skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Why couldn't they just shut the service off if these guys didn't pay? Going straight from "please pay or link" to "we will sue you" is unreasonable to an unbelievable degree.

The issue is not with them wanting to charge money or get links or whatever. The issue is that they escalated way too hard and way too fast when much kinder effective measures were available.
Piqtur
Some observations:

1. If the studio had filed a lawsuit, there's a very good chance that, after seeing the Asimov estate's permission, the judge would have quickly tossed the case on summary judgment --- and quite possibly awarded the student his attorneys' fees under section 505 of the Copyright Act,[1] as happened recently in several of the Righthaven copyright-troll cases.[2]

2. A copyright lawyer might have been willing, for little or no money, to explain the facts of life to the studio lawyer on behalf of the student. The student then might have been able to respond to the studio lawyer (with utmost politeness, of course), "do what you gotta do." He could then have started making his movie and waited to see what the studio did.

3. It's likely that any lawsuit by the studio would have been quickly resolved one way or another, without much in the way of legal expense:

• If the student had won quickly on summary judgment, the odds are that his lawyer would have been paid by the judge.

• If the student had found he wasn't going to win quickly on summary judgment, then he could have caved to avoid further expense. The odds are that the studio would have gone along --- and might even have been willing to pay the student's legal fees just to get rid of the matter.

4. Either way, both the student and his lawyer would have gotten at least some reputational benefit from the resulting publicity.

5. Heck, they could have proposed settling the case along the lines that Southwest Airline's CEO settled a trademark dispute years ago over the term "Just Plane Smart": Herb Kelleher arm-wrestled the other side's CEO for charity, resulting in good PR for both sides.[3]

6. All this assumes, of course, that the article accurately states all the relevant facts. Lawyers know from hard experience that this always has to be confirmed.

[1] http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/505

[2] http://www.copyrighttrademarkmatters.com/2011/11/01/righthav...

[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southwest_Airlines#.22Just_Plan...

[Edited for style]
Listening to Coldplay with the rest of the world doesn't make it any good. </joke>
I have heard that starting with Sinatra is the answer. Your answer is my confirmation. glad it works
That's a pretty aggressive message they posted. If you have downloaded, you face maximum penalty of 10 years imprisonment and an "unlimited" fine. Unlimited? Is this how they're raising money for anti-piracy programs now? And SOCA has the capability of monitoring and investigating me? I'm not even in the UK, and I never visited the site before. This is shameless fear-mongering.
In the Linux world more so than anywhere else, you have an odd and "at-odds" mix of users. There exists the "1993 was a great year for Linux" crowd, and the "Linux on the desktop" crowd. And somehow, you have major overlap between the two. While there are distros and packages contributing to both mindsets (meaning the two can coexist just fine), the biggest problem I see in the Linux world is the users who outright reject experimentation and change.

Personally I love where Gnome and KDE (and even Unity) are going. I might not use them daily, I might not find all their features helpful or productive, and I sure as hell am not using them on my server, but there is nothing preventing any Linux user from simply not using the new software. It's easy to find a distro that uses Gnome 2 or KDE 3 or doesn't have PulseAudio. But it's hard to use modern day software without modern day packages or backends. Without this rote experimentation that is at the heart of open source, I wouldn't be using Linux on my desktop. There are a lot of very controversial ideas put forth in the mainstream distros over the years which have contributed more to the adoption of Linux than they've taken away from the traditional users.

If someone doesn't like Unity, doesn't like Gnome 3, doesn't like KDE Plasma, doesn't like bleeding-edge distributions... there is a choice. Debian, Slackware, Arch, Gentoo, the list goes on. I don't much like the interface of OSX, but I don't create mailing lists to pooh-pooh it, I simply don't use it. If you have a point, make it. If you just want to complain, get a cat.
I use just 1 small instance for database, web, SOLR, cron jobs, and everything in-between. And yes, I do get a lot of alert emails saying it's over load. But that's how I roll.
This is beautiful, simple, and fast.
There are a number of people who apparently monitor Wikipedia relentlessly, lest the truth appear. In general, they seem to be motivated by their devotion to the Big Lie, extremist political agendas, and general crankiness.
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I wonder if finding sketchiness in those image results could be automated. Everyone through the machine stands in the same position, they're just of sort of various statures.

I mean, the supposed upgrade would mean that they are reducing the ability of operators to observe images. What's the point in it then? At a certain point, the humans won't be able to beat software.

I know the reasoning of security theater(that none of this actually matters), but it's pretty fun to imagine what we could solve with technology and software.
The conclusion by a friend's father, when he went from Minneapolis to Chicago and back, was that the TSA only pulled a side young females (20s & 30s) for full body scans.
This might be a shocker, but my personal machines run Windows. Anyone familiar with a simple automated full disk backup tool for Windows?
I do believe, based on what I've seen, that not enough institutions teach problem solving in general enough of a way to be applicable to building applications.

