skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The biggest problem with this straw man argument is that copying software is not zero sum. The movie studios do not lose exactly X dollars because there were Y downloads from Megaupload, or from any other copyright infringing site for that matter. Copying data is not the same as theft because there is no transaction cost and you haven't "deprived" anyone of any good. There is no way to prove that an infringer would have consumed that data if it hadn't been free.

Sure, having users pay full price for a movie (or CD or video game, etc.) is always the most desirable outcome. What's far worse than having someone infringe upon your copyright is for your media property to be completely unwatched or unused. When you're in the entertainment business, there's absolutely nothing worse than no one caring about what you're producing. A lot of people in the are starting to figure this out; look at how successful bands like Iron Maiden (on HN today) have been.

With that said, yeah, MU is pretty sleazy, but I'm not sure I would go so far as call them "criminal". They really were fulfilling a need which wasn't being delivered by the various media companies. I have no idea why movie studios can't figure out how to properly segment their market and charge different prices for different types of content delivery. The hyperbole about calling copyright infringers "pirates" and calling what they do "theft" has to stop, along with the lobbying government for draconian laws which stop reverse engineering. Provide better ways for your customers to not be copyright infringers and you'll have happier customers and more revenue.
Off by one again. Dammit.
You have to read it as "smurf" when written in certain contexts.

"Brainy Smurf, can you smurf me that SERP with some growth smurfing?"
It has the same spec so is pretty much the same, but with a different look and slightly bigger screen
Very interesting, thanks for taking the time to do this.

The top 20 are all guys. How many women are in the top 100?
Simple, and easy to use UI;
Robust and reliable;
Extensible design;
Massively scalable
Redditviz | reddit interest network
That was built in a couple of days as a demonstration, it's not a production-quality app.
Geohot presents an evasi0n7 writeup
Criticism, disagreement, and debate bring about more awareness on the topic and generally invites people to derive their own thoughts and opinions on the subject. For that you should be thanking him rather than shaming them.
People wrote this type of article about Android when the first Android phone had come out. Mozilla can definitely salvage this and it's natural that it would take more iteration before they arrive at a really good user experience.

I think the big problem Mozilla face is that they haven't been left much of an opening by Android. Even if they offer a wonderful user experience, why would anyone prefer a Firefox phone over an Android phone?
Mods, please don't remove the title as the original page does not have a title.
>they could afford a middle class lifestyle while producing music full time?

This must be science fiction. They could afford to record their album and maybe go on tour is more like it.
I thought about listing usernames with the bios, but I thought it might be unwelcome for some people. Of course they're all people who are public in a sense anyway, but not all of them are trivially linked in the realname->username direction if you Google. For example some people's HN profile just has a URL, and then their real name is at the URL. Others post under a well-known real name but don't directly link their RL identity in the profile. That setup means people who know their RL identity don't as easily stumble across their HN profile: the HN profile doesn't list their real name verbatim, or come up in a search for the real name, which would change if I put up an googleable index of username/real-name pairs. Maybe I'm being too cautious, though.
I'm quite surprised that there are that many Danish people on HN.
Naw. The world has changed. People value realness more than stiffness. Just google for Upverter's "Startup Depression". They've raised and billed plenty of money since then.
I would be willing to pay a premium to work with a company this transparent, either as a client or employee. Kudos to the author.
Am I the only one who thinks it's a little distracting how artificially formal this guy is?

Anyway, it's freakin obvious how much easier it is to pull a trigger with only a little hesitation than to get a brick out and beat somebody to death. I don't understand how you don't see that. It's like you've already made your decision and no matter what anyone says, you're 100% confident you can explain it away before you even see it.
So presumably they are going to keep a list of all those pages they tweeted out so that when their organic rank falls into the depths they can then email back all those people and say "please take down that page you put up with those links on it."

That will be particularly true when someone's random blog has a bunch of links to Bieber lyrics on it.
The problem is that while that while static page generation is definitely the best fit for what most people need, it is not the best fit for what they think they need. One of the big reasons WordPress was able to dethrone Movable Type as the #1 blog software was precisely because of its dynamic pages -- that was a big point of attraction for people over MT's static page generation approach. So much so that Movable Type's developers eventually felt the need to graft a half-baked dynamic page system onto their product, just so they could tell people who wanted dynamic pages that they shouldn't rule out MT altogether. (It didn't help in the end, but the fact that they felt they had to do it at all speaks volumes.)

Why do they think they need dynamic pages? The upsides of dynamic pages (no more waiting for pages to rebuild) are right there in their face, while the downsides (your server falling over if you get more than three readers at a time) don't become evident for a while. So to non-technical folks, dynamic pages seems like a no-brainer. They don't learn the downsides until they leap up and bite them.

