skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You've brought up some great examples of successful standards. Each of them in their current implementation work well for the task they were designed to do.

Many of them have not been without their failures. GSM had several long-standing security issues, some of which went on uncorrected after disclosure [1]. WEP was designed in the 90s and I believe there are a large number of security/encryption methods designed in the 90s that have since been proven flawed, either in design or implementation (RC4/MD5/SHA1 to name a few) Bluetooth has gone a completely different direction than it's original design and is also not without its failures. But the main difference is, each of the standards you listed was designed for a specific task, and works well in doing what it was designed to do. When you leave that area of designed function, they start to break down.

In relation to the wireless technologies(GSM/HSPA/CDMA/LTE, et al...), their design goal was indeed massive systems with 1000's of clients. They employ various technologies that would generally be cost-prohibitive or otherwise impractical (such as GPS synchronization) in the commodity consumer market. I haven't seen the price tag for an LTE tower site, but I bet it is several orders of magnitude larger than a $120 consumer router. Wifi was never designed to do this.

I agree that wifi is not unique in its success, nor is it unique in its failures. This extends to most entities in general. All have their failures and successes, including IEEE.

On a side note, I have never been that concerned with wifi encryption. The vast majority of wifi access is access to the internet. If you are not securing your data before it leaves your control, the short hop over to the access point is the least of your problems.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GSM#GSM_Security
I've been a fan of John Cage's work for a long time. However, for me his oeuvre kind of splits into two halves. Many of his early works (say, up to the mid 1950s?) can be listened to as decent works of modern music in the classical tradition. They are "composed"; they have internal structure and purpose. Sonatas and Interludes is a great example; Four Walls is another.

After 4'33", however, a lot of his work seems to me to be aiming only towards achieving some sort of ideological purity in explicating Cage's philosophy of indeterminacy. To some extent, once you've heard a few of these pieces, you've heard them all. The Freeman Etudes in particular have always been, for me, one of Cage's least listenable pieces.

It reminds me of a couple of concepts that I think Cage might have resonated with. One is "Wittgenstein's ladder" (http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?WittgensteinsLadder): "My propositions serve as elucidations in the following way: anyone who understands me eventually recognizes them as nonsensical, when he has used them - as steps - to climb beyond them. He must, so to speak, throw away the ladder after he has climbed up it." In other words, once you "get" what Cage was trying to say (in, e.g., 4'33"), you've gotten it, and you don't really need to keep listening.

Along the same lines, what Alan Watts said about using psychedelic drugs: "Psychedelic experience is only a glimpse of genuine mystical insight, but a glimpse which can be matured and deepened by the various ways of meditation in which drugs are no longer necessary or useful. If you get the message, hang up the phone. For psychedelic drugs are simply instruments, like microscopes, telescopes, and telephones. The biologist does not sit with eye permanently glued to the microscope, he goes away and works on what he has seen..." The analogy might be a little bit of a stretch, but Cage's music is something like an "instrument" that gives "a glimpse of genuine [musical] insight": the fact that beautiful, indeterminate music is happening all around you all the time, if you stop and listen to it.
In 2015 Startup Tech, “The Force” Awakened
We we have seen the army deploying their "smart munitions" gun this year (http://arstechnica.co.uk/information-technology/2015/10/army...) the purpose of which is to defeat enemies behind cover.

That works when you are in 'gun range' of their cover and can shoot at them. But if you're pinned down? What about the enemies rear area where they are staging? How quickly can you set up and tear down a mortar emplacement?

Giving the soldier on the ground the ability to send a round exactly where they want to, behind cover, even inside a building. And I think you've created a very strong force multiplier. Given the the current state of the art in having locally operated visual recognition on the drone itself (http://www.csail.mit.edu/drone_flies_through_forest_at_30_mp...) to either avoid obstacles or target specific objects makes the weapon even more effective.

In my opinion when these things make their debut they will be as disruptive as the machine gun.
In SF, the Loma Prieta earthquake destroyed the Embarcadero highway. It was never rebuilt, but that didn't really cause problems.
Aruba, Aerohive, and Ruckus all have great products. I haven't personally had the opportunity or necessity to use them but have always heard good things.

We haven't deployed them mostly due to cost, but also because we have had great results with Ubiquiti.
5k wifi users doesn't really sound like "a big part of the internet" to me, or even necessarily a "big part of Hamburg."
I'm pretty sure it's part of all of them. At least, I just tried it in an emulator and SMB definitely seems to have something like inertia built into the walk speed, and definitely running.
You can get a much better car for the price of a Model S. The price premium pays for prestige/coolnesss over stodgy old BMW/Porsche/Lexus, which is dampened signifantly in the used market.
You don't really need to pay for a book. If you're experienced with C# it'll be pretty easy to pick up.

