skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I agree, my current computer is three-to-four years old and I still use it on a daily basis. I've been through three phones in that amount of time. According to that logic I prefer my phone 3-to-1 over my computer yet if I had to choose I would drop the phone over the computer without thinking twice.

Plus, do the numbers account for saturation of the marketplace? PCs have been around for quite a while, Android and iOS have a much shorter lifespan with sales that have not peaked. I ask because I didn't read the article fully since I tend to avoid pronouncements such as "this thing here is dead!" we get every couple of months. Talk to me when PC sales have been trending seriously downward for five-to-ten years and then we can discuss the death of the platform.
6-7 on the weekends and weekdays. I code better free of distractions. To accommodate this requirement, I moved my sleep schedule. I sleep from 4am-11am. I feel most awake and in the zone somewhere between 10pm-2am, give or take.
we have very different definitions of destruction
‘iPhone frenzy’ to drive huge Q1 for Apple
I don't get why they haven't gotten their DNS name seized by ICE yet considering it's a .org
Don't mess with my Internet
Bit.ly on SOPA and PIPA on the social web
I don't miss those days. Although now that she's two, I have a "natural" alarm clock that gets up around 6:30-7 everyday.
..yes? Why I would I friend someone if I didn't want them to be able to see my info/pictures? I'm sure people care a lot less about me than I do.
The legitimate option is GO WITHOUT IT. You have no RIGHT to anything here...

I agree, and I'm surprised so many people miss this. If everyone simply refused to use content that was not distributed under acceptable terms the content creators would change the terms.
To quote luckystarr earlier in this thread: "Don't worry, legislation can be changed so this "problem" will be "solved" in due course."
Mark Zuckerberg: Facebook Opposes SOPA/PIPA
"the smartest people in the world are working hard to come up with ways to get you to click on ads.”

Does anyone know what quote he's alluding to here? I recall skimming an article on it some time ago, but I can't actually find the original.

I've been thinking about this trend - and, quite frankly, being depressed by it - a lot recently.
I know there is a lot of HN activity on this, today.

My reason for yet one more link: This is a link I'm sharing with my friends and family who are less technical and/or less informed on the topic.

techdirt's writing here, and consistently, has been eloquent and elucidating. And their linking lets the reader quickly and conveniently dig as far into details and background as they might desire.

I've been devoting a significant portion of my time in recent weeks and today to offering such information to my contacts who might be concerned but have remained largely uninformed. I hope we all can devote some personal time and attention to doing so, today and in the coming weeks (for this isn't over, and we need a bulwark of public education to slow down both this specific legislative initiative and the future ones that are surely coming).
Same here, and I'm 60189.
SOPA: Explanation by Example
Here is the statement, in case login is required to view the post on Facebook:

The internet is the most powerful tool we have for creating a more open and connected world. We can't let poorly thought out laws get in the way of the internet's development. Facebook opposes SOPA and PIPA, and we will continue to oppose any laws that will hurt the internet.

The world today needs political leaders who are pro-internet. We have been working with many of these folks for months on better alternatives to these current proposals. I encourage you to learn more about these issues and tell your congressmen that you want them to be pro-internet.

You can read more about our views here: https://www.facebook.com/FacebookDC?sk=app_329139750453932.*
Horrible graphics.

First, the stacked data scaled to a constant upper line creates the false impression that PCs are going away, but actually the total market for computing is exploding.

Second, in the line charts, it's very difficult to discern which line is for which products.
I went looking for it too but came up empty handed. I know it was said/written somewhere.

And yeah, it is depressing. And I spend my time thinking about what they're doing... not sure if that is better or worse.
Fall of PC platforms? I don't see any fall there, really, however much Horace wants it to be true.

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.

For example, take the mobile vs. desktop browsing metric from StatCounter.

http://gs.statcounter.com/#mobile_vs_desktop-ww-monthly-2010...

