skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Regarding the social implications and imperatives...

I think that groups like LulzSec provide a public service (see "Why the Joker and Not Batman is the Savior of [sic] Us All" http://thisorthat.com/blog/why-the-joker-and-not-batman-is-t... ) in that they show the importance and the need for everyone to be security conscious. I wish there were more groups like this out there raiding and dumping stuff periodically.

I wonder about whether it'd be political or legally feasible to have a law enforcement agency which just trolled around the internet and attempted to crack services that citizens depend upon.

The reason why this is relevant and important to dark nets, is that currently the only folks who use dark nets are folks who have something to hide. That might be folks who are illegitimately persecuted by governments, or folks who are legitimate criminals. These two groups are functionally indistinguishable, even if their intents and causes are different. They both have data they're trying to hide and communicate, without exposing themselves to authorities.
Which free software alternative is the best? Which free software alternative has better potential? (Not necessarily the same one)

On the FSF website they list high-priority free software projects, but the first three I clicked in the Skype section hadn't been updated since 2011, 2010 and 2009 respectively. Finally I clicked Jitsi and saw a 2012 update. http://www.fsf.org/campaigns/priority-projects/

I have pretty much one chance to move friends and family off Skype, so when/which alternative will it be?
> There's a reason you never see pros playing treasured vintage instruments the way a violinist would.

I don't understand. Violins are instruments too. Did you just mean pianos, or others too?
Tell Everyone Your Startup Idea
What RFID Means to Your Career
I'm not sure why iTunes rentals didn't take off. It seems like most people do want rentals, since they watch a show only once. Maybe the price point wasn't very compelling? Or the selection of rentals wasn't as good as that for buying?
Clickable: http://protonet.info
I'd be willing to help out as well. I'd really like to see a good HN site browser for Android.
It's not clear to me that it really has significantly more user acceptance. Unity was likewise the subject of much criticism, and drove many Ubuntu users away (like me, ironically to Fedora/Gnome3).

What saved Unity, I think, is firstly that it had time to get farther along the development curve before Canonical released it into the wild as the default (where Fedora 15 was shockingly rough around the edges) and second that Ubuntu has become the default development environment for cooking Android images, drawing a bunch of new users who aren't attached to the old Gnome 2 models.
The History of Information
I'm pretty sure Apple and these big vendors work out custom terms for the Apple cut. And I would almost guarantee it's not 30%.
This is another area where I prefer Raymond's open-source consequentialism to Stallman's free software deontology. Raymond actually takes the time to evaluate the harms (http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=4371) we anticipate from closed source software, and shows why we can expect a greater harm from OS or productivity software than from games or elevator firmware.
http://www.downforeveryoneorjustme.com/ - Save yourself a post next time.
Does ReactOS have OpenGL/D3D hw acceleration of some form?
100% agreed. Although I'm still having a hard time with Alt-~ (Mac-style "switch windows" not apps), I'm very happy with Gnome 3. The number of keystrokes and inches of mouse travel have been greatly reduced over Gnome 2.

The lack of a Start-like menu was initially off-putting, but I've grown to appreciate the lack of that bit of complexity. 99% of the time I run: Chrome, terminal(s), Skype, Pidgin and WebStorm/PyCharm, so I don't need to fiddle with settings or wonder about where in a menu an application resides. When I do need to find an app, the action button and search are perfect.

The only thing I miss in Gnome 3 are the many taskbar plugins that show mem/processor usage, but those will come. Otherwise, Gnome 3 does a great job getting out of my way while I do my work.
I once bought a beater piano for $200 so I could practice tuning it. We didn't have room in our apartment, so a friend let us set it up in his and I'd come over once in a while and bang on it (thanks, Eric!).

Most of the weight of a piano comes from the cast iron frame inside that holds the >20 tons of tension from the strings. And this piano was no exception - it was an "upright grand" meaning it was as tall as a baby grand is long. It took six of us to cajole it up my friend's stairs.

So when moving time came for him and his wife we had to decide what to do with the piano. None of us wanted to move the damn thing again, and since I really didn't have an emotional attachment to it whatsoever, we came up with the next best idea - cut it to pieces with a sawzall. And like another commenter said, if you ever have the opportunity to do this, do it. It was pretty fun. There's nothing quite like the sound of taking wire cutters to a fully tense piano string.
As someone who ran the public facing node with web-interface for the public grid for a while, I can assure you that it is less concerning than running a Tor exit. You will know the IP address of everyone who downloads and uploads from you via the web-interface, and you won't know the data of those who only use your node for storage.

The only complaint I ever received was from Sony after those "Geohot revenge hacks", in which they claimed that a hacked user database from one of their services was copyrighted by them, while at the same time they denied that it actually was the real user database.

