skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
If you have half an hour left watch the following video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xLEe496IS1o
Errol Morris interviews the notorious NYC lawyer Murray Richman. In the end you will realize, that it is all about the "asshole" factor and very little about actual laws.
Show HN: Automatic feedback on your LinkedIn profile
Megaupload is Swizz based, and it went down.
Late Night: Jon Stewart says SOPA would 'break the Internet'
I think you're being downvoted because you're making a very similar argument to "if you have nothing to hide you have nothing to fear". The only circumstance where the bank would find a dead body in a vault is one where they open every vault just in case.
I should clarify - it's cheaper than a wildcard cert. It also makes it really easy for us to get private label resellers up and running.
Now we just need iTunes U for Linux... Or better yet, the universities using it should provide the lectures in some open format as well.
I guess the dream of a fully EPUB 3 standards compliant authoring tool was too good to be true. The devil is in the CSS.
That is true. Think about how hard it is to find the right person to date and then marry. In the business world that is exactly what is happening. If the founders don't feel support and connection the way that best helps them, then even the best people will ultimately find it difficult to succeed.

It is why even the very best of entrepreneurs have failure. The relationships matter, it is one of YC's guiding principles.
Machine Learning on the Cheap and Easy
Just in case you're not noticing it (and I can understand why you wouldn't), your involvement on this topic pretty much consists of:

- offering an argument,
- being shown how it is flawed, and then
- ignoring the explanation you were just given, to fall back on a variant of "copying is free".

I think a lot of us readers would prefer it if you engage the arguments given to you.
It is interesting the number of arguments around the lock-in factor and how it is great for Apple at the expense of everybody else. The fact is that the format underneath should be ePub3 with extras. ePub3 (with various extras) is and be available on various platforms.

For a traditional publisher to switch to a digital/interactive workflow is a lot of hard-core changes. Target platform and the part of the workflow Apple has has announced is - probably - not that big. They will have a lot more issues around decided the type of content to migrate, kinds of assets/widgets to use, information design of an interactive eBook, firing the track driver company, etc.

If somebody later provides a good alternative technological solution, the change required would be on the last 20% of the production pipeline. And several companies tried to provide a solution earlier, they just did not catch on because they did not have enough of a pieces to make it compelling (enTourage eDGe anyone?).

Of course, in a meanwhile, Apple will massively benefit from the early bird factor and may create de-facto lock-in by just being the first to actually offer a good solution (which includes democratization of the publishing tools by making the Author application free). This was the payoff of all the costs that went into making iPhone, the developers went to it, therefore the iPad already had huge momentum behind it from day one. Now Author builds on iPad's momentum.

But that's different from a real lock-in, such as Windows (temporarily) not sharing the details on how to make a browser to be default and making IE browser a default for all web-related stuff. Or the lock-in of the secure boot.
Like the War on Drugs, it's almost quaint how the US government either isn't aware, or doesn't care that they're playing a game of whack-a-mole. As long as the the bureaucracy is strengthened, and the lobbyist checks keep rolling in, and everyone keeps their jobs, then everything is good.
How is ~420 acquisitions a year in a large industry amazing? Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Amazon and Cisco probably average over 100 a year between them and they are unlikely to be 25% of the tech industry total. Simple's blog post, at least, doesn't say how many small banks existed in 1980 or 1998 so we have no idea how this changed the small bank landscape. Oddly it does say that the number of large banks declined by 50% but I bet a lot of that was taking over failing banks.
Why would it have been a better outcome if the same number of people had paid for the game and only 10% as many people got to play? It wouldn't have been better for the game-makers and it would have been far worse for the population.
> It is, pure and simple, a piracy site full of pirated material.

Yes, but it was also full of absolutely legal content uploaded by law-abiding users. Many people don't have the expertise needed to set up a file server and not everything is small enough to be attached to an e-mail.

> I am also astounded that people on HN are calling this a legitimate business.

