skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I had a similar feeling, basically the comment can be considered slanderous. I do have to agree with the site that they might not be able technically to give the info.

I don't think whistle blower laws apply to someone making a post on the internet but I could be wrong. I thought it was more if you heard of illegal things and went to law enforcement about it.

Anyone can clarify if it applies or not?
Don't suppose someone could write a chrome plugin to block the sites he's listed as supporting SOPA?

I can't remember the list off the top of my head and I do want to make an effort not to buy anything from them ever again. I suspect many other people are the same, which reduces the effectiveness of the boycott.
Not if the item was produced by a a party other than the parties pushing for SOPA and its ilk. I think piracy is generally bad, I just think financing groups that want to destroy the internet is worse. Think of it as a transmogrification of the MPAA mandated warnings at the beginning of movies telling you that if you buy from pirates you're supporting drugs / terrorism / human smuggling / pick your poison.

If you buy from SOPA supporters, you're supporting the death of the internet.
McArdle at the Atlantic explores this more in depth:

http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2012/01/how-much...

http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2012/01/is-trade...
I think the author is missing the point. Microsoft doesn't really care about the license fee. Your lifetime value to them as a consumer of Windows specific services, digital media, and software is much more valuable than the license fees you'll pay.

On a related note why bother to use Windows if you don't plan on purchasing other Windows-only software? Is the author also planning to pirate Visual Studio and the like as well? If no Microsoft software is being used why not try Linux or Mac?
Find the Bug in my Fizz Buzz Interview (2:47 video)
Apple rolls out digital textbook service iBooks 2
Interesting fact here is that one of the applications with the highest turnover on the Android market is some medical reference app (Anesthesia Central).

It sells for 100 EUR.

There might be some relation between the price of the app and potential liabilities.
> I think I'll skip Iran on my next vacation for now.

They don't give a crap what an average tourist does in his homeland. Repressions are addressed toward their own citizens and foreign journalists/activists because they are a threat to the regime.
this will allow

But people are already allowed to do so: there already exist Starbucks and other restaurants that offer the service. What is changing is that people will be forbidden from choosing a restaurant that doesn't provide the free service.

they could not otherwise afford

TANSTAAFL - This regulation doesn't mean it's free - you can be assured that customers will be paying for it. All it means is that the cost will be amortized across the prices of the restaurant's food. The result is that a person who doesn't want wifi still has to pay for it. And thus, at the margin, someone who could barely afford a meal will not be able to afford [meal+wifi].
Apple eyes authors with new iBooks Author app
I completely agree (and its hypocritical of me, because I pirate too much for my own good, but due to financial reasons rather than 'moral' ones.) Pirating Windows still helps Microsoft, because its another computer not using a competing OS.

That being said, I think it is a salient point that a pristine distribution system will curb the effects of privacy; Valve's Steam distribution venue is a great example of this.
Seems you saw a Quora survey on our site? We had to change the targeting rules to make it a generic "referring site starts with Quora.com" kinda rule instead of specific URL's :(
Apple announces iBooks 2, iBooks Author to "reinvent textbooks"
I used it in http://qomun.com (shameless plug). Also it has been used by several high traffic spanish blogs and pirate parties (http://pirata.cat and http://www.partidopirata.es/). Kudos!
That quote is a perfectly accurate statement of what the Constitution says. Copyright inherently restricts freedom of expression, to the extent that reproducing work is a form of expression. The Framers wrote both the Copyright Clause and the 1st Amendment into the Constitution and left the courts to balance the two clauses, which is exactly what happened here.
Object factories vs. merging new values to fields in JS
SEO Ireland
Houghton Miff, McGraw, Pearson First Partners For Apple’s iBooks 2
what's an Iranian engineer to do. If you develop porn software, your government kills you. But if you work in nuclear engineering for your government, Israel kills you. I think the best policy would be for Israel to have a secret extraction program for Iranian engineers who are ideologically motivated and want to get into Internet porn engineering. Win-win-win-win (the last one is me.)
I don't think that quote is meant to be taken literally. It's more a commentary on how you can accomplish most things you can put your mind to; the only limits you place are those you impose on yourself.

