skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This is of course an opinion (one I generally share).

Generally the more niche something is the less fans it will have but the more those fans will love it.

A lot of pop music and modern moves + video games are designed specifically to appeal a bit to a large number of people. It's almost impossible to create something that appeals a lot to everyone.

So the other option is to find a small niche following and concentrate on extracting the most amount of money from them. I imagine that without some form of copyright most of the music produced would either be stuff produced by musicians for other musicians or for the upper classes who would fund it's continued development.

There would be a lot less "angry prole" music.
I don't think this analogy holds up very well. Getting a trophy is something that happens at the end and getting a seed round is something you do at (roughly) the beginning.

Getting a seed round of VC is more analogous to being allowed to be on the team in the first place. The trophy is more like an IPO or acquisition.

"Not Everyone Gets To Be CEO Of A Billion Dollar Company" strikes me as a more appropriate headline for this bit. I don't see any reason not to allow (or even encourage) everyone to try though. Sure, some (most?) will fail, but as the old saying goes "you miss 100% of the shots you don't take."
That does seem to help, but I still feel it breaks two common usability notions:

1) Lines are used to divide content and guide our eyes to what is important. In this case, we have to travel "across the line" to see the next piece of content which may be related, which breaks common notions.

2) Our mind usually focuses on the largest items on a page and then goes to the smaller details afterwards (Like how magazine article titles are always bigger than the text below it). In this case, after the top photo, my eyes move towards the bigger content boxes than the thin line in the middle.

EDIT: A third one!

3) If we focus on the line, the content to the left of the line becomes slower to read than the content to the right of the line. When we look to the left of the line, our eyes have to travel across the entire box to get to the start of the status. When our eyes travel to the right, the status starts a lot closer (due to text being written from left to right)

Here's an example:

Its a great day to be a programmer | I can't believe I got this job!

If you read this left to right, its fairly to read. But if you start in the middle at the line and want to read the left comment, your eyes have to go all the way to the left to get to the beginning, then come all the way back to where they were in the middle at the line. When you read the comment to the right, the text starts immediately.
The e-vangelists seem to believe that anybody is entitled to access to any content at any time at no cost—open source. Their real ideological objection is to the concept of copyright itself, and they oppose any legal regime that values original creative work. The offline analogue is Occupy Wall Street.

That alone is enough to render the article useless, a very bad piece for a generally high-quality blog (can we just call newspapers blogs from now on? it's technically the same thing)

On the other hand, the internet doesn't yet offer a good way for creators to get rewarded for their work. Donations are too arbitrary, itunes despite its popularity is tied to music corporatism and so is spotify. What other startups are working in novel ways to monetize intellectual property?
Doubtful that's their only reason. Google going down would be akin to github going down: more harm than good, and the message would get lost in the chaos.
I had a look at the comments on the article and pretty much every poster, wall street journal subscribers included, are opposed to SOPA.
The article is supposedly about SEO, but the author spends half of it talking about fraud and implying that that is what blackhat SEO is about? lol

Blackhat SEO is using programs like Xrumer and Scrapebox to build backlinks en masse, hiding content from search engine spiders by inspecting user agents, and building low-quality content farms of keyword-laden articles. Phishing and credit card fraud are totally separate.
Microsoft has 90% desktop market share. Software developers won't support other operating systems until they have more market share, and people won't switch to other OS'es until there's more software.

If the software you need only runs on Windows then you should pay for Windows. Those that can move to Mac, Linux, etc and get away with using Wine or other alternatives should. The markets for alternative OS'es will grow then more people will be able to move.

Sounds like you are stuck on the Windows environment. You should stay and pay for Windows. There's nothing wrong with that.
You don't need to buy anything. Here is an excellent free open source AS3 (and other languages) editor/debugger (for Windows):

http://www.flashdevelop.org/

Download that and the free Flex SDK from Adobe, create a new Flex 4 project and stick this in the Application tag in the generated Main.mxml file and you are done:

<s:Label text="Hello, world!" />

Use an AIR Flex 4 project instead with the same label control and now your app runs on both Macs and PCs (and Linux but not as cleanly) in its own native window with full access to the native file system and the Internet without any AJAX proxy issues.

I admit its not as nice as instant browser compilation but for some class of applications Flash/Flex is very nice.
While I do wholeheartedly agree with you, lets keep in mind that these are politicians we're talking about.

Baby steps. This week, get them to oppose SOPA/PIPA, next week, get them to be more transparent.
Do write them a supportive letter instead.
Dave Cutler, father of Windows NT, leaves Windows Azure to work on Xbox
I don't see it as stealing. reddit is a great community, but completely different from HN.
Thanks for the feedback, we added the suggested breathing room.
For some reason this sentence jumped out at me:

"Some lawmakers have noted that PIPA and SOPA would not affect anyone of the Web sites participating in the blackout."

