skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Elsevier own some really high profile journals, including The Lancet and Cell. Refusing to publish in these journals, or similar ones in terms of impact factor, is simply not an option for junior faculty in most departments. I have friends for whom "publishing in Nature, Science and/or Cell" is literally a precondition for getting tenure.
Well to be honest I found the Tines more interesting and so I'm glad he focused on them. But the zones of thought did strike me as a creative way to both solve the Fermi paradox and have space opera without otherwise breaking the rules of hard sci-fi.
They're planning throwing away most of the first stage and catching the expensive engines on parachutes in mid air with a helicopter above the ocean then landing them on a barge softly enough not to damage them. They haven't actually done this or even built the engines to do it. They have represented this purely hypothetical approach as more efficient than reusing the entire first stage, because you sacrifice less payload weight and they claim refurb costs will be higher for full reuse. In practice if you can deliver whatever payload the customer wants they don't care how you do it, and of course refurb costs are likely to be almost entirely down to engine refurb, which they'll still need.

It's certainly not obviously more efficient or quicker reuse, it's likely to be slower and far more costly if they actually do manage it, so saying it is more efficient is just a way for ULA to try to sound like they are still a contender, even out their launches are still significantly more expensive and they haven't even tried to reuse engines.
Possibly because it's a lot easier today to generate income without "producing" or creating new value.

"Sayer argues that the past four decades have been characterised by a transfer of wealth not only from the poor to the rich, but within the ranks of the wealthy: from those who make their money by producing new goods or services to those who make their money by controlling existing assets and harvesting rent, interest or capital gains. Earned income has been supplanted by unearned income."

Source: http://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/apr/15/neoliberalism-i...
Just out of curiosity, what paper is this?
Software patents can only be fixed in the near future if the largest software companies in the world work together. Sadly, some of them profit (immensely) from putting up that huge barrier for smaller companies to compete with them. Case in point, Microsoft has had to pay hundreds of millions in damages to trolls like Eolas, yet stand solidly behind software patents. For the millions they paid Eolas, Steve Ballmer could claim that Linux infringes over 200 patents. Oracle gets to claim $9B for 37 methods in the Android code. Apple gets to sue Samsung over icons, among other things. Basically, this is a cartel. They even have a website: http://ww2.bsa.org

These companies thrive on mind share. As is evident with MS shipping Linux subsystems with Windows 10, they have to court developers or their influence will wane. The loss of developer community happened over many years, and it should continue until these companies change their approach. Get projects you have influence over to try open alternatives. Spread the word in forums and meetups. Make their platforms uncool.

Being Open Source friendly isn't about releasing code under liberal licenses. It is about the commitment to software freedom. Not differentiating these two is ignoring history.
Practically, I like source libraries, because It was so easy find if there were any bugs in the libraries and fix them. I found it refreshing from other eco-systems and saved myself a lot of time. May be when eco-system matures more it wouldn't be such a problem.
That's supported by the observation in the article that companies are not investing much capital in improving productivity.

If you've ever seen video of a Foxconn factory you've seen the rows of people carefully placing ICs onto circuit boards. In fact, there are machines to do that. They're called pick and place machines[0]. They've existed for many years. But labor in China is cheap enough that it often makes more sense to pay humans to do it manually than to invest in automation.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SMT_placement_equipment
Look at that chart. I don't think that general productivity swings that widely.

The other thing to consider is that productivity tools like automation and outsourcing can bite back. When you lose your competency in "non-core" activity, you're now beholden to a vendor, whose incentives are often not aligned with the business.

Also, we have lots of middlemen skimming profits for services of questionable value. My underwear was made in North Carolina in 1990, now it's made in Bangladesh or China, but costs more. That money is going somewhere!
As a teen, drug dealer was more fun :p
They could say what the exposure is. If it's just "your private repos are exposed" then it wouldn't be urgent to patch a public server, for example.
Sounds like the San Francisco Bay Area.
Let's not forget that this whole business would not exist if researchers weren't so addicted to the prestige offered by glamorous journals. Most of the people complaining about scientific publishers are actually complicit in their success and dominance.
Many of those items aren't consumables, and you replace from wear and tear. Why wouldn't you think a temperature sensor in your Tesla battery will need to be replaced, similar to your O2 sensor in your ICE vehicle?
> Find a random Venezuelan online and send some funds (skype credits, bitcoin and plain old money should do).

Nice try, Maduro.

In all seriousness, if you want to help give those willing but unable to leave the means to do so. Sponsor their visa, send them travel money, help them find a job and a home in Ameeica, et cetera. Everyone benefits when more productive people are in more productive environments.
I have been asking this question for a long time, and yet fail to find or get an answer that i could understand.