The mobile share is barely inching up to 8% over the whole of 2011. That doesn't really show a fall of PC unless it's a headline from a site that has a reputation of twisting statistics to push its agenda.
You're absolutely right and it's called Baby Duck Syndrome, which you can learn about after the blackout here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baby_duck_syndrome
June 6th is World IPv6 Launch Day
If they lost users due to downtime, reddit would be empty by now. 12 hours down is a typical Tuesday some weeks.
Grooveshark closing ship in Germany due to licensing costs
A mobile web application tech stack
Yes that comment really helps but if i am getting it right, it is something like JSON, right? like JSON is used in public API's and all sorts of server-client communication. Any particular reason to take SOAP against something like JSON?
Adding a key may involve typing in hundreds of hex digits to a BIOS screen, with typical BIOS user interface. That will be a barrier to switching to Linux.
The Self-aware Computing Model
My opinion is that you cannot own or have any control over an integer. I don't care how much effort you put into "discovering" this number: go right ahead and sell that number on a CD if you so desire, but I beleive the buyer has just as much authority over that number as you do (none).
Yes, of course individuals or small groups will still create art in their free time.

You can't deny however that any massive undertakings would be effectively killed. No one will invest millions of dollars to produce a video game, or hundreds of millions to produce a movie if it can be freely copied.

It's great that you can make a game or movie on a small budget, but isn't it better to live in a world where we can have both? Does the cost of copyright really outweigh the benefits of living in a society where creative people can devote all of their time producing content?
I'm Pirating the Next Version of Windows
Statically.
I cut out all caffeine several years ago (that I know of - I'm sure it slips into me somehow), I don't drink coffee, soda, or even tea.

I don't drink a lot of alcohol as of late, mainly as a money-and-waist saving expenditure.

There are nights where I'll hit the pillow and be asleep in minutes, and there are nights where I wont. My sleeping can be very erratic. If you were to ask my S/O, she'd tell you i'm out like a light in 2 seconds, but that's only because her issues are worse than mine, so to her it seems like I'm an amazing sleeper.

She sleeps like a log on her days off, however, so to each their own. Woe be to the foolish man who dares try to wake her.

But I'm usually in that half awake / half asleep mode most nights, for a non-trivial amount of time. I've gotten used to it; The trick is to never open your eyes. Keep "playing" asleep, and eventually it'll happen. Once you open your eyes and let your brain turn on more fully, you're screwed.
How my behavior changing iPhone app made $1,673 in the first 3 weeks.
Google Slows Web Crawlers To Help Blackouts Sites
Identi.ca SOPA blackout
Classic did change. It went from having cane sugar before to having high fructose corn syrup afterwards.
On the second point, besides the fact that successful artists get a decent share of revenues or not, I just think that it's irrelevant to the question of pirating a piece of work.

If an artist is getting screwed by a label/studio is a problem between them and the label/studio. If, as a consumer, you feel bad for the artist, I don't think the solution is to pirate the work, but instead to let the artist and label/studio know you want to support the artist and not the label/studio and thus be a consumer for things that you feel are more fair to the artist. (e.g. concerts?)

The artist might have unfortunately sold some of their rights to the label/studio for exposure, promotion, etc. and in return don't get as much money as they (or the consumers) think they deserve. Next time, they'll probably deal with a different label/studio…

In fact, it's very similar to the situations between entrepreneurs and VCs… you take some money, sell some rights because that's your only way to make it big. Once you make it big, you might realize that you got screwed and think you deserved more. Next time, you'll either still have made enough money/fame to strike it on your own, or you'll work with better VCs.
For no good reason, a rant:

As far as I know, companies are not held legally accountable when their database is illegally accessed and consumer data (passwords and emails) are released to the public. In civil engineering, if a dam fails, the man who signed his name to the design is held responsible. Legally. And he likely loses his license. The same is true of doctors and lawyers.

