skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> The number of useful things that a computer could do might be infinite -- or it might not. We're unlikely to ever hit that point, because will probably be a long tail that never quite reaches zero.

As it is now, we - as humans with programming skills, not professional programmers employed by few select corporations and their subsidiaries - might never hit that point because we'll be prevented from doing so. Trusted computing, DRM, SaaS model and various other things together conspire to take away the ability to run Turing-complete programs on our own machines. It's something we need to keep in mind too.
Emphasis on the "same sized apartment" there: American-sized apartments are quite rare in Tokyo and priced to match. In Tokyo, unlike SF, there are tons of tiny but perfectly livable "one-room mansion" apartments at non-insane rents ($500-1000/mo, depending on how small and how far away from the city).
Dunno, I'm English so it's not an American thing. I don't even ever remember being taught it specifically but obviously I was because I sure as hell didn't make it up myself :p
Excellent. Make sure you keep a sharp eye on that and the future developments, this is one of those little things that can really ruin your life. It's bad enough to have a serious health issue, if it gets compounded by a financial crisis then you can go from 'ok' to 'really bad' in a surprisingly short time when there is no safety net.
> You say "Jobs was willing to give them this but the price was to go DRM free", but why would he do that if DRM was good for Apple, it's what locked this market to iPods?

Here goes a ~10yo tidbit from SJ [0]. Whether you take it at face value, see it as a PR trick, or anything in between is up to you.

> Apple was able to negotiate landmark usage rights at the time, which include allowing users to play their DRM protected music on up to 5 computers and on an unlimited number of iPods. Obtaining such rights from the music companies was unprecedented at the time, and even today is unmatched by most other digital music services. However, a key provision of our agreements with the music companies is that if our DRM system is compromised and their music becomes playable on unauthorized devices, we have only a small number of weeks to fix the problem or they can withdraw their entire music catalog from our iTunes store.

> [...] only 22 out of 1000 songs, or under 3% of the music on the average iPod, is purchased from the iTunes store and protected with a DRM. The remaining 97% of the music is unprotected and playable on any player that can play the open formats. It’s hard to believe that just 3% of the music on the average iPod is enough to lock users into buying only iPods in the future. And since 97% of the music on the average iPod was not purchased from the iTunes store, iPod users are clearly not locked into the iTunes store to acquire their music.

> The third alternative is to abolish DRMs entirely. Imagine a world where every online store sells DRM-free music encoded in open licensable formats. In such a world, any player can play music purchased from any store, and any store can sell music which is playable on all players. This is clearly the best alternative for consumers, and Apple would embrace it in a heartbeat.

> Why would the big four music companies agree to let Apple and others distribute their music without using DRM systems to protect it? The simplest answer is because DRMs haven’t worked, and may never work, to halt music piracy. Though the big four music companies require that all their music sold online be protected with DRMs, these same music companies continue to sell billions of CDs a year which contain completely unprotected music.

[0]: https://web.archive.org/web/20080107121341/http://www.apple....
Ummm... if something doesn't work as advertised, it's frail. Don't try to use weasel your way out of this by invoking "depth" :)
I'm OP. I just said why the 2 party system is worse. Re-read my previous comment.
The average new-build British home is 76 square metres; a typical single-wide mobile home ranges from 60 to 93 square metres.

We're a crowded island, we have small houses.
17 Companies Will Hack Your Brain with Their Brain Boosting Technologies Soon
> ... the record industry had unwittingly created a virtual music download monopoly in iTunes.

I really wonder how they could have been so stupid.
So this. I was on holiday in Mexico with my GF and American's kept asking if it was our honeymoon. They couldn't understand being able to take 4 weeks off and travel! (From NZ)
“Aging for Quality” – One of My All-Time Favorite Copywriting Tips
Joe Bankman: Tax Hero
RIP yahoo pipes. imagine what we could do on the web if everyone was about interoperation instead of walled gardens :(
The key to IoT security is open, user updatable firmware and reasonable per byte transit costs.
20 years web dev here, pretty much agree with everything the author wrote. Exactly my experience and conclusions.
I've done both: grew up, was educated and started my career in the US, then moved to Germany.

