skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
>How can you argue that copyright infringers are immoral, when the reality is that copyright holders are the ones who've violated the original intent of the law purely for personal gain?

I'd rephrase this as taking from copyright holders (violating the terms proffered) is moral because the holders are immoral.

This is precisely an argument based on justice/fairness. It sounds like you are taking a moral stand that piracy is equivalent to principled protest.

Taking a song for free when you are expected to pay for it isn't the same as refusing to go to the back of the bus, unless you do so with the explicit intent of suffering unjust consequences in the service of changing a bad law or social norm.

I believe it is uncontroversial that most piracy is done with the expectation of not being caught. Arguing for piracy is a difficult moral position because it is a 'small wrong' (breaking a proffered contract) with highly unlikely consequences. If you wish to take the principled protest stand you need to argue that it is right to pirate content with the intent to get caught.

Getting away with piracy doesn't really work as a moral stand. (Advocating piracy can be a pragmatic stand for the creative destruction of specific industries ... but that alone doesn't transform the individual act of piracy into moral one.)

A clean separation of 'pragmatic' or 'force of history' arguments from 'moral' arguments may serve you better.

For moral arguments you cannot ignore the moral consequences of the individual actions advocated. It's the classic doing wrong for the greater good. Breaking the law for principled protest is moral because the protester is seeking the consequences of breaking the law rather than avoiding the consequences.
It's all ASCII... If you're using octets for each character, you can definitely still squeeze a few bytes out of that.
Don’t Call Me a Douchebag
There's no + symbol on the new tab icon in Chrome 17
For a long time I thought that way, but Java has a killer feature that everything else is missing: it's really hard to write java extensions in C/C++, and thus it's near-impossible to crash your runtime. I think that combined with its C-like syntax was always going to ensure Java's success in the enterprise.

The other thing that makes it good for large systems is that Java was designed from the ground up for running untrusted code. I know the python module that attempted to offer the same functionality has been abandoned as basically unworkable. (Though interestingly this is one of the things that Tcl did well - safe Tcl actually worked, afaik).
Nieuwe kleding kopen: Kleur en stijl die je best passen
That is basically what coderwall.com does
Device Usage on the Social Web
The problem I have with Firefox is Mozilla's inability to fix problems or adopt new technologies in a timely manner. Take OS X Lion's new scrollbars, for instace. Lion has been around since July last year, and Mozilla has yet to offer support for the new auto-hiding scrollbars and for rubberband scrolling. It only took Chrome around one month to fix that. Same for native full screen support.

Then there are bugs that have been around for years now, like pressing Cmd+Left or Cmd+Right on a textarea does nothing. (Windows users: These are the OS X equivalents of Home and End) They say that there's a conflict with another set of key bindings, and that this is an issue with XUL, but I strongly believe that the Firefox UX should dictate how XUL works, and not the contrary.

The last time I looked, they were still struggling to make each tab an independent process. Chrome first shipped more than three years ago with such a feature. Since then, both Safari and Internet Explorer have adopted a similar model.

Their new, rapid release cycle is a great improvement. But updating Firefox is still annoying and slow. You have to check for extension compatibility. You have to wait for a progress bar to fill. They should have nailed this when 4.0 first shipped.

I wonder if Mozilla is suffering from finantial/funding issues right now, already, since their main source of revenue, ads on Google results in Firefox, is constantly decreasing. How long can they keep mantaining Firefox? Should they switch to a crowdfunding model?

It's really a shame this is hapenning, since they have great intentions: To keep the Web open and innovative. In terms of philosophy, they are also on a much higher ground than Apple, Microsoft and Google.
Another borked Blogger template. Cache URL as a "permalink", for those who have Javascript disabled:

http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http%3A...
Yeah, bad title. The DoJ has been sending letters to the owners of the IP addresses that are connecting to the formerly rogue DNS servers. If the companies don't do anything about it by March 8 it seems reasonable for turn off the servers, though they should hold on to the DNS server IP addresses so no one else can use them.

