skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Consider these numbers from the College Board (SAT/GRE folks) [1]:

Total of Reading, Math, Writing scores on SAT by college plans:

1488 -- Visual & Performing Arts

1476 -- Psychology

1587 -- Philosophy & Religious Studies

1606 -- Computer & Information Science and Support Services

1612 -- Engineering

1685 -- Physical Sciences

1714 -- Mathematical Sciences

As anyone that has been around a US university lately knows, non-native English speakers are overrepresented in CS departments and consequently, this bring down the verbal and hence overall SAT scores for CS a bit. Furthermore, that's a pretty big category for CS that includes some of the far less theoretical areas.

I've noticed, more than once, that Philosophy majors feel that they are somehow in a rarified domain where the things they do are far beyond the understanding of the rest of us. A bit like my father, a doctorate in Theology, that was worried that if I went to MIT I would end up being a super TV repairman.

Academic papers and books in Philosophy are at times obtuse, but really no more difficult than reading a paper on, say, orogeny, out of my field, so slow going, but not impossible (it's the study of how geologic processes form mountains). Can Philosophy majors say the same thing about my books on Ring theory, Measure theory, Category Theory, Stats, Machine learning, Computability, Compilers, or Operating Systems?

I've tried to understand general relativity (to no avail) and my struggles with quantum theory have given me a great respect for Physics majors--they deserve their place at the top of the academic IQ ladder, but Philosophy majors should perhaps take a peek at what some of the rest of us work on.

[1] https://reports.collegeboard.org/pdf/total-group-2016.pdf
At least for Gamestop, you're probably not wrong. Amazon Prime gets you new video games at 20% off MSRP. That's cheaper than what the distributor sells them for.
Where did you buy your Star Wars action figures? Your Lego sets? Or did you not play with toys as a kid?
I still go to B&N because I like to drink coffee and read magazines. I don't pay for the magazines, but I still spend like $10 on coffee and such.

Gamestop has no hope for a continued existence with their current business model. Frankly, I'm surprised they are still around.
Quicktype's big debut
Haha sounds like your kids will be spending most of their time at their friends house with the "cool" parents

They will only appreciate your dedication to environmentalism when theyre older
> In a world where browser manufacturers, as a block, refused to implement DRM, it's seems obvious that sooner or later visual media producers would be forced to the table, to gain access to paying consumers. We could be in a DRM-free world, without the inconveniences of elaborate technical restrictions on pass-through and mutual device compatibility, or black box binary blobs on otherwise open source operating systems.

Well, that, or they would have went the direction of newspapers & news - give up on producing quality content, and instead cater to the lowest common denominator by producing the cheapest, most polarising content possible.
RealPlayer was not a Web Standard like EME is. This decision codifies DRM in Web rendering standards.
Does this mean that the "R Us" trademark suits will cease[1]?

[1] https://www.lexisnexis.com/legalnewsroom/intellectual-proper...
The web is great when you know exactly what you want to buy. Brick and mortar is great when you’re still deciding.

Web is very very far from solving the browsing problem. Sometimes I know I want <new toy> but have no idea what exactly I want. So you go to the store to look around.

Sometimes I also like to ask the sales associate, “I have so and so nephew, what should I get for them?”. Web still sucks at solving the librarian/curator/advicegiver problem.
Well, its corporations with money that make communication technologies.

The history of wide scale, maintainable, free speech just hasn't worked. Ever. Why should computers be any different?
I thought that's why it was funny?
I feel you've brought the Browsers (Software, layer 5+) to an ISP fight (Layer 1-4). One that the 99% lost a long time ago. This has been snowballing for a very long time, I feel that momentum is minimal. This snowball is being pushed by pure force.

Power! Unlimited Power!
-Darth Sidious
The first three words of the post are "W3C abandons consensus"

con·sen·sus
kənˈsensəs/
noun
general agreement.