We did some searches for the URL of the webinterface and discovered that it indeed was mostly used by "Anonymous" as a Pastebin alternative, at which point it was decided that we did not want to aid in the spread of personal information, which is why it was shut down.[1]

So you are right, there is no public grid because of unwanted files, but not because of Child Porn, but because of some script kiddies.

1: http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.file-systems.tahoe.devel...
Let's say someone "popular" posted a negative tweet about you, and included your contact information.

Would you want Twitter to notify you about it and see if you wanted to file a complaint, or would you rather just sit in a deluge of hatemail with no idea of where it's coming from?
If I could say anything to the Gnome3team:

"I used gnome 3 shell for 6 months until I could no longer stand it. Please please, Gnome team, go back to Gnome2 or Mate. The desktop really doesn't need reinventing. You're solving fixed problems!"

Unfortunately, I don't know how well the open source adopts the philosophical concept of sunk costs.
Thanks a lot for this; after reading the BBC coverage, it sounded like a complete overreaction. Regardless of whether or not this action was justified, the extended tweet lists certainly put it a little more into perspective.
Shoreditch Is The Heart Of East London
If you’re looking to experience this bohemian scene then jump in a taxi to Shoreditch, fast! This art, culture and fashion hot-spot right in the heart of East London attracts those that are search of something creative and original. This area is thriving due to it’s alternative shopping scene.
Well, that's why people are so ambivalent about Hulu Plus, compared to something like Netflix. It has negatives, but it's cheap, so...
Don't blame the tool. Never blame the tool. Knives can do horrific murders, but they are pretty useful for cooking as well. I'm surprised your comment is the top one here.
Any recommendations for digital?
I think the main difference in content between Netflix and Hulu Plus is that Hulu Plus gives you access to episodes from the current season (and often the full season beyond the most recent ones available on regular Hulu.)

Also, the Daily Show isn't a great example since episodes deal with news so I can't imagine many people buying up old episodes. (And you can get free episodes going back a month at http://www.thedailyshow.com/)

Edit: The Daily Show is actually an okay example now that I realize that you wanted Hulu+ for the non-desktop experience rather than for back episodes.
My very first company out of college made all new employees read Built to Last. Unfortunately, it was a case study in survivorship bias.

Any conclusion from the book is so suspect you'll probably be better informed not knowing anything at all than having read that book.
If it's serious enough, why are you serving it as a static, unprotected resource?
What's to stop someone from storing a base 64 encoded image in a text field?
Sorry, you're absolutely right. I dropped that comment into the reply box in the wrong tab.

mea culpa - I have deleted it. Apologies for the confusion.

If you delete your reply then I will delete this, and then the thread will be clean again.
Totally agree on Netflix. I would easily pay $25 a month for Netflix streaming if it had great content (e.g., same movies as the DVD by mail service + HBO)
With a 2.6 system this problems will be simpler to detect, because at this point we have explicit (configurable) limits for clients, of type normal, pubsub, slaves, so the connection is dropped if the amount of pending data goes over a given limit (and the event logged).

This added a bit of complexity to a few code paths that now require to estimate the size of objects, data, and so forth, but I think this will pay back in the long run.

This blog post makes me wonder if we should implement compression in the replication link as a feature in the future, or at least binary encoding. In short there is a plan for a binary version of AOF / replication-link that can save a lot of bandwidth.
hahahha! I agree!
Tracking The Growth of NameCheap
Basic Operation of Michigan Terminal System [1969]
The future of GNOME: http://mate-desktop.org/
Opera mobile store - unencrypted credit card form
http://i.imgur.com/GWLAz.png

I'll take Tesco's attempt over that.
The day netflix gets commercials I am out
It's hard to see running a critical service over an SSH tunnel as a long-term solution. Even with monit and autossh guarding the connection, SSH isn't exactly rock-solid when used this way.

If the redis protocol is so compressible, maybe this behavior should be integrated as a protocol option like [1]?

[1] http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.5/en/replication-options-s...
Totally agreed. They might not be the original inventors of a computer technology, but their implementations are always groundbreaking. From the start, they took things other people did poorly and dominated on implementation, totally shaking up the market. Just look at the big 3:

- There were computers, they made personal computers

- There were mp3 players, they made the ipod

- There were phones, they made the iphone

In all 3 cases, the invention existed but was poorly designed and people did not like it or use it very often. And in all 3 cases, they created a version that was smaller, lighter, better designed, and that people loved to use and completely changed the entire industry.
iPhone5 leakage
And... I suspect that this is the reason why so many people are very suspicious of the project; they seem desperate to mislead as much as possible, at every opportunity.

I understand that they want to drum up support and give a positive impression so that more people will join in, but a little more honesty I suspect would go a long way.
First Bollywood Actress on Playboy?
You're not a hacker till you master keyboard shortcuts 
KeyRocket now supports Gmail shortcuts thanks to the KeyRocket Google Chrome extension available in the Chrome Web Store.
I like the variety available on Roku, but the painfully slow UI has me ready to walk away.
I am not a piano player, or even an official player of any musical instrument. I don't know how to read music.

