skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Hi, and welcome!

First, you might want to read http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hacker_definition_controversy#H... and http://paulgraham.com/gba.html (the latter by the founder of this site), which describes how the word "hacker" is used on this site. In short, the popular concept of a "hacker" is usually considered a cracker around hacker news and similar sites, while the term hacker refers to someone interested in computers or programming.

Hacking, as referring to programming, can be both a career or a hobby. "Software Engineer" would be a common job title, but many people from different industries enjoy programming on their own time (sometimes in addition to a programming job). Hacking as a hobby is a way to create things in the 21st century, where a digital creation such as a website can be just as real as a physical creation such as a car.

In regards to SOPA, there is plenty of reading material on hacker news:
http://www.hnsearch.com/search#request/all&q=SOPA
(and one of the earliest links there: http://boingboing.net/2011/11/11/stop-sopa-save-the-internet...)
Some of the articles and comments on those threads will probably be much more useful for your story than comments on this specific thread will be.

A little preface to the comments around here: what most people here tend to agree is that SOPA's free speech ramifications are much larger than its ability to stop piracy, regardless of whether they feel piracy is morally wrong or not. SOPA would fundamentally transform the internet in a way that user-created content sites that have taken off over the last decade (Wikipedia, Youtube, Facebook, Reddit, etc.) would become legally infeasible to operate. It also has several constitutionality issues, primarily around free speech and due process of law, both of which would be subverted by SOPA's provisions. But others have already said everything I could more elegantly in the above links.
For my iOS devices, the devices themselves are slow enough at rendering web content in MobileSafari that shaving a second or even two off the resolve is not so much a benefit.

The real benefit for me was the CDN content coming through much much quicker for the App Store. iOS 5 has gotten so capable of managing content with iCloud and such that I rarely tether this to my laptop any more.

As such, quickly downloading an app while on WiFi is very important, since anything over 20MB requires you be on WiFi to do it.

I only came about this information by noticing that I was getting significantly higher download speeds from the App Store while at my parents' house on their WiFi than I was at home - yet we were both Comcast customers and I knew that I was paying for a slightly higher data package and had been able to perform 16Mbps sustained transfers on my laptop for non-App Store content routinely.

So I copied down the Comcast DNS settings that my folks had and tried them out, manually, at home on my iPhone. The speed difference was almost immediately noticeable.

Prior to that, I'd been using Google DNS servers 8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4. Just simply changing my DNS servers resulted in a much better performance.

I'll have to shop around to see if I can tweak it even further :)
Why go completely dark? Partially put black censor bars over most of the search results. Throw in a prominent banner to a page explaining SOPA and a button to remove the censorship. Then there is less chance of users assuming some technical problem, and a greater chance for education.
Thanks, that works great.
Something is wrong with your MBP. Maybe you have a bad RAM stick in it.
We should also consider the media message we'd be sending to the uninformed. A site called Hacker News opposes SOPA; what do you think the average person's response to that would be?

Frankly I think that HN is the wrong vehicle to bring attention to the matter strictly from a marketing/outreach perspective.

However, YC is a great channel to carry this message, and PG has already taken a very public stance on the issue.
Of course, we also have X and vim now, if you really really want them. X is useful if you're using the Linux emulator to run, say, a web browser, or you can also use it + ssh to do X forwarding from a Unix box. Vim is just for the hopeless recidivists :)
You know how almost half of his writing is Mormon (LDS) fiction? Well, maybe all of it is :)
I'd love if Cloudflare had a No-SOPA switch I could easily set to make my site go dark when the day comes. I am sure others will want it too.

Anyone from Cloudflare here?
Developer opportunities with Mozilla Lab, Vancouver BC
Personally, I don't think the "eyes of history" will care much what whether or not HN went dark for the purpose of symbolic value. These statements of yours seem to apply better to group demonstrations of the more traditional variety.