No one said anything about a majority.
Ah yes, another Bane Capital success story.
Though this may have something to do with Amazon (and retail generally trending online), it does appear that the big culprit here were Bain Capital (and its partners) who took it private in 2005 via leverage buyout and ladened Toys r Us balance sheet with untenable debt from thereon. Apparently, they were paying $500M in interests alone per year vs. reinvesting capital in growth of their offline stores or online retail.

I personally feel that, similar to bookstores which as seen a resurgence in neighborhood mom & pop stores, while Amazon will continue to dominate, a lot of smaller toy retailers (both online and offline) will spring up to take Toys r Us' space.
Well, the alternative would be to not have employees in those countries and just ignore it as a market.
you should not have to pay the court costs to fight a system denying you access to public records. the agencies should be required by law to issue an exacting statement as to why the request is denied and reference a law based reason for that denial. As in, there should be an easily addressable list of reasons to deny a specific records request.

going to court is outright intimidation
Laravel's facades are not static method calls, and they are all configurable through Laravel's dependency container:

https://laravel.com/docs/5.5/facades

- edited to remove snark
>It is now possible, technically anyway, for operating systems to boot, service the request and disappear.

This was already possible even with a 2 second boot time. The problem is that it's a stupid use case because (unless the OS boots up in <10ms) the latency of waiting for the bootup is intolerable in any use case where a 2 second boot time was intolerable.
I guess I'm never getting my eToys gift certificate redeemed then :(
Cheap plastic toys probably use superior plastic to the PLA plastic of most maker bots though
Thank you for linking to it. Good for Gates! I am amazed at the proclivity of people to enjoy and dwell on doom and gloom. Even here on HN, where people are smart and tech savvy, doom and gloom prevails. I believe that the tendency to think negatively is very intrinsic to our brains, and prevents most people from achieving their full potential and, I think, this tendency is the major negative force in our ability to achieve faster progress and more just society.

PS Check out my recent discussion on HN, to see how my optimistic, most innocuous comments get criticized and down voted by doom and gloom crowd... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15100050

PPS There you have it: the comments to this thread are already piling up with doom and gloom.
May I interest you in the Black Iron Prison: http://www.principiadiscordia.com/bip/1.php
One of the major features of the British NHS system is virtually /eliminating/ the billing department.

I really think that should be considered as a major feature as well. Not receiving hospital bills months after a procedure and you thought things were all taken care of.
Yes we do.

Because right now the only thing kids want to do is click buttons on a computer.
Great work!

I never understood why this isn't the default.

Hopefully this will finally gain traction in mainline
Chrome. But I'm not holding my breath...
Can somebody explain what exactly is happening here? What were the pros/cons of the move? e.g., it is possible that browsers are in a tight spot: If they fail to provide certain functionality, then content providers just move to native apps. Was that the tradeoff here?
Or intensify?
> I would suggest not underestimating Mozilla's market influence.

They have no market influence. They have maybe ~10% of the market globally (I've seen figures between 5-15%), and that's primarily desktop - which is decreasing daily. On mobile it's even worse (probably less than 1%).

Any influence they have solely extends to the desktop, and that's not the primary way people are interacting with the internet nowadays.
Companies creating copyrighted works will always try to impose DRM.

The best that can be done is make circumventing it legal and easy.
I used to go to Borders constantly, like a hangout. As Amazon grew, I found myself doing exactly this: going to check out the latest releases, flip through the pages, pull out my phone and check Amazon prices. 99% of the time it was cheaper there. Add the book to a wishlist or my cart, put the book back on the shelf and leave empty-handed.

I felt horrible when Borders went under, but I do the same at B&N. If brick-n-mortar want to compete with Amazon, they need to compete with their prices. However, they also have a lot of additional overhead that makes it untenable.

This trend of resellers is going to occur until Amazon dominates the market, or we start buying direct from vendors which doesn't seem likely for many items.
I don't know about the GP. I claim that a form of DRM that Mozilla begrudgingly accepts into Firefox has better odds of not turning out to to be "Sony Rootkit" literal malware than if everybody else is rolling their own.

