skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Even if you were to find someone willing to import American DVDs to Estonia, the movie studios have region code lockout codes on DVD players to prevent that!

So use a computer to play your DVDs. Region lockout works on the honor system.
I really can't explain why, but PLOS tries to: https://www.plos.org/publications/publication-fees/

They just increased the fees for their general purpose publication, PLOS ONE. Here's their reasoning:

"PLOS ONE has not increased its Article Processing Charge (APC) since 2009, for the past six years absorbing increasing publishing costs without raising author fees. Its new price reflects the work involved in shepherding the volume of papers PLOS manages from submission to published work; PLOS invests significant resources to improve the quality of PLOS ONE output, thoroughly checking for ethics, competing interests and robust science."

They also say they're updating their terrible article submission system. I don't see how any of this costs as much as it does. PLOS ONE alone publishes ~30,000 articles a year, that's a huge amount of money in fees, even if not everyone pays. On top of all of that, they accept and publish 70% of all articles. That's a really leaky sieve that shouldn't be so expensive to maintain.
I remember while learning data structures and implementing them, I landed on http://www.keithschwarz.com/interesting/. It was enlightenment for me. By browsing through these examples I learned about good programming practices. Most importantly how commenting your code can help you even when you return after few years to fix something in it.
Actually is there any journal that actually pays reviewers?
Yes, please.

To be fair, a lot of people do publish their working code with the paper. It helps people like me understand how to do the work.

Bad code is fine, good code is better, great code is great. Stick to fine and I can do my job and you can write papers knowing that your work will be used by many.
"SCOTT SHANE: Well, five years ago, there were—there was a question about what to do as Gaddafi’s forces approached Benghazi. The Europeans and the Arab League were calling for action. No one really knew what the outcome would be, but there was certainly a very serious threat to a large number of civilians in Benghazi. But, you know, the U.S. was still involved in two big wars, and the sort of heavyweights in the Obama administration were against getting involved—Robert Gates, the defensive secretary; Joe Biden, the vice president; Tom Donilon, the national security adviser.

And Secretary Clinton had been meeting with representatives of Britain, France and the Arab countries. And she sort of essentially called in from Paris and then from Cairo, and she ended up tipping the balance and essentially convincing President Obama, who later described this as a 51-49 decision, to join the other countries in the coalition to bomb Gaddafi’s forces."

http://www.democracynow.org/2016/3/3/the_libya_gamble_inside...
> The balance that needs to be found is around the assistance which is rendered to warranted agencies to enable their access to data. IMO vendor supported key material attacks are not an unreasonable solution[...]If they can be enabled on a case by case basis such that it is cost effective for them to do the rest, that might be enough.

Why is it not unreasonable? You're compelling companies to write custom software explicitly for law enforcement use. Let's say you own a company that creates product X. Now the FBI is compelling you, through the court system, to develop a completely custom version of product X to let them access it or use it in some way. Sure they're paying you but you now have to redirect resources to handle this and you likely hired people to do things other than work on a government project. This ultimately can hurt your company and its market position simply by consuming your resources.

This is unprecedented outside of war times. It's hard for me to imagine anyone being okay with compelling a company to become a government contractor.

> It's a hard problem but it's not binary.

It absolutely is. The "middle ground" you pointed to isn't a middle ground; it's unconstitutional. I have yet to hear a technically viable AND constitutional "middle ground" in this debate.
Not working software per se, but I think there's a lot of beauty in the way Sandi Metz demos a refactoring of a thing called The Gilded Rose in this video:

http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=8bZh5LMaSmE
Any independent opinions of EF? They are great things about them in most media, though most articles have a PR flavor to them.
This is actually why I'm so hesitant on Bernie Sanders. I'm seeing the same campaign promises, the same basic ideas, the same wild support base. And I can't help but think we're about to face the exact same result.

I voted for Obama twice. I regret both.
SNI header being sent from the client can probably show even better patterns from the user.
Really, except Opera Mini everything was so boring.
I think it's naive to underestimate a government's ability to coerce people into not using it. There are many surviving illiberal democracies and it really wouldn't take that much to get the U.S. to trend more toward illiberalism either.

Lavabit?
I would not say that most scientist happly relinquish it, but they trade off the prestige gained from publishing in the journal for the copyright.

The real problem is the use of journals as an arbiture of research quality. If it didn’t matter to your career if you published in Nature or PLOS One then everyone would publish in PLOS One. If you are more likely to get a job or grant by publishing in Nature then people will do almost anything to get their work into Nature. We are trying to solve the wrong problem by worrying about journals controlling copyright.
If it's that garbage, how do you know your results are correct? It should be at least non-garbage enough that someone else could theoretically check it, or you're not doing science at all.
> JSON is just this beautiful thing that lets you store data however you want.

What if I want to store integers?

Not floats.