As I understand, they had problems of DMCA compliance. If you subtract the illegal files, theirs is a perfectly legal and quite useful business.
Great article, I think that one of the biggest barriers to people becoming entrepreneurs is the failure to grasp the fact that there is a vast spectrum in the skills (technical or otherwise) needed to get a business off the ground.

However, while I agree with your point that "I'm looking for the right cofounder" is really only an excuse covering up either a reluctance to jump in or an idea out of reach, there comes a point in any business (Maybe once you come up against an unforeseen technical problem, difficulty securing partnerships, ), when it becomes necessary to bring great people on board in at a co-founder level who complement your skills and make up for your shortcomings. The key here is having access to the right people, so that you don't have to "look" for the right people.

I think that in this case what determines your ability to recruit the best people comes from your "Network reach" which varies from person to person, but is something that must be cultivated as diligently as technical knowledge or business knowledge, by maintaing the right relationships, associating yourself with the right communities and groups, connecting people with each other, and carefully training yourself to recognize and maximize opportunity when it arises.
Does anyone else find it suspicious that Swizz Beatz was announced as CEO and 24 hours later there is an FBI crackdown? It seems like he is a patsy in this situation...
> There was a deposit paid by the families.

What if the family can't pay the deposit?

And I'm not necessarily suggesting that the student or the students family is stealing it. How tempting would a room full of iPads be to a thief? Or how about a group of teenagers at a bus stop / at the mall / somewhere not watching their backpacks?

> Anecdotal, I realize.

All I have is speculation, so I think an anecdote is acceptable :)
Right. I'm a language teacher and I don't get paid when a student gets a job and uses something I taught him.

I also don't get paid if that student becomes a language teacher and reuses lesson ideas he got from me.
As stated in your parent and elsewhere, Mega rarely responded to DMCA requests.
How do you say that you actually have this skill on a resume without sounding like a pompous d-bag?
What is this, a joke?
Kinda proves that SOPA, PIPA etc aren't really needed...
That doesn't mean you'll know the nuances of the situation if you've not done VC raising before. Nuances and confidence come from previous successful experiences. To bring this back to the article - of course a VC would prefer someone who has experience, and who of course will be easier to talk to then. It looks to be more closely aligned with if people know how to execute or how much experience they have with doing so, taking and processing information. Personally, I'm not good processing information and acting on it quickly - some of it, sure, but it takes time for certain types of information to sit. Sometimes I'm sure I overthink what needs to be done, instead of just initiating and playing off of what happens.
Now if people believe that anyone should be allowed to set up a site, fill it with full length DVD rips,and then charge $10 a month for access then no wrong has been committed. But I think most right-minded people would say that is wrong - otherwise we'd all be doing it.

Just not true. I don't think there is anything wrong with videotaping police going about their business (without breaking any other laws, hindering them at their job, and such), but you WILL NOT find me doing it in my home state (Illinois) due to such actions being zealously prosecuted felonies. Many other people agree with me here. A cost/benefit analysis making me choose not to do an action is much different than me thinking that action is wrong.
Best Free Instant Messaging iOS Apps
Haha, just won- and the algorithm happened to be one that was posted on the front page of HN earlier this week! It just goes to show, there's no reason to get work done when you can be reading articles on HN- it could turn out to be important.

But I have to say, I haven't heard of Quixey before- it looks like they're building a search engine for software. Are they just trying to replace platform-specific app markets, or is it something trickier than that?
the indictment alleges that the conspirators would disable only a single link to the file, deliberately and deceptively leaving the infringing content in place

I might be reading too much into this, but to me this sounds like ten people uploaded the same movie (maybe with different filenames, maybe different encodings/file formats), the DMCA request only named one of these files, and MegaUpload removed only that one file.

(I know the quote says "link" not "copy" but it wouldn't be the first time people get confused over the distinction.)

