skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This is really sad. I am in the process of making a game and am just thinking of calling it quits after reading stuff like this. It seems like MMO's are the way to go business side - since it is setup in a way that does not provide piracy vehicle. Which is bad if you don't wan't to make a MMO. Also, it seems PS3 hasn't been cracked yet and there are alot of PS3 owners deprived of good, non-casual games.
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Yes and no. Do remember that bullets don't kill people, it's people kill people.

TPB is just another tool for sharing files, it's people's actions that infringe copyright. They really should be after the folks who rip the content and upload them in the first place.

Get to the source of the incident, not the distribution channel.
From this teaser in teh bottom right, "What does BlueMailCentral do for the environment?
Because you use BlueMailCentral, your CO2 emission is lesser than when you would not use BlueMailCentral. The exact amount of reduced CO2 is impossible to calculate, but a reduction is.."

Lesser should be less.
Shouldn't these people be working when they are at work?
I don't see why it's any business of the government to restrict what people share with each other. I support copyright in what I see as its primary role of policing "passing-off" type activity - ie, trying to sell something you have no right to sell - but restricting private citizen A sending $whatever to private citizen B? No way. And TPB facilitates the latter, not the former.

"It's a pity that everyone calls this 'file sharing' (which sounds so innocent)"

People call it "file sharing" because it's about, get this, sharing files. What those files are is basically beside the point. I do not have a contract with the RIAA or MPAA to refrain from storing or transmitting data which may be derived from their works; if they can't make money in a world where people can exchange information freely, well, sucks to be them.

It's all moot anyway really. File sharing is a fait accompli. All these court actions are doing is speeding the development of the next generation, and then the war will truly be lost.
Wouldn't that mean anyone can sign up to read my mail? I think they should use their own employees who are background-checked and have signed some sort of an NDA
Probably. I like to think that a lot of people find and ultimately buy stuff they wouldn't have encountered otherwise. Having said that I'm kind of biased by the industry's use of figures.

For instance, if I pirate it then buy it my pirating is still measured as a lost sale. If I pirate it twice it counts as two lost sales. If I buy it because I pirated, it does not count as a gained sale from piracy.
The problems were exacerbated by Gamestop breaking the street date even after they were specifically told they couldn't. I think this all would have been a much smaller issue if Stardock had been able to release the game when they planned to.

In addition, I don't think that Stardock is necessarily surprised with the piracy numbers.
Here is a talk by Cory Doctorow mentioning why the DRM in the BBC iPlayer is retarded: http://www.boingboing.net/2009/04/15/my-drm-and-ebooks-ta.ht...
These stats are taken before the busiest period for the iPlayer (over Christmas) so I imagine they doubled the statistics for christmas day.

The BBC also created their own framework which they named Perl on Rails to adapt between Ruby on Rails which is used for their internal web apps and the perl code base of the main site.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/radiolabs/2007/11/perl_on_rails.s...
I'm putting my support behind this interpretation of the complaint.

I spent some time at a gov't subcontractor and the copy-paste version of cya was clear as day. Sometimes you'd see where search/replace failed and there would be other program names.

It was a mess and I'm fairly certain it was because of our size. Fighting a contract in court is an expensive and potentially reputation damaging prospect, so if you have significantly less resources at your disposal it is very likely that you won't be able to fight the baked in vagueness and contradiction.
If you're honestly asking this question, I think you've missed the point of a lot of what's said here on HN.

You might even want to pick up a copy of "The Hacker Ethic" by Pekka Himanen.
Yes, they should. That said, lunch / coffee break HN is something I look forward to. I get to keep up on with (some parts) of the startup world and generally learn something new every day. Of course my optometrist would freak if he knew I was using my break time to read HN ...
What's wrong with their attitude? They have a set of beliefs and they loudly espouse them. Their arguments are well-reasoned and, usually, politely stated. The only "establishment" they are against is the status quo of copyright law, it's not like they're anarchists.

They might slip into immaturity sometimes (see their "responses to legal threats page", for example) but it's not like the other side are angels either.
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That's what happened here, it was even blocked as category: hacking. Only lasted about a week, though. Comforting in a way that they had a human check.
didn't know those existed...are those owned/operated by PG?
Is Hubspot's @biz Twitter campaign deceptive? How should startups use Twitter?
Rule of thumb: don't trust pirated software! If you need to get some application, buy it, or use a Free version
actually, the version on the southpark site is higher resolution than the torrents, the only issue i've had is that the content delivery network stutters enough that dowloading yields a better quality of experience
Thank you for the explanation.

