skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The site had millions of users. Is the allusion to "tens of thousands" of files supposed to be convincing? Why was there a limit at all? This is a site that had to deal with (say) 10,000 takedowns a day; clearly, it had a rampant piracy problem.
I ran through something like this a couple of years ago and found it to be one of the most entertaining side projects I had worked on in a long while.

Scheme from Scratch - http://peter.michaux.ca/articles/scheme-from-scratch-introdu...
I see no mention anywhere in the DMCA of "reasonable limits" to the number of infringement notices a provider needs to deal with, only the statutory language demanding that providers act expeditiously to react to those notices. Why was there a "quota" at all?
once I noticed the light switch, I was really impressed. Great work.
Ah, thanks, didn't spot that.
What the world needs is Designer Degrees
Game Moguls Minecraftpack
IIRC, M-Pesa was launched by the dominant mobile phone carrier in Kenya. Its not exactly a model that a typical lean-startup even has an ice cube's chance in hell of success with.
And if you're a job-seeker: I don't really care how badly you need the job, you don't need that kind of employer.

Unfortunately, that isn't true for some people. When unemployed and living paycheck to paycheck with few, if any, marketable skills in a depressed area with a spouse and kids, the employer/employee power balance shifts dramatically to the employer. If I were in that situation and I thought giving up my password was the only thing between me and the job, I would probably consider it.
> Debian/Ubuntu doesn't create a root login (by default) at all, so there is no root password.

This is true of Ubuntu, but not of Debian.
Check Who Unfriends You On FaceBook
Nuclear power plants can produce hydrogen to fuel the 'hydrogen economy'
They added a code minimap?
https://github.com/visionmedia/superagent
I'd be interested to hear what percentage of active HN commenters have also applied to YC. I'm not an active commenter on HN (or any other site) but if I was to be more than a lurker I wouldn't want my reputation for snarky comments to impact future opportunities with YC or any other startup group. HN/YC has the potential to back into a professional hacker reputation system in a similar way that Facebook has done socially. e.g. block commenters who haven't submitted a YC app... of course if the % of HN commenters to YC applicants is low this idea is dead on arrival.
You're innocent until proven guilty in a court of law, but that phrase isn't a magic totem that gets you out of bad message board arguments. This is a community of nerds. Nerds are literalists and also pretty well-versed with piracy. Why are you wasting breath trying to convince them that MegaUpload wasn't a hub for piracy? It clearly was.

The link removal you're talking about did not "disable access" to the material; it only disabled access to it through that one removed link. This "linking" argument is just sophistry.

Also: comparing Rapidshare and MegaUpload to Youtube is sapping your credibility.
What's std::pair if it isn't a class?
>Rapidshare, Youtube, Hotfile. Which of these things is not like the others?

2 are general file repositories, one is specialized toward video? All 3 are very popular and heavily trafficked sites that host infringing content, but also a non-trivial portion of non infringing content?

>who's mind do you think you're changing with statements like that?

You're right. I shouldn't bother trying to change the mind of the MafiAA believer crowd. I still try anyways.
Help your users, be focused
Sometimes it's not. But if you're determined enough to spy on somebody via the audio on their phone, you will likely be persistent and eventually overhear something the person would prefer you didn't. If I were concerned about being spied on I wouldn't dismiss it so easily.
On feature of (Nordic party list) PR that irks me: With near perfect proportionality, you loose (geographic) ties to a specific block of voters. Because a large proportion of MPs are elected on the coat tails of "vote magnets" and the general performance of the party, the party becomes more important than the candidate. Owing your mandate to an artefact of the D'Hondt method and not the fact that you got more votes than the other guy does no favours to your attachment to voters.

I'm fairly new to the UK, but it seems beneficial to me that MPs have exactly one well defined constituency and all voters have exactly one MP (even if it's one they didn't vote for) that represents them in parliament.
http://redis.io/commands/set

> Status code reply: always OK since SET can't fail.

