skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
We all know MegaUpload is the go-to place for pirated content. That's not really in question. The question here is: Is our government following the rules our founding fathers laid out, or do they believe they can cut straight to taking down a company 90% out of their jurisdiction without even following due process.

The whole reason it's a debate is because if we, as citizens, don't watch our government closely when they make controversial moves like this, it easily becomes a very slippery slope. If we let our government get away with something like this, where will it end? Soon, will unwarranted search and seizure will be OK for the FBI, so long as they're after "pirates?" Will we end up like Iran who can execute a programmer 'cause they said so?

Yeah, those are extreme examples, but the reason it is such a slippery slope is because our court's decisions are largely ruled by precedence. If the courts declare the actions taken against MegaUpload legal, it's pretty much "anything goes" for the FBI and DoJ to attack future, perhaps less piracy-oriented or even completely legitimate companies. All the DoJ or FBI has to say is "see, you let us do it last time with MegaUpload."
"But that’s pretty much it – we currently know of no other major ways to exploit Moore’s Law for compute performance, and once these veins are exhausted it will be largely mined out."

This is an awfully big post on Moore's Law not to include any mention of memristors*

[1] http://www.hpl.hp.com/news/2010/apr-jun/memristor.html
and it's open source: https://github.com/studyers/instanotes
Thanks. I should change it so that it automatically resets when a user submits a wrong answer.
You don't need to know any special URLs either. All you have to do is stop the signup process after your Gmail account is created (step 1) but before you create your Google+ profile (step 2).
The best way to avoid saying the salary number is to simply ask the question of them first. In other words: "What salary range does this role warrant in your company?"

That frames the conversation really, really well. For one, if the two ideas are severely mismatched, you don't waste your time. If the number is low, you can make note of it then and explain why you are so much better than that. If the answer is non-committal, you've got a wonderful spot to review the role in detail and "come up with the number together".

If the number is high, you can reset your mid-point and focus more on their "horrible" vacation allowance that they'd need to correct to bring you on. :)
https://www.facebook.com/help/?faq=131728300237162&ref_q...
(I used to have an alternate name set to provide context for friends I met through Chinese classes (who only knew me through my in-class Chinese name)).
I don't know, SpiderOak costs $100/yr and I can use up to 100 GB. In comparison, tarsnap would cost at least $130/yr for the 36 GB I use now.

It's not about cheapskating, it's about competition.
Survey: Android set to beat iOS in battle for coder love
Antitrust law.
Sebastian Thrun Resigns from Stanford to Launch Udacity
What's the cutoff? Is it a 50/50 thing? If my site makes 10% of it's revenue from pirates, should I go to jail? Google makes plenty of money from sites that host counterfeit goods and copyrighted material, should Larry Page go to jail?
When I got my first job out of university I was doing C coding for a dept. that shared space with a group that had heavy unix scripting jobs. They were swamped with work and I was relatively free. One day one of the acting Business Analysts asks me if I know Unix. I responded "Sure, I know all the basics." He asked if I knew sed to which I responded "No not really." He turned away at that point, I went to google.

At that point I picked up a few awk/sed tutorials (I already was quite familiar with grep) and suddenly saw the world for what it could be. I'm seriously blown away day to day by the way I make things easier with these two tools. Parsing out data from massive files along with trying to do lots of adjustments to scripting files is suddenly super easy. It makes a lot of tasks easier and I look at some of the stuff I do in my new job and wonder how I'd get through without these tools. Hell, I even wrote a crappy C program to do the basic global search/replace that existed in sed before I realized how it worked in vi :%s/.../.../g

I also get more slashdot jokes now...

tl;dr - You don't know Unix until you know sed+awk.
Indie Game: The Movie draws tears, TV deal in successful Sundance debut
I thought the same thing, and even went to YouTube, just to feel a little nostalgic for a moment :)

I remember having to move one unit at a time. That alone required some skill!! =)
I still don't get what this fuss is about?