This mismatch between what people think they want and what they actually really should want based on their needs is sadly quite common in tech products, and explains how a lot of crappy products managed to become more popular than a techie would ever have expected them to be.
> Lisp programmers tend to be ignorant of applied mathematics.

As a Lisp programmer and a mathematician myself I must disagree. I spent years working on mathematical applications using Lisp dialects, initially drawing inspiration from computer algebra systems like Axiom, Derive, Maxima, and Reduce and later drawing inspiration from ontologies and knowledge bases like SUMO and Cyc. All of these systems are heavily math based and they are based upon Lisp.
Additional/Duplicate Information: http://pastebin.com/mT2n7uyj
User using multiple applications on a single phone is quite a lot more common use case than user using single application on several phones. I'd opt for making the common use case consistent.
The Unofficial Official Study of EdgeRank Reach Since December 2nd
Posted by the same guy who invented facebook and mobile payments, people should listen really closely to this genius!
as you grow, managing utilization and bench time will be key to being profitable. each project has a built in "fiscal cliff" at the end of it, and having a good pulse on when to hit the gas on biz dev and when to ease off is really important in protecting profitability.
2nd, and I'm not so certain backdoors like these are not used on all people.
Which one is better? I (lightly) use KeePassX and it's great for my needs, but I'm wondering what the advantage of KeePass is.
Yup. I wrote a version to do this when Fred Wilson requested it a little over a year ago and I realized I needed it too: https://script.google.com/d/1B8YC4D7KT7pZKXyq3TkfJUJPv1mmjZj...

Matt Galligan and I put together a version of the No Response Apps Script back in June also. It's more basic than this, but might be easier as a starting point for modification.
https://script.google.com/d/11c63LM4rOTxCP5uqffLDhIaEQFmNo0p...

I've been loving Apps Script for things that are too lightweight to need something like Boomerang, with a server and a full browser extension, but heavy enough that you can't do it with a search string.
Of the people who link a real identity (~70), I think none, though I was mostly just scanning for locations past the top-20, so I might've missed someone. It's possible women are more likely to stay pseudonymous than men, and also possible that there are just few to no women who post a lot here.
We use RSA tokens at the financial institution I work for. I'll be checking in with our CTO tomorrow (was out sick today) to see about removing them from our systems.
I agree completely. At the company I work for, we develop a complex client-side js app. We've got "backenders" who write Ruby, "frontenders" who write CSS + HTML, and "middlenders" who write really fucking awesome javascript.
I've always considered myself "on the Blue team" but the past year has really pissed me off. NSA, Healthcare.gov, drone strikes, and the President trying everything he can muster to go to war with Syria. I walked into our Business Developer's office one day and I said enough was enough. I could not in good conscience do work for the Democratic Party because of these issues.

I really doubt any of this would have been different if we'd had a Republican for President. Granted, healthcare.gov wouldn't have happened, but I doubt any of the other items would have looked any different. All US presidents have done things that I consider unethical or illegal. So to castigate one party vs. the other seems shortsighted.

Unless, of course, he has a huge contract offer from the GOP. Then it makes sense. In politics, money is the great decider.
I don't think consumers want cheap and disposable. They want faster and sexier, and they want to do what they're already doing, but better. That could mean cheap and disposable, that could mean more expensive but more solid. It also varies from customer to customer.

I don't think this is quite as clear-cut as you say it is.

As well, I think this march is a march fueled by developers, developers who are looking to do what developers are always looking to do: to make developing easier. I don't think it's external pressure fueling this move towards the web, it's developers desire to move towards a more universal/simple platform. If something else had come along before and been able to offer a better "universal runtime" than the web, we'd all be using that. But it didn't, so here we are, taking the path of least resistance.
Brilliant read. It's also worth reading the discussion from an earlier submission (60 days ago):

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6607661

With all the current discussions about crypto, RSA, backdoors, random number generators, etc, it's worth reading things like this to come up to speed with the concepts, even if you don't get all the details.
This strategy is total fail, Google specifically targeted this stuff with Penguin, which is a relatively old update by now. Combine the scaled approach with posts like this and the fact that Matt Cutts hangs around HN = likely won't end well for them.
>The government needs to break projects down into smaller chunks, to mitigate the losses if a supplier doesn't deliver, you don't pay them, and they go bankrupt. Then they need to establish and enforce an incentive system where suppliers are punished, not rewarded, for failing to get the job done.

that means government getting an expertise (at least at the PM level) in that specific domain. While it wouldn't be a bad thing (and actually a very positive shift vs. current state of affairs), it would immediately hit the typical "government shouldn't be in the <insert specific domain> business".