If so, this sets a dangerous precedent for other (maybe more legitimate) file sharing sites: firstly, if you host millions of files, detecting which files are copies of another file, or deciding which filenames are similar to other filenames, is not a trivial task. Secondly, as far as I understand the DMCA, it doesn't even require you to go to these lengths.

Of course, I might be totally off base and they might really have kept the very same file in place and just removed a link to it on some pages while keeping the link on others.

Does anyone know more details about this?
Elsewhere in the thread, people are saying MU was from Hong Kong.

Where do you see it as Swiss?
Good thing we had SOPA/PIPA to enable this legal action. Whew.
Read again, I didn't say you couldn't call the pirate an asshole. But in this article, and in many others, this is presented as an argument and not as the insult/opinion it is.

Besides, more often than not these terms are not set by the author of the work, but by for example a music label. Most artists of popular contemporary music don't hold the copyright to their own work any more.
Exactly. Jury nullification is a long-standing (and some argue necessary) part of democratic systems of justice. Basically, if laws are stupid and imposed on us by powerful people, juries should just refuse to enforce them.

It is too bad this has fallen by the wayside. In general I think "it's the law" is a terrible reason to do anything: all it really does is shift the cost curves. Businesses routinely break the law when the fine is less than the money they make, but if regular people do the same thing suddenly it's Eeeevil.
The Audacity of the iBooks Author EULA
As SecondMarket Passes $1 Billion In Deals, Who's Next After Facebook?
damn i hate those tags (being -moz or -webkit or any other, mind you)

such a way to break the way. need a different browser each time if the dev doesn't take the time to use every single tag there is (and its NOT the dev fault here)
They don't have to make that stuff. They can try to find something else to do instead.
Making Hipmunk Hotel Search on Mobile
You are correct. They aren't a linear history. In fact, the key is the @{#} syntax (man git-rev-parse). Each stash commit is a single commit pointed to by a ref/stash reference. Because of the reflog, we can see what ref/stash used to point at, that is @{1}, @{2}, etc.
> Megaupload never complied with DMCA requests - I made several as part of some research and never received any response.

Er, was this content that you held the copyrights to? That statement seems to imply otherwise, which wouldn't really be ok (or itself compliant with the DMCA).
> Megaupload is Swizz based

No, they were Hong Kong based. Rapidshare (Switzerland/Germany) has already been sued there, and won, so their (current) business model, for the time being, is not accessible for american "shock and awe" justice.
The release data of Bootstrap 2.0 has been announced:
https://dev.twitter.com/blog/open-source-summit-bootstrap
Grooveshark Blocks German Users Over Licensing Costs
Probably because:

pi·ra·cy/ˈpīrəsē/
Noun:
1. The practice of attacking and robbing ships at sea.
2. A similar practice in other contexts, esp. hijacking.

Is not the same as "making a copy of something in violation of copyright rules".
IBooks Author for Authors
Depends about the wording of the law, can someone have 1 person who has the job of fulfilling the DMCA requests even though the workload would require say 10 people to respond in a reasonable amount of time?
hg and git can indeed interop
I think we would all agree, none of our communication is ever flawless, including mine. I also think that from PG position he can only hold peoples hands for so long until they have to be big boys and get on there own feet and get there ass in gear. For all those who have played sports, great coaches treat different players differently based on how they best respond and that allows them to get the maximum effort from their talent. All I am offering in this thread is maybe there is something more that can be done from a new angle, for both PG and the founders growth and a solution to make the YC process even better.
The problem of lobbyist money subtly corrupting our government - Jeff Atwood
Some people may use Megaupload for hosting legit files, but I've personally never seen it used in any context other than pirated content. I wonder what the percentage of traffic is for pirated/legit content?
The HN headline is dramatically wrong: My grandfather was an autoworker, and I have a weapon he manufactured to protect himself from the company,,,

Grandfather Page didn't have to protect himself from his employees, but rather from the auto-manufacturer where he worked. Big difference.
URDU SEX STORIES: Biwi Ki Pasand
Visual Archive of SOPA / PIPA Protest Website Homepages
> According to the indictment, MegaUpload is responsible for at least $500 million in losses for the owners of the copyrights in question.

