skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Be more dramatic: "Proposed law requires us to censor these search results"
AlgoRythmics: sorting algorithms demonstrated through dance
People in the reddit IRC channel are talking about using HackerNews: brace yourselves :)
SOPABlackout And the “Internet Spring”
Let's try something different:A Musical SOPA Protest
Symantec Says Norton Source Code Was Stolen in 2006 Attack
Of course, but that implies that it is possible to pay for it. The copyright holders must adapt business models so potential customers can pay for a product they want, not some inferior DRM that hurts the customer. As long as piracy gives potential customers the best product, the incentive to pay is lost.
This might be one of the very few cases when 4chan is on hn.
I linked /co/ on purpose - I think it's one of the more civil boards.
Digital Textbooks From a Company Not Named Apple
Visa's Digital Wallet Now Available on Some Smartphones
Ok,

Let me tell you why Piracy, it works most people who sell stuff them self want piracy to work.

To start with this let me tell you something. I didn't have genuine exposure to computers until I was 17, The first time I really worked with a computer seriously was in First semester engineering. Here in India it was not very easy to afford computers for guys like me. In the first semester I went to a friends home who had a PC. And he had Windows installed. I guess it was XP. Another friend said he is soon buying a PC and wanted the Win XP CD. I was flabbergasted to know how easy it was to just copy the CD and install the OS on an machine.

Only many days later did I learn, If Microsoft wanted they could stop piracy easily. But they don't! Why? Because they want people to be trained in it, right from college. So that when they get jobs their employers are forced to buy the OS they are trained to work in. Most of my friends also bought endless pirated game CD's. Here in Gandhinagar, Bangalore you can buy pirated CD's like peanuts on the footpath. Again, why don't they stop it? They can if they want! But why the hell don't they do it?

Now coming to Music and art piracy. Even here, upcoming musicians can't really expect people to shell out money for their work. Piracy acts as an easy distribution medium. Trust me piracy is a blessing in disguise for them.

Sorry to say, but you have all the power to stop this thing without stealing our liberties. But you don't.

Also expecting people to be morally upright and not get into Piracy is big BS according to me. Its like parking your Ferrari in a lonely street in the middle of the night, with the fuel tank full and keys inside. Its bound to be stolen, don't blame the world for it. You are to be blamed for not taking the right precautions when you actually could have!

If Microsoft bans Piracy in India. I assure you they will have to beg and plead with people to even make a single sale. People will be happy to buy a non OS installed computer and install Linux on it. They don't want that to happen, they know it, we know it.

This is why you can't end piracy.
Historic: The Internet Protests Anti-Piracy Bills
Shockwave traffic jams recreated for the first time by Japanese researchers
You work with John? I went to college with John
OooooOooo... A black background with grey text! That's some pretty radical protesting right there. Should've turned off HN for 12 hours instead.
Even Big Companies Cannot Protect Their Data
The easiest way to publish your book, get feedback
I agree with you. If you want to stick it to copyright holders and the industry then don't use those materials. Don't watch movies that are produced by the MPAA and don't listen to music that's produced by the RIAA.

Pirating only gives those on the other side the impression and ammunition to say 'we are creating great things that people steal we just need to force them pay.' Not using their works at all is the only way to win.
Oh thank FSM, I've already hit it 23 times since it started.
I've met this guy and he's even awesomer in person
If the pirate derives benefit from it but less benefit than the price and thus does not consume, then there is a deadweight loss. In this case, piracy provides a net benefit to society.

(Studies have shown that the sales-displacing effect of piracy in music ranges from 42% to no effect at all[1]. If all piracy could be prevented, that's an awfully large deadweight loss)

[1] http://www.heinz.cmu.edu/~rtelang/SmithTelang.pdf
Yes they do because they created it. As much as they have ownership over their music, you have the god given right not to buy it.
Very well done, I wish google would have done something creative like this. Don't remove all the content, but make sure people have to take extra action to see it. Make them feel what it may be like to live in a world where information is censored.