I agree that HN we ought to be willing to go dark, (insofar as HN is a leader of anything) but still vote no on the grounds that it will be a meaningless gesture. Leaders should be willing to sacrifice as they ask from others, that doesn't mean it's helpful in every situation.

ps. I may be biased. I've never been very big on symbolic value.
Thank you monochromatic for provide an example for iuguy.

What he described is illegal in the US, by the way, and can get both you and your employer sued. It's not minor: it's part of culture bonding based on women-as-sex-objects rather than as possible equal participants.
Google and Facebook should remove all references to all politicians who supports SOPA, even if they are running for president.
Why not? Worst case, the productivity of the global tech industry spikes for 24 hours. Plus, lead from the front and all that.

EDIT: Oh yeah, and that point about the reddit refugees. Yeah.

EDIT2: and then we can have haskell day on the 19th or something as well. sweet.
It ceases to solve a problem when the user controls sorting.
Ask HN: Your input on a platform I am building 
As a freelancer I have been extremely frustrated with how hard it gets sometimes to get work. Especially, if you are new to freelancing.

I think most freelancers ignore the value of testimonials and positive client experience. Although other platforms allow people to endorse, I think there is a need for a platform where client's positive experiences becomes the core feature of a profile and not side feature.

Currently, I am working on developing the site but went ahead and put up the sign up page, blog and all. Link: squiry.com

Would love to hear your thoughts on idea itself and if you have any suggestion.
The fairly magic particles in Xenocide are based on Mormon theology, so if that's not compelling to you, the exposition of same in CotM is going to be pretty boring.
Immersion at the cost of aesthetics. Is this a carnival ride?
I should rephrase that to "the organization doesn't care about quality". The customer (you) might care, but since you're only consuming the end-product your decision has a lot less influence.

This is definitely an organizational behavior, as the person buying the product isn't the same person that consumes it.
Top 50 US patent assignees for 2011
They admit there isn't such a thing as political neutrality, I'd hope.
Causes Tech: Measuring Static Asset Failures with Duckweed
How did this article manage to reach the front page of Hacker News?

Although the game is good, it is not new.
So, where are the other kids? We want to play.
Scientists show how Internet dependency alters the human brain
I think the parent is not conflating at all, you are separating the same issue into two different issues.

Democratic means very little unless:

- Everyone in the nation voted

- All votes were equally well informed on what they were voting for.

- All parties running were held account to what they were promising.

Americans love going on about democracy as if it's a universal truth of virtue. Yet they live in a corporate plutocracy.

Seriously wiping out tens of thousands of people in the name of "spreading freedom and democracy" is far worse than anything any (all?) organised crime has ever done.

There is no occupying army in North Korea or Iran, but they still feel the force US lead aggression through use of sanctions.

Don't read this as a defence of the mafia and organised crime. They are (for the most part) an extremely destructive force on society. But they are little-league compared to the U.S war/propaganda machine.
Automattic, parent company of WordPress:

http://automattic.com/map/
Personally, I think such a thing would serve no purpose other than to make people on HN feel as though they've contributed something. I think it would be better for the fight against SOPA if everyone who voted yes wrote their congressperson instead (not to imply that they necessarily haven't, mind you).
I agree with you and although I am not U.S. citizen and I read HN several times a day (so it will be a hard day without it) I give you full support in this action. Just go ahead and fight!
The Homecoming saga is literally the Book of Mormon... IN SPAAAAAACE! It sort of holds up until the last book, then he completely loses it--I was able to sort of read the early books simply as S.F. but eventually it got too Mormon for me to handle.
I think you're comparing things a little too early. In 2002, things were still very much up in the air. In hindsight, the PowerPC first started showing signs of real trouble when Apple had to de-rate the entire Power Mac G4 line by 50MHz between the initial announcement and the first ship, but it still did fairly well for quite a while. It wasn't until close to the switch when the promised 3.0GHz G5 failed to materialize that the differences really got big. The Intel switch wasn't announced until 2005 and didn't happen until 2006.

