skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Well - they still report the news quite well. It's just their editorial page that's off the rails.
Come on Zuck, do you really mean it?
Apple iOS leading among corporate users, Android deemed most risky
Adapted:

javascript:(function(){$('#mw-sopaOverlay').remove();$('div:hidden').show();}())
My father-in-law was diagnosed with multiple myeloma, which is also a cancer of the blood, about 7 years ago. He has had two stem cell transplants since than, one six and a half years ago and one a year and a half ago. Both times he nearly died, but after getting through the scary stages he's out mowing his lawn and spending time with grandchildren that he otherwise would never have met. Science is truly amazing, and we're so grateful to the medical professionals who took care of him and helped give him many more years of life than he otherwise would have had.
Hahahah I share your hope, but I don't believe it to be true. Then again, maybe what we're seeing there is just a "best of" all the reactions.
I meant a few more paragraphs. But yes, it's easy to dismiss the article based on those 2 things alone. Bad choice on author's part.
A quick look at the list:

- Field Master: Have 100 fields in a single class.

- Overload: More than 10 overloads of a method.

- Potty Mouth: Use 5 different curse words in a file.

These are funny, but they miss what achievements are good for - encouraging new users to adopt good behaviours.
How Solar Power, Mirrors, and Steam Can Change the World
It's a YouTube video. They can just embed it on the page.
I am convinced that Sal Khan's contribution to education is so significant his work will be used in classrooms generations from now... though perhaps in the form of some kind of technological derivative.

So congrats! You just had lunch with the historical equivalent of Einstein.
I like your point, you are basically saying artist should sell things under CreativeCommons-like licenses (meaning you aren't restricting the rights of your consumers). Correct?

So treat Expressive works just like any other product, that can be bought, resold, copied, modifyed/hacked. Is that the logical conclusion of your position?

How do we (should we?) protect innovation? The patent system? the copyright system? Some other form of protection?
For the majority of people, windows activation and windows genuine "advantage" works exactly as advertised.

However, when you get on the wrong side of it, it is a pain in the ass of Lovecraftian proportions. I don't know if it's my luck, choice in hardware, or what, but I've had perfectly valid (retail!) keys start throwing WGA errors after working fine for a few months. After spending literally hours on the phone with someone who speaks broken english, I took my crippled XP install (this was back in the pre service-pack 2 days where failing activation meant you got locked out after a few minutes), went to a torrent site, and downloaded an activator.

2 hours (spent on the phone in a fruitless endeavor with the best of Indian tech support) and 5 minutes (spent downloading and running a crack) later, I finally was able to use my bought and paid for software.

After that, I pulled down an ISO with the service packs and cracks and other goodies slipstreamed in (XP Ultimate Edition by Johnny, still exists out there somewhere), burned it to a disc, and haven't used "legitimate" channels since.

Microsoft does not have my permission to use my CPU cycles and power to inflate their antipiracy metrics.
Oh man, someone actually did this? I remember reading a hilarious thread about this a year ago. http://blog.whiletrue.com/2011/01/what-if-visual-studio-had-...
Having to re-install the OS because of virus issues, etc. is NOT usual and shouldn't be punished by forcing the user to go through some stupid activation system.

Having to re-activate because of hardware upgrades (new motherboard, etc) is also not unusual. Again, I don't see why a PAYING customer should be be punished by forcing the user to go through some stupid activation system, when pirates don't have to deal with the activation system.

Just because the activation system hasn't negatively affected you doesn't mean it hasn't negatively affected many, many paying customers. Why should I get treated like shit for being a paying customer, when I could get a better user experience by pirating Windows?
I'm sad they don't have an achievement for writing >= N lines of code and having it compile (and not crash) on the first try.
Foursquare now displays pricing menus.
Each retailer that "supports" Upromise sends them a sha256 hash of your creditcard along with the amount for each transaction.
I've got a lot more faith in a torrent uploaded by a person with lots of other torrents (who has no motive but reputation and altruism), with lots of seeders than I do in a corporation who has a clear and present motive to make me miserable.

And somehow, I've never been infected by this. It's my conclusion that, much like the *AA groups nonsense comparisons of piracy to theft, the security threats are overstated by companies in an attempt to scare people straight.
Supreme Court Upholds Reinstating Copyrights Of Public Domain
No it is not, at least not for every version. I didn't have to use windows for a very long time, and about a month ago I installed a windows XP SP3 in a virtual machine. The grace period ended a few days ago:

- the automatic activation failed
- my product key is said to have been pirated
- the phone support for registration is now fully automated, and just rejects my phone activation.
- the machine won't load whole subsystems of windows until is activated (you can monkey your way around from the IE instance you can launch from the activation dialog, but your system is not fully functionnal)
- I am searching for how to get a human to deal with the situation

I might be failing somewhere and this situation is all due to my lack of experience, but I am with a CD of windows in one hand and a hosed install on the other, and nowhere to go from there.
This is just one of the worse software experience I ever have in a few years.
The article is not questioning the dominance of the current desktop computing paradigm. It is to illuminate the speed at which computing platforms can be displaced.

