skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Having a list of supported browsers is fine. All modern browsers are supposed to implement the same web standards, but they all have a different set of supported features and subtle rendering and layout bugs. Sniffing the User-Agent string to detect the browser is a small evil, but it's sometimes necessary.

Having a list of supported operating-systems is totally different. For a web app, this is almost never okay. The popular cross-platform browsers (Chrom{e,ium} and Firefox) are excellent examples of well designed cross-platform software. They both abstract the underlying platform and implement the layout engine in platform-independent code. It's very rare to find a rendering bug in these browsers that only affects a single platform. So, what I don't understand is why OneDrive is sending different code to Firefox on Linux and Firefox on Windows, and why are the support team being instructed to dismiss bug reports from Linux users when they are using a browser that would be supported on Windows? It's hard not to attribute this to malice. Even perpetuating the idea that it's not possible to write truly cross-platform software or that web apps have compatibility with specific operating systems works in Microsoft's favour, since they sell the most popular desktop operating system.
> What worked for audio, was that you had one vendor (Apple) that had a large enough market share. In order to sell DRMd media that worked on Ipods, the media companies had to sell through Apple. Or they could sell non-DRMd files that would still work on Ipods.

Ironically, this scenario just got more unlikely, thanks to EME now being a standard and thus available for everyone... Hooray for web standards!
Congratulations. But there's one critical skill that lot of us here will not have.

Luck.

There's probably a dozen automation tools out there. There are dozen chat and dating apps as well.

Yet all the effort and attention is focused on becoming a lottery ticket.
Wrong, neither I nor anyone in industry believes DRM "works" in that sense. You're misunderstanding the purpose of DRM, see my other comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13936576
I think you've perfectly summed up the problem the average anti-DRM advocate has: it's pretty easy to get people riled up when they paid a noticeable amount of money to “buy” something which goes away. In contrast, the Netflix/Spotify model where you pay a modest amount of money for all-you-can-eat accesss is hard to get much traction with since nobody thought they owned a particular work and the total price is so much lower that few people care.

I can't decide whether this is bad or a sign of progress towards training people that DRMed content is not worth much.
> There’s even a new maps app designed specifically for people following each others’ cars on long road trips.

What app would this be?

Classic Google taking an existing feature, rip it out, and put it back into another app with Minimum Viable Product functionality, and slowly restore it to parity
21 industries that will be disrupted by driver less cars
Yeah, I usually install it on Windows as well. Works just fine, although I don't use Windows extensively.
Witcher 3, big AAA title about the adventures of a magical swordfighter who also gets laid. The twist is, the developer also happens to own GoG.
Two Glimpses of a Grim Post-American Future
A note on the require issue: this makes sense if you think of requiring as it's compiled equal - importing.

You can't dynamically import dependencies - so if you're wanting to load JSON dynamically you should be using other mechanisms (even if it's just a FS operation or having an internal service to return JSON).
Bought for the patents
Whoa, a whole entire two people! On just one project?

I've been toiling all alone since mid 2009 on a great language called TXR which includes a fantastic new Lisp dialect with many original features and ideas.

$ git log --oneline | wc
3643 45798 313606

Over 3600 commits since switching to git late October 2009, after version 18.
The CDM is just a plugin - on Firefox it's a Gecko Media Plugin, and it seems easier to implement the GMP API than the NPAPI for Silverlight, since it's a lot more restricted.
> But I bet you'd see the same in blue collar jobs

Yes, that's probably true due to the use of power tools. Here's a longer article on the decline in grip strength: http://nautil.us/issue/45/power/raising-the-american-weaklin...
[Googles: "how to entrepreneu"]

NO RESULTS

[gives up]
Video Scale 2017 recap
We somehow got away from DRM on audio.