A year ago, we were offered an upright Kimball built in 1970 by my newly acquired in-laws. My father in law is a portly fellow and insisted we move it ourselves, but I instead paid exactly 300 dollars to have it moved the 14 miles from Exeter to Lee.

We let it adjust to the humidity in our house for a half a year, and then we paid exactly 175 dollars to have it tuned. As subjective as this is, the man who tuned it said "it was a D and now it is a B". He said that the Kimballs are a very cheap piano with a cheap sound, and tried to sell me a grand piano for 5000 dollars used. It would have required I vacate my home office to the basement.

He had other pianos for sale, and some were as affordable (but as cheap) as the 300 dollars I paid for a free piano.

It's immensely pleasurable having a piano next to where I program. I don't know what I am doing, but I suspect this is a lot of the allure - I sit there and poke, and figure out my programming challenge of the day while my fingers are occupied. We all know full well how the frontal lobe needs to be engaged for the "coprocessor" to have a chance at resolving our issues for us.

The piano is about 4 feet wide and barely 2 feet from the wall. Since the bench sits underneath, this is frankly not a huge investment in space. I recommend a piano highly to the non-player due to its affordability and its distraction properties, my own version of prayer beads I use while debugging in my head.
That's the real issue.

Gnome and Unity are both targeted at some sort of hypothetical casual linux user, that doesn't really exist.

Casual users DO exist, but they want iOS, not Linux - or more generally - an appliance, not a general purpose tool.
That's a bit like saying "America isn't a free country because I can't just murder whoever I want".

The GPL license does indeed restrict some things that could be regarded as freedoms, for example the freedom to distribute a closed source version (distribution only, you are allowed to create a closed source derivative as long you keep it to yourself).

It's a bit like "you have the freedom to do anything you want apart from restrict another person's freedom"
Couple of comments. The lack of tests would personally keep me from using this library, it's a pretty simple setup and relatively easy to test so it shouldn't be too hard. Also keep in mind that hitting the database for something like an AB test isn't going to perform very well at large scale. Finally, you're reimplementing a built in Django feature with your get_or_create_* functions. Just call Model.objects.get_or_create(...) no reason to rebuild that particular wheel.
The Scooba, also by iRobot, is a mopping version of the Roomba.
Agreed. You'd figure with all the title moderation recently, this one would have made the cut.
I'd be surprised if that was it.
iOS already allowed AirPlay streaming of Hulu Plus. And there are far more iOS devices out there than Macs.

Not to mention how much easier it is to shoot content from your mobile device to an AppleTV, vs getting off the couch, going to your PC, starting the content, starting Airplay...
You raise a good point. There is a difference, however; the Internet is actively monitored and ISPs respond to/work with the police to reduce this kind of content. Can the same be possible on something like Freenet?
Spiky Graphs
Netflix unleashes source for Chaos Monkey
What about a system that establishes a series of trusted agents, who get the data first, and have to approve it to propagate it onto the the wider publicly available network.

Anyone could become a trusted agent by publicly verifying their identity. Basically you need to find at least one other person who's identify is public to "sponsor" your information.

If you are publishing information the Chinese government you find a U.S. sponsor and vice versa.
Panasonic creates artificial photosynthesis as efficient as real plants
Some relevant quotes from the Ouya devs in Ben Kuchera's article[1]:

"That [controller] design is not final," I was told. "We are in a prototype phase and exploring several options."

"We know the hardware specifications, and are working with electrical and mechanical engineers to test the performance of the hardware. We have begun work on the user interface and software. We’ll pull all these pieces together and test how they fit, while we finalize the product."

It reminds me of that Kickstarter flashlight that's been in development for over a year[2]: they're not quite saying how little is done, and they'll be in over their head in no time. To me, every bit of marketing copy from Ouya seems willfully misleading.

[1] http://penny-arcade.com/report/editorial-article/the-reality...

[2] http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/527051507/hexbright-an-o...
Not to be a "Negative Nancy", but quite a bit speaks against G3's current direction in terms of blog posts and participation.

Especially the latter is easy to verify. Go to their mailinglists and see the level activity, it sure does not look very good.
Reading the actual mailinglists gives sometimes a quite disturbing image as well, with a few examples already linked in Mr. Ottes mentioned blog post.
All perfectly understandable. It's called "the path less taken."

A lot of people just don't click with formalized education at all in their early years. They just couldn't throw themselves behind all those authors and facts they're "supposed to" be up on. Some of them are too busy learning informally by dealing with the world around them -- i.e. with things like nature, work, and you know, other people.