So, what kind of situation are you envisioning?
Atlanta renovation achieves highest LEED score in Northern Hemisphere
The quota was not for DMCA requests, but for direct access link deletion by the content owner. This feature is not required by law.
And it seems that indeed, I've overestimated the average size of all those rips by about a factor of 50.

You won't even get to a terabyte if you sum those 20.
> Why was there a limit at all?

Maybe to limit the Warner and other companies' actions. They're trying to sue for obvious test files now. What are the chances that given unlimited access they wouldn't worry so much about verification of what's legal/what belongs to them?

It's a completely different thing if they reached the limit every single day, were rejected higher quotas and have a big queue of files to remove... But why didn't they say so?
One of my family members owns an iPad, and Apple seems to have optimized the entire experience to buy from the app store.
Hello! Here's a friendlier way to say it!

Thanks for the post! I find the write up technically interesting!

You should change the name because there are many other projects called HN Mobile and because none of these are official. Here are other apps called HN Mobile or Hacker News Mobile:

- https://github.com/ctice/hn-mobile

- http://www.newmediacampaigns.com/blog/hacker-news-mobile-fro...

- http://hn.gethifi.com

- http://ihackernews.com

Remember, creating a project and submitting a link to HN isn't personal, just a lot of hard work and luck! Happy Monday!
Name calling? Really?

Google is a business partner of the content industry. Serious (high-fidelity, in-release-window, substitutable commercial product) infringing content on Youtube is a headache for Google. That same content is the reason Rapidshare and MegaUpload exist.
I admired (and still do) your posts very much. Thank you for them.
The same things were said about Rails when I first started using it in 2003. Well, except for the speed part. :) Rails adoption was almost entirely for new projects back then. Rails had the advantage of Ruby, which was a great way to bring in newer developers. C might not be as attractive to today's equivalent, but I know many people who love Rails but are ready for something different. G-Wan seems to solve some of the hard parts of C programming for this usage model.

The closed source nature of G-Wan bothers me, and may prove to be an insurmountable problem, but otherwise I think the ideas are pretty great. It brings me back to the days of qmail and NSAPI...both of which were awesome in their own ways.
Yeah the switch in the bottom left corner was not obvious.

I thought the demo was broken at first.
>Nerds are literalists and also pretty well-versed with piracy. Why are you wasting breath trying to convince them that MegaUpload wasn't a hub for piracy? It clearly was.

So? It was also a hub for legitimate file storage. And this is why I keep bringing up other file sharing sites and youtube, as every single argument you're making could equally be applied to them.

> it only disabled access to it through that one removed link

Which is kind of the whole bloody point. Look at it from a frontend/backend perspective. On the front end, access to a file is removed once a given link is killed. You, nor anybody else in the general public can access the targeted file once that link is dead. Unless the file is either re-uploaded, or another link is found, that is.
Yeah, but by definition these customers don't know anything about Rails. And the way apenwarr describes it, these little Access projects are often done without anybody's approval, so getting an outside vendor involved will never happen.

What the customer needs is exactly what apenwarr provided: they continue to update their Access db as they always have, but, BAM, it's also on the web now.
It's unfortunate that the reflexive reaction is 'lighten up'. It's hard for people (in this case, men in the tech industry) to step outside their own heads and their own experience and imagine that it might be quite different for others (in this case, women in the tech industry).

There also seems to be a lot of defensiveness and hurt feelings on the part of lots of men. A 'we've suffered too' kind of complaint seems to crop up a lot.

And the subtext connects to the 'lighten up' argument - 'I didn't complain when things got tough for me, and neither should you'. I've observed a lot of internet debates deteriorate into comparisons of whose pain counts more, and discussions tend to be unsalvageable when they reach this point.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but wasn't "How to Create Your Own Freaking Awesome Programming Language" the motivation for CoffeeScript. That alone should be enough motivation for sending your money that way.
Agreed. Does openSUSE use PolicyKit for CUPS like Fedora does, or does it depend on lpadmin group membership?

http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Features/CupsPolicyKitIntegrat...
Although this was our first app submission to the App Store, we could tell how frustrating an experience it can be.