I really can no longer stand such outlandish claims. Do they mean they would have sold 50 million more movies at US$ 10 each if the site didn't exist? Or do they think they'd have sold 500 million downloads for US$1 each? Or 5 billion for 10¢? In fact, they most probably got a couple extra sales from people who really loved a movie they downloaded to the point of buying the DVD (or BD) version.
Backbone.js - Keeping a View's model in sync
Not to pick on him, because I think the overall received wisdom on new tech has shifted and morphed a great deal over the last few years, no doubt including Joel's...but I can't resist pointing out that, my how times have changed...

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2006/09/01.html

In other words, it's nice to see Joel greenlight something like this, I'd say it's kind of a sign of the times in terms of the industry's overall comfort level with what would be termed 'hip' technology, or 'new' or whatever moniker you want to attach to it.
The richest kids? No way, this is far more beneficial to the poorest kids in the worst school districts in the US (and world)!

The richest kids can already go to private schools and get a great prep education.

The poorest kids are stuck in terrible public school districts because of their zipcode, yet the per pupil spending can be as high as private schools.

Now if these kids are given a choice, say, here's a voucher for $10k, enroll in a virtual school, get an $500 iPad loaded with $100 worth of material. That's a BARGAIN! And it will only get cheaper.

The future of education is choice and private schools. It can still be public in terms of it being funded by public funds, but there's no reason to have the government running schools. They're doing a terrible job, and it has to stop because it's so important that we have good schools.
That statement doesn't imply anything of the sort. I acted as agent for the copyright holders.
In git, we solve this problem by sticking a .gitignore file in any directories we want to be part of the repo, but without the contents (cache folders, user-generated data destinations, etc.)

How do you get around this in mercurial?
> Almost everyone plea bargains.

Yup, because the feds have amazing resources and the "law" is such that everyone is guilty of enough "crimes" to get 100 years.

In other words, feds win a rigged game.
Doing it client side has a couple issues.

1. you need to block the click event until you get a response from your analytics endpoint. Google suggests doing this by adding a 100ms delay: http://support.google.com/googleanalytics/bin/answer.py?hl=e...

2. you might get holes in your data for a number of reasons: the user has JS turned off; 100ms isn't long enough for the request to go through; or the user might click off before your script can attach itself to the onclick event.

You definitely don't want to get yourself in a situation where you go down and all outbound links stop working, but if you can fail gracefully, replacing the link makes a lot more sense.
The quickest and easiest “Getting Started w/ GitHub” article you’ll ever read
That's pretty scary. I used to work for a company that had similarities of MegaUpload. It was all above board; I was paid a salary, didn't have any ownership in the company, and we obeyed the law. To think I could have been arrested for what I saw as a day-job is not cool.
I believed the $15 price was like the $0.99 per track price they set. Interestingly, this means that if the publisher publishes elsewhere the most they can charge is $15 on iBooks. But if they only publish on iBooks they can charge more.... however school districts will likely have $15 competing textbooks to choose from. I don't think any textbooks are really proprietary, so it seems hard for $15 not to become the price they gravitate to... but I thought it was a hard price Apple was requiring and apparently it isn't.

Your quora answer is talking about when textbook versions are replaced. EG: Every 7-10 years they go from American History, 3rd Edition to American History 4th Edition (or 6th or a competing textbook.)

I'm talking about how long the physical books themselves last. EG: The school may stay standardized on the same edition of the book for 10 years, but replace their entire inventory completely 3 times in that period.
Rapidshare just fought (and won) an antipiracy case not too long ago.

