skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Again, doesn't every p2p application share by default?

Yes, I think so.

> Is there any evidence that she wanted to share?

She knew what she was doing. She had written a paper about Napster's forced closure. In that paper she argued that it should be legal, so it's quite clear that she knew that filesharing copyrighted material was illegal. And she had password protected her computer, which showed that not only did she have control over the software on her account (she actually put the blame on her son during the trial; absolutely shameless, this woman), but that she was not a complete neophyte on the computer. Claiming ignorance just isn't convincing in this case.

> she likely would have gotten less of a penalty if she had indeed shoplifted these cd's and then sold thousands of copies on a chinatown corner

True, and rest assured, if a significant amount of people start engaging in this kind of behaviour, the RIAA will go after them too. My point? Filesharing is making the industry bleed. That's why they're going after it.

> She wanted to download and listen, not share, this music.

She downloaded 1,700 tracks. She shared 24. Those are the facts. It's impossible to know what her intent was, but my feeling is that you're being unduly lenient towards her behaviour.
I've seen a few people recommend The Princeton Companion to Mathematics(PCM) http://press.princeton.edu/titles/8350

I own this book and while I do agree it's a great book for getting a 10000 foot view about topics in mathematics it's not really a book one read to learn the math that the poster is asking for.

I agree with another post here that said studying is doing problems and being able to do them again a week later without having to consult the text again.

PCM isnt a good book for learning calculus, discrete math, probability or statistics( what the posters wants to learn) simply because it isn't designed to teach them. There are no problems/solutions in the book to try.

If you really want one book then I'd recommend Concrete Mathamatics http://www.amazon.com/Concrete-Mathematics-Foundation-Comput...
by Graham, Knuth and Patashnik. It has relevant topics and problem sets that you can work through to see if you truly did learn anything when reading it.
The path to enlightenment is hitting the "Send" button.

No sooner do I send off some request for help does a solution come to mind.
> we should not ignore the pettiness of the underlying crime.

Petty to you maybe. But I happen to know studio engineers who have recently lost their job, artists like the Futureheads (thanks god they had the courage to go it alone. They rock!) who get dropped from their labels. THERE ARE VICTIMS HERE.
My recommendations:
Hardy, A Course of Pure Mathematics.
Knuth, Graham and Patashnik, Concrete Mathematics.
Hoffman and Kunze, Linear Algebra (there are several free online books on Linear Algebra and Vector Spaces, Strang, Axler, Lang Halmos and Shilov are also recommended).
Feller, An Introduction to Probability Theory and Its Applications.

If you're not studying for exams and you have plenty of time on your hands, try the following algorithm:
1. Dive into some random chapter in the book and attempt the first exercise in that chapter.
2. Understand the problem by referring back and learning everything that might potentially have relevance to the exercise.
3. Attempt to solve exercise.
4. If unsuccessful, go to step 2.
5. If there are more exercises in the chapter, pick the next exercise and go to step 2.
6. If there are still unsolved exercises in the book, go to step 1.

Initially, this can cause excruciating pain and frustration. But every exercise is a little research problem and soon -- if you are the curious type who cannot rest until you have got to the bottom of a problem -- you'll find you've mastered the subject faster than you would have learnt its elements, had you taken a formal classroom course. The most important benefit of this method is that it will train you in some modes of thinking that are crucial in research. Think of it as callisthenics for problem solving type of research!
This may be below your level, but one of the most interesting and unique math books I've seen:

http://www.math.sjsu.edu/~swann/mcsqrd.html
Just a feeling, but I see a lot of weak companies being over-funded. The more often this happens, and the less often that VC's get their 4x return, the harder it will be to get funding. I remember a chart from a recent VC internal presentation showing the net return on industry investment from the last year going in the red.

Detroit was king, but in their success was greedy and stopped caring about the quality of the product. Other cultures sprang up that cared about the product, and the tides turned. People asked why their neighbors didn't "buy American" (instead of asking why Detroit didn't make good cars), but even grassroots protectionism won't save a rotten company.

Those who think the Valley is following detroit see that personal computing is tired and products are in a race to the bottom. I remember when a PC cost as much as a car, and people bought them as business capital. Now we complain if a laptop costs more than a car payment, and expect web content and software to be "ad based" (aka free to those of us who ignore ads). There are still opportunities here, but not at the VC magnitude (unless you believe Facebook's valuation).

The Valley needs to learn something new, maybe "green tech", pharmaceuticals, or robotics, if is going to continue its reign. It isn't guaranteed, and there are other cities that are familiar with these industries. The Internet currently has an English bias to give us a competitive advantage, but if Japan engineers better solar panels and makes them in China, it will be hard competition.
Perhaps you missed the several times that I said I did not make that choice

I didn't miss you saying that, but I also noticed that you replied to my original post with an unequivocal answer - so you don't support doing it, but you also think it's OK? Did I understand that correctly?