We got away from it with audio in part because a typical audio product such as a music single or short audiobook can viably be produced and sold DRM-free at a price so low that it's hardly worth anyone looking for it elsewhere even if they could find it literally for free. Unfortunately, the same economics don't work in most other markets.
> Workflow won an Apple Design Award in 2015, with Apple Accessibility engineer Dean Hudson waxed ecstatic about the way that it handled accessibility. “When I first saw the app, I was just like man, this accessibility is cray-cray. This is off the charts!”

Wow.
Surely it means that humans and (baleen) whales will increasingly be competitors for food such as krill?

https://risweb.st-andrews.ac.uk/portal/en/researchoutput/bio...

>
Abstract ... Although this only represents 4–6% of the estimated krill biomass in the region (and probably less than this percentage of the total annual krill production), the depleted numbers of baleen whales resulting from past or current whaling activities should be taken into account when setting quotas for the commercial exploitation of krill if there is to be a recovery to pre-exploitation biomass levels of baleen whales.
There's always the analog loophole. If you can watch it on your screen, you can record it.
At the current pricing, there is no way I would purchase. Flavor isn't worth THAT much to me.

At least for me personally, mediocre but extremely inexpensive coffee > "great tasting" $2-3/cup coffee. Not to mention, it being "instant" to me, means even at this price it will still be inferior to high-end bulk coffee.

I already thought Keurig pods were expensive (and they don't make great coffee either so I avoid them), this makes those look reasonable.

Maybe I'm just not your target market. The product itself sounds like it may be great, just IMO not worth the cost, and I have no idea what your target market would be, but it seems it would be an extremely small subset of coffee drinkers (I could be wrong)
The aircraft in question is being offered for a relatively short-range flight (London-Paris), 345 km (215 mi). Odds are good this flight configuration wouldn't be used on long-distance trans-oceanic flights.

Though it might be best-suited to short hops between islands, islands and mainlands, or across deep peninsulas. That's a somewhat limited set of markets.

For travel between heavily-populated continental points, ground-based rail would almost certainly be more efficient and practicable, and even in the case of the suggested London-Paris route, there is a ground-based alternative.
What other option was seriously on offer? I buy DRM-free music but the video options are extremely limited to a few committed proponents — I love them for that but it's like saying nobody should buy conventional agribusiness food because you can buy organic free-trade kombucha.
Your friends and family and google
That's 7.5 miles, or over two hours of walking every day. Ouch, that's a lot of time.
> That they engaged with it as both stewards and beneficiaries of its bounty

Sorry, but no, you might be thinking of Avatar.

They were just like us, they did whatever to it that they thought would be most beneficial to themselves, except more short term thinking than current society and with less technology and numbers so less damaging.

The question here is, did the do structural improvements for themselves (unlikely) or did they make large changes from how they lived like clearing and burning over lots of years (more likely)
Fraudsters frequently use "smurfs", who are often less than sophisticated, to get around this.

Pretend you're a not-too-savvy-about-international-finance person in the US who, because you have a pulse and are at least minimally socially established, has a checking account. The Internets tell you that you can make good money working from home as an accounts payable clerk. On showing up to work on the first day, your new boss tells you that the job is occasionally getting an email with instructions regarding an incoming wire transfer into your bank account, with instructions to keep 10% for yourself (your salary, obviously) and forward 90% to the supplier he tells you. Totally aboveboard, right?

Money laundering is a fascinating, fascinating topic.
This was my first thought as well. Most home automation solutions are very limited and require integration with something like IFTTT to perform anything but the simplest on/off scheduling.
I suspect this has more to do with the balance between L2 cache sizes and syscall overhead than anything else. Dumping nothing into nothing at 40GB/s is unacceptable, I need it to be 60GB/s!

With actual I/O devices the difference should be negligible. Sequential reads and writes are well optimized at every level, from the CPU to the HDD.
Interesting bastardization of a phenomenon documented in focus groups around news from a nearly decade ago:

"If the news is that important, it will find me [through social channels]."

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/27/us/politics/27voters.html
Hi, thanks for your interest.

You can check out the development here:
https://github.com/chenglou/reason-react-example

Cheng also gave a talk at ReactConf about our efforts.