Your company looks very suspicious, just look at all these words I wrote down that show you just how suspicious it is.

The words I wrote down are so suspicious, I'm going to take your house and all your money. You can start issuing your own words to get it all back in a few months while I get paperwork ready to keep it from you permanently. Trust me, I'm going to win, I promise. If I didn't think so, would I have taken your house and all your money?
"If you're a night owl, it's worthwhile to at least experiment with waking early for a period of time to experience the productivity increase that occurs from waking early."

I have worked on a early schedule many times and I'm basically on autopilot for half the day. I am never tired before 3:00-4:00AM and dispite my best efforts, if I have to work on a day schedule I simply can't get up at a decent hour without feeling absolutely miserable.
The War for the Internet has begun
Maybe the Mayan predicted the end of the internet with their calendar ;)
The arrests overseas we executed in full cooperation with those local countries governments. Not via some rogue operation.
Thank you HackerNews for bringing the original news about the RWA to my attention. I'm from the Netherlands and was able to throw this up into my network, and managed to get this issue on the agenda of the Dutch Surf Foundation and the Knowledge Exchange effort[1].

[1]: http://www.knowledge-exchange.info/
Victory for crowdsourced biomolecule design
PayPal does this all the time.
IRobot Co-Founder Urges Roboticists to Focus on Practicality
This is equivalent of saying Google is giving Google+ pages preferential treatment unless a Google+ page explicitly states it does not want such a treatment. I won't say that is fair.
I completely agree. This isn't encouraging you to create an open source project, it's encouraging you to make a demo project or toy project, which is something I imagine many of us do every time we're applying for jobs anyway.
I quit G+ because it's much easier to violate the terms of service on G+, and because they also take away your Gmail access when you violate the terms, and when you get down to it I need Gmail more. Ironic, I suppose.
> I'm glad the author of the post recognized that it is possible to switch from being a night owl to an early riser. Anecdotally, I am a night owl... if it were not for work and kids, I would sleep late and wake early. That feels natural for me. But, when my daughter was born, I was forced to switch and it has been fairly painless.

I am skeptical it is possible. Kids and teenagers spend years being yanked awake against their circadian rhythms, and they don't switch but instead their grades suffer as does their health (http://www.gwern.net/education-is-not-about-learning#school-...). As well, people suck at self-assessment - 'what do you think you know and why?'

Sleep debt takes up to a month to pay off (http://preview.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15892922); people don't realize this. People sleep in 23 minutes a day on the weekend (http://blog.myzeo.com/sleep-by-night-of-the-week/); people think they sleep longer. People restricted to 4 or 6 hours of sleep may claim they have adapted to it; they haven't and their mental performance still suffers (http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/17/magazine/mag-17Sleep-t.htm...).

Why do you and the OP think you can switch, and have? (What do you think you know, and why?) Because you didn't notice anything bad. I see...
I meant coming from an academic job to a non-academic one. I'm doing well on the grant front, but I don't think that'll help me in getting a "normal" job.
Does your business completely revolve around profiting from the illegal distribution of copyrighted works?
I agree, but it does provide value beyond a simple real-life lecture, most notably the fact that you can go at your own pace and rewind/replay at any point. This is huge. In addition, the lectures are much shorter for the most part, which also makes a significant difference.

Concerning the importance of discussion groups, face-to-face interaction, and networking opportunities -- those things are necessary in certain cases, but not all. The courses currently being offered through these sites are most often the ones that don't necessary benefit hugely from these real-life components.
> And now here is Megaupload being completely destroyed — its website shuttered, its assets seized, ongoing business rendered impossible — based solely on the unproven accusation of Piracy.

It was proven to a grand jury -- that's why they (and not the government) handed down an indictment.