And I don't know, but it might be possible to create a light-sabre. Who knows. I am sure that we live with technology today that seemed just as impossible 100 years ago.
This article is interesting to read and think about from a theoretical perspective. Practically, though, it is completely and utterly useless.

Fact 1: Pirating is possible and fairly easy across the board.

Fact 2: Some content creators try to limit access to maintain "exclusivity" or to keep margins high. These guys get destroyed by piracy.

Fact 3: Other services strive to make it as easy as possible to get their products legally - Steam, iTunes, the Louis CK experiment. Their stuff is pirated a lot less and they generate a bunch of goodwill on the side.

These are facts, and no appeal to morality is going to change that. You can't just tell someone to suck it up and say it's not their "decision". Of course it's their decision - everyone decides whether or not to pirate! It is ABSOLUTELY their decision. The way to curb piracy is not to appeal to people's morality and tell people they SHOULD or SHOULDN'T do something. It's never going to work.

Curb piracy by making it easier, safer, and more reliable to purchase legally rather than pirate. Articles like this do nothing but reinforce the author's sense of moral superiority.
Apple Isn’t The Only Disruptor: How Amazon Is Killing Publishers
Pirate Bay isn't the only way to find torrents. Private networks (such as what.cd for music) are hilariously easy to use, and generally much quicker than public torrents.
Report: 798 Daily Deal Sites Folded In Last 6 Months
There is a value in providing a "social news paper for a city" but that's not what OP is doing now. "Swarm" intelligence is superior to an individual. Filtering news articles by number of re-tweets sets higher threshold for signal-to-noise ratio, however, 140 characters hardly constitute a "news article". Below, my suggestion for a data mining web application that is focused on delivering a news paper customized for a city with high signal-to-noise ratio news articles.

Input: X = country, Y = city, tweets from twitter

For each X scan last N million tweets that have a link to a web-site, output M most linked domains (Facebook.com, techcrunch.com, cnn.com, wsj.com, etc) - this gives you a base for news feeds customized for every country

For each Y in X, scan last n thousand tweets that have a link to a web-page, output m most linked web-pages that are hosted on M domains for Y country - this gives you the "social news paper for Y city in X country"

Parameters M and N prevent spamming and shape long term trends. Parameters n and m give you short term trends, which in essence are the "swarm" intelligence about which articles are worth reading for a given city in a given country. The value here is a time saver of what is worth reading to keep up with your community.

Note to self: could be a data mining web app
Maybe "the right people" are those people who can take advantage of YC's capacity to extend their reach.
I think what you're saying is true from a certain perspective, but I also think that a lot of great progress comes from cross pollination of ideas. If field A solves a problem using method X, but field B has never applied method X then someone who makes that connection and applies X to B can start a mini-revolution in field B. New is pretty relative in that sense, especially if you reflect on Solomonic wisdom: "There is nothing new under the sun."
The boomers have also presided over a period of unparalleled monetary inflation. They chose not to take hard decisions. Being an xer, I can totally relate to the concept of being trapped. The boomers are sitting on gazzilions of dollars of inflated wealth and god knows how much power that goes with it. It is not so much the lack of power that bothers me, but the conflict between playing by the rules defined by the boomers and the new hope of post materialism.

I think the xers and yers will remain conflicted generations.
More generally, if you want to be paid then do work under a contract. There are many cases where you will willingly accept promise of financial reward - look no further than Y Combinator - but you're a fool if you don't accept the risks or pretend you should be immune to the illegal actions (rather than seeking compensation after the fact, anyway).