The metric that matters is usage, obviously almost everyone has a PC and since most PCs sold in the last 5 years are capable to satisfying users without an upgrade, the fact that PCs are still selling in such a high volume doesn't bode well for the doomsday predictions by number-twisting bloggers.

PC sales have not been contributing much to the bottom lines of HP, Dell etc for many years now.

In business, profit matters. Usage is indirectly useful if it leads to profits. This is the fundamental difference between the Apple and Google worldviews.

The tl;dr summary is that computer makers have to sell many more PCs to come close to what Apple is making from the sale of each iPhone or iPad.
I thought I knew how creepy SOPA/PIPA are
This ongoing trend of "gamification" is starting to drive me up the wall. Seems like some brainiac in marketing won some battle to sink their claws into the VS team. And I feel bad for them, because I'd hope they'd want to be spending their team actually improving VS (which is still an excellent IDE) instead of adding a layer of crapola lipstick.

What next -- achievements for the taskbar?
Like that small software vendor from seattle http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/redmond/projects/z3/m... http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/projects/slam/default.as...
I don't agree. This is only a possibility for some people. I gave up on Windows about five years ago and have been a happy Linux user since. I don't have any pirated software at all on my system.

But most people aren't ready or capable of learning a whole new operating system they have to install and manage themselves (unless Linux comes preinstalled on the computer). And most importantly, almost everyone uses certain software for which there is no equivalent on other OSes.

Now consider a certain user who is completely fed up with the way Microsoft has been (mis)treating their paying customers and doesn't want to support this behaviour with his money anymore. If you're not opposed to piracy "on principle", which is fine but ends all discussion before it can even start, then pirating Windows seems like a possible (yet illegal) solution.
Econ, IR, Poly Sci; all considered, at least my school, to be the fall-back majors when you didn't have the chops for things like biochemistry or physics. I stuck with Engineering because I wanted to do it and also, because it was hard; thus supposedly more rewarding in the long term. But this is almost telling me that the easy way out was the right thing to do ... confused.
Floundering Startup Color Makes Sexy Commercial to Explain Its Pivot
Is that legal? One of the reasons MPAA/RIAA are pissing everyone off and have lost all credibility is that they have helped write and pass many copyright related laws that make even the most natural things to do illegal. They are so out of touch with reality.
I'm not a lawyer, but it certainly sounds like his examples fit.

Here's the text:

[A site is illegal if] the U.S.-directed site is primarily designed or
operated for the purpose of, has only limited purpose or use other than, or
is marketed by its operator or another acting in concert with that operator
for use in, offering goods or services in a manner that engages in, enables,
or facilitates [various illegal stuff]

Group it according to the boolen ORs in there:

the U.S.-directed site is

(
primarily designed or operated for the purpose of,
has only limited purpose or use other than,
or is marketed by its operator or another acting in concert with that operator for use in,
)

offering goods or services in a manner that

(
engages in,
enables,
or facilitates
)

Now choose one of each from the OR'ed groups:

the U.S.-directed site is

(
*** primarily designed or operated for the purpose of,
has only limited purpose or use other than,
or is marketed by its operator or another acting in concert with that operator for use in,
)

offering goods or services in a manner that

(
engages in,
enables,
*** or facilitates
)

And we get:

[A site is illegal if] the U.S.-directed site is
primarily designed or operated for the purpose of,
offering goods or services in a manner that
facilitates [various illegal stuff]

Youtube is primarily designed for the purpose of offering a service: uploading videos.

This service (uploading videos) facilitates various illegal stuff (like copyright infringement).
Design Fad of 2012: "The Stacked Feed"
No, it's also that program that leaves comments on your blog posts and creates forum threads and replies. Profile creation is only a small facet of it. Honest webmasters like myself have to spend time each day cleaning the junk these programs leave, as well as much of the time of our forum moderators.
The Internet Freedom Amendment: Open Source Legislation
github has this for month: http://coderwall.com/
So if made a large scale business that included small restaurants I would be relying on their "honor" to send in the sha256 to show a sale? That's not good.
The important part, as the video points out, is the phrase "enables or facilitates."