Here is the back story:

http://www.fbi.gov/news/stories/2011/november/malware_110911

Check if your IPs are infected and how to clean:

https://forms.fbi.gov/check-to-see-if-your-computer-is-using...
Anyone have an invite for a Buspreneur?
I had the same question. Any results?
I would expect a complete statistical approach to work great for a sport like baseball where a team is exactly the sum of its players (i.e. most play is individual), but basketball it seems like basketball has so many other factors because you need all 5 players to work together to be effective. A weak player can bring everyone else down and a strong one inflate everyone else's stats. But maybe that just makes the statistics that matter more complex.
Your email is often used as the master key to all your other accounts. Especially if you have old signup or password reset emails hanging around, controlling it makes it easy for someone to control everything else.

So there's more than just privacy at stake here. I go to almost paranoid lengths to protect it from attacks known and unknown because once someone takes it, they can take over almost everything else.

Just something to think about.
I was surprised to realize how many DNS requests originating out of Fortune 500 companies were being handled by the FBI. I was unaware of it till now.
> What is really hitting Firefox hard is the lack of a viable (or at least popular) mobile browser.

The new Firefox Mobile, currently in beta, is quite good - it uses a native Android UI and is very fast and smooth. The older version, which used XUL, was indeed sluggish.

But, to be fair, none of this really matters. iOS and Android are by far the top mobile OSes, and hardly anyone replaces the default browser on them, which makes it extremely hard for alternative browsers (Firefox, Opera) to make any headway. Tech people like HN readers might, but 95% of people just use the default browser on their phone.
Would it be wrong for Mozilla to swallow their pride and adopt V8 as their JS engine? I've gotten really sick of mem leaks slowing down my netbook to be completely unusable if I happen to visit certain sites. It's not that there's a ton of JS on the page; it's just that Firefox's engine doesn't handle leaks as well.
I admit I've overlooked the caveat while posting the response yet even with the caveat this does not make much sense, as every code can be turned into branchless when you use predicated instructions (a bit less so with conditional moves). This is what GPUs do often (many architectures don't have branch instructions so all branches are always executed with predication).
So if it doesn't use XUL, does that mean extensions can't alter the UI? And if so, what's the point? :/
If you look at their financial statements firefox is pretty much a google puppet. Try konqueror for something more like what you're describing.
There seems to be a miscommunication here. I don't think people are doing anything particularly clever with regards to facial recognition. I think intelligence is based on complex, abstract, general reasoning. Physical object recognition is a useful input filter but not evidence of intellect.

It's not knowing the algorithm at all. I'm just pretty sure that the algorithm for intelligence is more complex/further from our knowledge than a contemporary grad student could do. I'd love to be proven wrong by a PhD thesis with attached AI.
Firefox can't do that much about their lack of.mobile share. After all, with one notable exception, most significant mobile platform vendors ban Firefox outright and/or make it practically impossible to implement. And that's truly a shame as the wonderful joy of Firefox Sync on a mobile device has to be seen to be believed.
72 hours to conceive, build and launch a startup in a helicopter
Doesn't emacs org-mode perform a similar function?
oh shit... I did not know
Hmm...

I looked into his stats because I don't pay much attention to the Knicks.

At any rate I think Jeremy Lin is definitely going to have a good deal of trouble succeeding long term. There are a number of concerns there, but by far the biggest is TOs. In each game he's played, he has had the most TOs of any player. You can coach that away but one of two things will happen, his FGs will go up and his ASSTs will go down, or his ASSTs will go up and his FGs will go down. What you want, for a lot of reasons that most of you probably already know, is for the latter to happen. What seems to be happening is the former. There is a reason it is called a Point Guard. That needs to be fixed or other coaches will definitely take advantage of it when it counts.

