messages through the Congressional website webforms, those go to the office CRM and are tallied and usually get a response.

http://house.gov/htbin/findrep?ZIP=

http://www.senate.gov/
Has Wikipedia broken faith with users by going dark?
Apigee buys Usergrid, shifts focus to mobile
I don't buy this argument. Instead of buying a piece of music or a movie, you download it without paying, then you are in some small or large way, you are stealing it.
LightSquared accuses GPS industry of rigging the evidence
This isn't a partisan thing. Some Democrats pretend not to support SOPA/PIPA as well.
Protest SOPA by sending a fax
Grooveshark shuts down in Germany
"At Apple Everything Is A Secret"
> If something is available legally and at a reasonable price (by which I mean not only available second hand for £100 as a collectable, rather than "99p for an MP3, that's outrageous" etc...) I either buy it or accept I won't have it.

You are assuming the world is full of honorable people like yourself. Unfortunately, that's not the world we live in. In the words of Scott Adams:

"The least effective system ever invented is something called the honor system. The theory guiding this system is that people are not huge weasels."
Agreed, this is just plain awesome.
I was just talking to a friend about timeline and how hard it is to navigate. I can't even go on friends pages that use it - it's just too hard to get used to, especially when almost everyone else uses the regular interface.
Adam Lashinsky: How Apple Really Works (TCTV)
I'm very curious about this too. I posted in another thread:

"Doesn't that just sweep the latency tradeoff under the rug, or is flash making up the difference? What about the availability tradeoff? (I like the formulation here, consistency vs availability and consistency vs latency, as opposed to CAP which never made sense as a 3-way tradeoff: http://dbmsmusings.blogspot.com/2010/04/problems-with-cap-an...)

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3480805
In Face Of Protests, Congressmen Begin To Abandon SOPA Ship
A strawman argument by an Adobe shill. Javascript and V8 aren't competition because they're faster, they're worthy competition because they're fast enough for most applications.
I wouldn't be so sure about 1). JIT compilers can in principle beat AOT by taking account of runtime profiling which AOT compilers have to make guesses at. I don't know how much (if any) of this V8 does, but it's a hell of a leap to go from "static system 'a' beats dynamic system 'b'" to "all static systems of type 'A' will inevitably beat dynamic systems of type 'B'".
Ask HN: Dev w/ Journalists, how can I push them to write about SOPA and PIPA?
I'm a dev going to a online journalist meetup today, they keep telling me news orgs and journalist don't take sides. I need some help showing that it affects them.
Citi Backs Gift Card Exchange Plastic Jungle
Note, if you just go to their IP, you don't get the white-out.
> I suspect many here will find it to be a thoroughly enjoyable page-turner that they'll be unable to put down.

This was not my experience at all. The first few times I tried to read this book, I blocked out a few significant chunks of time to get through it. That never worked. As soon as I set it down (a couple hundred pages in) I wouldn't pick it up again.

However, I recently succeeded in finishing it. It took me nine months of reading a few pages in bed each night. The book was enjoyable to fall asleep to. GEB was fun and thought provoking, it taught me something about mathematics and made me think about the nature of consciousness, but it was by no means a page turner.

I'd definitely recommend reading it though. And you were spot on with this analysis:

> You just might be surprised at how non-daunting it really is [...] It requires patience, logical thinking, a good grasp of language.

I'd also add that it helps you _develop_ patience, logical thinking, and a good grasp of language =).
Presumably if your traffic is predictable you could reduce the cap during quieter periods.
Ah. Sorry, I didn't quite understand you the first time.

Maybe life did form much faster under certain conditions.

You mean multicellular life here, obviously. Yeah, as the experiment shows, it probably did form fast under the right conditions. It's all about genes. If being a part of a multicellular organism allows one cell's genes to spread more rapidly, than that cell is going to have an incentive to be in a group.
While an interesting theory (I should read the book), how are you certain that system 2 comes online when viewing the timeline?
How to make Wikipedia work today
DynamoDB and SimpleDB are also a lot simpler than SQL databases. As far as I can tell, DynamoDB is a key/value DB with support for ranges and MapReduce, and not dissimilar to other NoSQL databases like Riak.

There may be instances where large datasets are hard to migrate from DynamoDB, but overall it doesn't look to me like lock-in would be that much of a problem, assuming you have a decent abstraction layer.
Hi - I'm Josh - the guy behind Stop SOAP.

There is no political intent behind this site. It is meant to be a joke. A joke with a grain of truth.