Anyway, just to cheer you up - compare US Gov / DOD corruption & waste to the cost (i.e basically plunder) of Sochi Olympics in Russia. While making great strides, USG has still long way to go before making into top corruption league :)
Knew his name was familiar. Mikko Hypponen has some great Ted talks as well:

http://www.ted.com/talks/mikko_hypponen_how_the_nsa_betrayed...

http://www.ted.com/talks/mikko_hypponen_three_types_of_onlin...

http://www.ted.com/talks/mikko_hypponen_fighting_viruses_def...
The main selling point of Uber is the app--but eventually Yellow Cab, et al will also have slick apps. What's the long term competitive advantage, besides evading regulation? Self driving cars, most likely.
For a little bit of history for those outside of the UK check out the Wikipedia history on Section 28 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Section_28).

The same political party that legislated Section 28 in the 80s is the same political party pushing the filters today.

It's simply about suppressing information about ideas and lifestyles the Conservatives and Daily Mail readers do not approve of. It really is that simple.
I agree, that number does sound kind of high. The number of deaths per rifle would likely follow a heavy-tail distribution: a few rifles would have extremely high numbers, and most would be have extremely low numbers. So the average would be a lot higher than the median. That doesn't rule out 2/rifle on average as a possibility. But the average is a misleading statistic if you're talking about the common case.
> gun violence in Australia was indeed reduced when they made gun ownership a lot harder there.

Yes, but due to substitution effects the overall violent crime rate didn't change much.
You've been playing too much Xbox.
Unfortunately, as a UK voter, there's no way to do anything about this. The position of every party at the next election will be the current position plus more control in one form or another.

I think we're living through a massive societal change, as big as the end of feudalism or the invention of the printing press. The internet is the first mass peer to peer communication system, and it works like the Christmas Truce in World War 1:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christmas_truce#Fraternisation

Ultimately, when people can talk unmediated by elites, they begin to want similar rights (eg Arab Spring), to share ideas about oppression (eg Womens' Movements), to share information (eg piracy, wikileaks), and trade (eg Amazon). They essentially stop seeing borders as being important. This is revolutionary, and it's not surprising that the establishment is resisting it. The whole theory of nation-states is based around the primacy of local laws being the only way the people in a country can live. No country is going to want people doing an end run around that. Rules about pornography and the control of public morality are just one form of this.

It's essentially the Shirky Principle: institutions will seek to preserve the problem to which they are the solution.
Yeah, that honestly almost felt like a challenge to his fellow presenters and show caring by boycotting the conference as well.

EDIT, Also NSA is a intelligence agency: spying on foreigners seems to me like it'd be their objective, regardless of the revelations... Lets not act surprised about this now. Other foreign intelligence agencies do their share of spying on foreigners too (again, their objective). Unless you're stressing 'widespread'.
They're probably just experimenting at that point.
Please do top-20 style bios for the top 100 :)
Thanks for the link! I am relatively new to submissions. Is there a way I can check for resubmissions ?
Ah. My ideas of labor unions presented here are in fact strange, because they have been narrowed (for the purposes of this discussion) to the perspective of "the union exists to protect your interests against rampant Taylorism imposed from the management, in the same way that Agile is posited in The Article to protect programmers from something analogous." While labor unions' members may in fact be best off under a scenario such as you describe in yourpost#2, that's not a grand example of a case where you can say "we need a labor union to protect our interests from management or our lives will be made miserable by exploitation" and seems not to relate to the issues raised by the article.
Well if you think back to the release of twitter the overwhelming response on most tech sites was that it was stupid/useless/waste of time, etc...

("Why would I want SMS restrictions on the web?!")

Maybe you need to get out of the tech-site bubble :)
And if you work at McDonalds 24 hours a day, seven days a week, you'll get more revenue than you probably would as an entry-level developer in many cities. The problem is that it is radically more work and doesn't scale well at all.

(You might think this is an unfair comparison, but touring does pretty much demand your whole life. Your effective wage from touring is typically not very high when you consider how many hours it consumes.)
good read...anyone thinking of running a consultancy should read this.
How I Overcame My Fear Of Death (And Failure)
Can tweets get dumber? Yes, when text is thrown out they can.
This has nothing to do with putting labels in bold or not, unless I misunderstood?
By journalists. This also include anyone they might hire/recruit to help them in identifying what is valuable.

For example, Bruce Schneier helped to make the news articles around the tor network by going through the NSA documents.
Architecture of ECMAScript 6 Modules
There are other Democrats out there. She has seniority in the Senate though, which is unfortunately valuable to far too many Californians.
The daily mail was the main media organisation putting pressure on the government about it. It's completely inline with the values of their print production.
"that many" = 2? Not exactly an adequate sample to draw general conclusions from.
In British english it's fairly standard; my first analogy-thought is to spiking a news story.
I personally don't think Google can ever be a champion for user privacy. The more data they can collect about users' online browsing behaviour, the more valuable that data is to its' advertising business.