Even in something like retail, your product can be stolen and there's no guarantee you'll get recompense. Yet laws regarding shoplifting have remained rather constant and non-draconian in all that time. The problem with the internet is that it's all too easy to get something without paying for it, but people all-too-often forget that the benefit of the internet is that nobody can deprive you of your goods (bandwidth notwithstanding).

Yeah, piracy sucks, but look at what other sectors of the economy have to deal with. Risk's everywhere; deal with it.
I differ on that, the cultural norm of believing that humans can be owned, that existed over centuries dating back to the Mesopotamia is what allowed slavery to persist.
Is it really the case that the poor are eating out at restaurants and will "starve" if restaurant prices increase? I do not think it is. In fact, I might suggest that this measure would save money for the poor: if restaurant prices rise, perhaps they'll take the hint that cooking at home is cheaper and then save more money? I'm aware my scenario is purely conjecture, but I think yours is equally fake. There's no way that restaurant prices will reduce the poor's ability to eat food.
Digamber, I came from India to the US about 2 years ago and it has been a deep learning curve!

You're right that the basic motivation behind the politician's actions are pretty much the same.

However, it is not the Oil and Financial Organisations that stand to gain from SOPA, it is the TV and Film industry. They put in millions of dollars to make movies each year and then do their best to protect their assets. This is not so in India, where it is common knowledge that a movie/song will be pirated within a few hours of it's release.

What's important to know is that if SOPA/PIPA or any other variants are allowed to be passed, they will benefit the Movie industry by giving them the right to shut down practically any website (in a simple way of putting it) without much need for logic. This threatens all the big search and knowledge providers on the internet - Google, Facebook, Wikipedia, Reddit, MegaUpload etc.

The funny thing is, of course, all of this is being done ONLY against Internet users in the US. So, the rest of the world can happily pirate movies and share songs, but US citizens will have to pay the price for SOPA. (HN, correct me if I'm wrong here)
For Arch Linux users, a patch has already been applied [1] to the xkeyboard-config package in [extra] this morning which corrects this issue by disabling the problematic "debug keys" in the X keymap. Update your system and restart X, and the issue should go away.

[1] http://mailman.archlinux.org/pipermail/arch-general/2012-Jan...
How do you hire great engineers? Give them a challenge
Yep. You are correct. I got the Presidents who appointed whom wrong. I stand corrected.
I was wondering why there were so many manufacturing companies and a couple of drug stores on his list. What's the dog in the fight???
What "promote the progress of science and useful arts" is such fuzzy language, deferring to the legislature's idea of what promotes that progress is as reasonable a decision as imposing the Court's own view.

Of course adding a given public domain work back into copyright doesn't promote the creation of any specific work, but harmonizing American copyright law with European laws, generally, might arguably promote creation of works.

The key phrase in the clause is that:

[The Congress shall have Power]* to... [secure] for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries.

*) Article I, Section 8.

Like the other enumerated powers, the language of the Constitution gives Congress a lot of leeway in exercising that specific power.
Was just going to post this. The game requires use of @-webkit-keyframes. As you can guess by the name of the deceleration, it's webkit only.
> don't decide to take the law into your own hands...it's not your decision.

If it's not my decision that means I should not be held responsible for what I do.
There no "we" in "I am the 99%". But Occupy hasn't put out and stood behind a coherent message, and probably never will, so it's a free-for-all to talk about what Occupy really is.
Very interesting. How do you find things like this?
It is protection from creditors. A judge will decide which bills they can pay to stay in business and what assets they can sell and under what terms.

Common stock is probably worthless and secured creditors will get some percentage of their loan back. The hope is the company can re-organize when relieved of debts they can't pay and creditors will get back more money than they would if they forced the company to close and auction off the assets.

thankfully Wikipedia is back:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chapter_11,_Title_11,_United_St...
He's a resident, not a citizen of Canada. They don't have any explicit obligation to this guy.
Sites like Megaupload are another step along the way to changing the music business. To break a new act, it's all about mindshare, branding, building up a name. The labels (used to) control that entirely.