Why did Apple choose to buy back stocks? Was there any need for it?

What has buying back stocks and wipe them off ( instead of keeping them ) benefited to me as a shareholder? Some would argue without the buyback, their share prices would have dropped even more, but that would at least create a chance for me buy a more for what i think is of value. Now as far as i have concern, they have merely make the stock a lot less volatile with NO / little dividends.

What has buying back stocks and wipe them off ( instead of keeping them ) benefited to Apple as a company? Those money could have been used somewhere else to create EVEN more VALUE instead of buying back?
The major thing publishers facilitated beyond simple distribution was organizing and vetting peer review. I appreciate that they have to make ends meet and that they are contributing something valuable, but it is at a point that the exorbitant price they charge people to read my work makes it basically inaccessible to many people, defeating the point of publishing it in the first place. And lets not even talk about publishers who require exclusive rights, so that technically I can't distribute copies of my own work...
Good post indeed.

>>So don't look for "the general public" to hold anyone accountable about anything. That's no longer how this country works. Not in 2016, anyway.

It's sad. With all the "information age tools" at hand, we see that people are just choosing to remain ignorant. Reminds me Huxley's brave new world [1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brave_New_World
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It's all based on the same book (Connectography). I highly recommend instead reading The Stack that just came out from MIT Press, which gives a much deeper analysis on the relationship between cities, software and geopolitics: http://thestack.org
> When a corporation's governance structure doesn't work, it dies and frees up resources for other endeavors.

Yeah, sure. As if we didn't have "too big to fail" in the last years. Maybe a history book could refresh your memory.
+1 on Surge

Is now the new Nodejitsu?
As with the 2nd amendment, arguing for the right to bear arms is not in and of itself an argument for their use. In this case, bitcoin represents by which civil disobedience could be practiced. As long as it is maintained as a real alternative (meaning first and foremost it operates outside the constraints of authority) then a reasonable argument can be made that regulators in democracies will compromise in allowing greater user rights in the official alternatives. Napster and bittorrent did change the music industry, in the end.

But even without game theoretic arguments involving civil disobedience, Bitcoin is still interesting. It offers cryptographic protections that have never existed before in real fintech applications (e.g. programmable signatures), and radical transparency and configurable trust that can patch the sort of vulnerabilities that led to the 2007 financial crisis.
Assuming for the moment this is true, what does that imply for near- and mid-term planning purposes for the average software developer with bills to pay but also spare cash to invest?
Wow, when I was a wee intern at Maxtor's server division ten years ago, I vaguely remember my boss talking about helium-filled drives. I never realized the technology had another decade of development to go! Though I guess it's possible the tech is purely Seagate's, and Maxtor's research was lost in the merger.
> This is too broad and abstract to be actionable, let alone analyzable.

Yes, that's the point.

When a phrase, concept, or ideal is so broad and abstract as to incorporate anything and exclude little, then when it is time to analyze the results, you can (in)validate all of it based on the whims of the people in power. It's really a neat trick.
We can cross that bridge when we come to it. Right now Bitcoin usage is orders of magnitude less efficient than it could be.
How soon until a Youtube user inhales the contents so we can all watch?
I told him that I knew he was frustrated by these particular things but that
they simply weren’t going to change, that they were inherent parts of the
job, and that I didn’t want us to be constantly battling over them … and
that rather than trying to force himself into a job that obviously was
making him frustrated and stressed, I wanted to see him figure out if he
could really be happy in the position, knowing that the things he was
complaining about weren’t going to change.

A couple of days later, he told me that he had thought about it and realized
he should move on.

So, in other words, you fired him. You made it clear that the job wasn't going to change, and that he didn't have a place in your organization. The fact that he submitted the resignation, rather than you submitting the paperwork is immaterial to the fact that you fired him. This is as much of a firing as a government minister "submitting his resignation" in order to "spend more time with his family" after a particularly embarrassing political scandal or gaffe.

Now, granted, I agree that the firing was handled well, and was done with a minimum of pain to both parties. But you still fired him. I'm worried that OP is trying to sidestep that fact and make it seem like this was some kind of voluntary meeting of the minds when, in my reading of the situation, it clearly wasn't.
> Only six patent holders on their list have sent more than two demand letters.

The point is that monopolies on ideas are fundamentally unfair, and can only be justified if they provide substantial value over the norm. That might be true in some industries like Pharma, but it is provably false in Software.

When has something (in software) been invented by building on some text in a patent filing?
It's a problem with the model. It's far too much for subscribing to a single site; especially when it's linked to from social media (HN) where it's required to have access to participate in community discussion.