Yes, I pay some spectacular taxes, and on a somewhat lower salary than I would probably have in the US, and as a result, live in a smaller house and drive a cheaper car. But the six weeks of annual vacation soften the blow, and being able to leave my nice bike lightly locked in front of my house and in front of a pub in downtown Nuremberg on a Saturday night makes up the rest of the difference.

As for the medical, my anecdata is that I've never waited more than two hours in an emergency room (each time, non-life threatening, just weekend) and that care was far less expensive than in the US, even as a private payer. One example while skiing in Austria: I fell and injured my thumb, ski patrol insisted I go to the hospital. I paid 20 EUR to take a cab to the next town. The emergency room looked at my passport and took my word on my address in Germany. A few x-rays later (no break), I had a packet of pain pills for the next three days.

A few weeks later, the bill arrived: 125 EUR.
Eh I was with you until the Nerdwriter1 channel thing, yes the production value is great and they are well made but if you watch other better ones like Every Frame A Painting, Lessons From A Screenplay, Channel Criswell, KaptainKristian, etc you'll notice how his commentary is less than meaningful when it comes to his movie/tv related videos.
Medium's trying to get in on that buzzfeed cash.
Surprising new role for lungs: Making blood
I don't think COW in general is a big issue for databases. You can get pretty good performance for ZFS (very stable and consistent behavior), for example. The COW is not free, of course, but you get interesting features in return, and if you need them (e.g. snapshots), it's usually much better than LVM + non-COW filesystem.

The fact that some COW filesystem perform poorly does not mean all COW filesystems do.
UX: Little Big Details for Your Product
Google Earth Pro 7.1 License Key and Crack Free Download
hey, sorry about that - the prezentz.js frameworks code was pulled in a wrong way to our site, but we managed to solve it now.
> "VC's never fund anything but social media apps and advertising companies" -- HN.

Well, they also occasionally fund stupid shit like uBeam.

> "Yes of course SpaceX is going to make Musk money" -- HN.

Isn't it? Except that money is wisely reinvested into the Mars transportation project.

> "Funding a supersonic plane is a stupid idea" -- HN.

Supersonic passenger plane is not a smart idea for various technical and economical reasons. I don't think that's just "HN opinion".
Apple OS X and iOS are both BSD based as well.

There 4 main families of BSD, each with a different focus. All are highly secure and some are portable across most CPUs. The Wikipedia articles provide a lot of good information.

I would choose BSD over Linux because it is more compact, far more secure and easier to implement drivers. The tools and utilities for both Linux and BSD are GNU - so only the kernel is different.
Though weirdly in modern American politics, there's some degree of inversion there, with the "coastal liberal elites" voting for "socialist" healthcare and the unemployed coal miner with black lung disease voting against it.
Apple is legacy hardware vendor, I don't see anything wrong making software for you own hardware to complete ecosystem. MS, on the other hand, tried to capture, lock in users' generic hardware and kill competitors, which is totally different case imho.
Hey, apologies about the autoplay, it's fixed now.

Also, Daniel (the author of the prezentation) has nothing to do with this article being screwed up with autoplay.
I meant "normal" as in mass-market, not "normal for HN". I, probably like you, of course have a unix fileserver in my residence (as well as a metric ass-ton of vinyl, because it seems we are similar types of nerd).
it's just one example of a system of living that doesn't involve a central government. I'm not an anarchist myself so tend to be extremely skeptical of anarchist claims that a country with no police force would continue to be "modern" for any stretch of time.
No. The article advocates scientific inquiry into outlandish ideas, and while parapsychology did not yield fruit other ARPA endeavours mentioned did.
In a similar fashion, some turntables have four rows of dots on their platter and a strobe light that will blink at a frequency determined by your mains AC frequency, and when the platter is moving at a perfect 33 RPM or 45 RPM, the respective row of dots for your AC frequency will appear to be standing still.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LdyiFn_idpY
Visiting a foreign country is regarded as an essential rite of passage in many parts of the world. Being surrounded by people who speak a different language, use a different currency and have a different culture provides a very valuable life experience. Your understanding of "normal" can shift very quickly when you get to experience being a foreigner.

