skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The last sentence bugs me. It is ambiguous at best, but in this context it implies a criminal past. The truth is that UMG used a DMCA takedown notice to remove media that Megaupload alone owned the rights to. Megaupload felt that UMG overstepped their bounds and preceded to start said legal battle. It seems to me that the final sentence, presented without context, is editorializing; basically saying 'hey the FBI says these guys are criminals, oh and they are also in court for this other thing'.
This isn't new. Canada -> US brain drain has been happening for a long time.

The economic situation for entrepreneurs in Canada is abysmal. The smart people leave because they know what they're up against. Every corner of the Canadian economy is controlled by either a monopoly, or a cartel supported by the government. The entire Canadian economy is essentially a syndicate consisting of banks and big businesses, and it's all wrapped up in rah-rah Go Canada! Go! patriotism.
Feds Shutter Megaupload, Arrest Executives
1. I never said that. I just insinuated they were one of the parties that would go after the site.

2. Please don't walk around calling people naive. It's offensive and unnecessary.
This is (and I don't mean to offend anyone) more of a deep-rooted psychological problem more than anything else. As people get used to an act, such as piracy, for example, and develop a natural comfort and tendency with it, they have already convinced themselves that what they are doing is not at all immoral or wrong, and would use all available tactics in their arsenal to justify what they are doing.
That's great news! Bravo to internet for creating awareness and getting more donors. Hope it all works out for him.
Interview with independent videogame developer, Kenta Cho.
It needs to be much much simpler than that.

What would be nice would be gestures. Maybe tap once, make a gesture and it remembers that gesture as a bookmark to that location. Later, make a line and the same gesture and it heads to that bookmark.

This way you can be looking at a chart, tap and make a number one. Head a few pages or another chapter down, tap and make a number two, a line and number one to look at the chart again and a line and a number two to head back where you were. Or maybe a standard "back" gesture.

Pressing multiple buttons and following many links is nowhere near friendly enough.

The gestures suggestion above still only works if you know you're going to be returning to a location when you get to it. Flipping through the book to quickly find a past location is a harder problem to solve.
If you read the actual press release and not the little WSJ blurb, then you'll see that DoJ's indicment said that MegaUpload actually did not comply with the DMCA safe harbor provisions and they did directly promote piracy. Of course, it's now up to them to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that this is true.

As for the not US citizens, it's covered via the Berne Convention: The laws of the country where the copyright is registered applies. They probably spell out extradition, too.
I'm really not sure if you can really consider this a quality of a person or a quality of the state a person is in.

In my best job situations, I've generally been approachable and ready to change directions based on outside input. In my worst job situations, I can see that I've been less approachable and this has been a function of being overwhelmed by the situation.

Now, one way to avoid going into a new situation and not being overwhelmed by the situation is to take the situation bit-by-bit - don't immense yourself in all the details but instead deal calmly with one thing then another. In fact, most competent people know this. And so, a lot of the time when a reasonably competent person winds up still paralyzed by a situation, it is because they've been confronted with some kind of emotional trap - "I know this should take a week but this puppy will die if you don't finish it tomorrow!" etc.
Ireland has also been added but unfortunately Twilio doesn't support SMS in Ireland yet.

edit: Also Austria, Denmark, France and Poland: http://www.twilio.com/blog/2012/01/twilio-launches-phone-num...
It was reported today that MegaUpload's CEO is none other than Swizz Beatz. How is it that the FBI charges the company's graphic designer but not the CEO?
At the risk of megadownvoting here...

Megaupload never complied with DMCA requests - I made several as part of some research and never received any response. The site charged for access to, and provided advertising around, pirated content. The site paid people (users/staff - it's a fine line) to provide popular content.

It went to extraordinary lengths to hide the identity of its operators.

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.

Kim Schmitz has made a lot of money over a five to seven year period doing this. But the risk that came with that was that eventually he'd face serious jailtime.

I cannot believe that Megaupload is being touted as an anti-SOPA posterchild. It is, pure and simple, a piracy site full of pirated material. I'd be astounded [see update] if anyone here uses it for anything other than pirating. But let's not pretend it's Dropbox - it isn't.

I am also astounded that people on HN are calling this a legitimate business. What was its business? Was it being used to distribute Wikipedia archives? To host videos of people's kids singing? No - it was hosting pirated content. Not torrents, not links. AVI files of films. AND THEN CHARGING FOR ACCESS.

[Update: It seems some people below did use it for sending big files. Colour me astounded. I've never had to do this so it's new to me. I guess the fact remains that they had to subsidise this activity somehow - and that they made their money off popular content. They have to hope this is enough to cover their asses.]
> Are then technically brilliant but socially awkward people truly less fit in almost all areas of life?

I would say no, they are not, if they recognize their lack of fitness and choose to do something about it.