Integers.
So far, my takeaway from the federal government's reaction to the San Bernardino attacks is the following prioritization of freedom:

Higher priority freedoms:

1. Freedom of religious choice and freedom from religious persecution. Freedom of religious assembly.

2. Freedom to immigrate to the US.

Lower Priority Freedoms:

1. Freedom to purchase guns and ammunition

2. Freedom to use encryption to keep personal communication private
Agreed. When I was really into emulation, there were a lot of objectively terrible games that I'd fire up for a few minutes every other day just to hear the music. I feel bad for the composers whose work had to languish in games like that.

Music is one of the most important things missing from many modern AAA games. Too many game devs either license existing pop music, or pretend they're making a movie (the source of a lot of problems really) and hire a film score composer. Older game music was certainly inspired by popular music but it had this distinct quality that made it really enjoyable to listen to. It wasn't just from the sound chips. Maybe it's because they loop.

Thankfully the indies and a few old-timers like Nintendo seem to understand this.
Maybe, however we have recent flooding events that are almost biblical. There are the recent in my lifetime floods in the Mississippi valley 1993 and 2011. Not to mention the 1927 flood. Ohio River flood of 1937 which I think is mythologized in the Johnny Cash song 5ft high and rising.

In the Great Flood of 1862 the California Central Valley flooded, 6000 square miles, some of which was still under water 6 months later.

While I suspect such floods don't occur in the Euphrates and Tigris basins now, 5000 years ago when the climate was wetter, perhaps such floods similar to the Great Flood of 1862 did occur every few hundred years.
Another, deliberately distasteful, one would be to incentivize reproducing to ensure one's family doesn't run afoul of the cutoffs.
I think there's a saying in this community - work on a startup that a few people really want, rather than something a lot of people kinda want a little.

That would also apply to having a "life". Live your life in a way that a few people will greatly love you and miss you. Rather than spend time with a lot of people who kinda enjoy your company a little.

There's certainly enough time in an early stage startup to treat your closest people well. I have a great lunch with my wife all the time. I bathe my daughter, play bubbles, and dance with her. I mentor young entrepreneurs.

Do things that people will remember you for after you're dead. Or at least the things they'll remember 5 years from now.
Agreed. Don't really know anyone who would say you are wrong for calling it X vs. 10. There are more important things going on in the world. :)
Joe Armstrong's "Universal Server".
You are correct. Money is just a way of measuring value that we agree upon that manifests itself in credit or paper currency, but is just an object. Appealing to the masses with "money driven companies" is an intellectually dishonest argument to froth it up a bit.
"the Community Research and Academic Programming License"
This sub thread is about legal ways to watch movies.

People seem to be missing the fact that importing DVDs is not necessarily legal; and turning your DVD player to region free is arguably not legal (under the various "interfering with rights protections mechanisms" laws.

To you and me "buying the DVD from some other region" is legit, while "pirate the movie" is less legit, but to the rights-holders there's not much difference. See, for example, this submission which is talking about rights holders asking Netflix to stop people buying content from a different country.
But they are still performing better than had they had no sleep at all.

I know people who regularly sleep 6 hours a day and I've also seen them after an all nighter. Not the same thing at all.
Because researchers depend on funding which depends on publications in prestigious journals which charge fees for access.

Every researcher I know would publish for free if it wouldn't ruin their career to do otherwise. They want their results disseminated as widely as possible.
BM25 has been available for awhile so is there a reason it is becoming default soon besides it is better in certain scenarios? Have there been improvements to the implementation recently?
> The problem came to light in a lawsuit challenging the racial makeup of the grand jury that indicted Luis Colon Osario, a defendant in the $7.1 million robbery of a Wells Fargo depot in West Hartford in 1983.

Gee, it started out as a chuckle but this is scary. Tsk, seems like there should be some sort of check in place. How would we know if our counties had a similar issue? Sure, sure, that was 1992 but we've got plenty of clever bugs hiding in code written in this century too.
Joe Armstrong is one of the original authors of Erlang. He's using the erlang nomenclature for servers and processes.
Sorry, I was wrong about publication cost vs the cost of published articles. They're comparable.

Let's say that I'm writing a paper. Maybe the underlying research cost $100K. So paying $3K for publication isn't much. And let's say that I need to review 100 papers for background, discussion, etc. At $30 each, that's also $3K. Even less, for subscription-based access.

So maybe it's a wash for grant-funded academics who publish in journals that charge $3K to publish and $30 per copy. But it certainly isn't a wash for academics with marginal funding, not-for-profits, etc, who publish at much lower cost.
No. Not at all like those.
PLOS is a non-profit, and employs full-time professional editors.

People forget the weird workflow in any journal that does biomedical work (including most of the PLOS family): manuscripts are submitted as Word files, then converted to XML and reformatted by a semi-automated process. There's manual labor involved to format the references and cross-references, mark up tables and figures, and proofread the HTML, PDF, and XML versions. The XML is then submitted to PubMed Central for archival storage.