I can't help but think that passport ownership is one of the fundamental cultural divides in the US. It's difficult to understand the value of travelling abroad if you've never experienced it and don't know many people who have.

Geography is no excuse - Australians are prolific international travellers, despite the size of their continent and their oceanic isolation. Spending a year abroad is the norm for young Aussies, but it's still regarded as a rare privilege for young Americans.
This is a strangely divisive topic in the startup industry.

For some reason, there are smart people who think that meritocracy works: work hard and things will be good for you. The problem is that in many cases working hard (as in building up a startup) does indeed give people the opportunity to rise in society. But it is not true in all cases at all. And so the negative statement "if you are struggling you didn't try enough" is completely flawed.

First, in capitalism, a work's remuneration is supposed to be related in a way to the perceived utility of that work for society in general. Second competition means that a work's remuneration is inversely proportional to how easy it is to perform.

Using those 2 propositions, it becomes obvious that jobs with little utility and high competition have a remuneration that tends to go down to 0 (fast food, taxis, etc.). So in these cases, no matter how hard you work, your pay can only go that high.
It's completely incomprehensible to me why research pussyfoots around the large elephant in the room. Commercial requirements tools (that are amenable to partial transformation into inputs for data driven code generation) do exist (DOORS, ReqIF), but there's a distinct lack of FOSS communities, which is something I cannot understand.

The rise of the agile methodology has IMO worsened the problem by basically making throwing in the towel the default approach. (Throw in some "but, but, you're doing agile wrong!" here.)
> I wish companies like this would come out and say what they are: an acqui-hire project.

That would be, well, most of the regular startups too. The problem is, you can't tell everyone you're aiming for an exit, because exit == fucking over your existing customers, and you need those customers to be able to exit. So, startups lie about how they care about the users and their product.

That's why nowadays I assume by default that a startup is just done for exit, unless proven otherwise.
Yet in the equally crowded Netherlands, the average house size is much larger. Is it just the house building industry is really poor here in the UK?
> we shouldn't be thinking of robots as any different to the market forces that have been going on for years

It's not that they're so different as such; it's the scale and speed of change that's different.
Literally every Uber driver I've spoken to was happy. In fact many of them have actually quit other jobs, to drive an Uber.
Privacy Law Course at Workplace
Workflow uses urlschemes mostly, but at least one co-founder (Conrad Kramer) has a background in reverse engineering and jailbreak tools, which probably helped him discover undocumented urlschemes in apps. Here's a great presentation he gave on reverse engineering lyft: https://realm.io/news/conrad-kramer-reverse-engineering-ios-...
Golang now has native support for OpenBSD's pledge(2)
>The tools and utilities for both Linux and BSD are GNU

There's a fairly substantial BSD userland. E.g. BSD make vs GNU make.
No, the signal indicates whether a given field is for even or odd scanlines. I used plenty of computers and CRTs around that time and not one incorrectly displayed progressive as interlaced.
I believe that from 2018, all new London taxis will have to be zero emission capable.

On the other hand, the "capable" may be weasel wording. It seems that the taxi being discussed is a hybrid with quite a short range (70 miles?). It can be recharged at a point, but can also be recharged via its petrol engine, which may run for lengthy periods if there are no quick charging points available (not many at the moment in London).