I assume the argument being made here is that they're domestic sites and would not be affected by the legislation. And since they're not pirating anything what do they have to worry about. I could see someone reading it and thinking this is much to do about nothing. But this bill really puts pressure on domestic sites to comply and as we all know will just push the pirate sites to find ways around the law. So really, the sites most affected by these laws will be domestic and law-abiding.
I find Wikipedia's blackout to be lacking in expedient information, and I see those tweets as evidence.

No where on that first page does it say "SOPA", "PIPA", or anything about censorship. I think the use of bigger, bolder text would've gotten the message across better than the more aesthetically-pleasing splash page they have now. Imagine how much more backlash there'd be if it had a look more inline with that have http://smbc-comics.com

It comes off as an issue that Wikipedia cares about, but doesn't explicitly tell me why I should care about it.
But that's not at all like the situation at hand. They're not refusing anything — it's only for one day, and if you don't want to participate, you don't have to. What you are complaining about is a minor inconvenience at worst.
Yep. Or if you're a redditor, send them a pizza :)
Many people in the US have a chip on their shoulder about the US taking even a tiny bit of friendly advice from the rest of the world.

When John Kerry mentioned the need for global consensus in one of the presidential debates, George Bush pounced and Kerry immediately tried to back off.

That is the political reality in the states when it comes to outside influence. Even a hint of it, from the best of friends, is not tolerated.
They're not protesting "something". They're protesting a law which they believe has a good chance of passing, and which will likely put them out of business if passed.

Now, should they interfere with your paid service because of that? I don't know. But it's not cut and dried either way. The best would be for the law to go away and for your service to continue without interruption. But it doesn't look like that's possible at the moment. You have to choose one, and neither one is something they "should" do.
Wow, Java, .NET, or PHP. What a choice...
Reposting my blog comment here (because I know people don't read all the way down):

I agree and we need to all become more vigilant. I also implore you, as a member of the news media who is paying attention - please help us stay informed. Government is big and complex and we laymen have work to accomplish day-to-day. Help us find information, point us to new sources, new ideas. Challenge us. Its not that we can't think, but simply that we are busy producing and I personally feel their are few news sorces that give me the facts, respect my intelligence, and dig in deep.
The Surprises of a Wikipedia Blackout
Sopa.js
Corporations are very different from other types of organizations - they make no pretense of representing the interests of the individuals within them. Their interests _may_ align at times with those of their employees, but they often don't - and they're not supposed to.

At the end of the day, corporations are _supposed_ to prioritize the interest of their shareholders, and in practical terms, they often also prioritize the interests of their senior executives, if for no other reason than those executives are compensated in shares of equity.
Mark Zuckerberg Finally Comes Out Against SOPA
Yes, this is pointed out in their FAQ about blackout http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:SOPA_initiative/Learn.... No need to post about it here.
Here's the SODA paper:

http://nms.lcs.mit.edu/~dina/pub/soda12.pdf
I saw a presentation at RailsConf two years ago where they took it to the next level. It was the Spanish Internet Party. If they got members in parlament, you could actually vote yourself online, and the MP would just vote based on the constituent votes. You could even delegate your voting power to causes you care about (for example, the EFF or PETA) so that you could have your views represented without having to spend hours or days researching every single issue.
Apple tried rental of TV shows. They shuttered it:

http://allthingsd.com/20110826/apple-pulls-the-plug-on-tv-re...
I expect it's something along the lines of "Everyone on HN is already aware about SOPA/PIPA, so what would be the point?"
Best link I've read all day, what a winner.

This guy needs to be invited to come hang out with us in the Valley.
I think he means to make copyright nontransferable. It's an interesting idea, but I'm not sure how well it would work in practice.
Re: "the smartest people in the world are working hard to come up with ways to get you to click on ads."

Maybe the third-smartest. The smartest people in the world probably aren't working hard, period. The second-smartest people are working hard to build shit that sells itself.
On the other hand, the "traditional" press has centuries-old ties with governments, diplomacy, it's even part of the constitution in most countries, so if you want to compare apples to apples, you have to also notice that the media establishment is defending its (now outdated) exclusivity over content distribution.

As an outsider (i m not in the US) one can see that it's not just the corporate interests of Google/twitter/facebook etc that are threatened, but also the transition from the old "mass media", (where mass manipulation was possible) to something new.

In the end, the whole SOPA debate should motivate people building startups to think up new ways to monetize intellectual property, not just ignore the problem
Why is it my job to do your policing for you? [...] Don't make your problem my problem.

I'd be wary of using that kind of argument because why does Mr. Average Joe care who polices piracy online? Maybe I'm too cynical about people but I think that they respond better when you angle it to how it'll affect them personally. The fact that the MPAA's problem has become our problem is of little consequence to the end user.