I don't have hard data, but as far as I know, once Macs went Intel, they all got significantly faster and cooler.

This was most visible at the top of the line. The last Power Mac G5 had the liquid cooling system and the top end ran four cores at 2.5GHz. I don't know about the liquid cooled model in particular, but the G5s in general were notorious for being noisy due to fans.

The first Mac Pro which replaced it ran 8 cores at 3.0GHz and was known to be astonishingly silent. I personally used one as my main work computer for years and it was impossible to get the fans to run fast enough to be audible unless you disabled the smart controls by e.g. leaving a kernel panic on the screen for a while. Obviously, this could be due to more advanced thermal design as well, but even allowing for that, you have twice as many cores, running at a higher clock rate, vastly faster in most real-world use, and with a much simpler cooling system.

The laptops had a similar story. The PowerBook G4s would get astonishingly hot, while the MacBooks were much less bad (although still not great initially).
Does anyone who reads HN not already know about the evils of SOPA?
Theoutcall.com gets you out of boring meetings and bad dates by calling you
My goto quip for these sorts of things is Carlin's "I leave symbols to the symbol-minded." HN can do whatever it wants, I voted No purely out of self-interest but if the site goes dark I'll just do a bit more work than normal. Even if all the major sites go dark I'm not convinced it will have any lasting effect.
Since Turkey has its own SOPA for years, these kind of debates happened a couple of years ago. One of the ways is to show a page with the message and let the users continue to regular site if they choose to. http://techcrunch.com/2008/08/17/web-censorship-is-so-bad-in...
I agree with you regarding the fact that no one in congress reads HN, however, I do believe that many people from very big companies (including Google, Facebook, Yahoo, etc) do spend time on HN.

Perhaps "going dark" can help encourage said companies to show support - in a similar way that the Reddit post has triggered this post.
Excel is considered 'functional programming', which is different than traditional programming but nevertheless incredibly valuable. I took a 'Computer Skills for Business' class during undergrad and I can't thank it enough for turning ten-minute tedium into snippets of code.
Educators are allowed to use movies in their entirety for face-to-face teaching situations. I am a teacher, and our school librarians are quite well-informed on the specifics of fair use for educators.
Maybe they can, but I'll believe it when they see it. Going by past accomplishments, ARM has done very well in making their chips faster, and Intel has not done so well in making their chips more economical. Certainly there could be a change in the game, but precedent heavily favors ARM in this one.
Google is integrated with everything.

Personally, I log into Google+ via the http://news.google.com website everyday. There's a sign in button on most pages.
More on behavior design can be learned from BJ Fogg of Stanford at http://tinyhabits.com/

I designed more then 10 of my habits this way and they stick.
The word "hacker" has a highly negative connotation to the mass media. This site may as well be called "Terrorist News" from their POV. The last thing our SOPA opposition needs is to be associated with "hackers" in the popular press. For that reason I vote No.
The Sims Social is a love letter from a computer virus
I'm sure they'd have change in requirements, but that happens in any project. However, the obvious distinction here is there is no development application, or approvals from government. This is the wild west.
When I worked on Wall Street about 10 years ago, somebody tried to used it to make a daily report and got slapped by the IT dept. for using "unsupportable" software. There weren't as many freshly minted PhDs floating around then. Maybe the attitude would be different. The report looked great.
Why, oh why, does everyone assume that a plethora of TLDs implies that all those TLDs must contain a complete copy of .com?

I claim the problem with the first big expansion - .pro, .info, etc - is that it WASN'T wholesale. Yes, if half the Internet thinks that only .com exists, and you add .biz, every corporation has to go register .biz as well.

If you add a thousand real, active, well-used TLDs, they don't, simply because that is no longer how the Internet works. We already see the start of this with ccTLDs; Apple (a pretty aggressive trademark defender) does not own http://www.apple.fm, and nobody expects them to, and nobody is confused that they don't. I'm sure my grandmother sometimes confused Elvis Costello with Elvis Presley, but nobody thought the one was impersonating the other, because people have last names, and that's how it works, and that's normal.