That's a different statement than your original. Your complaint is that people aren't leaving school as fully trained software engineers. I think you will find the same is true in all engineering disciplines: school teaches you the fundamentals, but you have to learn on the job how to be a practicing engineer.

Also, none of my programming projects were anything like focusing "on the same algorithms over and over in a dozen or two languages." Programming intensive courses focused on how to design programs, while introducing new concepts that allowed us to design a larger set of programs.
I've never read Shakespeare and have the ability to think, so it's obviously not essential. And people thought before Shakespeare. Shakespeare had to think to be Shakespeare, after all.

I understand why people hold it up as essential: it's how they learned to think, and they can't think of another way to learn to think. So they call it "essential." It's still wrong. But understandable. Learning to think comes from having diversity in experience, not reading Shakespeare.
Is the statement from the TSA claiming they are mapping each individual body scan to a standardized body model? Doesn't this distort the scan and therefore reduce its value? I don't quite understand how they could adjust it so that it can no longer see the shape of an individual's breasts, for example, but can still identify suspicious bulges on the body. I don't mean to be crude, but I am very suspicious about this claim.
You can just view the Google cache rather than go straight to the article. But that won't stop people from posting sensationalist headlines - everyone knows that's what people want. Just because a few rational geeks frown upon it won't make them change.
Key sentence: "my citations to the primary documents were insufficient"

While I agree that the wikipedia gestapo are often overzealous with reverting good edits - it basically requires a case-by-case basis of deciding what 'facts' are, which is never easy. If his 'primary sources' are better than the secondary sources that say the opposite, then talk sense to the person who is doing the reversion, or raise it with someone higher - don't just continuously attempt edit-wars...
You say: "Seth Roberts has speculated that vitamin D, despite its myriads of other benefits, may harm sleep based on some anecdotes (with 2 null results)"

My point is that he's collected a lot more anecdotes since then, and there seems to be some indication that Vitamin-D helps sleep when taken at sunrise rather than at night. I was curious about why you didn't mention this. I'm guessing that the posting just pre-dates his newer observations.
Looks cool, and your app might be landing at just the right time, considering Picnik is disappearing in a few weeks. Lots of people are looking for something just like this.

As a user though, you lost me at the first screen. I run my browser at full screen, so dragging a photo over is a bit of a hassle. Plus, I'm not ready to trust your app just yet with one of my photos - is my photo being uploaded to your servers? Is it staying client-side? I could go looking for a photo that I don't mind uploading but... meh, too much hassle. Adding a couple of example images would let me play with the app immediately.

I like your app philosophy, though. I look forward to seeing the app evolve.
> It's a pity the student didn't talk to a copyright
> lawyer (with litigation experience) before caving.

How much would that cost him in the US?

And how likely is that the court would actually grant him the money? The link says "at court’s discretion". Has it actually ever happenned before?
Cool.

Looks very similar idea to http://documentup.com/, which in turn is similar to http://readthedocs.org
Quote: "as I had cited the documents that proved my point, including verbatim testimony from the trial published online by the Library of Congress"

His opinion in this matter isn't as relevant as the fact that he cited actual testimony. That alone should lend enough weight to the edit that it should not have been reverted simply b/c of the Wikipedia "undue weight" policy.
That was the most guilt-trip-laden copy I have ever read.
One data point doesn't at all prove there's no special treatment, but it is good to hear about one case where special treatment didn't appear to be involved!
It would be interesting to do WYSIWYG editing of the Markdown docs here with https://github.com/bergie/createMarkdown
I believe (based on the article, not first hand knowledge) that it reveals the contents of your browser's cookies, not the database.
Innovation for the sake of innovation is no good.
I don't think it's unreasonable to stick with only the drag & drop feature in order to keep the upload page clean and uncluttered. It's really not that much effort to temporarily re-size your window.
Get what your saying about autocomplete, but the "avoid having to type extra characters" kind of autocomplete is very useful as well. I use it to complete things like long variable names and English text. Its main strength is that you can use it to autocomplete everything, not just the stuff your IDE is aware of.
This question just seems so wrong, don't try and create someone else's product. Think of something yourself, test if its viable and build it.
Add a regular upload button (if you can). And maybe you should provide some sample images, that way I can start playing around right away without searching my hardware for a image.

And this one is a deal breaker: when I exported the image it was absolutely useless. The quality has dropped substantially, rendering it (pun intended :P) useless for further use.

edit: could you write about how you made all this? Just a quick summary would suffice.
I've been pulled aside twice in about 10 or so flights. I'm male, old, and have a gut. Anecdotes != data.