If I make reasonable efforts to enforce your copyright, why shouldn't I have safe harbor against further liability?

Again, maybe my cynicism, but I think this is already too complicated (i.e. not soundbite-y). "We don't want the government in control of what you can look at on the internet" is definitely vaguer, but it's more memorable.
Lessons Learned from Localizing Canabalt
Hacker News will shorten URLs if necessary to make them fit, so it's not necessary to use URL shorteners (which are discouraged): http://divinecosmos.com/start-here/davids-blog/1023-financia...

Edit to add: Please make a compelling case why I should take the time to read an article that starts with an amusing replacement of the letter A in the headline with a quartet of all-seeing eyes.
A completely useless list that jumbles up unrelated items and is almostly completely devoid of any helpful context. The worst kind of blog dreck.
I did the exact same. I wasn't aware before calling that my representative opposed both bills, but I made sure his staff knew I appreciated it when they told me.
The reason for this is because a lot of the tech community are pro-piracy and tend to talk more about how they should be able to freely download and distribute copyrighted material because traditional distribution channels are outdated in light of current technology. That's certainly something worth discussing but now isn't the right time and the protests aren't the right place at least when talking to the public. A lot of the discussions I've read focus on piracy and throw in web censorship as an afterthought.

We need to leave torrents, file sharing, the Pirate Bay, and the others out of this and focus in on domain seizures, the cutting of funding, the lack of due process.

Most importantly we need to Explain it in a way that they can relate to!!!. Don't talk about Google and other sites being censored, search result censorship, and all of that as much as you should be saying things like:

"The government is giving media companies the power to:

- take down your Facebook post, your YouTube video of your cute baby son singing along to a copyrighted song...

- shut down your mom and pop shop website because you used a logo you shouldn't have by accident, mentioned a wrong name, or even slightly threatened to take away a single customer from a larger company

- etc. etc. etc. all without due process! All it takes is some company making a single complaint and you can be lose money, business, sources of funding, your domain name"

That's the kind of conversation that we, who know about this stuff, need to tell the public. Remember, a lot of these people think Internet Explorer is the Internet. They think you have to type in a URL in Google then click a link to get where you want to go (I've even seen someone type in www.google.com in Google's own search box!). We need to talk to them in a language they understand. It's not their fault they aren't tech savvy but it's still our responsibility to make sure they understand what we're talking about.

No jargon. No big words. Make it relatable. Don't talk down to them but do educate them on the issues, not technology.
> Anyone on the pro-SOPA side can say exactly the same thing about e.g. Google. One of Google's major divisions, Youtube, was built in part on piracy.

If we're being objective about this, then we should acknowledge that YouTube still carries a vast amount of illegal material. These days they get safe harbour because of the DMCA takedown provisions, but Google are still knowingly providing a tool that is and always has been widely used to break the law.

The thing is, the big studios may be able to afford people to monitor such popular sites full time and have a well-oiled takedown process, so the DMCA provisions balance things out for them. The small, independent outfits can't and don't, though, and the bottom line for them is that the law says they have exclusive rights but in practice those rights aren't enforceable.

The provisions of SOPA/PIPA are obviously over-the-top, but there is a legitimate reason for some of these organisations to complain about the current situation.
Don't take this as an indictment of the non-tech crowd; it's not just them.

Take this as evidence of the generic divide between "I care about this issue" and "I will pick up a phone and call my representative about this issue."

If you find a way to bridge that divide, you will have solved society.
> Translation of a domain name to a dotted quad is free speech activity.

Really? It isn't necessary to force every square peg of an objection into the round hole of 1st amendment free speech rights.

Even more generally, bad public policy can still be constitutional. Objections should be organized around the unsoundness of the policy in addition to any Constitutional objections. Defense in depth, so to speak.
This was the case for music for a long time (still is, but to a lesser extent) before iTunes came along. Downloading music through Napster, Limewire or BitTorrent was simply easier and more effortless. Even though people were willing to pay, they didn't because that would have required more effort to do so.
It certain is not stealing IMHO.

There are plenty of places to visit, dzone is another good site and maybe techmeme but neither of those have even a black bar on their site in solidarity.

HN does feel a tad sluggish though so maybe lack of new accounts helps prevent a total crash.
I agree, they've pretty much broken every single UI convention by having information chronologically separated in between columns. As a society, we're used to following down a column because of the breaks, like a newspaper. For some stupid reason, Facebook has broken this convention and made posts go back and forth between the column break which is idiotic.

What I despise is the lack of privacy, because if I tag a photo with a friend's name, all their friends can see it, regardless of my privacy settings which forces me to no longer tag my friends.