This battle is lost, let's not lose the war to have our little Alamo moment.
"Mainline web: 0-rated DRMed Netflix if you pay ever-more exorbitant prices for our increasingly tiered package deals that make you try and remember the joy of 'cutting the cord'"

"Alternative web: Some competition without DRM, zero-rating, or other nonneutrality bullshit"

You go ahead and stick with your Netflix, buddy, and best of luck to ya.

American ISPs and legal precedent are all of course bought up by the interests building the former, but luckily I'm not tied down here.
Yes I still don’t know why this feature isn’t in the AWS Console yet. Even Oracle Cloud of all people has this feature in their Virtual Compute.
You're right, this is effectively a serverless mode. But the serverless instances that are currently available (at least on aws) aren't powerful enough for some applications. For those of us stuck in the middle, needing big machines with serverless behaviour, this is a massive win.
I don't think MediaWiki uses Hack, only PHP with HHVM (though I could be wrong).
What makes EME a malware interface?
> Is the world falling apart?

> No.

> Here's a video. Watch it with a VR headset or browser that supports 360 degree video

> Watch me on facebook later this week

Somehow, I think this could have been more persuasive.
Researchers Uncover Mechanism Behind Calorie Restriction and Lengthened Lifespan
Interesting that the techcrunch link has thrice as many upvotes as the amazon link
Fair enough, but, at least, they should speak about how those reference countries are doing against the rest.

In the World Health Organization ranking (1), of all the countries compared in the article, the only one that appears between the first ten in any of the categories (except cost) is France and, in only one metric, Australia and the UK.

Not pointing that seems a strange omission.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Health_Organization_rank...
> Web is very very far from solving the browsing problem.

I may be a rarity, but I still miss Blockbuster for this reason.
"Add" itself is acceptable: "the desired currency must be added to the wallet's balance"
Maybe they will live again in virtual reality.
Laravel dropped HHVM support a year ago, and i'm sure many other CMS's / frameworks have either followed suit (if they ever supported it) or will soon.
DigitalOcean Security Notice: Default password in 1-click mysql installs
58.4% is more than half, but the title says it can't really be considered a consensus. Lots of commitees try to avoid passing things by simple majority and instead refine and/or compromise ideas until they get more buy-in.
adult ones See: Great Britian

I would love to see how that's working out for them, but even to wonder about the experiment borders on paedophilia. This is a tough nut to crack. (punintended...)
How is this not fraud?
This is a reference to The Simpsons, for anyone who didn't get it.
So what was their option? Refusing to implement DRM (as opt-in) would mean that the ignorant user wouldn't be able to see Youtube videos anymore. The result would be that these users would move over to Chrome, Safari or Edge. There was no alternative.
People forget that Alan Turing's essay "Computing Machinery and Intelligence" was published in Mind, a major philosophy journal.

People forget that Boolean algebra comes from a work called "The Laws of Thought," where Boole tries to describe the algebraic operations underlying thought. If you think that isn't something "philosophers do," this is an ancient goal stretching back to Aristotle's logic, up through Descartes, and into figures such as Leibniz (who independently invented calculus and played an important role in giving us the binary number system), Chomsky, and Jerry Fodor. Philosophy is one of the disciplines in the interdisciplinary field of Cognitive Science.

Much of the most important work on the foundations of mathematics was done by philosophers with a mathematical bent (or mathematicians with a philosophical bent, depending on how you want to look at it). Set theory. Incompleteness. First-order logic was invented by Frege.

A lot of the technology we're using right now is traceable back to the work of philosophers.

I've always found that the best way to think of philosophy is simply as inquiry. As a line of inquiry progresses, it may bud off into a field in its own right. Physicists today would have been called Natural Philosophers in Newton's time. In fact, before Newton it was Descartes' physics that reigned supreme in the academy. Some lines of inquiry might not bud off despite significant advancements, such as logic.

