skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
What do I want? For him to be thrown in jail. I honestly don't care about people swapping media between themselves. But setting up an exchange to do that, and paying for it by selling space to advertisers? That's not "sharing". That's business. And that business would collapse if he had to pay the copyright holders he depends on.

In general, audiences have NO idea how much time, effort, etc. it takes to produce decent work. Partly, that's by design, since good work should look effortless. But when you count the time getting good, a decent album may represent a decade of someone's life (10,000 hours, etc.) And the thousands of names in the credits of major films represent actual work, by real people. There's no reason these people should be expected to "find a business model" that doesn't rely on some form of legal protection when protection is the backstop of every viable business model in existence (not always legal, in the case of drug cartels; and where there's no protection at all, what you're really talking about is good luck and charity).

That said, I think enforcing copyright at the individual level is a fool's errand. No one writing the law - which evolved over centuries - ever imagined that it would be applicable on such a global scale, in such a granular way. Barring radical change in the law, I think individuals should be exempt from prosecution under something that is so spectacularly unsuited to free individuals and the democracy that depends on their liberty.

But corporations are another story. They're tools, not people, and tools have no rights. Shareholders have rights, employees have rights, citizens whose governments issue corporate charters have rights. But corporations themselves? No rights whatsoever. There's no threat to democracy in making them secure permission - by paying for it on fairly negotiated terms - or getting sued into oblivion. Indeed, that's the exact expectation around which the law and industries that pay for copyrights both developed. The Internet's appearance doesn't change the premise that anyone building a business around material they didn't produce, should include the properly negotiated price of their inputs in the prices they charge to others. Obviously, that's my own standard. It's not reflected in law. But I think it's a fair break. If it were reflected in law, I think we could put the copyright wars behind us for the foreseeable future.

As far as Kim Dotcom goes, it's clear he made his money on the wrong side of this line. That's why I'd like to see him jailed under law which should make jailing him a no brainer. I have no idea how he's going to pay for his current venture, but I'm pretty sure he says "safer" not "safe" for good reason. You'd have to be an idiot to give Mega the same level of trust that Dropbox enjoys.
You know, you could've just told us instead of making us look it up :)

>The Olympic motto is "Citius, Altius, Fortius." These three Latin words mean "Swifter, Higher, Stronger."
Neutral: our new car podcast
Thirdocean | The Week That Was in Social Media featuring Facebook and more
Intel's process advantage was always based on competing against less well funded competitors who expect not to be able to keep up with intel. Now that their competitors are actually spending to develop new process technologies the business model has changed and now Intel has to provide value over the default ARM solutions in emerging markets. We have already seen some competitors in the space (TI) exit.

As process designs continue to improve x86 will improve compared to ARM but the backward compatibility of ARM over time will place means that Intel can't expect to just be competitive if it expects to be successful. Add in the double whammy of the transition from desktop and notebooks to more mobile devices and intel's existing backward compatible proposition doesn't look so good.
A raspberry pi is by many considering a minimum viable computer of sorts, and the bottom of what one would consider acceptable performance.

Therefore seeing how Amazon compares to that is an interesting exercise. I was personally floored by how poor performance some EC2 instances has for some types of tasks (java/clojure related things among them).

I quickly decided Amazon was not able to serve my needs within the price-range I was willing to pay.
I am a little confused - did they agree not to pouch each others employees, or just agree not to cold call and so distract everyone?

I can imagine that individuals and even whole teams upped from one company to another in 2006 - so they did take employees - presumably via informal networks, conferences and so on - you know the approaches we are supposed to be polishing ourselves
This is a very intelligent, informed summary of the mounting case against the prosecutors. The author minces no words when describing Ortiz' and Heymann's strategy of charging Swartz with a battery of preposterous charges with the express intent of making any action except accepting a plea bargain (and thereby pleading guilty to all charges) the only reasonable approach: "[T]hey assumed that the risk of their success even on bogus charges would be enough to pressure Swartz into accepting a guilty plea on all the counts in exchange for a reduced sentence — which is what they offered him."

But what raises the deepest concern when I read this article is that the author continues on to describe Swartz's case not as a particularly bad example of prosecutorial oppression but rather as an exemplar of justice in the United States: "The process was fundamentally corrupt and shameful. But observers of the American criminal-justice system also know that it was a common one."

What can we do about this?
Easily. Most in our groups brought some sort of newspapers into the country, they were never confiscated. Our guides would actually ask if it was on to read the newspapers, and our guides knew about what's going on outside of their country. They would know about Assange, Occupy Wall street, Obama etc.

I brought an iPad, my laptop and my iPhone - they only took my iPhone when i entered the country - or, actually, they forgot, and I gave it up later on the trip, as I didn't want to get in troubles when leaving.