I basically have stopped using Facebook except for reading up on the newsfeed.
The Freaky Friday Management Technique
Wikipedia link doesn't work today... those crazy hackers who opposed SOPA have already taken it down. ;-)
I appreciate this. All I'm getting is 502 errors, and I thought that was the whole show; I was disappointed.
Valuation doesn't work the way this guy thinks it does. If I buy a hammer and use it to build a house that I then sell for 300K dollars, it does not stand to reason ipso facto that my hammer now costs 300K dollars. Yet this is exactly the level of reasoning that goes into his valuation for a university education.

The hammer costs what supply and demand say it should cost. And with universities, you have a case of increasingly plentiful supply for most materials chasing relatively stable demand. So market reality dictates that prices will fall, if not now then eventually.
For anyone who wants to try out the language, here's an OCaml tutorial with an in-browser interpreter: http://try.ocamlpro.com/
The Google Anti-SOPA Statement, Corporate Speech, and the 1st Amendment
Agreed a thousand times over! We need to make it relatable. I'm really good at talking with people so I wish I were there to help. We just need to talk about how it can affect their lives and businesses. If we put it in terms of their afacebook profiles, Youatube videos, blogs, and mom and pop shop websites and how those things can be threatened and put them into a lot of trouble we could get a lot of the general public on our side. I think we should go to great lengths not to talk about piracy at all.
Still seems the same to me in principle. For problems where there are multiple correct answers, probabilistic methods are frequently used to find them (e.g. genetic algorithms). All kinds of things can change timing and power consumption, especially when using a probabilistic method.
IIRC at one point SOPA also made changing your DNS servers illegal (the wording was something like "technical measures to evade DNS blocking").
Seems like financial/quant computing would be a natural fit. The author mentions ocaml being well suited for general programming needs - Anyone using ocaml (or haskell/f#/etc.) for real production code?

Edit: should have mentioned this earlier for an example - xmonad is written in haskell
Pirate Bay press release on SOPA
Time is a limited quantity for even the most prolific Redditor. Let HN not deprive them of it unnecessarily! :-)
MPAA: Internet blackout against U.S. law fails to enlist big sites
I agree with the article. They are basically using legal maneuvering tactics to satisfy the letter of the law, but are in effect getting rid of the last hold outs. I will be leaving AT&T when my contract is up and going to another unlimited provider. Many say that most of the unlimited providers are not that good, but AT&T is no better now, given that after a gig, they turn themselves into the worst performing service available. There is really no incentive for me to remain on their service.
>I suppose it's possible there are a lot of intelligent people with the emotional maturity of a 10 year old.

It's not necessarily a maturity thing. When I visit 4chan it's usually for a cheap laugh, not to engage in serious discussion. The Internet's big enough for all flavors of discussion, and 4chan fills its niche. It need not be considered childish for doing so. I can enjoy a rational foreign policy debate and also cackle maniacally while running down grannies in GTA. Neither exclusively defines my maturity level.
I was afraid of that, but now that I think about it, it's less of an issue when the big names (Wikipedia/Google) are joining in. It makes it harder for a politician to single those websites out and spin the protests in a negative light.

(Then again, anything's possible in politics and PR, so it's hard but not impossible).
Is it racist for someone to ask "where are you from originally"?
I agree. Blackhat SEOs don't necessarily break laws, and that sentence gave me pause as well.
What the Top 1% of Earners Majored In
So, basically, "pirated isos might have rootkits"?
Rep. Anna Eshoo (of California's 14th District, which includes much of Silicon Valley) also blacked out her home page: http://eshoo.house.gov/
I think the worst-case scenario we're all bandying about is implausible. I don't think we'll be closing down youtube, or even minor content-sharing platforms. I just think we'll see more like what ICE does with filesharing sites: shutting down sites that are probably legal in their home country but that the US doesn't like. That's not to say I think the bills are a good idea; in fact, I don't think there are any technical ways to prevent piracy and I would rather we didn't try. I just don't think life will change as radically as people say.
The US Government Is Not A Person
Embedding Prolog in Haskell (comments from 2012)
Couldn't this confuse people into thinking that those congresspeople don't support SOPA?
Given how easy it would be to bypass the proposed DNS block in SOPA in this exact way, this is just too perfect.
Correct! Even pirating Microsoft helps Microsoft.

The worst thing for Microsoft would be a strict enforcement of copyright: people would be running to alternatives.
Riak has many shortcomings, but I wouldn't describe latency or installation as primary concerns. Our cold response times have a 99% bound of 8ms, and median of 5ms on commodity SSDs. Installation is handled by apt and is trivial to automate.
Enlightening video as always. The most interesting bit was the analysis of how the bills are worded. Grouping in sites that enable or facilitate so called theft of U.S. property clearly shows how dangerous this bill could be to the internet.
What has been your experience with Riak?
Senator Orrin Hatch announces on Twitter he is no longer sponsoring PIPA