You say, "well no problem...when Stoudemire and Anthony get back the problem will ameliorate." It may. I don't know. I would have to revisit his stats at that time. If I had to bet, I would bet that it will get better. But other young PGs struggle with the same issue...to the detriment of their teams in my opinion.

I guess what I am saying is that success in basketball, as measured in rings, requires stats optimized for balance and flexibility rather than strength. When Jason Williams finally got to Miami he was a more balanced PG. IIRC, during the 2006 finals he averaged 12 points and 7 ASSTs. Critically, at that point in his career TOs were under control. Jason Williams peaked at, somewhere around 3.5 a game. Jeremy Lin is averaging twice that at least. Not good.
And consider, Jason Williams could make some of that up on the back end with steals. Not so much with Jeremy.

So I can see why a lot of statisticians would look at Jeremy Lin and say,"...well with my personnel...I'll have to pass on this guy." Of course if we scour the web we will find one guy who rated him highly, that is the nature of the beast. But there are a lot of good reasons that a lot of good scouts did not rate him highly. And most strategists probably see a lot of those reasons every time he plays.

All that said, Jason Williams, after initially playing a lot like Jeremy, achieved a REALLY good ASST/TO rating. If it wasn't THE highest...it was close. But again, that's the 12 points 7 ASSTs Jason Williams, which is what you want in a PG if you want to get to a ring.
Organizing Programs Without Classes
Sipwise raises VC investment &gt; 1M USD for open-source VoIP soft-switch
I don't need to do time tracking, but I've always wanted to use this -- http://letsfreckle.com/

The author is here on HN and an all-around cool person.
My distaste for Tcl/Tk helped me leave the EDA business.

Some backstory: Thanks to Randy Pausch, in the early 90's I was fortunate enough to be exposed to Python and the Tkinter interface to the Tk widget set. With that experience I ended up building large and complex EDA apps for the SoC IP market in the late 90s. Python was the enabler because its language and library features supported programming in the large as opposed to Tcl with its arcane syntax (especially for those with a C background) and minimal library support.

I still pity the AEs who write Tcl scripts for EDA tools.
My distaste for Tcl/Tk helped me leave the EDA business.

Some backstory: in the early 90's I was fortunate enough to be exposed to Python and the Tkinter interface to the Tk widget set. With that experience I ended up building large and complex EDA apps for the SoC IP market in the late 90s. Python was the enabler because its language and library features supported programming in the large as opposed to Tcl with its arcane syntax (especially for those with a C background) and minimal library support.

I still pity the AEs who write Tcl scripts for EDA tools.
BrowserID support was just pushed. https://github.com/omab/django-social-auth/commit/4136ea49e5...

Edit: Link to changeset.
You haven't heard about Mozilla's recent deal renewal. They more than tripled their income (to over 300 million a year, nearly a billion over three). They aren't hurting financially.
> I admit I've overlooked the caveat while posting the response yet even with the caveat this does not make much sense, as every code can be turned into branchless when you use predicated instructions (a bit less so with conditional moves).

Now you're just being intentionally obtuse. When I write if (x) y += z and say that it should be implemented with conditional moves or predicated adds per your platform, there really isn't much room for confusion.

> This is what GPUs do often (many architectures don't have branch instructions so all branches are always executed with predication).

Actually, all modern desktop-class GPU architectures have branch instructions. They only revert to predication (which in NVIDIA's case is implicit, i.e. not controlled by microcode-visible mask registers, though they of course also have CMOV-like instructions) when the different SIMD lanes take divergent branches. That's been the case since the G80/Tesla microarchitecture, which the GeForce 8800 from 2006 was the first product to use. Mostly-coherent dynamic branching is heavily used in modern shader code, to say nothing of GPGPU code, and is almost free. Incoherent branching is the big issue. Replacing that with incoherent memory accesses using branchless code can be a huge win, even though incoherent memory access is far from free.
Vim's built in IDE tools
I'm working on a series of CSS/design screencast tutorials that sounds like it suits your needs exactly. The series is aimed at developers. The series will guide the viewer through designing the most common pages like landing pages, contact forms etc. focusing more on design choices and principles rather than on CSS technicalities.