I could easily have left many devices there, with information etc.. In terms of communication devices, not so sure. There's absolutely no wifi in the country, and satellite devices are large, afaik.

I was war driving with my iPad in Pyongyang, searching for wifi.. NO wifi was detected, at all. Pretty interesting.

I lend my iPad to one of the guides for a week - the guide saw Breaking Bad Season 1 and heard Beatles and U2 :-) and even brought it home at night.
Offtopic - I like this style of repost notice, thanks.

(Since this forum closes comments after N days on an article, reposts are the only way to continue discussion, however, context about previous discussions is always nice!)
I kinda liked it; Even if you skip something the story is written in a way so it doesn't matter too much.
The U.S. incarceration rate (~750) is indeed much higher than that of say the U.K. (~150), but is highly disuniform. In states like Mass. or Minn. it's only ~200.

Comparing the U.S. and other countries on the basis of prison population is a bit misleading. This chart is relevant: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Lifetime_prevalence_of_inc.... The U.K. is more than 90% white. It doesn't have to deal with a huge black population that still carries the legacy of slavery and segregation. It doesn't have to deal with a huge hispanic population that has to deal with the challenges of immigration (and often illegal immigration). The U.K. doesn't have to deal with the gang and poverty-related crimes that arises from segregation and ghettoization on a massive scale.

In London, more than 60% of the population of the metro area lives in the city proper. In Chicago or L.A., that figure is under 30%, and in cities like Boston or D.C. it's under 15%. This statistic isn't just a matter of people in the U.K. enjoying city living. The 30% that live in Chicago in the city proper and the 70% that don't have dramatically different economic and demographic profiles. The U.K. hasn't had to deal with the total collapse of social order that accompanied the outflux of all the middle class residents from the American cities to the outlying suburbs in the 1970's-1990's.

To give a very specific example: New York City is heavily policed, and in places like the Bronx poor minorities can be harassed by the police just for looking the wrong way. And an entire city full of liberal middle and upper middle class people have absolutely no problem with that status quo. How can that be? You can't understand that state of affairs without knowing what New York looked like in the 1970's, 1980's, and 1990's--how it was hollowed out by crime.

The harsh sentencing in the U.S. when it comes to crime is a reaction. It's a reaction to social problems that Western Europe has by and large been spared from, though with the massive influx of Middle Easterners into Europe now I think they're going to get a taste of that in the next few decades.
By judicial system reform, I mean reducing the US's fetish for throwing too many people in jail for too-long sentences, which is what's relevant to the present case. I don't see any evidence that Cornyn did anything to reduce Texas prison populations or direct his office to stop intimidating defendants into accepting plea-bargains, or to stop seeking excessive sentences.
I'm very hopeful that MSFT will soon adopt a common standard, whether WebRTC or an adjusted WebRTC. However, the business case does not support such a push from Microsoft. They purchased Skype for $8B, and it's their every incentive to ensure web telephony remains difficult and that Skype remains the best, cheapest, and simplest way for people to communicate with video and voice. They want Skype everywhere, but Skype becomes less compelling in a world where any two engineers can effectively build Skype-level quality (or better) inside a browser.
I wouldn't trust leaving my data on his server much more than asking him to watch a box of ding dongs for me.
Want a million dollars?  Just ask for it.
Oops, typo. Too bad I can't edit my post anymore.
Totally off topic but there is a new scientist article
On the HN front page the your Ranger should read - no tree can grow leaves higher than 100 m up as the cost / benefit for capillary action fails

I suspect that for each species there is a maximum economic height and that give the uniform heights to a foresst
Looks like the post has disappeared from Aubrey's blog.

Google Cache of his original post: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:blog.au...

Gizmodo also has his post mirrored: http://gizmodo.com/5977076/the-amazing-story-of-how-bill-ngu...
Maybe on file upload, they encrypt it with the file hash then chunk those encrypted files and store those with dedup.

Then, on the user side, they store an per-user encrypted index (random, counter, MAC) to those individual chunks to represent the file.

That way, they can only see giant encrypted blocks of data, and per-user encrypted indexes to data. But it is all encrypted.

They would need to hack into accounts by keylogging passwords to decrypt the indexes and see what files users can actually access.

Public links could be shared by giving out a key in the URL that is a file containing indexes to other blocks. So whoever knows the URL, knows the index, and can get the data.

That is the way I'd design it, at least... :)

edit:typo
I have heard these from very smart people, just because it sounds good doesn't mean its true!
"Her prospects look grim. Rep. Darrell Issa (R., Calif.)"...

And that's when everyone should stop reading. Issa is a tea party loon.
Well, he worked for the DoJ computer crime division for three years.

http://www.law.gwu.edu/SiteCollectionDocuments/CV/Orin_Kerr....
http://www.justice.gov/careers/legal/jobs/ccips-trial-atty.h...
I agree with the sentiment here, but some of the specific claims are certainly wince-worthy. College prank? Greatest prodigy of his generation? Little to no commercial value? All those claims are a lot more complicated than that!