In any case, I should perhaps have been clearer:

What makes it OK for someone to hijack Iranian government websites based on hearsay they read on the internet, but makes it bad for the Chinese to hijack the Dalai Lama's computers?

I wasn't talking about you in particular - you did seem to defend those that carried out the attacks. You still haven't answered that question.

Moral relativism as a popular meme is very recent in the historical record

Who talked about moral relativism? Not me. The point of my question was twofold:

* One person's right is another's wrong, and that arriving at some sort of greater truth is something we (as a civilisation) haven't been able to figure out yet. This has nothing to do with moral relativism as far as I'm concerned, and I still don't think it's an easy question to answer.

* We only have partial, incomplete and possibly biased information about what's going on in Iran, the same way that Chinese DDoSers' understanding of Tibet is probably heavily skewed by the information they have access to.

That's why I don't think it's OK for us to DDoS Iranian government sites, and then complain about Chinese hackers doing it to anyone else.

Life is something you participate in. You have an obligation to make the choice.

I think it's perfectly fine not to have a strong opinion about something that you don't know enough about.
NASA - LRO Project
AT&T and Verizon deny price-fixing accusations
there is a webirc project in the works for freenode if i know correctly, its based on quakenets qwebirc (which is a lot nicer then mibbit, but of course YMMV)
Steve Ballmer Is Making A Bad $10 Billion Bet On Bing
I'm yet to look at it properly, but I'd call it a big mistake if this is not built on top of OpenID - to me that is the natural extension of the concept.

Imagine signing into a site with your OpenID and actions being sent back to your hosted DSNP profile Facebook Connect style.
The reason people are moving to the new #startups is not to use mibbit's client (I'm using Colloquy on the Mac), but rather to show solidarity for axod.
Statement by freenode because of the block
http://blog.freenode.net/2009/06/new-freenode-webchat-and-wh...
Analysis:
Seems like mibbit was being abused and it was difficult for freenode to combat the abuse. Freenode eventually just got fed up with all the time required to fix the problem. It was too easy to get on mibbit to evade a ban to screw with a channel.
Reid Hoffman from Linkedin isn't skinny (not sure if he was when he founded linkedin though)
Steve Wozniak - not skinny
this is not going to change unless the artists say something

"The artists" say plenty. Here's a talented pro musician who has spoken out against this:

http://bigego.com/

But you see the problem here: Jim Infantino is a great guy, but he's probably not famous enough for you.

The problem is that musicians who don't sign major-label contracts don't become world-famous. And world-famous musicians who are signed to major-label contracts and then speak out against their own label tend to... stop being world-famous. Even if they avoid having to fight their label in court, or release a grueling series of contractually-obligated albums that don't get promoted, the best case scenario for former major-label musicians is to reinvent themselves as indie musicians. After which they are indie musicians -- even if successful, they just won't be as famous as they once were. They don't have the marketing budget to fill those giant arenas. Unless they're Radiohead or Trent Reznor -- both of whom have "said something" against the RIAA -- but there are only so many Trent Reznors in the world.
How would this be abused? Ask for the source code, and they are required to give it to you.
Well, if this isn't a perfect vortex of inconsequentiality then I don't know what is.
As someone who has been placed in the position of semi-regularly banning mibbit from freenode OSS project channels due to abusive users, I can't see how this is a bad thing.

The quality of user was exceptionally low, and "easy webchat" simply doesn't seem like a strong value proposition for the technical users that frequent the network.
You raise some interesting and valid points IMHO.

I fully agree that the expected cost/benefit balance has to be redressed. Personally, the way I see that occuring is via a variant of the three-strikes rule proposed in France. I think that rule is too draconian; I do think that the internet has enjoyed a penetration level in society similar to that enjoyed by other basic amenities such as water and electricity. So shutting someone off from the internet is a highly draconian measure, perhaps infringing on someones human rights.

But what if rather than cutting someone of completely, you just limited their bandwidth to a size to make, say, reading email and news practical, but make it impractical to fileshare music in any reasonable volumes. What's good about this is that the penalty fits the crime: you'll still be able to enjoy the internet, just not media-intensive stuff. Certainly a nuissance and displeasurable to the perpetrator, but it seems to me a proportionate and fair response, and it directly affects their ability to continue engaging in the illicit activity.
Not every crime requires intent; criminal action can occur purely through negligence--you don't have to have or prove criminal intent to get a ticket for running a stop sign or in order to get a parking ticket.
why?, I mean, Freenode > Mibbit IMHO, its like I stop using Twitter because they blocked Tweetdeck.
Does Scala perform deforestation? If not, then separating construction and deconstruction is an abstraction win but a performance loss. A commenter, brandon, mentions this.