Seems like a smallish step in the right direction.
Bandwidth is practically free at least where I'm living in. Storage is something I need to think about and go buy separately.
RAID 5/6 in btrfs doesn't have data integrity features so you're back to square 1 on this regard.
- set aside a time after every iOS release to retest the frontend because apple will have broken some part of the standard in amusing and hilarious ways.
As far as I am concerned, they can. But they are not bloody supposed to change it again, after I have changed it to something of my choosing. I am sick and tired of "yeah, so you have set your default browser to FF, but we know better than you what you want; so we have reset it again on yet another Patch Tuesday. Admit it, YOU WANT THE E!" (Consent, what consent?)
The comments are remarkably negative for a can-do crowd of entrepreneurial people. Success is built on a string of multiple failures. I'm rooting for this team to succeed.
Why LÖVE?
Show HN: Gcmc – G-Code Meta Compiler
GearBest, uma loja online que oferece todo tipo de eletrônico importado
Supersonic passenger plane is not a smart idea for various technical and economical reasons. I don't think that's just "HN opinion".

AFAIK, the technical and economic reasons boil down to: "Too expensive to build, too expensive to fly, people object to the sonic booms".

I don't know if there is a way around the sonic boom problem, but for the first two there's an "easy" fix: make it cheaper. I don't have a clue how to do that, but and I have no particular opinion on Boom, but if someone came up with a way around that "small" problem then everything else falls into place.
I meant more as in 'feature A isn't doing everything I wished it was'; not as not doing its main task.
Related; I wish people would stop picking such names for their products / companies. Nowadays if I read anything about DevOps, I start to feel like I'm reading something about naval fleet command. Or the other day I saw that headline and thought about Mars terraforming project, only it turned out to be a configuration management software. sigh.
I keep meaning to change to tmux, but for some reason I still stick to screen. I know tmux is so much better, but I still find all the features I need in screen, and it happens to be installed on most hosts I am using.
Why Power Brings Out Your True Self
So many comments about big houses, I'm wondering if buying a big house in the suburbs that you have to commute hours to work from and therefore rarely enjoy is (to quote Homer Simpson) both the solution and the cause of all America's problems.
Curiously, a decidedly tech-unsavvy publication from where I live, described this event as "companies are boycotting YouTube because extremist videos are displayed alongside their ads."

Which unintentionally describes YouTube as what it actually is.
Thanks for writing up such an in-depth response. I really appreciate your feedback!

I'm working on the audio sources - the two book reviews were recorded with a Blue Yeti, which is awesome, but involved syncing up the audio later which was awkward. I've just taken delivery of a Lav mic (or shirt mic) so I'll see how that works. Early results seem middling - better than onboard mic, not as good as Yeti, but it'll be much better for videos like 'Designing Success'.

Thanks again!
This. They have been doing this for decades. Also Audi "8" something is equal to BMW "8" something.
Full disclosure: I didn't make this, but a friend of mine did. I found it to be a very clean and useable syntax, and some of you might find it useful.
Also of interest, the unit price of Concorde adjusted for inflation was about $160m around the end of the production run.
Restoration of the Town Hall and the Royal Asiatic Society
I'm more on the theory end of PL, but in my experience program committees generally regard difficulty as a negative for a paper. The main thing PCs want is for papers which make progress on important problems. Now, you can do this either by (1) attacking existing open problems, or (2) by finding new important problems.

It's easy to tell that a long-standing open problem is important, but generally these problems are open because they are hard, and consequently the technical sophistication for new attacks on them is generally very high.[] New problems can often be solved with relatively simple techniques, but it's also difficult to tell if a new problem is genuinely important or just some random thing made up for submission.

With a low acceptance rate, PCs tend to favor type (1) papers over type (2) papers, because few people feel comfortable arguing for a paper that might* be doing something important over one that is doing something important. This is widely seen as a failure mode of low acceptance-rate venues.

So over the last several years many of the top PL conferences (such as POPL, LICS and PLDI) have moved to a multiple track format in order to increase the number of papers they accept. This is precisely to give program committees the freedom to take chances on "risky" papers that might become important, or might become footnotes.