Things are still quite in flux, but you're welcome to contribute and help improve things.
What is the abuse? Changing your meaningless identifier?

Despite your explanation, I still don't see any actual damage. I made up the identifier in the first place. Why should anyone care if I change it? All my posts will remain my posts.

The only thing is that maybe some people who remember my posts with the old username won't recognize the new name as the same poster, which I don't see as a significant issue. Is that a problem for forum managers? I would have thought they would have problems with people creating multiple new accounts and spamming, not changing the username of existing accounts.

Please explain, I'm honestly curious. Maybe I'm missing something?
Multiple Coupled Finite State Machine DSL Using Tcl
>> because Netflix for years relied on plugins to deliver over browsers.

They still do, you have to have the Widevine PLUGIN and the Open H264 PLUGIN to play content on netflix

It is a pure myth that eme does not have plugins

>browsers have less leverage as more Netflix subscribers get their content either on set-top boxes or mobile devices (where Netflix has total end-to-end control), and fewer are stuck with browsers.

I am fine with that, I would rather have that than an HTML5 standard that requires binary plugins to work. I would rather have that then the risk EME brings to extent beyond video content to start having entire pages plugin bases, fonts DRM encumbered, and 100's of other consequences to this move that are coming
Ask HN: Why are spamming services (aka 'cold email') on the rise?
I've been getting more and more spam from entrepreneurs and growth hackers who send "personalized" emails (with automated followups at 1, 2, and 4 week intervals) using services like yesware, ninjaoutreach, etc to my non-public work email. The pitch verbiage is always similar like they're all using a shared script. Most violate the CAN-SPAM act as they have no opt-out mechanism while some others use a link to whatever service they are using to send the spam. Most also use tracked links as well as a hidden image to try to track open rates. Without fail, when asked, the sender will claim they 'got your email from LinkedIn' (where it has never been published) or 'guessed what it would be'.

Are other folks seeing a similar rise in this annoyance? Any thoughts on why spamming is suddenly 'sexy' and 'growth hacky'?
If you think about it, how many web designers were knocked out by WordPress?

Are you assuming it's a small number? It seems reasonable to assume that without WordPress we might have another 10,000 web designers. Or 100,000. Or 0. Or -10,000 if WP theme design increased the size of the web industry. We don't know.

These sorts of notionally statistical questions breakdown when you try to use "common sense" or logic-but-without-data to answer them. We have no way of knowing what might have happened without WordPress.
I don't understand your clarification either:

> The point of enforcing DRM is not to prevent piracy, but rather to flex their market clout and demonstrate control.

I don't see how DRM does this. The amount they've spent compared to the results they've got seems to demonstrate a complete lack of control to me.

>As long as they put up moderate barriers to ripping, and as long as they have legal sanction to suppress productized piracy, the steady stream of new must-have content allows them to throw their weight around.

What does DRM do to prevent productized piracy?

>Licensing streaming without DRM is a slippery slope that decreases the perceived value of their content.

So the choose to increase the real value of it instead?
Hi HN! I'm Ben, the solo founder of Calibre Analytics: https://calibreapp.com. Calibre monitors websites and applications in a clean-room testing environment from all over the world. Up until January Calibre has been an "inbetween other things" / evenings / holidays kind of project. (Only, oops—I did that for four years.).

Last year I knuckled down to get into the position where I could work on it full time. I've spent the last 8 weeks working on "Test profiles" (The launch post is here: https://medium.com/get-calibre/announcing-test-profiles-and-...) — It allows you to emulate hardware devices (cpu speed, user-agents and screen dimensions), as well as limit the bandwidth (latency, download and upload speeds), and set cookies (you could use this to log into your app, test a staff-shipped feature, or maybe turn off advertising and see the performance impact.)

I think I've finally got the basis of a really powerful tool, and I'm keen to share it with… everyone! I do everything myself, so if you've any questions, I'm here to answer them!
Isn't this just restating what I wrote in VC-speak?