Hoping this little tool and help relieve some of that frustration for us and other developers.
> This "linking" argument is just sophistry.

It's being supported by Google.
Marketing Automation Software Reviews
"I often feel like IOS apps work well despite Objective-C, not because of it."

Why?
Maybe SET wasnt a good example .. but lets say you are writing to the wrong type or something like that. I know that its unlikely something will fail in production like that since you should catch it during dev but bugs can happen.
Unfriend finder for Facebook..Works in almost all browsers..
How is it name calling if you parrot the arguments of the recording industry? Just because a number of the hacker type finds them distasteful doesn't mean you're not making the same BS arguments they are. Stop parroting their arguments and I'll stop calling a spade a spade.

>That same content is the reason Rapidshare and MegaUpload exist.

Bullshit. Or put another way, citation needed.
Why Choose between Shah Rukh and Salman Khan. Malaika Arora Khan
No specific feature is required by law. What's required by law is that providers

(C) upon notification of claimed infringement as described in paragraph (3), responds expeditiously to remove, or disable access to, the material that is claimed to be infringing or to be the subject of infringing activity.

There isn't any place in the DMCA that suggests any limit to the number of notices that can be provided. On a tactical level it seems like having limits was a mistake: they should have just queued them let the bottleneck express itself as a backlog and a delay.

On a strategic level, it doesn't matter. The argument that MegaUpload wasn't aware of its status as a piracy hub is totally implausible. It thus flunks 2 of the 3 conditions for establishing immunity under the DMCA.
I don't use it, but I am quite impressed with the cleanliness of the Google Closure source.

http://code.google.com/p/closure-library/source/browse/trunk...
Great post, but the title should be "how getting honest, qualified and constructive feedback made us rethink our idea." :-)
AT&T Sucks, but Won't Kill Windows Phone
This guy doesn't get consumer pricing psychology. It has been shown over and over again that consumers prefer fixed price, even if they have to pay more to get it. They don't want to be on a meter, they want a predictable budget. The telcoms don't set the dominant pricing model, the consumer does. There have been plenty of iterations of $/min and $/MB telcom plans already tried in the marketplace.

And telcoms would probably prefer a variable pricing model, makes their business model sane. Want to see a telcom exec head explode? Ask him if he wants more traffic on his network or not.
16 SSH hacks: Test your chops against this hit parade of expert tips & tricks
And Poor John Major was held to ransom by the hardline Unionist parties in the UK a few years ago.

Aurgaubly the same happens in the US as the party system is very weak and there is no comback from rebelling against the party line.
You think a jury will reasonably believe that Warner was sending tends of thousands of bogus takedowns every day? I don't.
Tangentially, there are people in CS who study trust/reputation systems (like karma), and how to design those systems so that people want to participate and "do the right thing". Maybe related.
Hi! Wanted to let you know that I wrote an article about how to get into Startup Chile: http://www.techvibes.com/blog/how-to-get-into-startup-chile-...
IE7 Support? Help please
If you have any knowledge of javascript can you tell me why this doesnt work in IE7
Google has an obvious interest in the legal particulars of linking to infringing content, but that doesn't mean that Google runs its business in the same fashion as MegaUpload.
DrRacket refuses to launch due to Easter Egg
Good on them for making it right. Although at first he just told Katta to go in for a rematch.

@therobpoz is probably right, I don't think Apple would have gone back and given him the laptop. Of course Apple doesn't need to give away their products in the first place...
Justin Kan’s Exec Starts Running Errands For Companies And Startups Today
Is there a way to style dynamically inserted <code> blocks (say inserted via an ajax call) after the page loads? I did not see an equivalent of the prettify() function of google-code-prettify that lets you do this. Looks great otherwise.
This wasn't a limit on DMCA takedown notices. This was a limit on their (not legally required) ability to directly take down files. It makes complete sense to limit this to prevent abuse.
It seems like you didn't actually read the article. Maybe you did, but she addressed the pure wordcount metric.