Not to mention it makes it sound like Ortiz was cooking this all up behind closed doors and everyone else was shocked! shocked! to realize how the "prosecutorial misconduct" had gotten out of control, when this is the way DoJ does everything it touches and everybody knows it.
You might have been able to do that in Burma. I know people who have travelled to Burma, Cuba, and other places and made similar arguments that I sympathize with. But you can't do that in North Korea: you can't go stay in small family establishments or choose where to eat. The entire trip is managed by the government and even trying to give money or talk to anyone about politics is probably risking the life of the person you talk to.

That leaves your first reason, which seems like a very self-focused reason -- I could learn the same thing from visiting other countries (or spending time reading up on the many accounts of North Korea, particularly those who have escapes).
The app is free!
Give it a try and let me know what you think, any feedback is appreciated.

http://www.frontpageapp.com
If you are, say, North American (I'm not), don't you have those kinds of environments much closer for example in Guatemala? Maybe it's not at all the same thing and even more dangerous.
You can't deny the Tea Partiers know how to work a bandwagon, though. Plus Issa is far, far older than the Tea Party and he'll be in office after they're measuring the dustbin for the new curtains.
As long as the logins go via normal web page hashing the passwords before sending them does not really add that much security. If the security of the server is somehow compromised, it would be trivial to put up new Javascripts that send the cleartext password to server. Users are not likely to go through the Javascript to check what it is actually doing.
cruel:
(1) willfully causing pain or suffering to others, or
feeling no concern about it;
(2) causing pain or suffering

Intentionally causing bankruptcy for someone (or freezing of their assets) while also threatening them with jail times wildly disproportional to the crime and damages caused by the crime in order to extort a guilty plea before you prove them guilty in a court of law is cruel. Doing so is the willful causing of mental pain or suffering of another human being. If you've ever known another person in the U.S. that has been wrongly convicted of a crime, you'd think it was a cruel system as well. It is especially cruel to those least capable of handling emotional pain.
Important part:

Prosecutors Ortiz and Stephen Heymann turned to a standard trick while pursuing the case, mounting a total of thirteen felony counts against Swartz and arguing that his college prank aimed at “liberating” a collection of academic articles with little commercial value was a serious crime. Although each of these counts bordered on the preposterous, Ortiz and Heymann clearly reckoned that at least one or two would stick during the jury-room bargaining process. More to the point, they assumed that the risk of their success even on bogus charges would be enough to pressure Swartz into accepting a guilty plea on all the counts in exchange for a reduced sentence — which is what they offered him. The process was fundamentally corrupt and shameful. But observers of the American criminal-justice system also know that it was a common one.
I wonder how Generic Propecia can help hair growth
Το Propecia έρχεται με τη μορφή δισκίων που περιέχουν φιναστερίδη των 1mg . Η συνιστώμενη για τους περισσότερους άνδρες με ανδρογενετική αλωπεκία είναι ένα δισκίο (1mg φιναστερίδης) μία φορά την ημέρα. Τα δισκία πρέπει να λαμβάνονται από το στόμα και συνοδεύονται με επαρκή ποσότητα νερού.
Because it's a ridiculously sensational article.

> ...Swartz and arguing that his college prank aimed at “liberating” a collection of academic articles with little commercial value was a serious crime.
Not sure, it doesn't seem to say anything about encrypting with the file hash and implies that metadata and actual data use the same key.
I agree that your contribution to the government is small, although it's not zero. I assume North Korea wouldn't be allowing Western tourists to come on these trips otherwise; they clearly see an advantage to your visit (unless they are just deluded that Western tourists will be fooled by the propaganda).

But, what are the chances that your time there will really shed any more light on North Korea? Encouraging friends to read "Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea", for example, or simply reading it or another similar book yourself and sharing your thoughts would arguably shed more light than a brief government managed trip and a blog post.

Edit: I'd love to hear why you disagree rather than just downvoting. I've wondered about making this trip myself in the past and this is where I've settled, but would be happy to hear further arguments.
The documentary "A State of Mind" is terrifically disturbing (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_State_of_Mind). Follow two participants in North Korea's Mass Games as they prepare to put on a show for the Dear Leader. Filled with "only in NK moments."
Read between the lines of http://www.bipm.org/cc/CCTF/Allowed/18/CCTF_09-27_note_on_UT... about what systems of time distribution already exist and which of those are approved for use by national and international agencies.
Are you sure that is a real Twitter account?