Of course, I don't mean to say that philosophy and inquiry are purely synonymous. There's something vague about what the discipline of philosophy exactly is. But I don't think that's too terribly important. The question is what philosophers do. Some of the stuff philosophers "do" would probably strike some readers here as very "heads in the clouds" type stuff. But some of the other stuff, I think HN would find interesting. Check out work by Hillary Putnam. Or Jerry Fodor, if you're interested in "language of thought" type stuff that bears some similarity to Boole's project in The Laws of Thought. Chomsky recently published a newish collection of essays called What "Kind of Creatures Are We?", which is worth a look too.
The Complicated Backstory to a New Children’s Book by Mark Twain
Remember the corporate sponsors of the original EME proposal in 2012: Google, Microsoft, and Netflix https://www.w3.org/TR/encrypted-media/
> I think the author of such a plugin would be at considerable legal risk.

If they are caught... ;-)
I feel for the guy, to be honest. I've been in a good relationship for years now, but I know that bitterness and resentment. If I'd made the mistake of broadcasting my honest thoughts during that time and somebody linked them to me, it would not be pretty.
TurboScript
Agreed, and I work for Google. This is not interesting.
>trying to shoehorn legislation into a format and workflow design for software is a fool's errand at best.

It's not for software, it's for text. Is the law no longer written in text?
Regressr – A command line regression testing framework for testing HTTP services
Too bad. Toys r Us has a great selection and good pricing. I found that they almost always beat Amazon on toys and eliminated the risk of counterfeit stuff, especially for things like Lego.
I like the service keybase provides, but I don't think it has any chance of taking off with the general public.

18 months or so ago I wrote an app called AnyCrypt, utilizing Keybase under the hood: http://lettergram.github.io/AnyCrypt/

The idea was to make it easier for my friends and I to send encrypted messages over any medium. Facebook Messanger, Slack, G chat / hangouts, etc. Facebook couldn't look into our messages, and everything was pretty easy. It took two clicks, which was a pain.. but because we were security conscious we could power through.

On the other hand, most people I work with, my family, other friends, etc. don't have the patience for that. It needs to be no clicks to at max one click. The current route keybase is continuing to take is a command line interface with multiple commands necessary.

The CLI is simply not going to catch on for the normal user. The experienced users just use their own PGP keys and manage it.

As for the new interface, it does look nice. However, the fact it needs to be a unique chat name is kind of a pain. Why not just sign a unique identifier to the chat, then rename locally? Similar to the way Signal does it? Also, what happens if you recent your PGP key?
The attack on consumer rights continues...
For large scale specialty businesses that do not have a unique competitive advantage due to their specificity? Sure! And they should go.

These stores are all middlemen and if it's their sole function, they should expect to compete on efficiency.

However, there are tons of smaller stores that I still frequent due to atmosphere, niche goods, or a niche appeal. For example, friendly local game stores that have excellent customer service or local grocery stores that actually source their products using local connections. One provides an atmosphere that keeps it busy every time that I've been and the other provides goods that I can't find anywhere else, unless I'm getting a substitute good.

Brick and mortar stores that lack either should expect to go under, and hopefully be replaced by higher quality stores.
I'm not sure "doesn't work with most major video sites" is an actual selling point.
For at least 3 of those companies, the "one reason or another" is private equity vampires.
I recall reading another comment [1] on this submission about some DRM technology being claimed to protect content for some 300 days in practice. To me that sounds like it's working pretty darn well.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15279266
Firefox was for a while. OpenOffice also for a short time (especially in schools), before webby things (Google Docs etc) ate it up.
Developing Desktop Application with EmberJs, Electron and PouchDb
I predict that companies will start using EME to deploy all their app code to keep their front-end more closed source.
> DRM is only necessary because there exist (too many) people who don't have a zero-tolerance policy against DRM.

Really? I can see a pretty good argument for why it SHOULD be legal. If I want to post some content I make online why shouldn’t I be able to try to protect it?

And let’s not go through the ‘But Sony rootkit!’ stuff. You can make safe DRM. Rooting someone’s computer is already a crime, that’s why Sony in trouble.

> As soon as these companies were making big money with DRM-free content...