I think it's true that a lot of technically brilliant people are socially awkward. It makes sense why they are that way, though. In order to become technically brilliant, they had to log many hours in front of a computer screen to practice and get good. Those hours spent programming didn't go into sports, theater, public debate, or whatever other activity might have built up their social skills.

The clincher for a lot of these technically brilliant people, from what I've observed, is that they start to feel superior to others because they are so smart/talented. They then begin to feel like the whole "smooth thing" is a waste of time, because we should just be able to compute our relationships with each other. (That may sound like I'm being sarcastic, but that is not my intention).

It's kind of the old story about "book smart but not street wise". There is a lot of value in learning how to make others feel comfortable around you, or to being able to work smoothly through challenging situations.

I'm thinking of the kind of situation where everyone in the room is tense and somebody is able to defuse the feeling. Being able to do that requires emotional intelligence, which is something many engineers don't always have in abundance.

Acquiring those abilities begins with seeing their value. If somebody who is socially awkward thinks it might be worthwhile to become less awkward, they can definitely do it. (I am speaking from personal experience here!)
The problem with this article is that he does not provide a compelling argument. Or, more accurately, he does not provide an argument at all: he just repeats that unauthorized copying is wrong.

As far as I can tell, he took "piracy is wrong" as an axiom. Which would be fine, except the article is arguing that "piracy" is wrong. Arguing that an axiom--or something you're basically treating as an axiom--is true is trivial and tautological.
To be fair, it looks like it was a busy day for them: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142405297020446800457716...
Microsoft does benefit, greatly, from piracy of Windows.

Gates has said so himself: http://www.itwire.com/it-industry-news/market/23137-how-pira...

Gates has also, in the past, confirmed how important piracy is to Microsoft: "Although about 3 million computers get sold every year in China, but people don't pay for the software... Someday they will, though. As long as they are going to steal it, we want them to steal ours. They'll get sort of addicted, and then we'll somehow figure out how to collect sometime in the next decade."
Is iBooks 2 really just Push Pop Press rebranded?
Great writeup!

Can you guys share what (if any) test suites were used? Was curious on this point.
It seems to be more "Erp, I don't understand... so I hate it.",
than "Well, I know exactly what I'm talking about, so I'm going to give you a lesson."
To me, your post didn't say "Iran isn't so bad" as much as "The US isn't so good". Which is not an unreasonable point, if not the one you were trying to make.
I wonder how much this "resourcefulness" characteristic is innate vs learned?

Can you learn to be more resourceful? To be easier to talk to?

I think you can, but aside from going out there and doing your thing and failing and trying again, I don't see how.
I had this very feeling while reading through the essay. It reminded me of General Paton's famous:

If you tell people where to go, but not how to get there, you'll be amazed at the results.
While I think that PG is probably right in his observation, it is not actually very helpful. It is kind of like when he said, "When we haven't heard from, or about, a startup for a couple months, that's a bad sign. If we send them an email asking what's up, and they don't reply, that's a really bad sign." [1] Well... ok. But is that cause or effect? I doubt business was booming and they just decided to stop responding to email.

If you have a startup that is growing I am sure it is easier to take advice and get funding. ...all sorts of things. If the business is not doing as well I can see where it is more difficult to see the correct action.

[1] http://www.paulgraham.com/die.html
Not trying to be offensive, but seeing the RIAA thrown around as this big boogeyman is annoying, and also seeing it stand in for labels, artists even more so.

One of the biggest foes for MegaUpload was porn, who have much more money but less lobbying clout than the RIAA.
My comment was glib. I agree with how SOPA and PIPA removes due process -- one I assume was followed over the course of 2 years. Investigation if a crime was committed, by whom, arrest offenders and confiscate goods.

Whether or not megaupload is guilty, it seems to me this was followed and bridged international boundaries nicking a "foreign" and "rogue site".

As an aside, I don't think megaupload fits a domestic definition. All indicted are apparently not Americans and it is a Hong Kong and New Zealand based organization.
I don't think text generation is realistic at this point, nor will it be in the near future. It's hard enough for a human to figure out the right thing to say to a child, let alone design an algorithm to do that. When I read Stephenson's book I thought that good speech generation was a much smaller problem to overcome (Indeed, it was dropped for the version of the Primer given to the cast-off girls) than content generation. I remember feeling that, were the Primer built today, the on-demand talent required would be guided improvisational interaction rather than mere acting.

However, I could see a Watson like search engine being a possible alternative. The child could carry around a monitoring device that would seed the search with the events of the child's day. If the child struggles in class, gets beat up by a bully, etc. the engine could then set programming from an existing library of stories, movies, etc. that is immediately relevant to what the child is experiencing. Entertainment for children is often designed to teach lessons. This would just time the lessons to have maximum impact. Teaching children is a bit like training dogs in that timing is massively important. Catch a dog in the act of peeing on the rug and you can have a far greater impact than if you don't notice the mess until after it's dried!