With an alternate channel, the hegemony of the handful of major labels is threatened. Once someone has the mindshare, you can monetize by touring, merchandise, and numerous other ways. (The label response to this trend is "360 deals" but that's another topic.)

Ever checked the math on a major label contract? Check Albini's "problem with music" for a quick refresher. It makes the most predatory VCs look like choir boys.
> I don't think it's possible to discount how critical to this point of view our freedoms are.

Thomas Hobbes had precisely this insight back in the mid-1600s.
> He had a beat on a Lil Wayne album a couple years ago that sounded like nothing was done other than sampling 2 or 3 loops from an old song and repeating them.

That same sentiment describes tons of great hip hop beats. The tricky part is picking the correct samples. Here's an example of a simple sample of one song being used to create a classic beat: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RY8EIoMelFc
As the other commenter said, not making money isn't an excuse to start spamming people. It's a greedy response, profiteering off dishonest practises that waste other peoples time who have to spend time cleaning up all this stuff.

Also if I want to buy door stoppers, I'd much rather Amazon came up in my search than a small site I've never heard of which I'm far less likely to spend money on. Trust is a big part of search results.

If a company tells me they can't outrank Amazon or some other big popular site for door stoppers I would ask them why they are trying to sell the same door stoppers as Amazon is, you're competing with a giant on a product no one will want to buy from you. You need to offer something Amazon doesn't. Maybe this is hand painted door stoppers, funny shaped ones, those are actual niches you can profit off. Door stoppers shouldn't be considered a niche in my opinion, it's far too broad.

In regards to the lazy trend of 'niche information sites' that have low quality content and adverts to make money from, aimed to be the middle man between a search and a product sale, these are the bottom of the barrel websites and I hope every time I search in Google that these sites don't come up. They also waste everyone's time, are extremely uncreative and are diluting quality in the general web experience for everyone.
The fact that they can notice private "illegal content" at all is a violation of trust. If I mark something private, I should expect that it will be private from everyone including employees of that company.

While it is reasonable to expect that they would contact the FBI in such instances, I would also hope that noticing such details illicits a "I shouldnt have been able to see that, so we're not doing enough to protect the privacy of our clients" response and corrective actions.
I like what you're saying in reference to building things up over time and pivoting into new spaces. I think that is the path to finding a co-founder. You have to go out and do things. Your idea reach (part of which is your network) will expand as you go.
Try this: http://maddox.xmission.com/
>I do have to agree with the site that they might not be able technically to give the info.

I have mixed feelings about sites that rely upon the "we regularly purge identifying information" excuse. In this case I believe it makes the site directly responsible for libel as they are actively looking to protect the sources of information that benefits them.
Prezo - a Cool new iPhone app to share and collaborate on photo albums
Whoops. I didn't realize I had made that mistake. And instead of "conservative appointee" I intended to reference the appointing President. Though, it does strengthen the argument for the mixture of majority and dissenting opinions. Thanks for the correction.
You think they looked at someone who coded a piece of free software for image uploads, that was used by porn sites, and thought "he's a threat to our regime"?
>I think the xers and yers will remain conflicted generations.

Conflicted with each other? Or internal conflict?
I select Make, then Model just holds on "Loading..."
This is such a game changer. Just another great lock-in tool for iBooks and Apple.
Probably by looking at the source?
A Technical Case Against National Internet IDs
This article is really "How to promote your blog." There isn't anything that's HN-specific, aside from literally just mentioning the HN demographic.