It only has 96 followers
This guy makes $500,000 a year wearing t-shirts
looks like any other aggregating content website, how is yours different?
Yes, but it looks like he is seriously going after her.
Ask HN: Learning A Programming Language(s)
Hello HN -
I am faced with a certain type of "information overload" regarding the learning of programming languages.

I have been trying for the past several years to become proficient in a programming language. The issue is: I sometimes feel like a "kid in the candy store". Here's an example:

I am trying to learn C# at work. Suddenly, an exciting new article comes out on HN regarding, say, Python or Ruby. I switch gears and begin studying those. A few days later, another interesting article about Go.. Then Javascript.

To summarize: My question is - How to maintain the focus on really mastering programming itself rather than jumping from one language to another? I really would love to be a programmer and read about it constantly, but I feel I am taking 2 steps backward and 1 step back each time.

Thanks!
FYI the original title of the post explained this via parenthetical, but the title was changed by the powers that be to what it is now.
Show HN: Github for Recipes
How particle physics could make recommendation engines smarter
Gods below, I don't want to imagine the vertigo that would cause. Like being on a merry-go-round without the sensation of moving from your inner ear.

It's a decent control idea, but I can't imagine being able to use it, personally.
Alternatively, to avoid labeling the JSTOR downloads as a hack, which has different connotations for Harpers' readers and the public in general as it does here.
They don't really sustain the country/regime on tourism. It's a drop in the ocean.
Ortiz will answer for her actions, perhaps not as a matter of law, but certainly as a matter of common sense and decency.

No one should be exempt from behaving like a decent human being, and one does not need to break the law in order to be fired for executing poor judgment.
Dark Footers in Web Design
Simple tips to find (or create) more time in the day of a Software Engineer
also, guess why they forgot to take my iPhone when I entrered the country? Because the customs guys were busy playing Angry Birds on my iPad, and looking through my photos.. zooming in on the photos of the pretty girls that I had in my Photostream
Exceptions are hard to reason about even in the general case. The granularity of what constitutes an exception will cause mismatches across the modules of a software development project. Even worse, exceptions break the control flow and make retries of an operation difficult. Exceptions need to be replaced with encapsulated and explicit error handling within a resumable function that the programmer is forced to handle.

In the case of dependent operations you can cut down on code bloat and build more advanced error handling functionality like exponential backoff on top of this foundation.
Just wanted to comment that this works better in Internet Explorer 10, documents seemed to compile significantly faster than on Chrome. Running Windows 8x64, for reference.
it's a little silly to expect someone to use examples from outside their domain expertise

Right, I get that. But...

It did seem like he derailed his own point into a weird cultural commentary on programmers though

That's what I was commenting on - the way DW connected the initial thesis to the commentary made it seem (to me anyway) that these expectations were exclusive to programmers.
Out of curiosity, why do you specialize in developing MVPs for people with ideas, and how did you get into that type of work as a primary focus? Do you find that the work is more interesting than doing consulting jobs for more established businesses? Assuming you've found plenty of projects that meet your rules, do you have opportunities to become a co-founder, and have you considered them seriously?

I've done consulting, startups, and free work on side projects. At this point, if I find people and projects that meet my requirements, I'd probably prefer to become a co-founder and make a real go of it. I don't think I've ever taken a small amount of equity as compensation for substantial unpaid development work. Under those circumstances, equity is not tasty. I'd rather do well-paid consulting work or find a great team and go all in.
Social networks are traditionally thought of as a way for people to interact with each other. It changes the dynamic when a service intentionally allows non-humans to have accounts (which seems like a good thing). The question is can bots, in general, be used for a productive purpose that adds value to the ecosystem. (fake followers, being the biggest use case thus far, don't really add value to the ecosystem as whole).
There wouldn't be much point in doing that.

Encrypted data is indistinguishable from random data, so it is incompressible. The chances of finding anything significant to deduplicate are so low that it's not worth trying.
There is an issue in that our society doesn't provide us with the time and space needed to participate properly in governance. This is true even of Congresspersons: they spend as much time providing the service as they do keeping their job [1]--and those two activities aren't the same. We need a culture where companies see it as normal and natural for people to take time out of their daily/weekly/monthly schedule to seriously study and engage with issues.

[1] http://politicalpartytime.org/blog/2013/01/18/bennet-leads-t...
Ok, maybe it's a troll. (What isn't?)

1. I don't understand. Is the wearer of 2 headphones not allowed to talk, or is he not allowed to be verbally addressed?

2. If all the girls are wearing headphones, how the fuck...? Am I RIGHT?!
Really?! I didn't expect that!
(I don't run Windows, and so I didn't try it in IE.)
Good to know, thanks!
The previous website Kim owned was http://www.megaupload.com which got shut down last year due to hosting illegal content.
Did you read the article? This doesn't seem like the old "Microsoft bullying others into following" story, this seems like legitimate reasoning for the moment.