HN will pay for content, but they won't pay under these terms.
And I'm seeing it on Edge.
If anyone is having trouble accessing https://scihub.io (the site providing the papers) you can find the site directly at the ip address: https://31.184.194.81/ ... Apparently the domain name was seized. The certificate is for sci-hub.io (safe to accept). Or you can just connect to http://31.184.194.81/ if you don't want to bother with the warnings (and are ok with DOIs and papers being transmitted without encryption).

EDIT:

Their other domains:

https://sci-hub.cc (uses sci-hub.io certificate)

https://sci-hub.bz (uses a separate certificate and ip address -- 104.28.20.155)

And a tor site: scihub22266oqcxt.onion
There's always "no true scotsman" in economic discussions. Just try pointing out any problem with free market and wait for the inevitable "yes, but that isn't a real free market". Somehow, economic discussions seem to be the home of every extremist view one can find and with it all the "no true scotsman" arguments.
This subthread turned into a sorry flamewar that went straight to Hitler. How embarrassing.

We detached it from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11591910 and marked it off-topic.
From Haxe's introduction:

> Its syntax largely follows the ECMAScript standard, but deviates where necessary.

Anyone can tl;dr the main differences to JS?
> Hitler was quite the orator. Had you been there, you'd have been cheering.

Please don't make Hacker News miserably worse by posting things like this.
I initially read this as "BMW Windmills".
Please don't make threads like this even worse by responding to trolls.
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I guess I'm missing the practical vector associated with the "compare" timing attack. All of the js source code is available to see in a debugger, as well as all of the stored memory values. If you've put sensitive information (a secret) in the browser, you've already failed...
Haxe is what ActionScript should have been. However (imo), it's hard to find a niche for it now. What does it get me that Perl and OCaml don't? I've been drawn to Haxe several times over the years, but have never really thought of a project, "huh, Haxe would be a great fit here". Maybe if I wrote a mobile game or something.
Or even http://sci-hub.bz/ and http://sci-hub.cc/
Rational response to the economy that -- for whatever reasons, productivity increase, wealth transfer etc. -- is able to satisfy all the demand by putting just a fraction of the population to work is to create bullshit jobs that nobody needs and that don't add to productivity. I've written about it here: http://250bpm.com/blog:44
Venezuela is being run by Atlas Shrugged villains. If there was ever in history an appropriate time to reference Atlas Shrugged, it's there.
The "prestige," as you call it, is necessary to get a job in academia. Where you publish your research is considered a trustworthy approximation to the quality of your research, and requires a lot less time & expertise to vet.
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I spend over 30% of my time at work (pleb level helpdesk) doing busy work that generates no actual benefit to the business other than making it easier to track the real work I do. If we were more trusted to do the right thing or the tracking of our work was better automated my job could be done with half the staff.

The entire company has similar inefficiencies at every level that have all been introduced over the last decande and especially the last two years. From all accounts this seems to be a pretty similar trend happening all across large businesses in Australia and I assume America as well.
Overheated hype. There are already over 100 million land mines deployed around the world. Pretty stupid as robots go; but the same heartless automated indiscriminate killing. Been going on since World War I. So yes we'll get used to it, since we already have.
> He might have been in prison now

For hypothetical crimes he could've committed had he lived? Because he certainly wouldn't be in prison for things he actually did.
Were you scared when he bought three years ago, and went public?
Just a test, interestingly the link[1] got broken

[1] chrome://history/
You probably perceive GitLab as having more vulns because we're a very open company, whereas most other companies keep it mostly to themselves.

Relevant: https://twitter.com/tenderlove/status/725370404513017856
There's been some progress: http://aomedia.org/
Do you enjoy board games? If you are free Thursday night, I know some people.
No, the OP did not make clear that the employee "didn't have a place in [his] organization". He made clear it cannot continue like that - but that leaves the employee a chance to reflect on and change his attitude towards the job.
It's much closer to ActionScript and ES4 than to ES5 or ES6/2015/Next/Harmony/Trickshot.LegitScript/whatever the latest ECMAScript standard is. The main difference is probably decent macro support.

There's always the Cookbook (http://code.haxe.org/category/beginner/index.html) if you want to see for yourself.
I'm digging in a little more and seeing some odd behavior, but it's unclear if this stuff is new to 50. Star this ticket to follow along: https://crbug.com/607788
Ah yes, the nefarious anti-patent lobby, attacking our freedoms again!

You seem to imply that patent trolls don't exist and are not a problem. Sure, there aren't many letters on that tiny web site you've cited. Why does this mean there aren't many patent letters going out in general? It's completely irrelevant.