Not that the article is bad, but its really just a plug for their product (shareaholic) with HN seemingly surgically inserted into the article so it could be posted here.
I wonder if HN clipped the quote in that url. Let's try this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stigler%27s_law_of_eponymy

Yep--for some reason that worked.
I think most computer-savvy people, looking at a file called "cat.jpg," would make the leap to "it's a picture of a cat." The name is practically just a compressed version of that.
They are slapping down recording costs, and they definitely less than in the nineties. However the marketing costs remain very high.
I'm a full time music producer and have my own studio. That cut some of my out of pocket costs but the true cost of my album (it's eight songs) is probably $30-40k which I experience as opportunity cost (i.e. I'm not working on paying projects) and I stretched it over a couple of years. It's not a rational use of resource for me by any measure, I'm just obsessed.
The cost of production can categorized in different ways; time, money, talent, effort. At a certain point one seems to reach a limit that can't be breached. Music is organized information, it takes a lot of fighting against entropy just to make it competent, never mind good. It's like some kind of law of information entropy dynamics!
Seriously, if you compare any commercial release against the ocean of self produced music (like you find on MySpace)the amature stuff is not listenable and the commercial releases are, and they cost a lot.
4.5 Million People Signed Google's Anti-SOPA Petition
Game copy protection rolls further downhill
12 Inconvenient Truths About American Higher Education
I'm no expert and I could be reading it wrong, but from what I understand the treaty allows for the "rule of the shorter term" though wikipedia states that not every country has "accepted this rule."
Yes, as I acknowledged in my first post, I'm being hyperbolic. But it's absolutely true that the regulation will force potential diners to spend money whether they want to or not.

Thus, to your point, it's likely that the total amount of restaurant dining in Kuala Lumpur will decrease. Some people will choose not to pay the higher price, and stay home.
I don't see how that can be if they're doing it with all comments.
Lawyers will benefit a lot. As a class, lawyers, especially those specializing in "Intellectual Property" will benefit financially the most.
Corporate slogan generator
First: a file being named Child Porn, no really I'm not joking this picture has naked children in it.PNG doesn't make it illegal content.

I suspect he also means that they shouldn't be looking through files in the first place on the grounds that "there might be something illegal in them"
Any citizen of an opressive country who doesn't support the govt is looked at as a threat, that's how regimes treat their citizens.

The accusations are a tool, not a reason.
Actionable Advice For Your Early Stage Startup From Brad Feld
Doesn't seem to work, at least in my area. I'm getting zero results on some pretty common cars.
As it stands, this is not great. The cost of an iPad is $500. It'll probably need replacing every couple of years, and that's assuming your kid doesn't break it all the time (if I'd had one of these at school it would have been smashed up constantly). Each textbook is a minimum of $15. Over the course of a high school education, this is going to cost each child ('s parents) thousands of dollars.

This will only benefit kids at the richest schools, which will not fix America's education problem.
Really great inputs @zeratul, we will certainly analyze your technique :)
Join me in refusing to do any work that involves traveling to the UAE - as a gay man I've never had to worry about what they'll think of any work I do..
The fact that it increments over time doesn't mean anything, he could use some server side script to randomly increment the value.

Are we supposed to believe he has had 256,056,823 (current value) visitors to his one-day-up SOPA page?

Or is it the aggregate for total visits to his site, ever?
As a web page (Google Docs Viewer link -- Google account sign-in not necessary):

https://docs.google.com/gview?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwyden.senate....

Pertinent excerpt (after the "good job" part):

The Senate, however, has scheduled a vote for Tuesday,]ar1uary 24 at 2:15 PM to override my and move the
Protect IP Act towards passage. _This will he the deciding vote_ that determines whether PIPA and SOFA move
through the Congress or are turned back for more sober discussion.
Venture Deals, by Brad Feld and Jason Mendelson. The full title is "Venture Deals: Be Smarter Than Your Lawyer and Venture Capitalist." It's aimed at founders who have little understanding of the processes, players, and terms in a funding round. It's definitely worth the $30 cost.
SOPA & PIPA Blackout Day: Why We’re Not Fighting for Enough Today
I don't understand the key presses used. Is the "Multiply" key the asterisk (Shift+8)?

And also the + key on the numpad works?

I was unable to get slock to crash, using a US laptop keyboard. :/
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And here I thought civil disobedience was a proud American tradition.