There's a lot of manual labor involved in the profess. You can't just hand-wave away and say "peer review is provided for free" and assume the rest of the process is free.
djb servers are really beautiful. Built securely from the ground up, with very little attack surface area.

http://thedjbway.b0llix.net/
The whole world is flooded with fiction about using guns to stop bad people with guns. The narrative around crypto is tiny by comparison.
There are three types of funding going into US labs: money, green cards, and IP rights. Science is already horribly under-funded and removing IP rights, one of the sources of non-conventional funding, would make it even more so unless the removed non-conventional funding was replaced with conventional funding. Which is unlikely. Given that context, I'm all for letting government funded labs keep their IP.
PNG (Portable Network Graphics)
I think this is part of where the phone encryption scare comes from, right?
Biologists discover electric bacteria that eat pure electrons rather than sugar
Not if the bullets come out of the barrel at less than 10 feet per second. Just make a law limiting the bullet’s velocity to below the skin piercing speed. You have your arms, but you can't do much with it beyond killing flies.
Artificial Aesthetic Sense
AlphaGo is not the solution to AI
"the public will be putting their data within reach of every hacker in the world through a government-imposed weakness"

You're reusing arguments about key escrow in a way that doesn't apply.

This isn't key escrow. It's about software updates, which use digital signing in the way it's supposed to be used.

Apple's software updates are guarded by a private key. Of course they need to keep the private key safe, but sometimes use it to sign releases. It's expensive but doable, and a good thing too, because the entire app ecosystem (not to mention https and Bitcoin) depends on keeping private keys safe.

If keeping a private key safe is impossible even for a well-funded company like Apple, public key encryption doesn't work. Game over.
This.

Journals made a lot of sense before the age of the internet, when they actually did have to do a lot of work to coordinate the activity of physically collecting research papers, mailing them for reviews, paying dedicated people for typesetting and so on. Although the cost of all of this has almost vanished now that tools for editing are so accessible and delivery costs are inexistent, publishers still charge ridiculous sums for papers produced mostly from public money simply because of their prestige.
Someone has to coordinate the peer review process - that is, vet the trash, enforce standards, locate qualified reviewers and coordinate their feedback into digestible form. Now, in my opinion 95% of this is automatable and the other 5% probably costs about $50 per manuscript, so the current fees are certainly outrageous. However I don't think we will be doing ourselves a service to say that publishers do nothing at all. They just don't do anything comparable the value that they extract.
Mostly entertaining myself: used for retro emulation gaming, web surfing, remote admin over ssh, music (10h of battery), watching videos, tinkering with an exotic platform.

Being asked for input about what features it should have beforehand was very nice. 10 hours of battery is something I really enjoyed while on-the-go. Having a keyboard is convenient and a major upgrade from my previous handheld (gp2x), along with the ability for homebrew apps. The software repository is great. SDXC support, 2 slots.

It is a little too thick to my taste, the OS is not designed for a small touchscreen and feels awkward at times, I had an issue with the analog sticks sensitivity on the desktop (pyra has improved sticks).

Keep in mind that the pandora was not intended to be a consumer product but a limited run by a community member for a community of handheld enthusiasts of a device made to address perceived flaws in the GP32 and GP2X handhelds. The objective was to grow from a handheld gaming console to a fully capable pocket computer running on opensource.
Age-aggregation bias in mortality trends [pdf]
Sorry, i find it hard to imagine a scientist feeling sad that he will publish a Nature paper. You are spot on that we need a new arbiter. It's 2016 and we rely on this ancient system, it's no wonder that the elseviers of the world take advantage of it.

But the control of copyright is a real problem, and i think we underestimate how much it hampers science (esp. considering the wonderful things one could do with machine analysis of the texts)
>that's a pretty sweet hack.

Really? Lying about having serious developmental disorders is a 'sweet hack' now?

I mean, the comments below are overstating things but the danger of amphetamine addiction (especially for people who are using the meds off prescription and are more likely to do especially risky behaviors like snort it) is there and selling the Ritalin is a felony and everything about this story is actually pretty terrible.
Or code that worked on the specific test case described in the paper but was flaky as hell on anything else.
That too, although a case could potentially be made that licensing of university-owned patents reduces the need for tax subsidies. E.g. the University of Wisconsin recently won a $234 million judgment against Apple just as their state funding was being cut by $250 million. http://news.wisc.edu/warf-wins-patent-infringement-lawsuit-a...
But the doctors prescribing the amphetamines aren't thinking about actual solutions or alternatives; they just go through the motions and cash checks.

My roommate was one of the largest Adderall prescribers in the United States. He has 20 cars, 3 homes and brags that he spends money "like a trillionaire". If you ask him where he lives, his response is, "what day?"