My regular comment has been, "I don't mind the scans, but I'd appreciate it if they would stop giggling."
Seems more complete and visually engaging than the others to me.
Very well done.
Although a hosted version like documentup could be really great too for open source projects
Yeah I thought the same thing only DocumentUp has a better design/concept.
Police close down UK music site
Image resizing seems to be an easy-to-implement idea. App Engine + Stripe + A Good API can do the trick. Will get to work on it!

Receipt tagging is a different beast. The format is inconsistent, mining data would be difficult and I don't know if people would be willing to send potentially sensitive details of business transactions to anyone.

But I'm up for it given it has a substantial market. Any other takers?
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That's the 'old' but cheap process.

We can directly encode an organism's DNA. As in scan something in Virginia, email it's DNA and have someone else in California who print's that organism's DNA which then goes on to reproduce.

PS: There are still limitations based on the cellular machinery that exists inside a cell and the target cell. But, when it comes to DNA we have that down.
There's nobody I'd trust less than a Wikipedia editor to act as the arbiter of truth, but they could still do better. Wikipedía could adopt a policy of preferring primary sources over secondary, which would still keep out the "teach the controversy" cranks who are the obvious reason for the "undue weight" criterion without affecting well researched rebuttals of conventional folly. They consciously choose to do the exact opposite, preferring popular opinion to actual verifiability, and IMO that's wrong.
Kind of amazing to see a service go from a browser extension to a well funded startup.
If you're right, that would be a major positive advance. If the open source community at large could build off an up-to-date Android base that was trivially compatible with top-notch hardware, I think some interesting possibilities might emerge.

Sadly, I think that it's unlikely that Google will really risk enabling this kind of freedom, because of the concern that it would just make life too easy for Amazon and Facebook.
>How is modularization and code reuse a bad thing?

The problem he is complaining about sounds like a lack of modularity to me: being forced to pull in dependencies that he won't be using at all.
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All prices now equivalent of 1 USD (0.64 GBP). Was experimenting with pricing, and had not set all back.
I completely agree that it's not an unreasonable approach; though Gigya should have made the subject line of the initial email clearer; and probably should not have mentioned the legal route in a second email. If still left ignored I am sure they could have sent a certified letter if still no action was taken.

The articles mention of the link back being a paid for link is exactly what it is - in exchange for not paying $6000/year you have the option of placing a link on your site. It's a fair option.
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I understand your thought. Yes, the image is sent to the server for several reasons:

1. Perspective. The app is able to render all effects in the client's browser except for the 3d perspective. This is made on the server side

2. Download. Since I want to give the user a "native" download, the only way to do this is with a server.

If it would be possible to render (quality) 3d transformations in canvas and to send out a download I event wouldn't need a server for processing the image.
We are not trying to create someone else's product. Basically, we are looking for what people need everyday. The problems they face and any existing solutions they use. So that we can look for patterns in users' needs and build something that adresses them.
There is no expertise involved. The page made a statement that was factually false. This was a fact that is easy to check as the wrong "fact" of no evidence is obviously ( yes, obviously has a prosecutor ever gone to court with zero evidence to present?) wrong and a matter of public record.

To say a fact is subjective to popular, to say nothing of demonstrably wrong, opinion is the completely antithetical to the goal of being an encyclopedia.
SO when will we end this security theater cluster fuck?
I say if all depts have to face budget cuts body scans go away
If he was at university then surely there was a clued up professor there who could have given him all the advice he would have needed.
I see you've built it with backbone.js + jQuery.

Can you share your experience with this JS stack ?
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Viz from an open-source keylogger, with d3
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I agree with the need for an upload button.

I'm on Ubuntu 11.10 and dragged an image from Thunar to Firefox. Firefox just opened the image instead of it opening in your application.
Didn't the FBI background check on Jobs conclude that he was prone to not being forthright and honest with a tendency to distort reality? I don't think they got winged over by charisma.
I like it. Care to elaborate on what libraries/framework/tech you used?
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There are a few research systems that do exactly this, and I think that some of them may be coming to the market soon.

http://www.modrobotics.com/ is the one that I could find quickish.
Of course, that was backed up by a release schedule that launched new features/improvements on a near-daily basis for 3+ months afterword. If somebody launches a product to "beta" and can't quickly improve on it, I don't really consider it a beta.
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That's interesting, I never had any quality loss with my images. Maybe you could send me your original image so I could investigate that.