It makes you know that their are things here that you can't see, but you only have to take a small action to see them.
Show HN: [4 Hour Hack]: Youtube Lyric Finder
OP, if this is just a whine about how unfair the world is and how special you are, then fine.

But if it's an attempt to make something happen (stop SOPA), then it's not working and is in fact counterproductive, so please just STFU. You are offsetting the good hard work of so many others trying to make the right things happen.

Make no mistake about it, we have reached the point where the best course of action is probably to simply appeal to the common people's innate sense of "fairness".

Copyright is not fair. We get that.

Pirating is not right. Most people would agree with that, too.

Multiple wrongs do not make a right; most people's reptilian brains sense that, too.

Long ago, before the Code of Hammurabi, the common code of law was often unfair. If, for example, I accidently killed your daughter, the penalty was to put my daughter to death. Such logic today is laughable and modern people would never put up with it. Except that's exactly what SOPA is, penalizing Party B for Party A's transgression. We don't do that anymore.

There are other good arguments against SOPA, but yours is not one of them. Instead of influencing those who need to be influenced, you are just fanning the flames of SOPA proponents. Hell, after reading your article, I almost understand their reasoning...they need to do something to stop your wrong to stop someone else's wrong to stop someone else's wrong, etc.

It's time to stop the cycle of doing wrong to combat other wrong, and just start doing right. It works better anyway. It would be nice to have you on board for that.

I have more to say, but unfortunately, someone in another thread did something wrong, so a moderator has turned off the rest of my comment...

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It would be pretty interesting to see a bunch of blacked out profile pics today
Poll: Would SOPA get results explicitly contrary to its purpose?
Specifically, I think pirating music/movies has become so integral to the culture that if these laws passed, there will be a short time where piracy drops off and then people will learn to use VPNs to get out of the country or some other encryption or new communication systems and as such SOPA will act as an optimization pressure that forces the public into the world of cryptosystems where piracy can't ever be stopped.
Yes, SOPA would force people to learn the dark side
No, the gov'ment would effectively implement a system that beats all easy solutions like VPNs etc
No, people are too sheepish to figure out the easy ways to keep getting stuff for free and likely will just start paying for it
Wow man, this guy is serious. Although I can see there are huge flaws in his argument I would really not like to debate someone's opinion just today. Instead I will tell you two silly reasons of why I pirate.

1. The prices are all wrong. If they want me to buy something I should be able to buy it. I am not saying that since I am a student I don't have the money to buy it. But spending 400 Bucks of my native currency for 12 songs is just ridiculous. I don't want to do that.

2. This is even more sillier, I pirate because I can. Maybe this is a usability problem, but I don't want to seem like I am on some kind of a high horse. But still, if you are willing to give me individual songs (I rarely want the whole album or OST) for cheap I will consider buying it. Payment is not that much of a problem, you can have a wallet like system.
These pseudo-blackouts help raise a point, but the truth is that unless the site goes down, information blocked, people don't realize just how bad censorship really is.
I see HN mentioned on reddit on nearly a weekly basis. Today will be different.
someone should go on Foxnews and explain to those viewers that this is:

1., Big government grabbing the freedom of its people

2., After freedom of speech, your guns are next. They will raid your homes without warrants on the pure premise that someone has maybe placed a gun there.

Turn the Foxnews/Tea Party monster against Murdoch.
No, people are too sheepish the easy ways to keep getting stuff for free and just start paying for it
The SOPA Blackout Roundup
Interesting hypothetical, but I think there is a difference between specifically asking for a service (and possibly creating a contract) and not paying vs sharing a copy of a work already produced. Otherwise, there are loads of services you can argue against paying for in that way.
At last a good angle: Stop The Wall
> Can you give me an example of how you would frame the material in your response using task-based documentation?

My response is task based. The titles are tasks you would like to perform.