Five years ago, the average American non-technologist's mental model of the Internet was "you type the company name and .com, except sometimes it's .net and I don't know why". Now it's probably a little more nuanced - but only a little, because .com is still Where Everything Is.

If you change that, you've changed that. Because you changed it. So it's not the same.
I read this book when I was in 6th grade. I liked it a little. By 7th grade I thought it was lame (I read all the sequels up to Shadow of the Hegemon). I now think it's fairly terrible sci-fi. Anime (I understand that's a very broad stroke) is much better.
> they might have bad data, and there's very little you can do about it except report it and wait

You can actually go to Google MapMaker and modify things yourself. I've fixed many things to date.
http://www.google.com/mapmaker
Ugh. Whatever happened to "I don't agree with what you have to say, but I will fight for your right to say it?" that has made America great? Is it so quickly forgotten?

If he's a jerk and he's wrong and you think he's overrated or should be boycotted, you know, go ahead and say so, but "should not be tolerated"? That's the language of "they belong in jail or Siberian labor camps".
What if all companies in the YC family were to do something on January 18?
Chat is much more personal and intimate than a shared newsfeed or email. Automatically making chat contacts out of hundreds of strangers or people I will only ever exchange one email with is inappropriate and bad UX.

They don't need to know when I'm online. They don't need the ability to interrupt what I'm doing. I don't need my chat list huge and unusable. By all means give me the ability to add people and circles to chat, but making it automatic seems silly.
Your privacy? Use english please... what are you referring to?

Sounds like a myth.
Thanks for all the excellent pointers, some of which I knew but most I did not. I'm happy things turned out so well for you.

We recently had to navigate the Google Maps licensing obstacle course at $work. I tried getting quotes from Bing, but it was just as hard to get a number since we could only go through resellers. In the end we negotiated down a bit and reduced our map usage. But the next go around I'm seriously considering taking some time to investigate doing the maps ourselves. TileMill looks gorgeous!
You don't have to like the author or agree with him, to like his book. Far too many people were educated to hate.
Image color palette extraction with node-canvas for node.js
I ve had a product manager guy trying to do that. Didn't help; his ideas were mostly irrelevant. The problem is he grew an attitude and tried to interfere with my work.

I generally hate analogies, but it's like a real estate agent trying to work with architects.
Only in the US. We’re pretty powerless in other countries, except for signing that White House petition.
Their design isn't up to snuff, I'd agree. So, it appears all that research and the brain trust nets a let down.

Please be gentle
How does our brain know what is a face and what’s not?
No - Google and Facebook will not go dark and SOPA will pass.

The big internet companies such as Google and Facebook etc. will probably get some exception from SOPA (like they will not liable if they allow easy censoring tool for big production companies) and because of that they will be quiet.

Look, paying few million to lobbyists to exempt you from some legalization is much more efficient - and in parallel you can kill competition like duckduckgo.com
Might I suggest you watch the 2D version? I don't get queasy; I would love a 3D version of this movie.
I like Bang! better: http://www.amazon.com/BANG-La-Pallottola-The-Bullet/dp/B0010...

Battlestar Gallactica is also very similar: http://www.amazon.com/Fantasy-Flight-Games-BSG01-Battlestar/...
see 1) of grand-parent. And remember there are creative ways to do a blackout. Darken the page, map or Google Doodle. Something to raise awareness, and increase coverage. No need to pull the DNS or serve a blank black page
Matt Cutts mentioned it in a blog post earlier - must have piqued the interest of people who had never heard of it.
I had the exact same idea a year ago. Looked for competitors and found one very good looking that provided this service for free, with a great website. That's why I didn't develop it. I hope there's enough demand so that op has success, though.
When Taxpayers Pay for Research, Shouldn't They Own It?
How about comments like "Women getting their panties in a bunch about something as minor as that is the reason they aren't taken seriously in the workplace (to the extent they aren't, I mean)"? Not even so much the message as the way it was said.
Shouldn't we be secretly hoping it will pass so that these big US companies will have to move their operations overseas to our countries?
It has little to do with IQ, and lots to do with education policy.
My friends and I play The Resistance (http://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/41114/the-resistance), which is along the same lines, with some traitors secretly mixed into the rest of the group. The difference is, unlike in Werewolf (or Mafia), nobody gets eliminated, so nobody has to sit out for virtually the entire game.
>There's also the inexorable and unbelievable growth that China has experienced over the last few decades. Growth like that has a tendency to make lots of things look like bubbles that aren't.