It's somewhat ironic that there is an "it should be easy to spot" kind of rule, but not an equivalent "it should be easy to comprehend". In theory it could be printed in a 2cm font and be completely unreadable at the same time :(
LittleSnitch is an app that will inform you when an outgoing conenction is being made from your Mac. Running this after launching a craked version of PS, for instance, should let you know if you've suddenly been recruited into a botnet.
The widespread "piracy" of the Spirit Of Christmas short is what made South Park as popular as it was, early on.
Personally speaking only, I've spent about $1,000 (conservatively) over the past few years that I absolutely would not have spent if it had not been for edonkey, bittorrent, and other technologies.

My interest and time for music waned completely after high school, and had it not been for the ease and zero price of these technologies, there's no way I would have found the artists who produced the hundreds of CDs I've bought in that time, or the dozens of concerts I've attended.

This is just supposition, but my guess is that so-called "pirates" consume much more music and movies (paid) than non-pirates.
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But... but... but... don't you think the pirates are helping promote the game?
I think you're missing the point. These SEO hackers don't announce themselves by defacing your front page or deleting your database. They insert hidden links in your HTML to boost their PageRank and it's in their interests to go undetected for as long as possible.
Pretty surprising that they would allow network play without a valid, paid account.
I too, is in the process of making games. However, I alway thought of piracy as a business problem or just "underserved" customers.

If they paid for the bandwidth, the computer, the hardware upgrade than surely they have no problem for paying for goods and services that can't just be simply be provided for free.

Gone are the days you can just sell a new game. You have to maintain existing projects and games as if you were a open source developer developing your own little corner of the world.

You may even have to sell t-shirts.

Whining about piracy make for great drama and gain sympathy, but it is not going to help you win a single penny.

Whether or not you have the right to control what other people can do with their copies of the game is another matter entirely.

I think we can agree on one thing, the importance of having something to eat.
From a tourist's point of view, I have to say "Silicon Valley" is the biggest disappointment ever. It is a sad failure of urban design. Parking lots, office parks, with some vegetation sprinkled around, and the usual food places.
Very like most of the midwest.

I think it is a huge failure of urban design. Everytime I drive down on the always congested 101, I am reminded on how much better this place would have been if it had chosen a more European urban city/village design.

BTW. The majority of googlers are I know, hate the location. They'd love if they could work in SF, but they have to do this soul crushing 1hr commute everyday.

Why wouldn't they live around Mountain View? Simple, if you are single, that place is boring to borderline depressing.
what bothers me is that people consider lengthy, complex and un-understandable contracts better than easy and simple ones. having said that, a lot of people also consider weird looking code superior to simple but equivalent code
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Well, on the bright side, they did sell 18,000 copies, so that's $720k. I couldn't see any information on how much the game cost to develop, so we don't know if they still made money or not.

To me it's "sad" in the same way that being able to voice calls from your PC is "sad", if you work for a telco that is. People found a cheaper way to get what they want. Good luck betting against that.
The founders claim that they do not make money off the site; what they take in is just enough to cover server and bandwidth costs.

See the 12th paragraph down at: http://torrentfreak.com/news-from-the-pirate-bay-press-confe...
Its a global recession where advertising is hit quite badly. I'm actually impressed that:

1. It took this long to take a hit on earnings

2. It's only a 3% dip!
I know you're being facetious, but it is certainly possible that their sales would be even less without piracy. Plenty of games sell less than 18,000 copies.
Not to be insulting, but I think the animation is really annoying. However, I will say it did draw my attention to that section, which was probably your goal. That being said, I think there are easier, less invasive ways to accomplish the same thing.
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> Cars travel on a massively subsidised infrastructure (they are called roads).

Roads aren't subsidized and neither are traffic police. They're paid for by car- and truck-specific taxes and fees.

We've played this game before. You'll bring up a study that supposedly shows that cars have expenses that are not covered by taxes. I'll point out that said study ignores one or more large taxes paid for because of cars that pretty much covers the gap and then some. (The dumb version is that you'll point to the cost of building some road and assert that it couldn't possibly have been paid for without subsidies.)

> The purpose of subsidising an infrastructure is to make operating a service on it profitable.

In the case of train passenger trains, that almost never happens. The cost of running the train exceeds the revenues. Even the CA proposals don't claim that they'll run without subsidies. Instead, they argue "other job creation". (They also claim that folks will pay to build highrises in Fresno over the train station, generating enormous profits.)

Here's an easy test that almost every proposal fails. Take the projected revenue (which they never hit) and divide it by the projected number of jobs (which they usually exceed). Ask yourself if the average salary plus benefits is going to be that low. (The proposal will often tout "high paying jobs".) Notice that this figure doesn't account for non-salary operating costs.
There were six trips: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moon_landings#Manned_landings
So is it short_url or short_uri or short-url or short-uri or "short url" or "short uri" or shorturl or shorturi?