Compare with the TOC of the NLTK book:

'Accessing Text Corpora and Lexical Resources (extras)'

What is this? What does it help me do?

If it's prepare a document for analysis, then the title should be 'Preparing text for analysis'

'3. Processing Raw Text'

'Process' is a meaningless word, like 'System' or 'Data'

4. Writing Structured Programs (extras)

That sounds like a coding guidelines document. What does it have to do with language? Why do I want to do this?

7. Extracting Information from Text

Better.

8. Analyzing Sentence Structure (extras)
9. Building Feature Based Grammars

Why do I want to do that?

10. Analyzing the Meaning of Sentences (extras)

Good. Better would be 'Determining the meaning of sentences'

11. Managing Linguistic Data

'Managing' is another meaningless word. Are you going to process a managed data system now? No? Perhaps there's some practical advice regarding handling large volumes of text here. Cool, then my task, and the title, should be 'Handing large volumes of text'.
Life on Mars (and elsewhere)
Reddit, doing SOPA blackout RIGHT!
I'm thinking of things like this --

* http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Academic_dress_of_the_Universit...

* http://ask.metafilter.com/59198/Why-do-students-at-Oxford-Un...

* "If the Proctors consider you not to be dressed correctly they reserve the right to refuse you entry. Any infringements involve the Praelector in paying a fine of a bottle of Port!" (http://www.clare.cam.ac.uk/Graduation-2011/)

-- which serve no obvious purpose, but can potentially make people feel that Oxbridge students are strange and different (and maybe posh or snobbish), and not the kind of people they'd like to be around or become.

I'm not saying this is always an easy call, though. Once you're there, a bit of harmless tradition can of course be fun.
I do about 6-7 on weekdays, then crash on weekends and sleep 12-13 hours. If I don't get my weekend crash and roll into the next week, I'm practically brain dead by the end of that week.

I have some respiratory problems that make the sleep quality not that great either and 6-7 often more like 3-5 depending.

I'm chronically sleep deprived. It's not healthy.

I'm also a supreme night owl, doing my best work around 6-9pm, and shutting down the brain to sleep is a constant struggle.

Don't do what I do, it's not good, but it's a vicious cycle I'm slowly breaking out of. I used to do 4-5 at night and crash 14-16 hours on weekends. So there's that.

Left to me own devices and no schedule, I'll fall into a cycle where I sleep 8.5-9 hrs, and consistently go to sleep at around 2am and wakeup at 10-10:30am. Sometimes it'll fluctuate and I'll go to sleep at 3-4am, but I'll always wake up about 8.5-9 hrs later, and I'll eventually stabilize on my 2-10 cycle.
The camera focus, the light balance, the difficulty of interacting with the iPad from the side - the cat was the last straw. I just went with an edited screencast instead: http://remembary.com
This is something everyone that talks about this topic needs to understand. Basic economics teach us that an infinite supply comes at the price of (near) zero. The amount of music, movies, software (products) that can be distributed is only limited by technical issues, such as the amount of bandwidth and hard drive space. So naturally distributors should expect their product to have a lower price than it once had, especially when selling online.

Of course this leaves out the production costs entirely and probably a whole lot more. I'm not an economist, but I think this is a fatal flaw in the business model of most entertainment companies.
I'd pick any one of those over Jira and Confluence any day.

I tend to use Trac most.
How does the length of which the copyright is applicable affect whether copyright infringement is stealing?
How A Small Newsletter Turned Into a Very Big Newsletter
Stop SOAP
Wikipedia, other websites go dark in anti-piracy bill protest
I looked at CNN's frontpage take on the SOPA blackouts. Here is their definition of SOPA:

If SOPA passes, copyright holders would be able to complain to law enforcement officials and get websites shut down. Search engines and other providers would have to block rogue sites when ordered to do so by a judge. Sites could be punished for hosting pirated content -- and Internet companies are worried they could be held liable for users' actions.