As for the EFF's legislative proposals, you've seemingly cherrypicked one of the less interesting ones, and then argued that it won't work because the current patent system is so broken that it takes 3 years to get a patent.
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As in so many other endeavors the law works to protect the true criminals against humanity.
They turned a high volume illicit prescription drug seller case in to multiple arrests of hitmen. We also don't know what, if any, deal he has been offered. That seems like it was probably a great score for the DOJ.

Keep in mind, a lot of the crimes we've read about in this story are himself, a non-US citizen not in the US, doing things with/to non-US citizens not in the US. I imagine the prosecutors are fare less concerned about a South African living in The Philippines having a Filipino killed than they are with the fact that the killers were brought in from the US.
I don't get it - some commenters are suggesting that the authors of those papers aren't paid, but the publisher is. Why would the author want to limit the spread and accessibility of his work in such a way?

As an outsider who doesn't have any experience with scientific papers and how to get them, it seems very obvious to me that there should be a huge demand for an open platform to publish and read those papers - from authors and readers alike. Why does this role need to be filled by an at best semi-legal party like SciHub?

The fact that users with legitimate access to those papers actually opt for SciHub to get them confirms that the current solutions just aren't working for their users. So why would authors rely on them?
I had a young dev in my team many years ago. We agreed it wasn't working out, so I helped find him a totally different type of role in another part of the same company. It worked out great. I have no idea why this doesn't happen more often, it's not difficult to do in any reasonably sized company.
Are you aiming at developers as developers, or developers as employees who can put the company credit card details into your SaaS signup?

For the latter, you just need an honest service that would make their team's job easier.

A license for Sublime Text costs $70. I don't know how much money they make, but it's a popular product. The value perceived there is probably something like "I know it costs money to develop and maintain a highly polished, I'm willing to pay to support a tool I use every day, and I'm honestly kinda fatigued with all these ancient open source editors so take my money and give me a clean nice text editing experience."
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IntelliJ is a lot more expensive than $40. At their price point, I'd assume they mostly target enterprise customers, and not so much individual developers.

Maybe that's another selling point for my app? Most other database software is targeted at enterprise customers (endless feature checklists, a price of $500 per seat); whereas I mostly target individual developers.
Why does academia put up with this stupid system? Academics are already the ones doing all the peer review on their own, free of payment, right? So why not say "Hey, we'll set up our own servers, host papers free for all to access, and then note which ones pass the same levels of scrutiny we'd apply as reviewers were we reviewing them for Nature, Science, Cell, The Lancet, whatever"?

Doesn't seem like the journals actually provide much beyond asking professors to do stuff for free, both in terms of writing papers and reviewing them. Is inertia really worth letting them leech so much money and lock down access (antithetical to the whole idea of public-ation...) while they're at it?
Are your counter-claims not hyperbolic ("liberate people from bondage")?

Regardless of the extreme pros or cons, Bitcoin is revolutionary.

PS - Your middle paragraph is painfully hard to read (is it one, huge sentence?). This makes your post feel like it was purely an emotional, unedited response with little filtering...
Have any of the mirror sites uploaded all 50M papers as a torrent yet? They really should...
How long has leasing out compute resources been an industry? 1-2 decades? I'm sure there were leases on timesharing systems in the 50s and 60s, but that's still just a half century, and hardly the same industry as AWS.
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Do you think it relates with what's going in Japan?
I'm sure it's been possible for a while, but just wasn't really necessary. Hitachi's been doing it for a few years already, for what it's worth.

http://www.storagereview.com/hgst_ultrastar_helium_6tb_enter...
This might have more to do with medical advancements in the past 100 years, than with the social impact of television.
Exactly, which is why I made the connection.

Still, the "single-issue commenter", as exemplified by both of them, can be valuable to a good community. @michaelochurch's writings have definitely shaped my thoughts, so kudos for him, and, if I were in the position to use it, @graycat's bibliographies would be rewarding to mine (unless his knowledge is outdated, as @barrkel suggests). Yet I can't help but get the impression that the single-issue commenter is very prone to overexposing themself, especially if a large proportion of their comments are multi-thousand word diatribes that recycle most of the same themes. Not to mention, people readily pattern-match prolix commenters to complete crackpots, even though both those users seem to be above that level. My impression is that single-issue commenters would be best served by posting a lot for a year or so, followed by some time to lie low -- if their contributions to the discussion around their issue are really valuable, their posts should stay in moderate circulation as other users refer to them in later discussion.
Because many important old-timers still read journals back-to-back. This is how they stay up-to-date, and how they find citations. If you are not in a journal, they won't cite you.
Interesting that Australia (Western Australia in particular) still hasn't learned this lesson.