But, if you really want one, the definitive choice is "The Swift Programming Language", which is free: https://itunes.apple.com/us/book/swift-programming-language/...
Terraforming AWS – Setting up highly available Consul cluster in less than 5min
You are not supposed to feel bad for Rand - he went through his depression and now he is OK.

You are supposed to learn from his experience, and Rand's openness gives us that learning opportunity.
Go ask a few friends 'have you ever been out in a dark enough night to see the milky way?'

You'll be surprised how many adults have never seen the milky way with their own eyes.
Interesting!

Given that RAM is relatively simple, I wouldn't have expected yields to be such an issue. Also, since the marginal cost of a CPU is relatively low, I figured again, it wouldn't be a large hit to Intel's bottom line to overcome the yields or to give out new chips through warranty.

Remember that for buyers, RAM and CPUs are marked up significantly. A combined CPU RAM unit, would be justified to have increased price over just a CPU. As long as CPU-RAM Unit cost <= CPU + RAM, buyers wouldn't mind and society would end up better as a whole. Potentially making it worthwhile for Intel, regardless of loss in yield.

I am not very educated on the subject though, so I'll defer to your knowledge on it, and agree.
Not all forms of crime are equally lucrative. It's hard to imagine another form of crime that is capable of sustaining even 1/10th of the income of drug smuggling.
He clearly states a price range of $30-50 and the entire argument is built on that the price won't go up. (Otherwise why sell at 36?)

The much weaker argument of "over decades oil will have less importance" doesn't seem to be his argument at all.
Interview with Darius Kazemi, web artist who makes Twitter bots
1. Devs don't have to worry about security groups with `convox install && convox deploy && convox ssh`. But security groups are created with CloudFormation and you can use your AWS keys to introspect and change them.

2. Currently every app gets a Kinesis stream and we tail all Docker logs and put them into Kinesis. Then `convox logs` can stream logs from Kinesis, and `convox services add papertrail` adds a Lambda / Kinesis event source mapping to emit the stream as syslog to Papertrail.

I'm pretty happy with this setup and think it represents a good default infrastructure that is still extensible.

Would Kinesis -> Lambda -> Sensu make sense too? It's a pretty new pattern but this seems a lot saner to me than per-container log agents, or even bothering with custom logging drivers.

That said, one user has been using logstash by bringing a custom AMI with his logstash agent and creds baked in.

3. It's one VPC per rack, but I could see modifying that. We've already started to parameterize some VPC settings like the CIDR block to help integrating with your existing VPC usage.

https://github.com/convox/rack/blob/master/api/dist/kernel.j...
Maybe in certain countries, but the big picture is that worldwide barrels/per/day consumption is continuing to increase:

2014: 92,086,000

2013: 91,243,000

2012: 89,846,000

2011: 88,974,000

2010: 87,864,000

Almost all that increase in consumption is attributable to Asia. Any downturn in the curve will be attributable to the economy of China slowing, not renewables taking the place of oil.

I don't disagree that the consumption of renewables is growing rapidly, but that doesn't mean they're making a dent in oil consumption. They may down the road at some point, but right now they're a spit in the ocean.
Google is not all that secretive; they publish a lot of their most interesting research (you do have to be a subject matter expert to fill in the blanks, but they give you a lot to work with).

Apple is very secretive, but they are more and more in the minority and I don't think this policy of theirs has anything to do with patents (more like controlling the entire product marketing and PR process as much as possible).

The idea of the lone genius inventor is no longer true (if it ever was) and needs to go away. These days, these are often the people doing the worst science--the ones with some algorithm that no one else has thought of. Big technological shifts are the result of millions and millions of tiny little innovations, none of them in themselves worthy of monopoly guarantees.

I think innovation would actually increase if the entire patent system simply did not exist (but I admit this is a very extreme stance and therefore would be more in favor of making patents easier to invalidate via a public peer review jury kind of thing. Patent office needs help and volunteer experts could lend a hand, particularly with the internet and better search tools to uncover overly broad patents and prior art automatically.)

If you've got a great product and can't figure out how to make money off of it without patents, it's not a great product.
They're visible and loud. And unless you're using something with decent radio/battery range, you're still in the visual / shooting range.
And that would be great, as it would force constitutional processes for large legislation, e.g. the war on drugs.
While cases like the scan-to-email trolls make the news, it's precisely because they are relatively rare. Tech media likes to hype these up and make it seem like there's a rash of these cases, studies by the GAO and a couple of scholars indicate that there is actually no patent troll crisis. While it's true that we have insufficient insight into the numbers for demand letters, there are very few other reported entities actually doing this. That said, I'd still like to see lot accountability and tracking of demand letters.
It seemed like he understood that to me. This quote basically covers it:

> Yet, as one BP director replied when I asked why his company continued to risk deep-water drilling, instead of investing in alternative energy: “We are a drilling business, and that is our expertise. Why should we spend our time and money competing in new technology with General Electric or Toshiba?”