Thanks for the explanation. Same goes to the other replies.
That's how Android Intents work, Apps can register to handle domains.

In my opinion, it's a far more elegant solution than encouraging developers to register pseudo-protocols to use in URLs that also result in very awkward interactions if the app's mobile site tries to redirect to the app and it is not installed. (Then again, this gives users a "choice" (!) of whether to open links or Intents in the mobile app or native app.)
http://xkcd.com/304/
I agree w everything you wrote above, but I lack the tech knowledge to understand the following comparison: "high powered marketing is distribution which is almost all code these days"

Would appreciate it if you further clarified. Thanks!
pg, if you're going to blackout, could you try advocating Internet Freedom alongside going dark against the SOPA as a way to show HN wishing to have Internet Freedom to do business?

It would also show that there's a technologically advanced audience here that has great concerns of the anti-Internet attempts.
Just black it out forever, that'll show 'em
If there's no difference, perhaps you'd like to elucidate on the difference between, say, Sweden and the average 3rd/4th world nation? I mean, with the reach of Sweden's government, it's gotta be a hellhole, right?

This line of argument is generally referred to as "jumping the shark". Obviously there's a difference.
Feinstein ... I know that name. Ah, that's right, she's the anti-gun-nut. Authoritarians don't change their spots.

I believe that ESR posted on this a while back, the idea being that people seem quite happy to champion big-Govt. intrusion into almost all spheres of life, but get all uppity when that sphere is the Internet.
To say that such a thing is "no significant oppression" is a contentious statement at best. The world government had imposed a two-children-per-family population-control policy, imposed on many members of society against their will, against religious objections. This is visited in the book(s), though not for overly long. Also, the young child has a government monitoring device implanted on his neck at the beginning of the book. That's pretty creepy.

I suppose that if you're just saying that the oppression is not as gratuitous as 1984 or whatever, that's true.

(The secret genetic engineering experiments to make people extra intelligent but then give them OCD to keep them under control is a later book, it's true.)
Hey guys, I'm the owner of hngp.axxim.net, I kinda forgot about this project, but tomorrow I'll be adding in google authentication (to manage your visibility and stop spammers) and fix the site load speed (did someone say ajax?!) and some other neat, but needed features.
I like the XMen movie. However, the OP says Steinfeld plays Petra Arkanian, Ender's trusted right hand.

As I remember it, Bean was Ender's trusted right hand. Petra was an anchor for Ender's humanity, but it was Bean that was the real military genius, and actually made everything work.

So I'm concerned about how well the movie will reflect the books.

And BTW, contrary to other here, I didn't enjoy the second book, and I really hated the third. But when the "Shadow" books came out, I found them really interesting. I thought it was a great device to re-run the story, but entirely through the POVs of characters who, in the original novel, we thought were nothing but bit players. It challenged my mind to try to resolve the real story between the conflicting perceptions, and I think OSC was trying to show us something about our own personal views of reality.
The only way you can have a story from Variety on HN is if you are talking about Ender's Game.

So excited!
Pragmatically speaking, maybe YC could come up with a statement threatening to move businesses outside the US to circumvent some of the provisions of the law. Shutting down HN - i doubt any congressman is in here to notice. In any case i could use a daily detoxification, so yes.

p.s. Pyrrhic is not the right word, maybe futile