The treatment is actually similar to what would happen to the brick-and-mortar assets of an indicted meth distributor. Normally when a grand jury hands down an indictment then business functions that aid the alleged criminal activity also get shuttered. See http://www.nwitimes.com/news/local/lake/hammond/feds-e-c-com... for instance.
> Do you really think that MegaUpload generated 175MM from a few users signing up to a paid account, and from ads and scams that were displayed on URLs with legit content.

When did we end up in a society where "Do you really think..." is sufficient for judge, jury, and execution?

The fuss is not about megaupload. The fuss is about the MPAA and the RIAA teaming up with law enforcement to make sites and businesses that they don't like disappear from the internet, without due process.

It's been said before, but your whole post describes pre-google youtube. The only difference is they didn't use ads. It's worth noting, the charges against megaupload have nothing to do with any dirty business using ads.
Neural network learns to identify group sizes without knowledge of numbers.
Bollywood: How Indian Cinema Has Kept the World’s Attention
> However, most porno filters can sometimes be bypassed in 5 mins.

That's the most non-deterministic sentence ever.
RMS: "Free software literally gives you freedom in the area of computing. It means that you can control your computing. It means that the users individually and collectively have control over their computing. And in particular it means they can protect themselves from the malicious features that are likely to be in proprietary software,"

Open-source, proprietary or not, gives you control over your computer compared to closed-source software. It's not free software versus proprietary software.

Free software goes beyond open-source, and besides safety gives you freedom.
Revenue vs margin
When that percentage is the primary driver of your business.
> Whether natural light exposure can be simulated adequately by the computer monitor during waking hours and a blindfold during sleeping hours, or whether getting up at dawn is required, I would like to know -- anyone?

Computer and electronics have been shown to damage melatonin secretion in the evening (all the blue light they emit), so it stands to reason that they could act like a light box in the morning.
The man is discussing paradigm shifts. While memristors will be pretty awesome if they ever come online in commercial production, I'm not aware of any major paradigm shifts they will cause (or prevent)...?
Jsgrep / jspatch - toolkit for searching and modifying JavaScript
Isn't it strange that we are celebrating being able to build things made 20 years ago, but in the browser?

I can imagine someone in 2032 posting somewhere: "Hey! I ported Crysis to the XXX "
Being XXX = an Augmented Reality 3D Browser or what comes next in 20 years from now.

Just a thought.
Charlie Stross:  World building 404: The unknown unknowns
There was a related link on HN to an rdist blog post discussing Bunnie's work (before he wrote his own post), which sadly didn't get any attention: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2995641
Facebook disputes $390K property tax bill on Oregon data center
It is offensive to compare a youtube/dropbox hybrid to a meth distributor. That smells of appeal to emotion.
Setup a Bitcoin mining rig powered by Linuxcoin & Smartcoin
In theory, you're right: courts don't make laws. In practice, courts make law every day. This is intuitively obvious (e.g. If law says you can't do A or C but says nothing about B, and the court says "B is really just like A and C, so B is also prohibited under the law", the court has just made law)[edit: perhaps not so obvious if you don't practice law, but courts do this every day], but also goes deeper: The very idea of judicial review itself was invented by the courts (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marbury_v._Madison).
I disagree. Here's the scenario I envision with spammers on G+. Tell me if you see it differently because I could certainly be missing an angle.

1. Spammer signs up with fake name (something like John Smith) and either has no profile picture or some picture pulled off Google.
2. Spammer adds users to their circles.
3. Users see the circle request, but, since this is just some random person adding them, they don't reciprocate.

In this interaction, spammers don't have an avenue of communication except via their username. If they could use a pseudonym, their username could be www.getcheapp1llz-ezi.ly, which would be as effective a way as ever to get people to go to their site.

On a site like twitter, where usernames are not limited by any criteria that I'm aware of, the spammer would have the medium of username as a communication method.

Now how much of this is relevant to modern times, where spammers are mainly working on SEO for spam websites? I don't know.