I placed the emphasis around the offending line. This wordplay makes SOPA sound more palatable. Under DMCA, copyright holders already have the right to demand that websites take down offending material. Under SOPA, a judge can order the search engine itself to be shutdown. Search engines, news aggregation sites, and online community providers must be proactive in removing links before a judge is even involved. Under SOPA, the definition of a "rogue site" is anything that happens to have a link or piece of information representing a violation of copyright.

See "No Duty to Monitor" at http://blog.reddit.com/2012/01/technical-examination-of-sopa-and.html
I feel for you. But when I described the problem as "solved", I meant that the solution to music piracy has been found, it's been tested, and it has prevailed where implemented. Unfortunately, it has yet to come to your country, probably due to your small population, as you said.
John Abraham marry with Priya secretly?
One wonders what she'll make of the place she wants to go (UCL) where they keep the body of the founder on display in a glass case in the main hall, and he's wheeled into meetings and listed in the minutes as "present but not voting"?

Not to mention that UCL is just as "elitist" as Oxbridge, and aspires to be more so...

(Disclaimer: UCL alumni)
I have weeks where I do 5 hours per nights, sometimes even less. It makes me feel awful.

I survive with 6 hours, but I really need 7 or 8 to be in top shape.
Well then they have a god given right to not digitalize it.
HN has been receiving an influx of Reddit users for quite some time now. I do feel HN's quality has suffered as a result (not due to people coming from Reddit in particular, just the classic problem of quality reduction as communities grow)
for screencast on simulator, i suggest using this instead of the cursor. atleast making it more real http://wonderwarp.com/phonefinger/
This is so sad. Wikipedia is so helpful.
Sharing an original work against the express wishes of the creator? Nope, you are dishonouring their hard work in creating the content and their intentions in making it available to the public.

I supposes breaching the terms of the GPL would be 'honourable' too.
Grooveshark music streaming service forced offline in Germany
Stop SOPA and PIPA, a personal request - The Hiltmon
<rant>

So then, what if I am willing to pay for it?

I would very much like to watch US TV shows. Preferably on a computer, since I don't have a TV (but on TV would be a good effort too!) Unfortunately, somebody has decided that I am not allowed to.

If try to buy Hulu Plus, I am greeted with a nice message telling me to fuck off back to where I came from. Same with Netflix. Hell, I can't even watch a 2 minute clip of the Daily Show without resorting to browser gymnastics.

So I pirate US TV shows. Mercilessly. I can't see a downside. If the piracy has no effect on their profit margins, then we continue to get great TV content. If they go bankrupt, then some people who I violently despise lose their jobs. It's win/win!
Imgur mirror because tinypic loads pretty slow for me: http://i.imgur.com/NPllL.png
Perhaps your "life is unfair" line could be extended to the artists who feel it's their natural right to take advantage of the diminishing costs of digital distribution.
I hadn't noticed that. Not sure why they can't have the href point to the docs page and use JS to show the fancy menu if enabled.

Then again, this is still a prototype. Hopefully someone will fix this before switching over.
Because copyright is not the same as stealing a physical item, so if you want to discuss the morality of it, then length does play a role, as it should since all works should enter public domain at some point, therefore ALL discussions about copyright should address the ever-extending length.

Also, discussing the morality of copyright infringement is also important, as copyright infringement does not rob the owner of the item itself. It only duplicates it.
Php.net blacked out
What evidence is there for the quality of these "detectors"?
"You can't just copy a car."

Not yet, but the technology is rapidly improving. With the right equipment (3d scanner, 3d printer), you can copy basic items at home today. It is only a matter of time.