I wasn't planning on using bootstrap though because I think bootstrap offers too many possibilities to developers who don't understand design. I think keeping things simple and limited is the best approach.

Do you think not using bootstrap would be an issue?
> The problem I have with Firefox is Mozilla's inability to fix problems or adopt new technologies in a timely manner.

It sounds like your priorities - UI features like scrollbars - are not identical to the FF developers. That's fine - it's why it's good we have several good browsers to choose from.

Generally though, Firefox has definitely been inventing and adopting plenty of new and exciting technologies, some random examples: TypeInference in the JS engine (still unique to Firefox), Layers graphics system with support for hardware acceleration/Direct2D/etc., WebGL (together with Chrome, lots before Safari or Opera), Audio Data API, new JS features like Proxies and WeakMaps (which Chrome yesterday blogged about finally implementing), etc.

> But updating Firefox is still annoying and slow. You have to check for extension compatibility. You have to wait for a progress bar to fill. They should have nailed this when 4.0 first shipped.

FF 10 defaults addons to compatible, and FF 11 and 12 will add things like update in the background (no progress bar, no prompt). It would have been good to have had this with 4.0 of course, but it does take time to do - waiting to release 4.0 until now would have meant not shipping all the other great features mentioned before.
If they meet their goal of making this 98% effective at removing salt, what would be the economic impact of this technology?
i'd predict this will never be reverted. it's another example of google's infallible design principles being bestowed upon the people.

my favorite justification of removing the plus sign is that "it's too jarring".
Been looking for that symbol for days. Google, you fail, again.
Partly. You can still write addons, and they still have a lot of flexibility to change stuff - including the UI - but it is more limited than with XUL.

The performance cost of XUL, though, is just too much for mobile.
I like to call this cognitive compatibility - the amount of effort required from an uninitiated English-speaking observer to understand what a program does. Most people who are deeply familiar with a language will have a tendency to discount this effort, but really it is essential because it minimizes the translation layer that your brain has to use any time you read code.

Python encourages code which is readable in English and reasonably brief. Having readability, consistency, and the "principle of least surprise" as primary language and community principles ultimately saves developers time and makes them more efficient.

And the maturing of PyPy is incredibly exciting.
NBA media and fans are much much more resistant to empirical stuff than baseball. I think it's because the appeal of the game is more about emotions and hype than baseball. There's this feeling that things can't be captured in the numbers, but what they use instead is so inferior for judging players. I mean the Knicks acquired Carmelo Anthony at the cost of all the efficient players on the team. All of the stats guys were very skeptical the media blared on and on about how they would be contenders and they were terrible until this undrafted rookie came along.

Another example, what I've found interesting reading some of the NBA statisticians blogs is this argument about "clutch". Most fans and media insist that Kobe Bryant, a player who shoots a lot of shots at the end of games and makes spectacular shots sometimes is the best closer in the game. Meanwhile almost all statistical evidence points to Chris Paul, a player who runs boring routine plays down the stretch, as by far the best closer in the league in terms of actually winning close games.

Until the NBA stats can predict winners like baseball, the public will always go by the "look." The teams themselves however, are almost all hiring statisticians now.
Yep, that's why I stick with Firefox too.

Lately, Chrome has begun to ask me to "log in to Chrome". What? No thanks, I don't trust Google never to associate my browsing habits with my Google account. They have too many incentives to go evil.

If RMS can survive on a 9" netbook for the sake of his principles, a lot of us can survive on Firefox. Besides, it's not as terrible as Chrome & Safari aficionados will have you believe. There is definitely room for improvement, but none of those are deal breakers for me personally.
Definitely interested in trying it out for https://Framous.com
"With zip.js files could be deflated, or inflated, within the browser."