For what it's worth, I know a few people on G+ who clearly have a pseudonym as their name and they haven't been banned yet.
Firefox goes 2-digit, time to check your UA sniffing scripts
More Megaupload fallout: FileServe shutters file-sharing service
Ask HN: I'm getting on a plane in 12 hours what shall I read / instapaper
I know this has been asked a few times and I've taken a few of the suggestions previously but new books and articles come out every day would be good to get an updated suggestion list...

As a bit of background about me, I'm CEO of a newly funded startup which is semi stealth / semi I'd tell you but there is only a landing page and I'm pretty sure your getting sick of those...

I've read

* Delivering Happiness
* The PayPal Wars
* Coders / Founders at work
* Steve Jobs
* 4 Hour Work Week
* Lean Startup

and a few others...

But I'd love your suggestions :)
Do you know if there is any explanation of 'unique pointers' and 'unique closures' anywhere? I'm quite interested to see some of the decisions, especially wrt the type-system.
Speaking of salary negotiations, there is something I always wondered about the US:

What is the difference in "pure" salary vs additional costs to the empolyer?

Things like 401k contributions and benefits (e.g. dental or health) certainly come with a pricetag. Seeing as I'm doing remote work from another country, I'm not sure how much that actually saves the company. The same goes for simple things as not needing office space / electricity / ... which I provide for myself over here (as I'm working from home).

Does anybody have any insight on that?
I've currently got the Riak book to read which although I'm not super technical (I can build a simple app in rails / php) I like to understand what the dev team are talking ahout :)
This part of the final paragraph summarizes it well.

"[St] Augustine tells the parable of a pirate captain who is captured and brought before Alexander the Great. The emperor says "How dare you terrorize the seas"? The pirate captain replies, "How dare you terrorize the whole world? Because I only have one ship, I'm called a pirate; because you have a great navy, you're called an emperor." The difference between a pirate and an emperor is one of scale only."
Free Android 4.0 UI PSD Pack
EFF (Electronic Frontier Foundation) activism team does a Reddit AMA
Yes, it is a technical solution to a "problem" (air quotes denoting that this was a conscious business decision by Google).

It brought to my mind the infamous checklists explaining why technical solutions to spam would fail: http://craphound.com/spamsolutions.txt
I hope the Greece don't get all those Neo-Nazis that plague(d) former East Germany.
OK, dumb question which I'm too lazy to look up for myself: what is TCP Fast Open, and how is it different from T/TCP? My vague memory is that the latter was dropped because allocating port numbers without requiring an explicit round trip simply could not be made robust vs. DDOS attacks. What tricks is TFO using that T/TCP didn't?

(edit: Not so lazy after all I guess. The draft RFC here: http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-cheng-tcpm-fastopen-00 and after a very quick perusal I don't see an attempt to solve the DOS problem either. It seems like it just requires apps to handle the transactions really fast and then close the connection?)
In my experience, most companies will severely lowball on big relocations and cost of living adjustments. You could be living in the boondocks on $100k a year, where the cost of living is next to nothing. And then you find a roughly equivalent job in NYC, where the cost of living is easily 2X or 3X your current situation. Will the firm in NYC double or treble your salary? Extremely unlikely. Most will simply anchor to your existing salary, with perhaps a very miniscule adjustment for COL.

In these situations, it might make sense to volunteer the first number in the negotiation, and to go high with it. Don't mention your current salary. Just talk about how the cost of living is a big adjustment (be precise about your multiplier, citing a data source), relocation is a big adjustment, etc., so accordingly, $X sounds reasonable. (Where X = the first number you mention; you do not make reference to your starting point before arriving at X. The hiring manager or HR person usually won't work backwards and reverse-engineer your starting point, but rather, will treat X as the anchor. The mere fact of having a rationale leading up to X makes X seem credible).