Backstory: I was waiting for a conference call, saw that stopsoap wasn't registered and put this together in 15min.

Deeper backstory: I'm the co-founder & CEO of Simple.com. We deal with many SOAP APIs. The upside is that SOAP provides very clear specifications as to how the API is supposed to work. The downside, is that things rarely work as expected. It is frustrating, but such is life in banking.

On a more serious note, We're Hiring. If you'd like to work at Simple, where we replace you bank & give you clean REST APIs to your finances, check us out: http://simple.com
Not to quote the watchmen, but who repairs the repair?

I am kind of Knuth with this who seems to day that this whole parallelization/multicore stuff may be a result of the failure of imagination on the part of the hardware designers.
Windows is 50M, Android 12M

IIRC in webOS a substantial portion of the user-land utilizes JavaScript, as a whole one could surmise that they constitute modular parts of an overall system. I do not know what the TLoc on webOS is, but I would assume that it would have to be in the ball park of large. I think it is as valid as the total line count of windows or android it is also the problem with looking at these things from just a TLoc perspective.

Static typing evangelists seem to have a blind spot: they persistently tend to assert that you can't write good and large dynamic codebases.

Thanks you probably summed up my post better than I did.
Now you're just arguing for the sake of arguing.

city41 wrote "If they are not willing to pay for it, then they have no right to enjoy it." in the context that "it" is copyrighted work that is offered for sale, not just anything. You know it as well as everyone here.

But I do believe that if somebody has something you want and they only offer to you for a price (be it money or otherwise), you don't have a right to it for free, pretty much whatever "it" is. (assuming they have the right to that control in the first place obviously) See biot's comment for eloquent point-by-point explanation.
Disk Storage Market Has Its Worst Days Ahead
Like you mentioned, that in your experience it leave you groggy, personally I think this depends on the person and how their body reacts to beer. I've found that one beer (500 ml) at least an hour or two before sleep doesn't leave me groggy in the morning at all. If I drank beer right before sleep that probably wouldn't work well.
NY Tech Meetup Emergency SOPA Meeting [Live Blog]
With Today's Protests, SOPA Becomes a Mainstream Issue
True, but I then see this as a step backwards vs SimpleDB's pricing model.
The Expert Javascript Programmer
20001? :)
There's sort of a force multiplier with Google protesting online. It's that Google also has lobbyists who are pointing out and explaining the online protests to legislators.
Would be interested in details about any with Strong Consistency, decent replication across fault areas, which get the same level of performance (single digit ms) at a cost equivalent to dynamodb.

Quite a lot can be done with smart use of hugely scalable simple key-value maps.
Having followed the changes in their platform for years that doesn't seem to be the case. It s probably somebody new wanting to try some new idea. Zynga does have an optimization engine in place, Facebook does trial and error too much: profile boxes, tabs, no boxes, top stories etc, it's just pointless variations of a newsfeed.
How do their weights compare?

If the new stuff is the same weight by volume as conventional laminated glass, then you'd have a 50% weight savings.

If the new stuff is thinner, and lighter, then it'd be useful for applications where the current glass is too thick and/or heavy.

Also, in applications like secure windows for bank tellers and such, something thinner would probably be better aesthetically. When you're dealing with someone behind a thick sheet of glass, it puts a different tone on the interaction.
I think it's mostly just because they've always done it that way. It does give a chance for the movies to circulate to the lesser theatres that didn't get it in the first weeks of the run, without them having to compete with the rental and streaming market, but now with digital distribution it's not even like there's a limit on the number of celluloid copies anymore.
I like the new Timeline feature but the inability for me to switch to some sort of "old" view when I just want to see a perfect list of updates without any fancy grouping an annoyance. For casual use the Timeline is good but it leaves a lot to be desired when I want to see everything.
Not sure if troll...
But it's not a better and prettier interface. It's just awful. Granted, the only ads that appear on a Timeline page are in a narrow column off to the side (I didn't even know there were any ads until I specifically checked for them after reading this article), so I'm not sure how valid this conspiracy theory is. But it doesn't change the fact that Timeline looks horrible.
I see your point, but I think it is mainly because they don't want Wikipedia/etc to be de-indexed and not be #1 hit for EVERYTHING anymore. This protest is exactly that, a protest, a mere emulation of what could happen.