Then slowly grow to form their own view of the world, and seek their own path to obtaining a more structured comprehension of it -- which might well mean starting (on their own volition) formalized education sometime in their 20s or 30s -- or perhaps not.

A great many who choose this route, or have it forced upon them may fail or flounder -- but a great many also don't, and end up with accomplishments for others to read about or hear about in those books, classes and received intuition that some people think are the only valid starting points to figuring out how to make a dent in the universe.
The better pianos (Steinway, Mason & Hamlin) from the 1920s are actually still very valuable and in demand. A well kept or restored grand piano from that era costs > $20,000 and can be one of the best deals out there for a good instrument. But any low end piano — even one that's only 15-20 years old — is destined for the dumpster before long.

There are two problems that cause this:

1. Lack of craftsmanship in the original instrument.

2. The expense and lack of skilled labor to restore and regulate pianos.

It's just too expensive and time consuming to have a skilled technician work on a low-quality piano, and because they are not made well in the first place, they just won't stay well-regulated for long.

Because of this, even a relatively new and good looking piano doesn't make a great instrument once it gets past a certain point.

This is a common problem in music schools. Most of the pianos are in poor condition and the technicians can't keep up with keeping them in good shape, and the good pianos are generally locked up and only the piano majors have access to them.

Only high end pianos are worth putting any time and money into, and because of that they actually make a good investment, while the value of low end pianos just drops off a cliff and they end up in a dumpster because they aren't even worth moving and repairing.
I can browse the Internet for a long time before I see an archive full of hard-core pre-teen porn unless I go looking for it. It is difficult to browse the Tor .onion network without seeing at least links to this. Sometimes users land on it by mistake. Try it.

Tor gives the impression of being a sea of kidporn with little islands of interesting stuff, especially when you factor in the cognitive fact that human beings give greater weight to negative stimuli.
A lot of redundancy can be eliminated, and we have good past experience (and results) with this approach because we do it in the RDB format used for storage.

For the replication link it's easy to imagine a simple way to encode command names as operation IDs, the same for prefixed length stuff. So now you have:

*3
$3
SET
$3
foo
$3
bar

But this may become like: <set-opcode><2><3>foo<3>bar where the opcode is 1 byte, and the rest of the prefixed lengths are variable depending on the argument size, but most of the times 1 or two bytes. This of course is much more compact.

However it's not bad to have the current format to be exactly like the AOF, and the client protocol itself, so everything is the same currently... and is future/backward compatible without issues. But well performances always have some price.
Minitel.org - Memories of Minitel and X.25 networks
Both of which are desktop solutions. Yes, they kinda work on a TV with mirroring and such but they don't have a good couch / remote experience like AppleTV or the various other systems. If my non-techie girlfriend can't figure it out easily, then it's not worth my time.
This is great! I like more too choose from!

Currently XFCE is my desktop environment of choice, but if Mate is adaptable to my needs I might switch.
> The desktop really doesn't need reinventing.

I'm surprised people think this. Do you think we're going to still be using the Windows 95 model in 10 years?

Sure, the relative importance of the desktop will diminish as other forms of input become viable, but we're not there yet. I still do 95% of my work in a desktop environment with multiple windows and everything, just like I did 10 years ago. The difference is that the desktop environments I have access to now are better than the ones I had then. I hope that trend continues.
I wholeheartely agree. NetFlix has made some silly missteps, but the outcry over raising their rates was confusing to me. The value per dollar is mind-boggling. It already has more great stuff that I have time to watch, and I would still pay substantially more for a deeper catalog.
I think it actually says a lot more about how generally-free our society is.

Giordano Bruno was imprisoned and executed for disagreeing with the church, so had much reason to hide his activities, even though they are what we could definitely consider "legitimate".

Child pornography producers and consumers are similarly persecuted, though clearly with much more sound reasons.

At least in western countries, there aren't a lot of instances of repressed communication that need to be conducted across a channel like this -- especially few legitimate ones. This is not to say that such a system isn't useful; just that I believe the fact they're so full of child pornography and the like is actually, in a roundabout way, an indicator of a healthy society.
I'm not blaming the tool. I'm pointing out its inadequacy. I am saying there is an interesting and very hard problem here that severely limits the adoption of these technologies, and that solving it would be both interesting and important.

The darknet problem as defined by most techies is solved, yet almost nobody uses these systems. Why?
This reminds me of the ethical dilemma I face whenever I search for something and the site I'm looking for comes up in both the organic and paid search results.

Do I like them enough to save them a few pennies or not?
Is a corporate email address really "personal information" ??
http://www.reddit.com/help/faqs/piano#ChoosingaKeyboard
There's nothing quite like the sound of taking wire cutters to a fully tense piano string.

... as long as you're careful about it. I know musicians who have been injured by being in the wrong place when a string snapped.