AI cannot presently compete with humans when it comes to content generation, but the above device could be with a child night and day throughout their schooling, which is something few, if any, parents can do.
Scaling Druid to 26 Billion records/second
WebRTC now in Chrome dev channel
Is that your opinion as a judge or lawyer who has studied the law in depth, someone with a reasonable law background that's actually read it, someone that just read it, or someone that's read a summery of it from a unbiased source?

Or just your guess based on hearsay?

PS: http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/z?c112:H.R.3261:

SEC. 204. AMENDMENTS TO SENTENCING GUIDELINES.

(H) ensure reasonable consistency with other relevant directives and Guidelines and Federal statutes; Note: You can't actually define what this means even if you read all relevant legal precedents, because it's allows monkey patching of the law by these guys http://www.ussc.gov/ an independent agency in the judicial branch of
government.
Developer states he will be pirating Windows 8, tired of activation issues
See http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3369876. Summary: people seem to be ignoring security.

Also note stuff like https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3419693: node.js is not free of issues itself. (To be fair, lots of people got that wrong and it was patched quickly.)
Ask HN: What is the best way to find a website buyer?
I've sold two websites in the past, but in both cases a potential buyer contacted me. Now I'm looking to sell a website that I no longer have time to maintain, but that I think has a lot of potential. Are there good places other than Flippa for finding buyers?
It has nothing to do with "nations that work with the US." Instead, under the Berne Convention the laws where the copyright is registered apply to the work no matter where the infringement takes place. All of these countries are members of the treaty.
Surely a user created only three hours ago, with only one comment and a random username wouldn't have nefarious purposes!

Better double-check. Offer him some bacon.
The UK based sms service I use doesn't. But theres a monthly fee for the number. I'm sure this was the case with others when I was shopping around as well (again, UK based).
$400/hour isn't bad :)
>Of course, it's now up to them to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that this is true.

Federal prosecutors have a 95 conviction rate for trials that go to jury.

Almost everyone plea bargains.
Interesting that its okay for content owners to have false positives when flagging content, but it is not okay for site operators to have false negatives.
Create a self caching website ready for offline usage with HTML5 and jQuery
How is Megaupload a domestic entity? All the parties were foreign nationals and were arrested outside of the US. The corporation was out of Hong Kong:

Megaupload Limited
P.O. Box No. 28410
Gloucester Road Post Office
Hong Kong
"One reason that some textbooks are so expensive is that they can take a lot of time and effort to produce and they're selling a few 10k of copies, at best."

That's more the case with college textbooks and specialized subjects.

When you're talking about a US high school textbook, for something like biology or algebra, it could be hundreds of thousands of copies, maybe millions, if the book is widely adopted. (In 2011, there will be 14.5 million students in grades 9-12 in the US).
The opposite of evil: Google named best place to work in America
FOXCONN: "Managing One Million Animals Gives Me A Headache"
I too am glad that someone finally went for the big guys. Rapidshare should be next in my opinion. They only make money on piracy and they know it. On the other hand, I hate when p2p networks are targeted (thepiratebay for example). Sure, they too make some money but nowhere close to paid sites like the megaupload and they don't even host the pirated content.
MegaUpload Shut Down by the Feds, Founder Arrested
It's not yet obvious it was intentional, to my knowledge.
ILibrarian » The Congressional Record iPad App
CIA's "Facebook" Program Dramatically Cut Agency's Costs
Actually, it is probably yes on 11 (50-year down the track). Unless Apple encrypted the format, it is epub3 - zip file with html, xml, and other standard-based formats in there. Unzip, extract, modify, recreate under emulator. Same story as OpenOffice.org. Much better than than MSWord formats and - frankly - much better than books from 50 years ago, which if you wanted to do any "modern" thing with (e.g. searching), you would have to rip apart, scan, do text-recognition, layout-reconstruction, etc.

Now, if Apple has put a real DRM/Encryption in there, it would be quite another story. Even then, 50 years down the track, any digital modern encryption will probably be a 10-second crack away.
Schools already have books so the only ones bought are those to replace. Occasionally a new batch may be bought, but not at a rate of every book, every 4 years.

Based on your maths if you consider that each student uses 17 individual books per year, now consider that 2 are scrapped and need to be replace the cost for that year for that students is only 2 * book cost ($80). So $160. Now consider that they attend for 4 years, thats only $640. Not thousands. Even if they are scrapped every 4 years, the cost only becomes $1,280 per student.

So to go paperless from the current system the device and content needs to be less than $640 for the students entire attendance at that school (4 years).

A device like the iPad won't last 4 years in an education system, not including the battery life and software support by Apple.