[*] Occasionally, someone will solve a difficult open problem with simple techniques, and these papers are immediately accepted with much rejoicing. It's easy to have your cake and eat it, when you have two cakes...
Self-Serve Data Preparation: Help Yourself
I didn't mean to say that the proof could be used in science, but neither can the proofs of pure mathematical theorems, either, such as the ones involving infinity. You don't have to test something for it to exist logically.
You don't actually need a passport to travel within the EU. Just a European id card. Still, most people I know do have passports, but that might tell you more about my particular bubble than anything else.
They definitely get it wrong but I think they don't care because it is 'good enough' and are not sure how to improve the match making, it probably will get better over time of course as software always does. Up until recently I was getting ads for Muslim dating sites showing up on YouTube. I am not Muslim, and I am not interested in dating, and never searched for anything to do with this. I suspect they showed up because I watch some Bollywood music videos on occasion. The algorithms are not as intelligent as I once thought, they seem to go with a 'good enough' approach. Bollywood is a subset of the Indian film industry, 88% or so of people in India are not Muslim, also I live in the UK and I am a westerner of Indian origin (so likely a minority of traffic) but they must also get traffic or interest in these videos from Pakistan and others and think, good enough relevance, insert ad.
I read the biggest danger is something pointing up and cutting the exposed cable running to the central motor controller, potentially shorting it. That would stop all motors on the rover (wheels and a few more).
You have been colonized by American propaganda
Depends on which europeans you mean. The higher taxed countries like the nordics pay mad taxes. I don't mind though because I feel it's well spent (i.e. my attitude towards public spending is that it is usually pretty efficient). That's probably a big difference to the US where the attitude seems to be that taxes are pretty much a black hole.

Tax calc for me:

Employer pays $8k

Payroll taxes deducted: $2k

My gross salary: $6k

My income tax: $2k

My net salary: $4k

If I make one big pruchase for all my $4k, the VAT is (with some exceptions, 25%) so I buy goods for $3k + $1k tax.

So basically, of $8 paid by my employer each month, I can buy goods or services for $3k. That's pretty steep! If you look at the income tax above, you'll see it's only 1/3 however.
From your linked comment:> If you want to use the Clear Key key system for privacy, you need to deliver the key over https

I don't see anything that requires that the key be delivered over the net. I just did a test with Clear Key where the page with the video playback has a text field that the viewer pastes the key into, and that worked [1].

The scenarios I'm envisioning involve sharing videos between people that have good non-web methods of communicating, so can distribute a video's encryption key via some non-web means. End user encryption applications tend to by usability train wrecks for non-tech people (heck, they are often terrible for tech people, too...), so what I'm going for here is trying to get rid of the video viewer having to go outside their browser to deal with viewing an encrypted video.

Maybe this can be done with MSE without EME, by handling the decryption in JavaScript?

[1] Based on the Clear Key sample here: https://www.html5rocks.com/en/tutorials/eme/basics/
A recreation of Bollywood
Dries Buytaert's response, linked from his (at this time) most recent tweet: http://buytaert.net/tag/living-our-values

Living our values!!! JFC...

I don't think he understands the actual implications of the values he claims to be defending.
First Amendment would be the U.S. Government saying "take down those videos". That's not what's happening.
> We have managed to be largely blind to this because the amount of work that's available to programmers has expanded hugely to compensate for increased productivity - plus our tools aren't quite as nice as the hypothetical I described.

I don't know if 'blind' is the right word since this topic gets discussed on the regular both here on HN as well as on more general programming forums like reddit.

Anyhow, I certainly agree that programming as a career the way we know it today is predicated on the notion that the potential scope of work available continues to increase. Why wouldn't it, though? IMO we've barely begun scratching the surface of what's possible with computation technology. Will productivity really outpace the amount of available work by that much, that fast? Seems weird, but I'm no futurist so maybe I'm just being naive.