It will not surprise me if the government steps in to create standards for online security; programmers have not taken steps to self-police.

The same seems true with SOPA. The theft of intellectual property is clearly a problem. A robots.txt file does not stop someone from scraping your content. There's been no effective self-policing and in its absence the result is a Congressional act.

Does the act go too far (by denying due process)? Sure. Might that get scaled back in the courts? Likely. Has Google, Wikipedia, or any of the countless sites protesting SOPA offered up an alternative that actually resolves the problem. No.

I don't support SOPA, but I have a hard time opposing it when this is the state of affairs it was born from.
Just to expand, in most cases 30fps is considered the minimum while 60fps is your target. Most people cannot see the benefit above 60fps. As browsers start using the GPU available on the device in hand then 60fps should be easily attainable; unless you're doing something crazy complicated.
I hope this means an SSD option for RDS is coming soon.
Yes, that's what I meant with 'cold'. For recently requested data, that is cached in RAM, the response can be as quick as 3 ms.
It doesn't say anything about "strange" or ownership in the article...

Site is definitely strange. The site is about a book, which is written by the founder of the fund...
Copyright, at its heart, is aimed at giving the person who creates something control over the creative work.

I'm certain this is just wrong, at least from a USA perspective. The first copyright in England was to control, that is, copyright is censorship.

In the USA historically copyright was a way to induce people to enlarge the public domain.

Giving "creative" people control has never really entered into it, in the USA. I'm given to understand this is different in continental Europoean cultures, but SOPA and PIPA are American, and based out of an English-speaking culture.

If you propose to add some kind of "moral right of control" to a "creative" work, you first need to define "creative work" so that I can tell a creative work from an un-creative work without referring to some authority, a list or an oracle or a government agent. Then we can discuss what moral rights might pertain, and how long they should last, etc etc. I personally think that the prevalence of independent invention invalidates any such "moral right of control", but you clearly believe otherwise.
The first mention I heard on NPR (National Public Radio) followed Wikipedia's announcement that it would blackout. The brief news segment was poorly written and made it sound like Wikipedia was opposing "anti-piracy measures", but it broke the silence.

I also heard one call in to state public radio. The show host and his guest both knew nothing about the topic (despite the show being a "recent news summary" discussion) and heavily discounted the legislation's significance as well as mistakenly generalizing and presuming that "nothing was likely to pass in the current Congress".

Now that the blackout has raised more coverage, most of it still seems to be skewed towards saying that "some Internet companies" are "opposing anti-piracy measures".

I fear the education process will need to continue for some time.
The Oatmeal Explains SOPA
Their governments could try (citizens likely wouldn't be able to), but we've seen how that's worked in the past. The only countries who can change US policy is China and Israel.
GUI color selector integrated with vim
Unfortunately while this is becoming a mainstream issue many news agencies are framing this as tech companies being pro-piracy. Much more unfortunately many people aren't even bothering to read the pages that are blacked out today to understand why the blackout is occurring. Looking at everything being retweeted at the below URL is a good example of this:

https://twitter.com/herpderpedia
That's why there's GTA :)
The Power of Conversation
My point is that they should spend it in ways that create incentives for politicians, not confusion and annoyance for their customers.

If a stop SOPA/PIPA vote was held today, less than 10% of the people raising a stink about it on the internet would show up at the polling place.
I'm not overstating myself when I say: this represents, to me, everything that is wrong with our society.

We have companies like Target that exploit workers, destroy the environment, and sell toxic products to us, only then to "donate" 5% of it's profit to charity.

We have people driving around wearing TOMS shoes which are made, marketed, and sold using fuel that... ahem... fuels colonialism of the very same sort that made those African kids shoeless in the first place.

And now we have pigs being entertained by some flashing lights, while they are locked in a metal box.

You want to know what's entertaining to pigs? Digging is fucking entertaining to pigs. Rooting around in the dirt for some awesomeness to munch.