Great for a private school, but as the education system currently stands. No way.
I agree that it gets tough (although I think the Golden Rule answers the temple question, and a lot of others). The thing is, in this case, they aren't even trying.

The whole "you don't have a choice" bit rests on the assumption that piracy is immoral, and the posts themselves serve simply to remind people of that. It's rather condescending, and entirely pointless if they don't accept the assumption that piracy is immoral, which they almost certainly do not.
One of the members of the group can generate a new key pair, and share it with all the other members (in the same way one would share a file with each individual). If Alice sends a file to the group's key pair, anyone in the group can read the file.

Adding members to the group is trivial; just send them the group's key pair. Removing a member would be more difficult. Perhaps the most convenient way would be to add an additional layer of security on top (so members would need server access permissions, plus the private key). The only other option would be to create a new group and to re-encrypt all the existing files with a new key.
TwitPic Launches New Redesign
For technical matters I much prefer physical books. It is trivial to flip between two or three pages at once, anywhere in the book. Reference books fall open to the page I'm most likely to need. I can leave three or four lying open to different pages and glance at them without needing to hit any buttons. I still haven't found an eBook interface that is as easy to pick out a single book from as my bookshelf, spines showing, organized by topic and then author.

My cargo pants pockets exactly fit a paperback book, and if I ruin a paperback by being caught in the rain I'm out at most $8. Books are a great combination of disposable and persistant. I can read a book one-handed, in the bath, and can easily and quickly share books with friends or use them to answer questions I am asked.

More than half of my library has been bought used, most for $2-$4, which no eBook even comes close to on price. The best thing about eBooks is how much cheaper the paper versions have been as everyone else sells them off.

eBooks have a long way to go before they are as useful to me as a physical book.
Apple never actually capped textbooks at $14.99 (from my understanding). What they've done is launch with all the textbooks at $14.99 or less. They're setting a precedent and I'm sure they're hoping it pressures all textbooks to follow suit, but nowhere did I read anything about Apple requiring all future textbook offerings to follow the launch pricing.
This part caught my eye:

"The Socket.io server currently has some problems with scaling up to more than 10K simultaneous client connections when using multiple processes and the Redis store, and the client has some issues that can cause it to open multiple connections to the same server, or not know that its connection has been severed."

I wonder if they ran into redis's hard-coded 10k connection upper-limit. As it turns out, their configuration for "unlimited" connections actually has a cap of 10k. I believe in master this is going away, but if you need more than 10k connections on redis <= 2.4, you need to manually patch the daemon, in case anyone else runs into this.
+1 to you, and this is correct. The industry doesn't get called out by Congress when it claims billions of dollars of lost revenue by people who wouldn't have paid either way.

Of course, I've come to believe that intellectual honesty is a cognitive luxury for most people; especially politicians.
I don't disagree with you, but its hard to deny that MegaUpload was full of copyrighted material.

I always got the impression they were complying with the law in the most minimal sense, but had no real interest in preventing copyrighted works from being hosted on their site.

In some ways MegaUpload reminds me of YouTube. Its hard to deny that they got big by providing access to copyrighted material, but have since become a legitimate service for sharing legal works.
What if our entire view of history today is misguided or very much incomplete because of similar events that occurred in the past when there was hardly any redundancy of information?
What did the SOPA black outs actually achieve for music?
Larry Page's Grandfather Kept A Lead Pipe To Defend Against His Employers
Of the UK services I've seen, none charge for incoming SMS.

The 2nd on my Google search is http://www.textover.com/incomingsms.html which states:

We do not charge per message received.

#1 and #3 on the Google search were both a bit vague, mentioning only a fixed rate monthly charge of £5 and £7.50 per month for a number to receive messages on.

They didn't mention whether they charge per message received, but every other price is unambiguous so I'd probably read it as them not charging for receipt of messages beyond the line rental but for the sake of argument didn't want to jump to that conclusion.

The Twilio price is good though, I was finding outbound rates closer to 4p per SMS and only dropping down to 2p per SMS with serious quantity paid in advance.
I'm also interested to know. I am thinking about selling my site also :-)
I would rather have something verbose that corresponds to the underlying API than something I have to guess or remember.

Is it createProdAdvClient, createProductAdvClient, createProdAdvertisingClient, createProdAdvertClient, etc.?

Completely arbitrary.

My ideal API clients have a base layer that maps intuitively to the underlying API, and a developer-friendly upper layer with idiomatic method calls.

A common trick in Ruby, for example, is to give the API client a proxy method (e.g., api) that uses method_missing to map method calls to API end points.

You wind up with API clients that look like client.api.some_method(...). Under the hood it might transform some_method into "someMethod" before it makes the API call.

However, if you want, you can still access the raw API endpoints programmatically.

Just my preference, I realize, but I think it's important for libraries to idiomatic.