Google, Facebook, Youtube, and other sites that either allow user-generated content or generate links through web crawlers are "offering goods or services in a manner that (...) enables or facilitates [copyright violations]." Since linking facilitates copyright violation, this affects every site that doesn't manually vet every single link it makes.
you can choose whether queries are consistent or eventually consistent.
Yup, AML sucks. My mother was diagnosed with APML in April 2011, which is a variant of AML with a much better prognosis (more like 90% than 50%). I was so relieved when we found out it wasn't AML proper and she wouldn't need a transplant, but it did get me to finally sign up for bethematch.org. Not everyone is "lucky" enough to get APML.
It's kind of surprising how flat the curve is. Even the "worst" major choices still have plenty of people that make it to the 1%.

Of course, nowhere from this data can we conclude that your choice of major has an effect on your future financial success. Just that there's a correlation.
Not sure guns are a good example.

Every country that has implemented anti-gun laws has seen a massive reduction in gun related crimes.

Countries that never had full legalisation of guns also experience a lot less gun related crimes than countries with full legalisation.

Off topic I know, but bad example. :)
This is really great and i wish him well, but to my understanding at the ending of the post, even if all of this is successful, Amit still has a really short life expectancy? Can he perpetually do this over and over again to combat the disease and prolong his life longer?

That must be incredibly difficult to deal with.
I agree. It's unpleasant to see him simply ignore the limiting language. He focuses over half the video on the "enables, or facilitates" clause, spreading the false impression that the provision says _any_ site that "enables or facilitates" could be taken down under SOPA. I am a lawyer, but it doesn't (or shouldn't) take a lawyer to see that the provision has fairly strong requirements other than just "enabling" or "facilitating" other violations.

Sorry, but I think spreading popular arguments along these lines is a bad thing. It leaves the SOPA-advocates with the strong response, "Read more closely, you've misread the provision." Now it may be that the provision as a whole is too broadly written, poorly written, too vague and uncertain, but when the SOPA-opponent makes the original mistake of misreading entirely it's hard to win back the desired position of being an authority on why SOPA is bad.
The compiler for haXe (http://www.haxe.org/) is written in OCaml. That's actually how I ran across OCaml to begin with.
If you don't like their product or policies, don't use it. If you use it then you should pay for it.

This strikes me as a valid ethical position, though I happen to think things are more complicated than that.

People who pirate Microsoft products don't really hurt Microsoft, they hurt the rest of the competition.

This, on the other hand, doesn't make sense. You seem to be assuming that the invariant is that the user will not be paying Microsoft. And that might be true for you. If you're not going to be sending any money to MS no matter what, then yes, using MS products helps them somewhat.

For the author of the article, however, the invariant is that he will be using MS products. Since he's going to be using their products in any case, when he is fed up with their policies and decides to pirate instead of purchase until they get fixed, of course this hurts them.

If you want to argue that nothing is invariant, and that the best way to hurt MS is to both stop purchasing and stop using, well, of course that's true, but it's not relevant. What the author is talking about is simply stopping paying for something until it gets fixed; whether he still uses it or not is of very minor importance to MS next to whether or not he pays for it. His goal isn't to destroy MS or make them irrelevant; on the contrary, he just wants a better customer experience.
My broader point is that CAN-SPAM did nothing to reduce spam. http://www.cybercrimejournal.com/alexdec2009.htm I believe anti-SEO legislation would be just as ineffective.
This was not done by the VS team. It is an extension developed by members of the Channel 9 team inspired by this post on someone's blog -> http://blog.whiletrue.com/2011/01/what-if-visual-studio-had-... , and the associated Reddit thread.
The Pirate Bay's statement on PIPA/SOPA
That's more or less correct. But, the customer who is tracking their percentages earned would know that their purchases were not accounted for.
The amount of consumed read units by a query is not necessarily proportional to the # of items. It is equal to the cumulative size of processed items, rounded up to the next kilobyte increment. For example if you have a query returning 1,500 items of 64 bytes each, then you’ll consume 94 read units, not 1,500.
Ah, 6.001

Brings me back to the fall of 1998, and many long Thursday nights spent working on problem sets. This was before you could do the exercises on the web, so you had to go into an ancient lab with grayscale terminals (unless you wanted to download a special version of emacs onto your computer). If you needed assistance, you had to get on the TA's help queue, which was written on a chalkboard.

Typically I would finish my problem set and emerge just in time to see the sun rise.
This is a great way of driving people out of teams with poor code quality.
This is exactly what I do and advocate.

I own an XP Pro license and bought the upgrade edition of 7 Ultimate. Reformatting would require installing XP, upgrading to the latest service pack, then "upgrading" to 7. Giant PITA.
There's a similar problem with games and achievements. The parody game "achievement unlocked" is a pretty good take on it.

(http://armorgames.com/play/2893/achievement-unlocked)
CAN-SPAM has been very successful in shutting down big bot nets and sending some of the biggest spammers to jail.