> The biggest thing with the subscription is clear [Customer Acquisition Cost] vs. [Long Term Value].

i.e. "recurring billing results in more people failing to cancel, because they either forget or are deterred by our 'customer retention program.'"

> With our current model this equation works and we can profitably acquire new customers.

i.e. "we wouldn't be able to profit and grow without doing this."

It seems like you genuinely care about good coffee, but what's the desired end-state? If it's "great instant coffee at $1/cup with no auto-billing," that makes sense. If it involves negative option billing, it's shameful.
Kotlin: Practical Swift/Scala/C#-like Language for JVM and JS
Butterflies.

(To a rough approximation.)
Great. Because it's not like we've been using Google Plus for ages to track our whereabouts. ;) And before that, Latitude.

But wait, there's competition - we also have their Trusted Contacts, which features similar functionality.
How to hunt for a black hole with a telescope the size of Earth
To be fair, "algebra" means very different things to different people, so I don't think Grue3 meant to be quite as brash as it may have sounded.
Apple acquires powerful iOS automation app Workflow, makes it available for free
Where Am I? Geolocation in Elm
That may lead to people switching to other browsers more often than dropping Netflix subscriptions, but the costs for Netflix wouldn't be 0

Maybe not, but since they already provide their content via various apps anyway, it's hardly a leap to them providing a dedicated, proprietary player on other platforms as well.

If Chrome were to ship without DRM, Netflix would cave faster than you can say "thepiratebay". See what happened to flash when it wasn't supported on the iPhone.

Flash continued to be the dominant platform for online video for several more years, major sites didn't work on Apple devices, and competitors literally ran campaigns with lines like "See the whole Internet"? I'm not sure you're making the point you intended to here.

If your defeatist attitude had prevailed in the early years, we'd all be writing VBScript to animate the spinning gif on homepage.doc – yes, Microsoft once tried to push .doc to replace .html.

This is just silly. At no point in the history of the Web, from its earliest days growing out into public awareness, was there any serious prospect of anything like that happening. Whether we're really better off with JS having become the dominant front-end language is a different question, but I digress.

I also think the music industry has proven quite clearly that you'll have a lot more success with carrots than sticks.

The music industry can sell its primary content at sub-dollar prices and still make a reasonable profit. Almost no-one else can.
You're targetting espresso over drip. This is good in my books, but I don't know how the US oddity about drip vs espresso will affect your market. Europe and Australia/NZ will likely pose different marketing requirements.

For EU/AU, it seems to me like you want to be competing with the Nespresso market and leveraging the fact that you can produce a similar 'pod' quality (or better) without the machine - basically a convenience approach, perhaps with some price influence. You'll struggle to compete with superior flavour since we understand decent espresso. There's a reason Starbucks has nearly completely collapsed in Australia and it's largely thanks to Italian migrants in the 60s, and enough of Europe knows about Italy that they have a clue about coffee. The secondary advantage is that in AU at least (maybe also EU? my experience of travel there isn't broad enough), a good cafe-made espresso is quite expensive (AUD$5) so you have profit margins on your side too.

For the US, you can't really compete on price and people are more happy to drink rubbish coffee like badly made drip and Starbucks. To this end, in my mind you will need to convince them that the superior flavour is worth it when it is not prohibited by superior expense or effort (ie: going out to a specialist cafe). The evidence is in this thread where people balk at the idea of a $3 'instant' coffee. This is a distinctly different marketing ploy to the above, but I think a one-size-fits-all won't work for you.

I don't really have a lot to add, but that's my gut feel on how you need to go about pitching this. Simply saying 'we can do instant coffee that doesn't suck!' to me doesn't quite capture the subtlties of the problem you're actually solving for consumers, as it doesn't place it in the broader context of how/where/why they consume coffee.

Good luck!
Joe seems quite fast and robust across all the tests.
But the part about a book author calling the professor who gave the C and getting her to change the grade just happened. Look at the date on her form to amend the grade: March 1, 2017:

https://i1.wp.com/loweringthebar.net/wp-content/uploads/2017...