I think that's why the primary argument is that they should cease R&D entirely and just distribute profits to shareholders until they run out.
CEOs, their staff, and their idolators.
I've driven someone else's EV conversion (pretty much irrelevant in terms of performance) and ridden in a Volt. Dollar for dollar it's nothing special. Compared to similar econoboxes the instant torque is cool. Compared to similar vehicles (Civics and the like) it's a ripoff. Compared to similarly priced vehicles it's slow.

I'll agree that as it stands now electric stuff has to be the future from a purely numbers perspective (emissions will be a bigger issue, demand for oil will rise, methods of getting it will become more expensive, etc, etc) but at this point it's not worth paying the premium for unless you've just got to be an early adopter, live in an area with massive subsidies or want to one up your Prius driving neighbors conspicuous environmentalism.
Which products are you thinking of in particular?
fewer downtown exits

Fewer downtown exits should mean better flow through SR99 because there will be less intra-city traffic clogging lanes. That's one of the reasons the Big Dig improved traffic on I-93, they removed a bunch of downtown and South End exits. Of course the Big Dig supplemented that by increasing the capacity of surface streets on and around Atlantic Ave.

If Seattle is doing something similar (I'm not familiar with the specifics of the SR99 project) that should be a bet positive for traffic flow. If not, then, well, sucks to be in Seattle.
Digitalocean is a great alternative for simple things.

I use it for dev / early projects and as things get complex or need more redundancy I make the production spend on AWS.
I wonder how much this depends on what your job was.
Only if you do not count in the environmental impact of burning oil.
"Proved reserves" (developed and undeveloped) are also a large component of how an energy company is valued by Wall Street.

Regardless of the current price environment, it's important to keep a portfolio of potential exploration opportunities.
I remember seeing something similar posted here for ruby (rubygems) - does anybody remember what that service was called?
Apple was lauded for years by the tech world for many reasons: dominance in audio/video/image production, the switch to a bsd based os, their dev kits, etc...

Microsoft has suffered greatly from the tech world's hatred. And, one has to wonder how different the mobile world would be if MS had built a better/more open community around their brand.

The techies, developers, etc... are the early adopters. They are the ones that are needed to keep your products fresh and relevant. Once they leave, the company is left with the unwashed masses and the platform stagnates (e.g. Microsoft).
7 Predictions for 2016
Thirty-six [1] is not "huge numbers". There are literally thousands of oil and gas companies in the US. I repeat, most are succeeding.

[1] http://www.slideshare.net/MarcellusDN/haynes-and-boone-llp-o...
Since we are generalizing, its worth mentioning the tendency of Gujratis (or most Indians) to be extremely insular and selfish:

"Trust and honesty remain essential to Gujarati-dominated industries. Mr Mehta, himself a Jain from Palanpur, whose diamond company has a turnover of $1.8 billion and offices from Antwerp to Tokyo, says that, despite the size of the business, it is still “all based on handshakes and words, with no contracts”. "

These people have traveled from Antwerp to Tokyo for 200 years...yet Palanpur is a shithole just like every other town in India. They have seen all the benefits of a free and modern society, but have not lifted a finger to bring 1% of those ideas to the town where they live.

Surat which processes 90% of the worlds diamonds is also a shithole. Its just yet another massive Indian city with no modern infrastructure, garbage and sewers everywhere, and had a plague outbreak about a decade ago!

While these globe trotters make millions which they stash, how much money do you think the rank and file of diamond polishers make? Do they have adequate health benefits and protection against problems like this: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16201206

“We don’t have to deal with government too much, and mostly not with the banks, as most money comes from families,” says Dinesh Navadiya, the head of the Surat Diamond Association. “So there is little scope for corruption.”

No corruption...except massive tax avoidance. It is impossible to run the smallest business in India without running into corruption.

Some might argue these people have no obligation to improve society and that's Ok. But any article writing about the pros, should also write about the cons.
Everyone prefers to pay more over time vs make a larger capital investment.
>It's when you don't have good arguments nor is well read you have to resort to this type of name calling.

You called me ignorant directly and you started it. "Ignorant" is a highly charged word that will ignite hostility. Do you start debates with that word in real life? Perhaps if you had experience with "copyright debate" you'd know that things won't end well when you start something with that word. Maybe you're just too ignorant to realize that. I never directly called you anything. Besides, there's a difference between fact-calling and name-calling in which case what I'm doing is more closer to the former.

>You clearly don't have much experience with debating copyright

I'm not talking about copyright. I started the topic and that topic dictates the terms of this debate. The topic was a sarcastic example about piracy and theft in terms of supply, demand and value. It was not at all about copyright law. When you talk about human law you deal with controversial topics like whether a pattern of sound needs to be copyrighted or whether a recipe needs to be copyrighted. I'm not dealing with any of those ambiguities. I am dealing with what happens in economics when you pirate something. What happens when you pirate money and what happens when you pirate software. I am not talking about written law.