Flashing lights are about as awesome to a pig as Dubstep would be to someone who had been denied human contact their entire life.

Let's stop trying to paper over disgusting business practices with last ditch attempts at charity.
Not my first GUI code. I've done lots of web development in the past 15 years. Front and back. I've written an OS X app, several iOS apps including some universal ones, a few Android apps, a few webOS apps, and one Windows Phone 7 app. In a previous life I made games and utilities with Visual Basic and played around with Gtk+ in C (but quickly ran away).
Minneapolis' Code42 lands $52.5M series A from Accel & Split Rock
Did Techcrunch get hacked? Lets hope so.
To anyone having problems with sleeping schedule—check if you have Vitamin D deficiency. Taking supplement seems to help in my case.
I've never used Flex in my Flash projects, I just use straight AS3 with FlashDevelop. Requires the Flex SDK to compile but none of the code.

You do not need to purchase anything from Adobe to compile a AS3 project.

edit: I don't mean for this post to be as negative sounding as it may appear, it's not a comment on your abilities.
Thoughtbot's playbook
Costs about $700 for that privilege.
I used to be a huge pirate but I'm not anymore... except for one thing and that's live streaming of cable television. Quite honestly, I wish everyone pirated cable television until it is offered a la carte. The way these media companies stuff packages down consumers throats is just evil.
Roy Blunt, Senator from Missouri, has also dropped support: https://twitter.com/#!/RoyBlunt/status/159698998578524160

Politicians are getting the message (which to them, may just be that dropping support is a quick and easy way to gain popularity with its younger constituents)
Or here for no fee.

http://www.cis.rit.edu/class/simg716/Gauss_History_FFT.pdf

As a Gauss fanboy let me just say wow. Especially note that from 1828 to 1965 there a various versions of the FFT presented for special cases but Gauss had the complete version in 1805.
> There is no demonstration that an economy with copyright is superior to an economy without copyright, and plenty of current and historical annecdotal evidence to suggest that copyright is strongly detrimental to economic success.

Which you haven't cited, I notice.

If an alternative economic model provides a more effective incentive than copyright, then it is unlikely that today's copyright laws prevent anyone from adopting that model instead and reaping the rewards. Obviously you can give lots of examples where this has been done successfully to back up your case, then?
While the benchmark is certainly valid, he general argument is weak and he comes to a mistaken conclusion.

The argument assumes that compiling a program is a fixed amount of work, hence a AOT compiler will always have an advantage.

This is wrong.

We can chose how much effort a compiler expends, and this choice has a complex relationship with the execution speed of our built program. Read Andreas Gal’s PhD thesis, then look through the source of LuaJIT for an example of how one can achieve peak execution speed while spending only a fraction of the time that’s typical inside the compilation machinery.

What this means is that AOT vs JIT vs Tracing is a complex topic with no simple winner. Real systems will increasingly be hybrids.

Lastly, wtf does Santa have to do with anything? If you’re making a claim, support it with a logical argument and evidence, not a lame rhetorical appeal.
Offices don't look at faxes, they are normally discarded.

Do you have a specific source for this? Or are you just assuming that this is the case based on how most business offices treat unsolicited faxes?
Introducing Chegg’s All New eTextbook Reader
The Complete List of Convincing, Unique, and Legitimate Excuses
Have you tried using the wiki link to identify them?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:CongressLookup?zip=6018...
I'm sure there will always be interesting engineering problems somewhere to work with when you have a website with 600 million users.
I'm wondering how it's technically possible for a submission with over 500 up-votes to be flagged to the point of being pushed off the front page; interestingly, it was not a gradual departure, as you'd expect, but rather it seemed to move instantly, from the top spot, to number 33 or 34, on the second page.