The other thing I'd say is not to make X a wildly ballsy figure, or to pull it out of thin air. You should have a very realistic reasoning for having arrived at X; it shouldn't be complete bullshit. Giving a number that is wildly off the top end of the pay scale for a position is a sign of naivete, which is often a signal that you're not actually qualified for the position (or that you're overqualified, in which case, why are you applying for this position?). Your anchor X should be somewhere at the high end of what your research tells you is a realistic range for the job in question.
Yes. The same for programming languages features such as Javascript.
I built ThemeSquirrel since I really like ThemeForest, but absolutely hate the browsing method. I don't want to mouse over every thumbnail to see the larger preview.

ThemeSquirrel was directly inspired by Scrollsy, the infinite scroller for Etsy that another HNer created recently (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3458214)
Refactoring can impact your unit interface too, and when that happens you'll have to refactor your tests accordingly. What you don't want while refactoring is being stuck with your old interfaces.
A community-driven manual for Node.js
we're getting sopa in ireland in the next few days. kinda slipped out yesterday and is trending on twitter in ireland at the mo.
http://www.tjmcintyre.com/2012/01/irelands-sopa-faq.html

so for any irish folk who frequent hackernews; http://stopsopaireland.com/
Yeah I did read that. The police in the respective countries carried out the actual arrests. But since when did the U.S. see themselves the official justice department for the entire world? (I guess the answer is "since WWII") But how many people in the U.S. were being so irreversibly harmed by MegaUpload that our government felt such a need to command this world-wide operation.
60+ Megapixel Map of 1918 US 'Auto-trail' System
What exactly is the "radically change" that you're after? You want them to charge more for what they do? Your site does not specify what you're actually trying to achieve...
The College Premium vs. the Marriage Premium: A Case of Double Standards
I could be mistaken, but that feature only applies to the creation of cookies by third parties.

If you visit facebook.com, a cookie will be set, then later when you visit another site with a facebook widget, it WILL send that cookie that was set earlier when it wasn't 3rd party.
So we want them to learn problem-solving (i.e. "given tools, solve problem" for any set of tools and any problem.) Given the experiences I've had trying to teach things to programmers, I'd like them to learn problem-solving, as well. Most programmers have a small tool-box of solutions (i.e. languages, libraries, platforms, &c) and the bad ones (i.e. most of them) run DFS over that tool-box until the problem appears to go away, and start quaking in terror if you give them new tools or radically different problems.

Programming is a kind of problem-solving. Learning it makes you better at solving the kinds of problems it solves. I have seen no evidence for the assertion that the kind of discrete-approximation problem-solving style inherent in most programming necessarily makes you better at solving problems in the general case.
Great to hear it! Garry and Aaron were fantastic advisors during our batch.

Looking forward to seeing what new tech they'll build.
There were lots of Germans moving to Spain and other places, when they still boomed. Lots of them are coming back. So in a sense you already see an influx of workers from Greece to Germany, it's just that they are German.
Is your MVP really an MVP?
Maybe acm can come up with something like OLPC? The more fortunate among us can perhaps subsidize the cost of access for someone else?
Polish Government's Plan To Sign ACTA Gets The SOPA Treatment
Is it just me or does it feel very wrong that this app profits from copyright infringement? Can companies like Apple sue for damages from his Fake iPhone 4S app?

The other Android income report which shows up here often is from kreci who profits from similar prank apps (https://market.android.com/developer?pub=KreCi.net&hl=en) which feed off of ad revenue.

Personally, I try to strive for a higher standard of app which should be the goal of most Hacker News readers.
Commit Keeps You Committed To Daily Tasks
I second that sentiment. I think text adventure games engage your brain more than, say, battlefield 1942. Similar to perhaps books vs movies/tv.
I do not know about unique closures, but afaik unique pointers in Rust are similar to std::unique_pointer in C++ (with some syntax sugar).
This is an iPhone app I made that was just covered by lifehacker. More information here: http://thinklegend.com/commit