>My arguments are absolutely based in the current discourse.

Possibly based on discourse but not based on reality and therefore off topic.

>If someone copy something they would never have bought the economic damage to the author is theoretically zero.

What dream world do you live in where you think this is all that happens with piracy? Many people also copy things that they would have bought in the first place.

>A digital product already has infinite supply.

And as such, the product is usually worthless unless distribution/supply is artificially restricted (Netflix, DRM, etc.)

> Copyright doesn't even deal with "increasing supply" as a intrinsic thing.

Who cares? Increasing supply is a part of reality, and that is what I'm talking about.

>If you spend year creating recipes for a restaurant that become successful and someone opens a restaurant next door serving the same things (and thereby increasing supply) the original restaurant has little to no copyright claim

Why are their secret recipes? Why do people hide these things? Because restricting supply increases VALUE. Copyright law is an issue that is separate from this phenomenon.
An Entrepreneur Juggles Six Companies and One Worker: Herself
Short term, no.

The plan is to get the Convox API locked in while mastering advanced AWS like VPC, ECS, ELB, Kinesis and Lambda behind the scenes.

Long term, yes, and in tandem with when the other cloud providers leveling up. For example Google Cloud Logging (for continer logs on GCE) is still in beta.
DLL Hijacking Just Won’t Die
Oil isn't in decline. There may be some alternatives to oil that are newly viable, but you still have billions of engines that aren't going anywhere.
2016 will be the year of concurrency on the web
I would be very much satisfied if I could print _anything_ on Linux.
Uber and Lyft Go to City Hall
Visiting my parents for Christmas, I helped my mom set up her new win10 laptop. (and she's real good with computers for someone her age whose job wasn't in IT)

Lesson here for anyone wanting to use emails for usernames:

Make it really clear that you're asking for the email as an ID, as the username. Otherwise this will incline people to enter the same password as their email because they think they're asked to log in. Even if they know it's important not to re-use passwords over different logins.

To make this anecdata N>1, I teach computer stuff to kids (ages 8-12, generally) and they tend to make the same mistake.

(working on semi-public computers, I am glad I get to teach them about Private Windows: "if it's not your computer, only enter your password on a window that shows the little mask/sunglasses-guy")
A fashion designer can't design a collection and enjoy exclusivity. A couple of months (if not weeks) later the fast-fashion store are going to have copies. They can't dictate the terms of a sale anymore than a musician that gets copied can.

So the fashion industry have worked out their own added value in forms of heritage, luxury and exclusivity. Just like people who sell open source add value with trust, support and consulting. And people who sell games add value with multiplayer, statistics and achievements.

Less copyright means more labor not less. More performances, more innovation, more consulting. If that's a good thing and when it's not is of course a discussion in itself.
But now we need a UX analysis ;)
This should put to rest the persistent, pedantic hypercorrection that the "cat" command is so named because it "catenates" files as opposed to concatenating them.
The copies are sent to dev/null and thus the global supply remains unchanged.

The project wouldn't be an "art project" if the copies were actually distributed.
Disclaimer. I'm not a string theorist. But I've worked in related fields and know the basics of the subject.

Woit's arguing that the study of string theory should be abandoned because it fails to make correct predictions about TeV scale particle physics.

He's wrong in two ways.

First, he's wrong to single out string theory for this particular failing. The Standard Model has stood for 40 years. Many extensions have been proposed, some string, some not. Not one has made a correct prediction. The stringy extensions are more complicated than some other models, but they're also better behaved in some important ways. Most Standard Model extensions are just more of the same dysfunctional effective field theory nonsense. At least strings is finite and couples to gravity.

Second, he's wrong that making these predictions is the correct metric for judging the work of the string theorists. The people I know who study strings study it because they see it as the best approach to learning new things about quantum field theory and quantum gravity.

These are extremely hard subjects, and no approach has been very fruitful. But string theory has been relatively successful as a source of new ideas. It's given us new classes of standard model extensions, calculable examples of confinement, new QFTs, calculable examples of holography and black hole radiation. No other approach can say as much, which is why string theorists are a large subpopulation of high energy theorists.
Way more than that. The numbers for photon rockets come out at about 300 MW/N. So to lift one kilogram against earth's gravity you need about three gigawatts.

This is why people generally prefer to use the energy to accelerate reaction mass instead of just generating photons.
Agree, that was my point. It's not relevant to talk about their marginal cost as if you could ignore their need to balance their budget eventually.
https://www.moneydashboard.com/ Is a very nice to to this in the UK at least. It isn't perfect but its much better than things I've tried in the past.