He is about 150 pounds overweight, dresses like a 90s rockstar and usually drives a Lamborghini Aventador. I don't trust he is impartial or an expert in his prescribing people what is effectively a daily routine of methamphetamine.

I know a few people who are prescribed Adderall who have attempted suicide. It's very easy to abuse amphetamines and abusing them makes one irrational. Meth has destroyed my hometown and as Dr. Carl Hart states, there is really no difference between Adderall and methamphetamine.

It is very dangerous to suggest that you can cure lack of focus by amphetamines, or that somehow this "ADHD" disease can only be cured by amphetamines.
I really love the idea of explaining the actor model as tons of tiny little servers compared to a single monolithic server. I tried to make the same comparison recently when I talked about adding distributed transactions to CurioDB (Redis clone built with Scala/Akka): http://blog.jupo.org/2016/01/28/distributed-transactions-in-...
You don't. But there are 5x-100x more bugs lurking in the methodology so triage is the name of the game.

A much bigger problem is that grantsmanship strongly incentivizes against verifying your methodology and being diligent in your construction of null hypotheses.
For all that matters , a badly formatted "times 12" word document is just as fine as a "polished" research article. This is science we are talking about, it's not an infomercial. Besides, all journals have strict and long guidelines that all presumbissions follow. I just don't buy the manual labor argument.
I'm don't understand how JSON is better than XML, edn, toml, or yaml. They all have pros and cons, but if I had to pick one as being beautiful, it wouldn't be json!
well, the bluetooth keyboard kinda defeats the purpose of having a handheld in the first place.
They are extracting rents from research far beyond the value they add to it.
Note that Bernie and Hillary have both said they believe middle ground can be sought on this issue.

As strange as it may sound, the Clintons did the most for the pro-encryption side of this debate. Former President Clinton passed CALEA, which TechDirt points out applies to "manufacturers and providers of telecommunications support services" [1]. Also from CALEA,

> (1) Design of features and systems configurations. This subchapter does not authorize any law enforcement agency or office

> (a) to require any specific design of equipment, facilities, services, features, or system configurations to be adopted by any provider of a wire or electronic communication service, any manufacturer of telecommunications equipment, or any provider of telecommunications support services;

> (b) to prohibit the adoption of any equipment, facility, service, or feature by any provider of a wire or electronic communication service, any manufacturer of telecommunications equipment, or any provider of telecommunications support services.

I believe the judge in the San Bernardino case will point to this to deny the DOJ's request to use the All Writs Act to compel Apple to write the special version of the OS. At the very least, CALEA is a strong statement that Congress has already decided that they will not pass laws requiring Apple and others to put backdoors in their phones. That doesn't mean the debate is over, however. Many people still do not understand encryption technology and will blame technologists for standing in the way of legislation that they perceive would have saved us from certain terrorist attacks.

Although Bernie has said he's against surveillance, he and many of his most vocal supporters remain uninformed about encryption. I tried posting a couple times in the Sanders subreddit, calling for Sanders to take a stronger position in support of end-to-end encryption [2]. The response was he can't take a position on this because it isn't a major issue. I think that time is fast approaching. Obama hasn't let up, and obviously neither will technologists. It's difficult for a politician or law enforcement official to tell the population that they can't track all communications in the manner they used to be able to, and on the other hand, we technologists cannot simply ask math to stop working.

[1] https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20160223/23441033692/how-e...

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/SandersForPresident/comments/49otvu...
CS conference proceedings published by our friends at ACM and IEEE are usually for-pay just like their journals.
I've always wondered why that's sent in the clear --- the usual justification is that the hostname needs to be known before the right certificate can be used, but that can be gotten around by using a certificate named with the IP address of the server, establishing encryption, and then sending the hostname to get that certificate.
Your message can basically be distilled into "it's absolutist but we can't let it come across that way to hurt our PR".

I'm not sure trying to increase the complexity of the issue just to make it sound like the technology community doesn't see this as binary is a good solution. I think what we need to do is education people around how encryption works.

If we're wishy-washy about the whole thing it may come off as something we can possibly do in the end. I think education is the only way. But that's just my opinion.
I have not met a scientist (including myself) that was happy about giving up the copyright, but it is viewed as the cost of publishing in a “prestige” journal. Nearly all scientists would prefer to retain the copyright if they could and make their papers widely available to everyone interested provide it did not exclude publishing in a career advanacing journal.
Nothing the size of the Med, of course. There are several major below-sealevel basins in Northern Africa. The most significant is probably the Qattara Depression[1], which probably won't ever naturally flood, but is the target of many plans to flood it intentionally for power production and improvements in local climate.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qattara_Depression
Yes, there is a special kind of joy knowing that unless the underlying infrastructure has a problem you have handled all the edge cases, and it is still readable.