Google has an insatiable appetite to track and record as much online activity as possible. Their privacy policies remain vaguely-worded and do not tell you what they track and record. Even their statements regarding the NSA revelations are couched in terms of security. Security and privacy are closely related but they are not the same things. I don't doubt that Google has a strong commitment to security, but even if they manage to prevent third-parties snooping on their data that doesn't stop them from collecting the data in the first place.

Consider how ChromeOS could potentially track your every action. If you use ChromeOS as your primary OS over the course of a year, Google knows every website you visited, the total amount of time you spent on those sites, it even knows how often (and when) you print to your desktop printer. For me, the privacy implications are horrendous.

Of course, they are not using this data for nefarious purposes, but no company should be able to collect such phenomenal amounts of data without closer scrutiny.
Well, one advantage is having any competition at all. The taxi market has been so badly broken for so long that just being able to introduce new drivers and companies results in lower prices and better service all around.
What makes a bad client, and why did they cost so much? I can understand a bad client who constantly harangues you, asking for tiny changes, tying up support lines, but that shouldn't cost so much?
Conflicted. On one hand, we have a camp of people who would say "static content" almost always equals garbage content. Documentation aside, who would ever want a static website? I don't see much advantage of having to setup environment, ensure libraries are installed, etc. – every time you want to do a simple change from a computer other than your own. I'll take WordPress over that any day.

Scenario: You just noticed a major typo on your new, statically generated microsite - using Markdown, pelican, etc. ...but the only computer you have access to is running a fresh copy of Windows 8.

Talk about your non-portable website.
I assume you mean Quora, because I know at Stack Exchange we were religious about doing everything the right way.

I think Google cares more about the user experience (how bad is it if a user ends up on this page after searching) than the exact letter of the law. The truly sleazy sites usually do badly on both metrics though.
Very cool. It'd be interesting to see some kind of influence ratio, such as karma / # of posts, or date joined.

Wonder if the pool is made most of older loyalists or newer upstarts? Seems like people who have been hanging around for awhile, both due to their usual heavy involvement in tech industry as well as if you're around longer, you can make more posts :)
Grab Photoshop and CS2 For Absolutely Free
Have the lib dems ever said anything about it? I'd expect them to be against it, if they weren't in coalition.
I'm currently in the top 100[1].

I'm easy to find on the Internet, but I don't know if you bothered or not.

So: I'm 44, and in the UK, and male.

[1] proof that HN is in decline.
No, I think you're doing the right thing.
It's worth checking out the NYT piece on the rise of Twitter and the role Dorsey played. His rise to fame was a tumultuous one and while he is no doubt a talented individual he is credited with more than he actually created. It will be interesting to see how his influence develops and shapes Disney's future.

"Ideas rarely, if ever, come from the mind of a single person, but those who go down in lore as visionaries take credit for them as if they do. Dorsey seemed to understand this intrinsically, too.”

"By this point, many Twitter investors believed what Dorsey had been telling the media for the past two years. More important, they knew the public did. He could be an effective public face of Twitter as Costolo managed the operations. The board was grateful for the $25 million that Costolo arranged in deals with Microsoft and Google, and he had a good rapport with Twitter employees. A pact between all of the investors was formed. By late September, Costolo was told that he had been picked to be interim C.E.O. Williams was out. Dorsey was back in."

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/13/magazine/all-is-fair-in-lo...
I think you are missing the point, he did not say he went to the blue team. He said he doesn't want to work for the side that supports drone strikes, etc..., not that he has switched camps.
The War on Terror's Jedi Mind Trick
piracy is radio
Normally obvious dups are detected by the system, but many are not. You can search before submitting, but most people don't bother. People will pick it up and cross-reference earlier discussions if appropriate.
AskHn Is there a world civil war brewing? Re power corruption
I'm furious and angry that HSBC gets a pass for crimes that would send a normal person to jail for decades. Nsa scandal, etc.. There is a mafia with untouched power, and it's name is government, but not just the US, other countries have similar issues. I feel like something needs to change, do you get the feeling like something big is coming?
Sorry, but I seriously have to disagree: 21st Century C is one of the worst tech books I've had the misfortune to read. It's written by a butthurt C devotee whose interest is as much in sneering at other languages as it is in teaching something. It argues brace styles and text editors. It's loaded with inaccuracies. It can't be bothered to mention when it's using a header file to introduce a function. Typos abound. It seriously, without the slightest trace of humor, includes a chapter called "Becoming a Better Typist." It's just...crap. I stopped buying O'Reilly books after I couldn't get a refund for this mess.

This article is by clueful professionals. That book is everything except that.