It's not about pretending the web is normal, its about ensuring that everything is back to normal tomorrow.
LetMeBeta - Show and Tell for Your Projects/Startup
That's pretty nasty, hence why I always set different wallpapers & motd files on each server I run! :)
RecordSetter: Invent world records
I love the timeline layout.. id rather scroll easily through stuff from a couple of years ago and get a good overview of what I was doing than go through photo galleries I have on my PC with no context or further information.
It has its rough edges, but I have to say that scrolling down the Timeline is a more personal and emotional experience than can be found anywhere else.
Microsoft introduces Xbox-like achievements for developers
> Of course you can promise types to the JS engine.

Because a variable can always change types, it's actually trivially proven that in a dynamically-typed language, there will always be programs in which the type cannot be inferred.
Interesting. I've a friend in Australia who's been doing some work analysing rainfall using arrays of wire across long distances (details somewhere here: http://wiredlab.org/), and during a recent conversation he pointed me at this paper: http://www.icita.org/icita2004/abstracts/128-5.htm which seems to use another method (involving Primes) for calculating Fourier Transforms, and claims a 95% speed up.

Sadly I haven't had a chance to look into it in any great detail yet, although it's "in the queue" of things to poke at. I thought it worth pointing out in case anyone else might find it useful.
Clay Shirky: Defend our freedom to share (or why SOPA is a bad idea)
Not having read the book, may I ask why is the formatting (not the illustrations, that's kind of obvious) so important?
I think the formulation that "the smartest people in the world are working hard to come up with ways to get you to click on ads" is awfully reductive. Reading Steven Levy's In the Plex really gave me a sense of what the people at Google are actually about, and it's not just making money. There's a somewhat naive idealism at work that you can judge however you want, but you should acknowledge its existence.

While I tend to give the people at Facebook less credit, I do think there's a similar idealism at the core of the project. But I think they're fundamentally undermining human connection in many subtle ways that I've written about on my blog. Specifically, and more to the point, I think Timeline undermines the human intimacy of private sharing for the benefit of public performance.

http://blog.byjoemoon.com/post/10755504272/intimacy-and-perf...
I don't understand your argument or what you are saying is wrong.

Rights are a legal limitation on the actions of others, not a physical limitation. They exist to limit people from doing what they otherwise "can" do to you in the physical world.

You have physical property rights so people cannot enter your home when you are at work and take your television. That is enforced through the law not the Fort Knox security that you might have.

If you have travelled to countries without rule of law you will understand what it means in practice when this right is not strong. Fences, security guards, and metal cages inside your house in every middle class home.
I posted a comparison to Cassandra here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3480480
The Oatmeal's awesome SOPA/PIPA Blackout
Flipped Classrooms Give Every Student A Chance To Succeed
I just looked up the author. Here's his Linkedin http://www.linkedin.com/in/achaudhuri

July 2010 – Present (1 year 7 months)
specification, design, and implementation of ActionScript

Well, that explains a lot now, doesn't it?
Has Wikipedia broken faith with users by going dark?

No.

[T]o shutter Wikipedia — a crowd-funded international encyclopedia — in protest of a single national issue is even worse.

Referring to SOPA/PIPA as a "national" issue is glib or ill-informed. A disproportionate amount of Internet infrastructure is located in the United States and thus our laws have disproportionate impact on the Internet. It is not just websites in the United States that would be affected.

Moreover, this protest is limited to English Wikipedia and, I believe, only visitors from the United States.
Advances in Dataﬂow Programming Languages
Make no mistake. The entire site blocking mechanism of this legislation was always intended to target foreign websites. The broad overreaching scope that ignores due process and the DNS provisions, the part everyone has been mad and vocal about are the products of this. But the intent has always been to stop foreign sites.

The Pirate Bay has been the slipperiest fish to tangle with. Every attempt they have made to stop or block it, including alleged manipulation and influence of Swedish courts and law have failed. Because it's a foreign website and we have no jurisdiction over it. So they crafted this law with the intent to have the ability to block Americans from viewing it within America. The way it's worded, it's able to block anything else, too.

So since the outcry and the backlash, they have shifted their narrative to explicitly spotlight those dirty evil foreign interests. But I don't believe for a second that it was never the original goal.
True, it's pay-for-capacity and that's worse for the user. On the flip side, the constant factor seems to be about 20x cheaper (caveat: this is based on my personal experience with SimpleDB; since Amazon doesn't seem to explain how "box usage" is computed, I don't know how broadly applicable my experience is).

The big plus for Capacity Units is that Amazon actually provides a deterministic model for figuring out what you'll be charged for a given query.
Isn't this the basis of "disruption"? Change the format and you cause people to look more closely at something. Users will get used to timeline and they'll have to change again. Also I'm skeptical of the statement "facebook will be changing the way our brains process advertising".