That being said, I've always preferred to think in terms of separation of (computational) concerns, something functional programming excels at. And it's often not hard to deforest manually when the time comes.
What exactly are you saying? I'm saying the pyschology behind that title makes it more likely to sell. The person who wouldn't want to read it is not a "smart person"; hence an idiot. That's what the title says.
Not now, but back then he wasn't obese.
see my other comment on this thread: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=665259
I don't trust this software much. Most enterprise software I've dealt with requires at least two paid consultants to install and configure. "gem install enterprise" ? Are you kidding? This is kids stuff. A few other concerns:

* No rea (Ruby Enterprise Application) objects? How do I package my software in to one file that I can upload through the enterprise application manager?

* Speaking of which, where is the enterprise application manager? I expect a buggy web app that only works on ie6 and requires 10+ activeX components.

This is a step in the right direction, but there is a long way to go.
Tudor Court Hotel 
Tudor Court Hotel in Paddington England offers the best accommodation with all modern amenities, ideal location for business or pleasure.
How Safeway Slashed Its Healthcare Costs, While Keeping Quality High
Poll: I would have preferred to compress my K-12 education into this many years.
Do you think that your K-12 education was mostly a waste of time?

How many years do you think would have been sufficient for you assuming you only learned what you consider to be important and did so at a rate that you could handle?
leave as is
Being Crazy Is Noisy
They also claim that the communication and collaboration with Mibbit wasn't easy.

Direct link to their new web IRC client: http://webchat.freenode.net/
FCC to investigate exclusive mobile phone deals
"(Yeah, I know, Windows has a limited version of this, involving shortcut icons. But I want to make up my own keyboard shortcuts, and as many as I want.)"

Vista has this built in in the new launcher. For me to open word, I hit Windows, W, Enter. Boom. It's smart enough to prioritize by your most common programs.
why splitting community ? shame

[17:30] <swombat> it's called +m
[17:30] <swombat> it works like this
[17:30] * swombat sets the channel mode to 'moderated'.
It also doesn't work well if you're muscular. When I was really into bodybuilding, my BMI always indicated I was either obese, or borderline obese since I wasn't tall and muscle is very dense. Used to get a good laugh at that.
If it were a few years ago, I would have been super excited about this. Not that I am not now, but since I use JQuery (which by the way supports most of these DOM traversal methods), I think this does not directly affect my code.

Of course this will significantly increase the speed of JQuery DOM traversal if they start using these APIs for Firefox.
axod - you might want to handle widgets and other things in a nicer way: http://www.bikechatter.com/chat , by for instance, just saying up front that freenode is broken.
Are you looking for something like https://www.fbo.gov/

e.g. DOE search:
https://www.fbo.gov/index?s=agency&mode=form&tab=not...
ahh I understand then :)
Agreed. Maybe it's not very nice, but I kind of think that anyone incapable of installing a proper IRC client probably shouldn't be using IRC in the first place.

The situation on, say, the ruby-talk mailing list is analogous; whenever you see a really, really stupid question, check out the submitter - chances are it's through one of the web interfaces to the ML.

The necessity of installing and configuring an IRC client to use freenode is an example of a good barrier to entry.
> "easy webchat" simply doesn't seem like a strong value proposition for the technical users that frequent the network.

Which is why they saw to it to create their own web chat...
Exactly - I happen to know an diesel-engine geek, a train geek and a submarine geek.
Wow. Unduly lenient for disagreeing with $80,000 per track? As you can see from the above conversation, I'm fine with something like $10 and then perhaps a $100 administrative fee.
Alternative title: Study shows we all gravitate to each other

m1 m2
p(r) = G -----
r^2

where p(r) is a probability of a social link between two specific individuals with a distance r between them and m1, m2 their individual susceptibilities of being linked.
http://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/0906/0906.3202.pdf
Definitely, muscle mass was one of my main points. BMI tries to indicate body fat percentage but fails somewhat miserably for a lot of people. A better thing is to have a real body fat percentage number.
I didn't mean to be 1st iPhone buyer at my Apple Store--it just sorta happened.
* Going http is a nice way to get around firewalls. Sure, I can tunnel through SSH to my server, but that is a bit harder and not everyone has a server to tunnel to.

* Part of axod's idea, from what I gather, is simply to provide a nice chat system, that happens to have IRC as a backend. Would you say that people who can't install a proper nntp/smtp/whatever client shouldn't be allowed either? How 'bout twitter, to pick something popular? How about people who need help setting up an online store presence because they can't code it themselves? We owe the existence of this site to pg knocking down that particular barrier to entry.