"shortlink (http://code.google.com/p/shortlink/) doesn't have any of the disadvantages of its predecessors...

Sam
Should we pay hackers to find bugs?
Welcome to software and the internet. Distribution is far easier, but so is copyright infringement. If you've released your own software, 10:1 shouldn't be surprising. Stuff like audio software is even worse, where the ratio spirals completely out of control and small developers will often need a second job.

Would all those people have bought the game if the bootlegging weren't available? No way. But it definitely would have been better. Well, maybe? Hm.

It's a trade-off you're basically forced to make now, even if you don't want it. It also doesn't help that lots of sales still come from boxed copies for some reason (which costs money to produce..) and all of the piracy happens over the internet (where it costs extremely little to distribute over) so developers looking to increase sales of games have to pony up even more money upfront to get boxed copies into stores.
I'm training for a marathon or two. I actually came across the RunKeeper app just last night while searching. Does anyone here use it? Any feedback? How is the distance tracker? And speed tracker?

My main concern really is keeping the iPhone charged up for the long runs (5hrs+). That's when an app like this would really help but if it'll kill my battery, I might as well get a typical running stopwatch.
This post resonates with me. Without getting too hung up on the typesetter extinction, I think the general notion that the task of "coding" will change is almost a given. Even the early assembly coders of the 60s would be hard pressed to imagine the life of a modern coder working in an IDE.

At a high level I agree with the general change vector the author proposes. I've been code doodling with some of these notions in my spare time for quite a while now. In particular, I think

contexts:

are nested and form a graph (not necessarily a tree)
can exist in isolation outside of any other context (e.g. a double entendre)
are some times shared (a conversation)

transformations:

*can* have conditional processing
may not be deterministic (sometimes probabilistic feels better)
I think other languages can (for all practical purposes) return lists

I think some other key aspects are missing from the description, particularly:

external (unresolved) references
self references
self replication

On a few occasions I've almost written a similar blog post, but maybe this will spur that along. Many of these notions also seem to fit comfortably in LISP (from what I understand).
I agree. I _do not_ condemn any torrent site, or BitTorrent itself. No point damning the technology, it's the use that annoys me.
this happen with me sometimes, i think that no one will think of this file to open or think of its content.

Two mistakes he made 1- the file name is easy to guess 2- he allowed file listening in his server
* Typesetting as a job may have disappeared but design of text and fonts certainly has not.*

Indeed, text design is in a sort of golden age. Never have the tools of typography been so highly available to so many people.

The very word "font" used to be a highly abstract technical term, known only to experts. Now there are large audiences of people who collect fonts like baseball cards.

Until HAL gets here, the programmer's job is pretty safe.

Assuming, of course, that HAL doesn't create demand for software just like humans do. "Dave, I could work much faster if I had a spreadsheet that was better designed for nonhumans. But I don't have time to work on that because I'm too busy in meetings during the day, and at night I want to practice my chess. I want to do better in the tournament next month."
True and that second part is a fair point (and a statistical issue). I dont think it affects the point though.

I am certain that the majority of people on here that do pirate will probably have the consience to purchase what they took if they like it a lot.

But what about the 100's of thousands of youngsters pirating all that music. I seriously doubt many of them buy even 10% of what they download.

And what about the argument whereby if you download something to "try" it and decide it is not quite worth your money does it then get deleted? Again a doubt it... :)
> Their arguments are well-reasoned and, usually, politely stated

Really? Mostly they just fall back on the usual anti-capitalist rethoric. Nothing particularly wrong with that but they certainly dont do it politely from what I have seen :)

In terms of the other side: true both have their faults. But why does that mean we should side with the pirates :) they have done something wrong.
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USC, Purdue, heck even harvard have online only degree options. Try finding a school you actually want to go to then see if they offer an online program. There is no need to scrape the bottom of the barrel just because you need a little flexibility. Find a school you want to go to and see what they offer.
icombinator.net no. the other one is not mentioning it..
Primary source (podcast):

http://mediacast.sun.com/users/dannycoward/media/PC_0002_Jam...
Actually, they're not, at least not in the US. Some places they're close to break-even, but that's often because they're subsidizing other forms of transit.

As I mention above, we've had this discussion.
Yes - that shows an astonishing lack of business sense.

I was going to chime in that the smart thing to do when your business model ("build standalone software and sell it") isn't worthwhile anymore is to adapt that business model ("build networked software and require a paid, verified licence for networked functionality"), rather than to rant about piracy.

But in this case, they did build a networked application/game - but they forgot to actually charge for the networked part! That's pretty silly tbh. Unless the networked activity is bringing you additional revenues, you should charge for access to it.