Awesome story. :)
I do use plug, actually. It was more a complain to the fact that the editor does feel a bit sluggish sometimes if you have a few plugins on. I think vimL is a pretty darn slow language (not to say that it's probably one of the worst languages I've ever touched).
My understanding is that humans + livestock are 98% of terrestrial vertebrate biomass. I've seen this from both Daniel Dennett and Paul Chefurka. Hrm, xkcd, now that I think of it.

I've not run across a good number for invertebrate biomass, though your point of total annual cycle vs. instantaneous is worth considering.

OK, I've just tracked down a Wikipedia page which gives ants + termites biomass as less than that of humans + cattle combined, roughly 850 GT vs. 750 GT, taking high-range estimates. Beatles are another highly-abundant insect phyle which might ... tip the scales.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biomass_(ecology)
You sure? 100 ships a day means 14 minutes per ship, and a lock cycle takes 10-20 minutes, so that's awfully suggestive to me. OTOH, I'm not sure of the relative difficulty and expense of adding height to a tunnel vs creating and operating a lock - I'd assume at some length it makes more sense to use a lock, since tunnel cost scales with length and lock cost doesn't.
I remember writing a piece of machine language on a C-64 which flipped the color palette as fast as possible. It was so fast that all you saw was individual horizontal line segments of different colors within every individual raster line. (I.e. it was faster than the horizontal refresh rate of the CRT which is usually what, well over 10 kHz.)

Sheesh, when was that? Probably 1985.
That's true, but I draw the line at people creating a higher life form, and that's what it would take to replace programmers.
PA Semi -> A* CPUs
US Officials: Info suggests Trump associates may have coordinated with Russians
I agree that it's a myth that EME doesn't have plugins. What EME does is reduce the scope of those plugins.

HTML5 does not require binary plugins in order to work.
The Week in Ethereum News
Very little programming needs any algorithms though. Most of it is literally deciding what data to record, what validation rules to apply, and how to aggregate the collected data in to something useful. It's why MS Office is so prevalent - most business software is written in Excel with all the "code" abstracted in to forms and macros.
Uptownfunk, I also severely limit my caffeine intake (right now zero). It's a tool that mitigates fatigue at the expense of anxiety, irritability, and sleep disruption.

Through an anthropologist's lens, caffeine helps adapt unreliable human mental concentration to an industrial/capitalist society. (Just like ritalin and adderall!) See ern's comment regarding "forced to take coffee to keep up with my fellow developers". I've observed that coffee is the most common beverage (after water) which employers freely distribute in the workplace.

This said, many folks prefer a caffeinated existence and don't experience the side effects. If it works out for you, then enjoy it!
Very much agree. And I think the corollary, which you describe more than state outright, is that as the tooling and technology gets better, the human value-add would likely demand the talents of the more imaginative, "right-brained", and creatively extroverted - not the stereotypical techie profile. Knuth thought he could do it with literate programming, which didn't take off, to say the least. Maybe it won't ever be that way. Interesting times ahead!
I've worked with Auto Layout a bit.

- The GUI built into Xcode is usable once you learn its quirks (e.g. how to swap the relationship in a constraint so that it doesn't say that the right edge of some button needs to be -5pt from the left edge of the button next to it).

- The ObjC/Swift API is bad.

- It handles RTL languages excellently: by default, constraints are expressed in terms of leading/trailing edges, but can be literal left/right if you want.

- It deals poorly with adding and removing views from a hierarchy: removing a view discards all of its constraints, so you need to have logic to reestablish them.

Unfortunately, there are horror stories about performance tanking with an OS update or taking on exponential properties, like this one which lead the team to develop a non-constraint-based layout framework:

https://realm.io/news/slug-nick-snyder-layoutkit/

It leads me to wonder if unpredictable performance is a limitation of constraint solving… or at least to be cautious with current implementations. Maybe an API that only makes known-fast relationships possible would help.