Now, the question of abusive users is another one, and one that deserves to be taken seriously. But I have no idea about how axod handles that side of things.
PHP Interpreter Detects SQL Injection and XSS Vulnerabilities
I want some recommendations on good math books on: calculus, discrete math, probabilities, statistics

Calculus Made Easy by Silvanius P. Thompson (Feynman taught himself calc with this book)

Concrete Mathematics by Knuth, Graham, Patashnik

Fundamentals of Applied Probability Theory by Alvin Drake

You probably want to learn Linear Algebra - get Gilbert Strang's book.

The Schuam's outlines in each topic are good for review. I like the ancient ones, usually there are dozens of them for next to nothing at any good used bookstore.
If you want the strict non-coerced equality, I think you are supposed to use === as in javascript.
well, a company like palm could find numerous ways to not send you the cd in time (delaying strategies). don't you think so?

it could be like calling google trying to reach an engineer from adsense.

-> of course a company could delay sending you the code, which could ultimately force you to go to the court to get it.

has anyone received the cd already?
That's like shooting fish in a barrel.
Google asks New Yorkers "What is a browser?" (Most people don't know)
When I did Facebook app development consulting I did both the client sourcing and acquisition and the development/consulting. From my personal experience, 50% is not a high percentage for the amount of time spent on this work. Between managing Ad Words campaigns, talking to potential clients on the phone, spec-ing out projects, and making proposals, I'd say the time to get to the development stage far exceeded time actually developing.

Also, you don't simply get a client once they are introduced, it almost never works that way. I would have to talk to clients for hours on the phone, most of who (as far as I can tell) had no actual interest in proceeding with the project, but wanted to ask a lot of questions anyway. The sales process is worth far more than 5%.

I'd say this agreement is very fair.
How the Army Prepared Me to Work at Google
Gabe Newell?
Although I believe I could have learned the material in significantly less time...

1) What I thought was important at the beginning of high school is not what I thought was important once I graduated. If the decision was left to me, I would have been wrong.

2) You can't pack social skills into less time.
I have a G1 from T-mobile (Arizona, USA). I'm pretty sure all G1 plans come with unlimited data; you pay more or less based on text messages and call minutes.

I get tethering via the Proxoid app. It does not require being root. It has some downsides: it's not a super-simple one-click thing (not that I care, but some might), and I haven't got it working for https yet.

But otherwise it is really good. Made getting stuck at LAX last week less annoying.
please someone create aspwtf
Take a look at what http://www.sparkfun.com has to offer. They make alot of adapter boards so that the more interesting devices (eg. accelerometers) are accessible to hackers without smt soldering skills.
I know the "official" reason, but I'm curious if there's any correlation between the blocking of mibbit and axod's post about how much revenue mibbit was making here (http://axod.blogspot.com/2009/06/revenue-browser.html) - the timing is awfully suspicious.

I mean, a day after the post they "magically" have their own web client up that they would rather you use.

I had a look at the qwebirc client they implemented, default installation right now (looks like it was just thrown up) no ads yet, wondering how long before that changes?

EDIT - well it seems that in part some of the argument from freenode's perspective is about money.

(00:44:02) axod: nenolod: and please explain what incentive I would have to falsify such information
(00:44:17) nenolod: axod: assistance with ban evasion in exchange for money
(00:44:26) axod: nenolod: seriouslly?
(00:44:30) nenolod: axod: seriously.
(00:44:33) axod: lol
I would have made the same assumption, except, as I mentioned, the two examples he gives are major construction projects. Since it was clear that the 37signals post was addressing all types of projects, I thought I'd give one example where the argument against planning doesn't hold.
The US State Department Takes Twitter Seriously - So Should You
Wow, that client is great! A lovely, clean design, written in Python, GPL2.

Damn, so many nice things written in Python .. guess it's time to learn it : /
Ask The Entrepreneurs » “What do you do all day, anyway?”
Here's the thing, though. When you're a beginner in just about any field, the first few things you build aren't very useful. They are good for learning, but that's it. Once you get beyond a certain point, you can build stuff that can actually be used for something.

These days I'm mostly into high power LEDs (just built a small battery-powered light for my tent and now I'm working on an LED headlamp). LEDs are fun to play with, and even at a beginner level are quite useful -- an exception to what I said above!

Probably going to put this stuff on a new site, and move my LED tutorials there with a few simple projects. If you want a heads-up when it's ready, contact me through my profile.
do you think a 15 year old can decide on what's "important" to learn?
I'm kind of restating from a comment I already made above, but I think that its very wrong to state that a 50% finders fee is very high.

From my personal experience with consulting (particularly Facebook app consulting) I found that week-to-week I consistently spent more than 50% of my time getting from potential leads to actual sale and spec'd product than I ever did actually developing.
Calculus the Easy Way. It's old but good.
FUD: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=486482
Do you have a source for this?

I did not know axod held similar conservative family values as myself.

I am now more interested in supporting him.
What do people love about this book so much? (I haven't read it).