Her motivation for increasing her word count was the reduced number of days per week she could write on, trying to balance family life and professional life.

Her desire wasn't simply to have reached some arbitrary count, it was to increase her productivity so she could meet her deadlines while working fewer days.
This all sounds great up until I get to the "How?" part. All of his suggestions are sane and sound reasonable, but I don't trust any of the current data providers to implement any of them in a sane way.

>Ruthless transparency from the telco as to how much you’ll pay for every MB.

When have any of the telcos even been translucent when it came to pricing? They hide real prices in pages and pages of fine print and don't offer any details on taxes or fees until they print them on the bill after you've signed up.

>A price-per-MB that, off the top, feels reasonable.

... like the rates we pay for text messages? Or existing wireless overages?

>A price-per-MB that falls during the course of the month as you use more and more.

Again, I don't trust any of the existing data providers to lower prices ... ever.

>A lightweight API so that you can obsessively check how much you spent in the last week or hour or ten minutes. So that after a while you won’t need to.

I foresee SOAP or invalid XML/JSON or servers that mysteriously go down at the end of the month due to "unexpected demand."

These are great ideas, but I think we need new competitors in the market before any of them will get implemented in a mildly sane way.
Yes. My suspicion is that this is a backdoor lobbying effort by Facebook to get some TOS-protecting legislation passed, e.g. http://www.kcra.com/news/30750931/detail.html
There's nothing inherently wrong with classes. I use classes occasionally. But if you don't need to use one for everything. C++ isn't Java.
Much better than the pecl extension.
i hope so !!!
Pre-trial seizure isn't un-precedented nor inherently evil.

The Feds freeze the assets of a fraudster, e.g. Bernie Madoff, when accused of a crime. They are not yet proven guilty, no, but there is a pragmaticism that underlies the decision to trade defendant rights for the public good.
There are a number of things wrong with they way our current cellular network industry works in the US. The biggest issue IMO is subsidizing phones. When we pay phone bills, we're also paying for the cost of the phone. When we buy more expensive smart phones (which make excellent use of a data connection) we pay more via data plans. These data plans also have the cost of the phones built in.

From the carrier's perspective, grandfathered unlimited data plans are acceptable because the cost of the subsidies have already been recovered. More expensive newer phones require higher subsidies to be palatable to consumers, so data pricing is adjusting accordingly.

I would be happy to pay by the GB for my data if it were charged at the market rate, but it isn't. Cellular bandwidth is charged at the market rate + the subsidy recovery.
Parse is officially out of beta
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moral_panic
They are legally required to take down material; the law doesn't distinguish between "links" and "files".
I can only hope they kept logs of all takedown requests. Now they only need to find a reasonable sample. Honestly, I believe that even if they tried hard not to make mistakes, at this volume they would get some false-positives - and that's as good explanation as I can imagine. Now the question is - can Mega* guys prove enough of cases like that. Or maybe they have other explanation for the quotas - I don't know - I'm eager to hear more about it.
I bet he will be building some RPN language ... which is a rather boring task.
Here's our (my) take on it: http://blog.forrst.com/post/19956380482/big-news-forrst-has-...
Ray ban 3025
You're right that it isn't universal. Just like any compromise or "selling out" of principles in the name of short term gains, though, I think the empathy should only go so far. Pity those people but don't desire to be them or think it's okay that they compromise on principles.

"Take as your life's objective the goal of getting money for doing
your own thing. You were born to do this. Never lose sight of
this and settle for second best because this is one compromise
that will guarantee unhappiness. Leave that kind of compromise
to others - they were born for it. You are not."
-- Mark Tarver
I think it's pretty clear from the introduction that this would just be a one-sided response to some of the government's weakest claims. It's essentially just reading one side's legal brief and ignoring the other.