*EDIT

More like a series of cases, actually. German courts seem much more level headed than their US couterparts. Details here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RapidShare#Legal_issues
Megaupload shutdown - Government gloats
The Evolution of (Web) Development Tools
I'm interested in reading the data and procedures for your experiment. Where can I access it? I hate to say this, but until you provide your work; it's really difficult to believe anything you just wrote. Not to mention it's pretty impossible for the people at Megaupload to defend themselves. How do we know that you actually followed procedure? What do you define as proper procedure? What were the items in question?
It was a bad joke on the fact that a purported owner of Megaupload is the artist "Swizz Beatz".
It's kind of ridiculous that an anonymous comment left on a blog caused all this hoopla in the first place.
Tips for Entrepreneurs from a First Year VC
Yeah! The second part of a prima facie case for policy change is to show that the proposed solution solves the problem. The third part is to show that the proposed solution doesn't cause more problems than it solves. That would be "cost/benefit analysis".

Show us that a problem exists, that someone gets harmed, and how much that harm amounts to. And please, don't use propaganda techniques. You'll just look bad.
Legal Services for businesses
Sure, and there's probably a subset in there that would actually be successful with someone else but just have a personality mismatch with Paul. But it's probably a minority of those who couldn't make it work with him.
World Changing Mathematical Discoveries
Robert Welch's 1958 predictions for America's future were horrifyingly accurate
Did someone know the email address of the fbi to sue the people I don't like? How much it cost? Are they going to use fire weapons?
First they come for the sites that are 90/10 pirate to legit. Seems reasonable. Then 80/20. Then 70/30. Now they're getting the process streamlined. How far will they go? 20/80? 10/90? When will it be too much? When does it become unreasonable?
I think you misunderstand. He's not talking about social awkwardness, but rather a mindset that prevents the open and honest evaluation of ideas that fall outside of a predetermined set.

When you try advance ideas through discussion with someone with that mindset, communication breaks down because they are unable to wrap their minds around something they for one reason or another do not want to hear. Talk critically with an entrepreneur who is obsessed with a horrible idea (they're rather easy to find at meetups and whatnot), and you'll see what I mean. There is a palpable disconnect in the conversation if you try to get them outside of what they "know".
Video:  How Ramit Sethi went from 0 to 300,000 blog readers and monetized
HP India brings Internet TV for the masses
This provides a good overview: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tzqMoOk9NWc
I guess the big difference is the level of interaction. A Mercurial extension has access to all the functionality that Mercurial offers: applying patches, creating commits, history walking, etc. But it doesn't really modify the underlying representation of that data (queues store their data in the working copy, for example).

Git doesn't give you access to its functionality but instead gives access to its data model. Stashes are just references, commits are created or destroyed at will, notes are just objects that point at commits and are stored in a different set of references, etc.
"I think most computer-savvy people..."

http://cl.ly/0Y1M1D0z1g123I0S0u1R - cat.jpg ;)
Ubuntu 11.04 is not affected either
" but if it really wants its textbook initiative to truly take off, it will have to develop apps for other platforms"

I don't think so... from some (very) preliminary experiments this morning, the .iBooks file is just a zip file containing a bunch of XHTML, XML, SVG, and JPG files (along with a few files I don't yet understand, but not many of those). There doesn't appear to be any encryption/DRM/other nastiness involved. If such is used, they must be applying it at the store level. I don't know whether this is pure ePub 3 or not, but in any case I doubt if it's going to be hard to convert these to other platforms or develop apps to run them directly.

If you want to have a look for yourself, use the command line zip rather than the Archive Utility that runs when you double-click the file in the finder. It gets confused for some reason.
Interesting. What's the difference to you? Git's extensions are shell (or whatever other language) tools is all, in my mind.
Get modern dictionary.

pi·ra·cy

noun /ˈpīrəsē/

piracies, plural

1. The practice of attacking and robbing ships at sea

2. Similar practice in other contexts, esp. hijacking
- air piracy

3. The unauthorized use or reproduction of another's work
- software piracy
Quora don't "need" to do anything. You just want them to.