With the right technology, why wouldn't you copy a car? A car only has value because of its inherit scarcity. If you could copy a car, it wouldn't be worth anything (aside from the cost of materials required to perform the copy).
That's primarily a contract law issue rather than copyright.
10 Green Building Predictions for 2012
These trends, which range from a boom in certified multi-family construction to the advent of consumer friendly home energy technology, were identified by us based on discussions with a broad range of audiences over the latter part of 2011.
I manage about 7 or 8 hours on weekdays. I used to get a good 9 hours until i moved into the new house. I find lack of sleep very severely affects my productivity the next day and can even continue onto the second. I would love to have a polyphasic schedule or even something that remotely alludes to it, but its difficult to pull off. I really value my sleep and i miss my afternoon naps. I used to wake up feeling extremely productive with afternoon naps.
On average, I sleep 8h on weekdays and 10~12h on weekends. I have no choice but sleeping at least 8h, otherwise I get a headache…

I organize my life and my work in consequence. I can "rush" and sleep 6h / night but no more than 3 nights in a row.
I went to Trinity College from an inner-city, state school background and always oddly enjoyed the weird traditions I experienced when studying there. These experiences coupled to the history and the grand buildings always made it feel as though I were studying in a museum which, in turn, really fed my imagination/curiosity to explore what else was out there (in terms of odd rituals/behaviour e.g. announcing exam results on the steps on Senate House). I doubt that was their intention but it was an interesting side effect.
An implementation of Fully Homomorphic Encryption
PhoneFinger
No one seems to address the third argument: giving the "Entertainment" industry more money, is giving them means to lobby for liberticide laws, like SOPA, ACTA …
Is the only solution to isolate oneself from popular media ? At the price of cultural impoverishment ?
i try get about 7.30 - 8 hours most week nights, and could get 10 or 11 during the weekend... Weekend, i probably wont go to bed till 2 or 3 am, but wont get up till 1 or 2pm... most week days in bed around 11 or 12, up for 7...
I sleep an average 4 - 6 hours a night.
Neither, people will eventually figure out how to controvert the block but it will take ages to catch on
You need to take into account that test scores don't tell you enough. Currently roughly 8% get the top grade (A star) at A level, per subject [1]. I can't find a number for what %age of students achieve all-A star grades, but I expect it's still greater than the number who apply to Oxford or Cambridge.

It's the job of the interview to distinguish between those who have the potential to go beyond what's needed for A levels. For the most part, if someone has had to work extremely hard to achieve the top A-level grades, they're going to struggle at Oxbridge where the level is that much higher.

I'm not saying the current interview process is perfect, but test scores alone don't tell you enough to distinguish the best students.

Disclaimer: I went to Cambridge.

[1] http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-11012369

(edit: asterisk -> "star" to avoid italicising)
This is indeed a good post, thanks for the link.

Grellas is right to point out that current laws turn a range of intellectual goods into property. We shouldn't forget however how they do this: by enforcing scarcity when the default was abundance. By the way, you can get abundance back by breaking the law.

I reject the terms "property" and "theft" when talking about ideas and recordings because they are abundant by default. By using those words, they make you think in terms of scarcity. They skew your perception of the issues, then exploit that bias. This is why I insist that others do not use the word, "it's GNU/Linux" style. Even if you know what you meant, many people don't, and it has consequences. (In the same vein, I remind people not to say "internet" when talking about the world wide web alone. If you believe you "have the internet" as long as you can run a web browser, you won't notice nor protest when your ISP starts blocking TCP ports.)

I also reject copyright and patents altogether. Not because they are not property by default, and therefore illegitimate (I find this argument very weak). I reject them because I believe they do more evil than good. Most probably, they are more a hindrance than a help for our economy and our technological development. Not to mention the inevitable loss of individual liberties, which humans tend to value by themselves.

Overall, I believe scarcity should be abolished whenever possible. If we get to the point where there is so much abundance that life is not fun any more, then we'd have a good reason for scarcity. (Video games provide an example: god mode, unlimited ammo, and free experience points tend to spoil the game. I'm still tempted by the cheat codes, but I think twice before I type them.) But right now scarcity is a problem to be solved. Copyright and patents are part of that problem (or at least a symptom).