All effects except the 3d perspective are rendered via canvas in the client's browser. After that the image gets sent to the server which adds the perspective (if needed) and sends out the download.
Yes, that's actually a very powerful "feature". I tried that approach for a simple app I wrote:

http://scribble.wreally.com/

It works totally offline, and if and when you are ready to sync, it takes the locally stored stuff online. For bonus points, it continues to work offline too! :)

Scribble users totally love it. BUT - it really increases the amount of effort and complexity involved.
To 'save the artists ' of course. Nothing personal.
From what I understand, this system is only being installed on millimeter wave scanners and not on backscatter devices. In my experiences, the backscatter devices are much more prevalent.
While I'm very, very anti-TSA and this sort of thing wouldn't surprise me a single bit, saying you "found patterns in complaint data" is silly. Such data is obviously biased from the start; we can do far better than this, with simple actual statistics on persons examined.

But in the end, this is what you get when your "random screenings" aren't actually random in any way, not recorded for future analysis, and (due to the previous point) not audited for bias. You can make arguments why we wouldn't actually want random screenings in this stuff, but I think we all know that it's pure security theater regardless.
If you scroll down on the main page you can see a list of open source libs I used.
Grandfathering is as stupid an idea as freemium. Ever heard of inflation? It's a totally and utterly stupid idea and I'll have zero sympathy when any startup doing it suddenly find themselves in a world where the dollar isn't worth anywhere near what it was.

Prices change. I don't expect to buy a Mars Bar for 15p from my local corner shop as they sold it to me that price 20 years ago.

It is fine to say 'we're discontinuing your current plan, sorry'. Maybe be nice and offer them 3 months more free to transition if you can afford to. NEVER grandfather.

What you don't do though is threaten legal action because you changed your T&Cs, that's just stupid and regardless of you CYA 'subject to change' clause you're not going to win in court and you just made a bunch of pissed off ex-customers telling everyone you suck because you threatened them.
I agree with his sentiment - it's something I have said here on HN several times - but I disagree with his word choice. Unix is not an integrated development environment. To me, an IDE implies a monolithic program. Unix is not that. To differentiate it, I'm tempted to say that Unix is a distributed development environment to get across that the tools you use for development do not exist in one monolithic program. But I don't like that phrasing, either. Rather, I prefer this:

Unix is a development environment.
It could've been free first consultation, it could've been a few hundred dollars - if OP had already budgeted $10,000 on the project, a small price to pay.
It's not that bad.

"Crypto shocker": well, yes, it is shocking and it is about crypto.

"four of every 1,000": 27,000 out of 7.1 million from the researchers' current collection. (Most of the paper is based on an older version of their collection, for which the figure is more like 2.7 out of every 1,000.)

"public keys": this is the least accurate bit; it applies only to RSA keys, not to all public keys. That's pretty bad -- though, according to the paper, somewhat over half of the public keys in their sample are in fact RSA rather than ElGamal or DSA or anything else.

"provide no security": the paper says "... that offer no security". Perhaps "no security" is slightly overstated -- the keys are vulnerable only to attackers who can be bothered to do much the same work as these researchers did -- but they make it clear that doing that work is far from being rocket science, and that there are "people who know how to do the computation quickly".

What about this justifies saying that "even by the usual linkbait standards, this is egregious"?
No, it does reveal the database as far as I know. But again, it's a completely public site.
In fairness, he didn't attempt to edit war (only making the changes once) - he just gave up the discussion very quickly and didn't argue the point.
> By downloading a film, even if you don't pay for it, you are contributing capital to that film. You'll cache the the plot, characters, actors in your mind and likely talk about it with your friends & collegues --in social situations re-enforce the film's value and reify the investment others have made by paying for the film.

That and $8 will get you a Starbucks.
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This has been well documented: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technology_adoption_lifecycle
Wikipedia should have NPOV articles and forked POV versions. I'd read diffs comparing the main NPOV and POV versions. This would make disputes easier to resolve. We could have a branched view of the article from all POVs.

Wikipedia should be more like GitHub.
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Show HN: Invaders From Space WebGL game
Check out http://genomecompiler.com

It's a design/debug/compile tool for synthetic biology
250ms matters. That's 1/4 of a second. It matters for a crawler tremendously.

DNS query sizes are wrong. I'd double each. But still, inexpensive from a bandwidth standpoint. I get it.
Oh come on. You're clearly not "most users" if you can just set up cron jobs. It's important for us to remember who most users are and that they are not us.
Evaluating primary sources isn't a perfectly simple and straightforward exercise, and cranks generally have facts that they can point to to "prove" that their view. I expect that with selective enough citation I could create a fairly convincing (to a layman) argument for quite a wide variety of points of view.
FWIW I actually bailed for the same reason. I do appreciate the simplicity but it seems like it would be easy enough to add an unobtrusive link in the bottom corner "...or click here to load up a sample image!"