Particularly Dotcom completely ignored a number of the accusations the government has made (http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2012/01/why-the-feds...). Namely, he didn't address at all that they paid users who were popular uploaders with known infringing content. He also cherry picked some instances of his own use of the system without addressing any of the instances of employee abuses cited above.
I was also thrown off by the "the HN mobile web app" and thought it was official. I came to the comments to say, "could you please set the viewport on the regular website and save me the need for an app?", which I still want to say, but not to a third-party developer.

But really, that looks great. Love the attention to detail! I like mobile web approaches a lot. And getting that native look and feel seems to be a big reason (sometimes unspoken) why clients don't want to use the browser. Nice to see some effort put into breaking down that barrier.
Big news: Forrst has been acquired by Colourlovers
Anatomy of a great invoice
It's true, this seems very uncommon in the wild. However I would be surprised if it was completely non existent.

Whilst this may be a non-story at least it shows that people are thinking about these things and waking up to the things that suddenly become possible once your entire life is lived online.

If I were more cynical I might think that this story was intentionally stirred up by someone who had an interest in gauging the public reaction to this.
My husband, Rob, interviewed at a firm where his HR contact could not understand why my he was upset when an automated email that appeared to be from the HR contact sent Rob his password in plain text. Rob replied to the email to complain, thus actually giving his password to Mr. HR. When Rob continued to complain about this problem, Mr. HR accused Rob of not trusting him and insinuated that maybe the hiring process should stop right there. Rob could not even explain to Mr. HR why he was so upset in a way Mr. HR could understand. So HR departments tend to have very different ideas about passwords than, for example, HN readers.
Looks to me like Rainbow.init() would do it.
To add to the list, Peter Norwig's lisp interpreter is a short, concise introduction to interpreters.

http://norvig.com/lispy.html

http://norvig.com/lispy2.html
Technologies for building a scalable Library Management System
Hi I am working for a Library (vis-a-vis paper books) Management System for a network of schools and was wondering what are the best technologies to use? I know there are a quite a few open source ILMSs out there. But we are looking to build one from scratch to make it scalable. And we also have time. I would truly appreciate help in this regards.
I know a lot of people always seem to be complaining that mysql is not powerful enough in a production environment, specially the people with large websites complaining that it is not scalable enough. Personally, I feel that that is not the case in most instances. Only a very little amount of people ever have to deal with these issues and mysql is performs really well for rapid development, which, in most cases is what people want and need to get their idea up and ready.
The article doesn't mention limits to DMCA requests - presumably, WB or anyone else could have sent as many requests as they wanted, all of which would be complied with. It's direct takedowns which were limited.
The Lean Application
Introducing Gertboard Rev2 - the GPIO extension board for Raspberry PI
"I read a while ago (no links I'm afraid) that essentially a US agency/regulator has to give permission for a US based entity to sue an agency like the FBI."

Is "sovereign immunity"[1] perhaps the concept you are referring to? It was mentioned in an HN comment thread a while ago, but I don't remember the exact context.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sovereign_immunity_in_the_Unite...
iPhone doesnt need bigger screen it is already a decent phone with wide and viewable screen.
Which moral calculus allows you to call someone else's work "crap", where I can't cast aspersions on the quality of technology adoption in the soap manufacturing industry?
Looking at the new pricing, by storage size vs number of objects looks like a good change. You and parse benefit by making smaller objects.

Kind of sorry to see the $49/month plan go. The jump from free to $199 seems a little steep. (I know there is pay as you go for the basic level, but I'd kind of like to know the costs before hand)

All in all I like the new pricing.

Congrats for the release.
Up until you said that, I assumed that was the general feeling. Though, I've never been in this situation myself. Can you qualify why that attitude is disingenuous and unhelpful?
7 Years Of YouTube Scalability Lessons In 30 Minutes
"Why was there a "quota" at all?"

The article suggests that Megaupload gave content owners such as Warner Bros. a mechanism for directly removing infringing links (and again, without being required to handle it in that fashion--this being a massive convenience for both parties).

It would only seem natural that you'd want a way reigning in perhaps abusive usage of a delete/rm command.
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