Far too many people see nothing wrong with piracy. It works on music because it’s so cheap. I don’t think you’ll get 99c TV shows or especially movies any time soon. It probably isn’t sustainable, especially for movies.

So people will pirate, out of cheapness or inability to pay or ‘righteousness’ or whatever.

It’s not going to happen.

> ... I am pretty sure the large media companies would in the long run give up their stupid idea that DRM is necessary.

Why should they, from a business perspective, give up control they have now with basically no downside? I don’t even see a moral argument they should give it up.

Now I agree we need better fair use laws, and security people should be able to poke at DRM to make sure it’s not doing evil things. But I don’t see why society, under moral or business obligations, could support outlawing DRM.
Node.js HTTP recording proxy for CI environments
"guiiise, it's just encryption!"

Try harder. Maybe go with a "for the children" or anti-terrorism tack.
Thanks for that! From my reading of the end, it seems to me that there is inherent conflict of interest in being a content-licensee and a browser-maker with respect to DRM e.g. an analogy that builds on foxes guarding the hen house.
I wake at 0600 and commute to work, to be in for 0700 at the latest (I cycle 6-7km.) From 0700 to 0800 I work on personal development such as reading a book or doing some online study (or sometimes I just catch up with online news as I am now.) From 0800 to 1130 I work. From 1130 to 1300 I dine and take a walk/socialise. From 1300 to 1500 I work. At 1500 I go home.

Essentially I work for 5.5 hours -- my fingers are on the keyboard, I'm in a meeting, or I'm thinking through a problem for 5.5 hours per day. We also have the concept of the eight hour day in Australia (which I believe is a matter of law, in fact): eight hours of work; eight hours of social time; eight hours for sleep.

I do this everyday. It gives me a lot of freedom to do the things I want to do when I get home at about 1530 and makes me feel great. I feel healthier for it. I can innovate when I get home and work on a project, or spend more time with my fiancé.

If I ever find my self in a position with a company that the boss(es) don't like this setup, then I simply show my self the door and find another job. Life is way too short to be putting my employer before my own life, health, wishes, and dreams.

Also, I aim to find a job in which I'm solving real social problems (even in a for-profit manner) and not just doing it for the sake of it or the wage. I think this is important too.
The EFF is right for resigning. There's no reason for EFF to be part of a supposed standardization group that is ignoring complaints, especially for a recommendation for a technology that puts freedoms at risk.

And to put salt on injury, the W3C is claiming that they couldn't reach consensus on a covenant regarding anti-circumvention regulations, however they are now making this recommendation without consensus, which seems to me to be disingenuous.

The W3C is clearly and has always been a charade.

And people won't forget that easily, just like we haven't forgotten the days when they were holding the web back. So if they were worried about becoming irrelevant by not adopting DRM, well, they just became irrelevant regardless. Might as well admit that the standards are made by two or three companies which control the market and stop this circus.
Laravel encourages DI via Service Containers: https://laravel.com/docs/5.5/container
And, Laravel static methods (as you see in the docs as Facades) are not truly static (and testable/mockable).
https://laravel.com/docs/5.5/facades#facades-vs-dependency-i...
http://usman.it/laravel-4-uses-static-not-true/
Man, screw Legos.

It was K'Nex all the way for me.
You don't understand the food metaphor. If you have 3 plates of food, but they can be eaten in any order, then 3 people can eat them in 1/3 the time that 1 person could eat them. The food/plate is the code/data, the person/fork is the processor. You're never eating the same exact piece of food at the same time.
I never needed to go to one of these stores to know what I wanted, they just happened to be the most convenient place to get them. I now shop at Lego.com for Lego's for me and my children and Amazon for most other things. Avoiding toy stores and advertisement heavy entertainment has given me and my spouse great control over the toys that we introduce to our children and household.
What good is Firefox if it doesn't have integrity?
I'll go ahead and say they don't exist. There are countries where the ER will kick you out if you can't pay, but none which require you to get an appointment a week in advance for a life-threatening emergency.