Also this isn't a little annoyance, it's wasting time and resources for everyone just like email spam is. Daily me and some volunteers on my site spent time cleaning up the junk that these blackhats use.
My mistake, then. And thank goodness. Full ignominy goes to those guys, then.
Defeating SOPA and PIPA Isn't Enough
Gamepocalypse already happened. Money is just a point system.
wow with logic like that... I kind of understand why the US public keeps voting in morons.

For the people by the people.
Not 100% positive, but I would think a service like Yodlee can provide you with help. It is the same service that mint.com (although I don't believe they use it anymore) and others use to aggregate your financial data into their platforms.
I love Pixelmator but I can't find any way to do nearest-neighbour resizing. Which I figured was the simplest thing to implement. Even MS Paint can do that.
The guy really deserves some kind of recognition, but I don't think there's a Nobel or Pulitzer for education (telling).
Show HN: Interview coaching for engineers
Unless he took a physical copy off of a shelf somewhere, he didn't steal anything. Pirated, ripped, copied, used without paying for, there are about 20 possible verbs to describe the act of using software without purchasing a license.

Stealing is not one of them.

I know I'm beating this horse fairly hard, but it's something that people need to be aware of.
LibreOffice.org seems to be the one that started popularizing this script.
As a total non-biologist, doesn't the "10/10" refer to the parts of the cells that touch and communicate? That is, the interface? If so, I would guess that what DNA is inside doesn't matter for the purpose of compatibility. Walks like a duck . . .
noted. (both requests that is).
Hmm, this looks pretty interesting. Would anyone happen to know why they dropped the course originally? Is there any sort of push for more functional programming at MIT now? I saw that they had a Haskell class listed on the SIPB IAP 2012 page.

CMU also has a Haskell course and also is pushing for a complete "elimination" so to speak of OOP from their curriculum (http://reports-archive.adm.cs.cmu.edu/anon/2010/CMU-CS-10-14...).

EDIT: Okay, I can't seem to find the page about the haskell course at CMU now. Maybe I'm thinking of a different university. Oh well, the message stays the same in regards to functional programming.
Yep. Then bring on the legislation "banning" proxy servers, Tor, ...
Unless they were unknowingly at a participating vendor. How long does it usually take to get this information back. Is it same day or is there a longer delay? Thanks for the information by the way.
Explaining SOPA/PIPA to a non-techy:

Imagine you owned a small, boutique t-shirt store. Your business depends on local artists bringing you t-shirts that they designed, you display them, and sell them. Taking your cut, to pay your bills and send your kids to school.

On a cloudy Tuesday afternoon, the Feds show up. They take your merchandise, close down your shop, and shut down your bank account. Nobody tells you why. There is no court case and no due process. Nobody you can talk to about this.

You are confused by this and depressed. No idea what happened. You go to the movies to take your mind off of things. And then it hits you, you now know who came after you...

You remember that one of the artists supplying you with t-shirts designed a t-shirt that had a girl, with a dragon tattoo on it.
Glad to see some English majors made it :). Now how do I get there?
Bought windows XP. Lost the CD. Had to pirate it.

Bought windows 7 online. Had to download it through windows special download manager which took ages, then gave me some exec that I couldn't burn on a CD... I had to pirate it.
We've had tremendous personal success using mock practice interviews to prepare for technical interviews. We found that by simulating a real interview situation, we felt more comfortable, confident and clear during the actual interview.

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I'm being interviewed on Dianne Sawyer's show tonight. What should I mention?
Myself and a friend run sopablackout.org, and we've been contacted by ABC to be interviewed. I'll likely have less than two minutes to mention what sopa is, why it's bad, and what we should be doing instead. What key points should I hit?

Right now I'm going to try to mention:

-MPAA/RIAA support of senators/reps

-SOPA/PIPA not actually stopping piracy

-Loss of jobs/business/startups due to bill

-How promoters of the bill have said that if china can do it, we can too.

Other thoughts?
Thank you Ilya for sharing this today - a small oasis of information in a desert of SOPA spam.
Really cool HTML5 SOPA blackout page
An interesting corollary of this is the possibility of curing AIDS[1]. Of course, the procedure is way to dangerous nor are there enough AIDS resistant donors for this become a viable cure, yet it is fascinating that these few people are one of the few that recovered from an incurable disease.

[1] http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1858843,00.ht...
IKnode Team opposes SOPA/PIPA
"Use Native Client. You'll get as close to machine code as you'll ever get, while running in a sandbox. The only way to go faster is to fully trust the code on your machine."

Nitpick: The only way to go faster is to use the hardware privilege separation that Chrome is always already running under, which is considered insufficient to sandbox untrusted code for historical reasons and organizational reasons (Chrome doesn't have much control over the kernels it's running under), but no technical reasons.