I think it's terribly important that it be possible for the community to reflect, critically: SOPA is a serious issue, one we should all be concerned about, and more importantly taking action against. However, there is a point where it becomes an echo chamber, where we are preaching to the choir. Having nearly every submission be yet another "X is blacked out" does not necessarily correlate to communicating to our lawmakers that we do not want this legislation to pass.

Clearly this subtle, yet provocative submission's intent to communicate such a critique was understood by a number of people. I'm still unsure how it ended up bumped so quickly, but whatever the case, I hope the point wasn't entirely lost on those of you who didn't appreciate it.
You are not the target audience. Yes, if you're reading this, you are not the audience that Facebook is building for. The Timeline is there after being extensively tested and stays there are long as the results (Facebook definition) are better than the alternative.

In case you missed it, to be clear - you are not the target audience.
I think this is a fantastic service and I applaud them for providing it, but I get an "unexpected error" whenever I try to submit the form.
What I Wish Wikipedia and Others Were Saying Today About SOPA/PIPA
When I click "Send it Now" nothing happens
You really should consider forcing yourself to sleep more. This whole incident changed how I view my life, and how important health is.

When I was lying in the MRI machine, wondering WTF was wrong with me, I literally saw my life flashing before my eyes.

After the MRI was negative, I quit my job, and decided to spend the next year working on something that I wanted to work on, and get my health back into order, ie. lose 20 lbs and decrease my blood pressure.
I had one professor in college (Physics) who taught using this model. I created pod-casts for all his lectures and sent then home as homework. Then during class he would work problems (designed to teach key concepts that lined up with the pod-casts he had been sending home), it was a great model. Given this was a college introductory class, so about 50 students. It worked well. He had the lowest drop/fail rate of all the other professors, who taught the same class material. I have long found working example problems for Math/Science classes to be the best way to prepare for an exam. This model of flipping what is done during the classroom time, definitely works. I hope more educators adopt his model or at the least try it out.
My experience was similar to yours. I read it when I was 15 or so, a bit at a time. I didn't understand all of it, but I knew that this was something formative and that maybe a computer science degree would be a really good thing to pursue. I've read it several times since.

Unfortunately, I've found Hofstadter's other stuff to be less compelling, other than his Scientific American column, which was collected in Metamagical Themas (an anagram of Mathematical Games, the column his replaced).
> the 1980's computer

Which is, incidentally, a Mac Plus.
> "Why is it that the folks defending copyright always pull out the "But then creators will take their balls and go home!" card? That's such a repugnant, faithless argument. Numerous examples exist of people creating in spite of the system--and even making a living doing the same!"

Your logic is faulty - just because some people will continue to create in spite of the system does not mean all can continue to. Yes, indie game developers can continue to make games, but what about larger undertakings? You can't spend millions of dollars and employ large teams to devote themselves fully to creating a game like, say, Diablo 3, without some way to support those deveopers, artists, etc. A world with only indie games is less rich than a world with both indie and commercial games.

> "Tell that to the guys from Wolfire, or Notch. I'm sure they'll want to know--they've been doing it for years, and would be upset to find out that they can't make a living that way."

I'm not following this argument. Both Wolfire and Mojang (Notch's company) sell games. They also provide free demos but their primary income comes from selling copyrighted works, not donations.
http://encyclopedia.thefreedictionary.com/baby+duck+syndrome
Their "physical distribution" by means of a complex technological infrastructure involving microphones, amplifiers, speakers, lighting, electricity etc. etc., which, as you point out, "the artist didn't make," but which the artist wishes to leverage in order to make a greater profit.

The argument of "well you didn't invent TCP/IP so you can't expect to make money distributing digital copies of your music" is the slipperiest of slippery slopes, as none of us personally created all the technologies we use to make a living. I use a laptop, text editor, and web browser, none of which I created: have I forfeit my right to make a living as a web developer?

It seems that the simplest, most generic expression of your argument (correct me if I'm wrong) is "No one can reasonably expect to make money on anything which can be reproduced digitally, and this is more or less fair." I disagree.