That's what gzip is for.
Really? I noticed it was missing (a few day ago since I generally use FF), and liked it. It looks a lot cleaner now, it's nicer to look at and doesn't feel like it's asking for my attention the way the old one did.
SURVEY - Startup Weekend Minneapolis - Real estate analysis for real people.
We've discussed this before here, often.

A product can be unbelievably crappy as long as it solves a real pain point. If your product makes or saves people money, if it saves them an arduous chore, if it gets them laid, then your product can be actively hostile to the user and still succeed. There's nothing "delightful" about the vast majority of consumer products or services.

It's when your benefits are less clear that interface becomes important. Invantory falls firmly into this latter category - their own homepage blurb essentially describes them as "a nicer Craigslist". Offering a nicer version of a commodity is potentially very lucrative, as Apple and Starbucks shareholders will testify, but it's inherently more difficult to bootstrap. The incumbent players have enough resources to crush you like a bug, so you're gambling that they're too dumb or too slow. That's a big gamble, certainly a bigger one than I'd be prepared to take on a product that's hugely dependent on network effects.
I thought it was a UI glitch too.

Lookin closer the button looks like an "small empty tab", so maybe the designers decided that the + was redundant?
HN-related factoid: Jeremy Lin was born in southern CA, grew up in Palo Alto and both of his parents are immigrant engineers.
Hey Mike! Glad to see you are doing this again.

My question for you is a relatively simple one. I am working on applications for internships at a few tech companies for this summer (business side, I can't code well enough yet to apply for technical stuff yet) and am having trouble reconciling the general advice I've received from people about how to write a cover letter/resume and the nontraditional nature of the tech industry.

Essentially I am having trouble making sure my cover letter sounds professional without sounding like a "business type"

Any advice?
Yeah I've been on the dev release channel so this has been the case for me for quite some time - I personally quite like it, though I do understand that there's some potential confusion for new users. Certainly wouldn't describe the old plus as "jarring" though.
> I'm glad for Chrome as I think it's motivating Mozilla to build a better browser.

So, Chrome is to Firefox what Firefox was to Internet Explorer?
Yup. I've done this on a number of projects :) Not as necessary nowadays as it was for PSX, Genesis, and more limited memory platforms.
> The last time I looked, they were still struggling to
> make each tab an independent process. Chrome first
> shipped more than three years ago with such a feature.
> Since then, both Safari and Internet Explorer have
> adopted a similar model.

The reason for Firefox's apparent inflexibility is that addons are allowed to hook deep into Firefox's internals, which means that any large changes to the engine lead inevitably to addon incompatibility. Such a thing happened last year, when a version of Aurora introduced fancy new tab-dragging animations; the underlying code changes broke so many addons that the feature never made its way to Beta.

Gecko is old, and I don't envy the task of the Mozilla developers who are responsible for balancing the advantage of modern enhancements with the risk of breaking addons that have been working for the past decade or more. From this perspective, it's no wonder they're looking towards writing a brand-new browser engine.
Don't, if you're at all familiar with adwords they won't have any new information or optimization strategies. You also run the risk your "account strategist" will see something that they decide is against the Adwords policy and ban you.
I have one of these cameras, specifically, the TV-IP422W. Great to see TRENDnet pushing an update so fast.
I wish I could just get rid of the button completely. I realize that people will likely need something there by default, but after learning how to use CTRL+T to open a new tab, I have no need for that little button.

I'm pretty sure Opera lets you get rid of it, but I can't really remember.
They have been getting much more complex. For example many stat geeks have been trying to make one that takes the +/- stats (how well the team does when the player is on the floor in terms of point difference per 100 possessions) and adjusting it based on the +/- of the teammates and opponents that have shared the floor with them. It's definitely more challenging than baseball, but there are a lot of interesting things to try.
I got 1 invite left :)
send me your email : @picsoung

Wondering when they will reveal who is selected.
Social is worse. Crunch for months to release followed by crunch every week to add a feature.