Ideally, what you want to do is build a product where the networked portion of it is so essential that very few will bother cracking the software and running it standalone. A good example of that would be WoW - some people have cracked it to run on homebrew servers, but they're by far the minority. Most dutifully pay their monthly licence.

When your business model becomes obsolete because of changing technology, you should adapt, not fight it. What's true for the music industry is also true for the software industry, I'm afraid.
Until then the next step would be the rise of Application Designers.

They will operate with various Domain Specific Languages and Application Generators.

http://clair.ro/blog/2009/03/30/towards-to-automagically-gen...
> Especially if you live in the US, UK, or Germany, there are good, legal alternatives.

I live in The Netherlands.

"Legal" to me seems a word that's terrible marketing. Maybe we should use words like "artist-supporting" and "moral" to indicate it. I don't think people care about the legal aspects as much as they do about the moral aspects of it.

> I sympathize with those that, out of frustration with the record industry for not offering music in the format and with the ease we want, turn to filesharing. But if that's why you originally did it, morally speaking, you should at least make an effort to acquire your music through legal means.

It's not really the music that sends me to TPB; it's movies (which I don't watch all that much anymore nowadays). Do you know any alternatives for those?

I think the main reason why TPB is my first resort is habit. It's a very easy go-to point where you can get anything you want, when you want it. It's interesting how "easy" can supersede "morality" so easily :/
Disagree. TPB has made its name by being "anti-establishment" and they flaunt that. In their Usage Policy they state:

"The responsibility lies upon the user to not spread malicious, false or illegal material using the tracker."

which is tantamount to saying that they turn a blind eye to what's happening on their service. On their legal threats page they respond to various letters. For example, in replying DreamWorks who were annoyed about distribution of Shrek 2 they wrote:

"It is the opinion of us and our lawyers that you are ....... morons, and
that you should please go sodomize yourself with retractable batons.

Go fuck yourself."

So basically they either turn a blind eye, or defend the actions of people using the tracker for the copying of copyrighted works without authorization.

If you read the letters they send they claim that they are not breaking the law in Sweden. I guess the court disagreed with that.
EMusic leaks email address to spammers
My wife recently made a purchase from eMusic.com. According to our usual procedure she invented an email address unique to them for the registration. We are now getting around 100 spam a day to that email address:

2009/04/04 : 41
2009/04/05 : 30
2009/04/06 : 41
2009/04/07 : 35
2009/04/08 : 61
2009/04/09 : 65
2009/04/10 : 43
2009/04/11 : 85
2009/04/12 : 91
2009/04/13 : 95
2009/04/14 : 118
2009/04/15 : 116
2009/04/16 : 95

No other email addresses have been compromised, so it isn't that our machine is infected by a worm or virus that's giving out addresses - it must be them. Besides, the purchase was made via a Linux machine.

Emails to their "service" department as listed on the "Use of Private Data" pages have gone unanswered. Clearly they either don't care, or are incompetent.

This is exactly why we use unique email addresses for every service we use - it's trivial now to spam bin them, but be warned.

Don't use an email address you care about with eMusic.com
That's too bad.

I think in a few years America will be where China is today: you'll be unable to buy PC games. Instead, you'll rent access to data on servers under the game company's control. It is already pretty much happening -- the American PC game industry might as well be called "WoW and friends" at this point going by the sales charts.

That is the ultimate solution to piracy. And it will work. It works in China. You can no more torrent a game residing on a server than you can pirate Basecamp by downloading Firefox.
Big companies often use an off the shelf content filtering setup whose support contract includes blocked site lists with regular updates. I used to work for a bank that used one called SurfControl (who apparently have been acquired by WebSense: http://www.websense.com/site/scwelcome/index.html).

So every now and then at work I would return to a site I'd been visiting regularly and it would be blocked after a new URL database update had come through. Sometimes it would eventually be unblocked again some time after that.
I didn't really think Devry was scraping the bottom of the barrel.

Cost is an issue - although the GI Bill will cover a majority of it, the schools I am looking at do charge more than I will receive so out of pocket expense is of some concern.
> It's not really the music that sends me to TPB; it's movies (which I don't watch all that much anymore nowadays). Do you know any alternatives for those?

I use iTunes, from which I watch mostly TV series, occasionally movies. Their selection is by no means exhaustive, and it's not cheap, but at least it's easy! It would be nice if we could get something like hulu in Europe.
I wonder if this article will increase their sales, btw... wouldn't be that surprising. I, for one, never heard of this game, and now I'm going to go check it out. I may not buy it, but certainly it's a decent marketing move. If 100'000 people are willing to play this thing (pirated or not), it's probably decent.