skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
There is more than one kind of parasite.

Copyright and other intellectual exclusion (IE) laws were introduced in good faith to ensure that (1) it is rational to undertake intellectual endeavours and (2) the number of people who benefit from intellectual endeavours but don't support its development is limited.

Then the background against which IE had been written changed; now, some IE holders began to abuse their monopoly (a form of parasitic behaviour), and they came to informal understandings with lawmakers (who also put their own personal interests ahead of the collective interest, which is again parasitic) to strengthen the IE laws.

The real problem with IE laws is that as more people use intellectual works, the value to society increases, but due to the exclusionary nature of IE laws, they discourage widespread dissemination. The best solution would be a separate parallel economy for intellectual works where all consumers pay an amount from the primary economy that doesn't depend on how many intellectual works they consume, but producers receive an amount that depends on how much utility consumers directly or indirectly extract from their work (in proportion to all other intellectual works). That would open a number of difficult issues, and current parasites under the IE scheme have amassed enough power to resist it strongly, so I doubt we would see it any time soon even though it would be collectively beneficial.
This is utterly thinking out my ass, but here is a question I had about IPv6 that I thought I would ask:

Could it make sense to use a network wrapper around some types of objects, such that each object has an IPv6 address - and all communications between then occur over IP?

Say you build a distributed app where each component of the app has an IP wrapper - you can deploy the various components in such a way where the calls between them occur on IP - this may allow you to deploy an app across multiple cloud vendors that would otherwise not have the ability to mix and match services.

Say, you have one vendor that has super cheap storage, and another has a particular hardware-based feature you want to tak advantage of. Deploy part of your application across both - linking the components through IPv6 tunnels...

Obviously there are performance issues with this - but it may make it more secure/resilient if those factors are more important.

E.g. you could have duplicate service components spread across multiple vendors which would make the overall app much harder to take down in an outage....

so aside from performance.... what other thoughts would there be against making core components wrapped which are globally addressable?
Diablo 3 Beta Coming Q3...
Ask HN: Is There Some Reason That A Lot Of Articles Are Dying?
There was apenwar's article on Bitcoin and the article on the best to hire a programmer. I'll admit that neither was absolutely first-rate but flagging/deleting them seems a bit extreme. Is there some new school of "deletionism" appearing on HN?
I'd definitely attend this meetup in SF/SV area. StartupGuild is a great community for entrepreneurs.
Wolfram Alpha cleanup script
As long as the measure of productivity corresponds to something physical (which even bits on a harddisk are), then an exponential increase in productivity (as we have seen in the past) would eventually require humanity and its products to form a sphere whose radius grows faster than the speed of light.

Do you agree that that is a pretty hard limit?
Fermat's Last Theorem - Is this the marvelous proof?
Ask HN: What do startup companies want to see on your resume?
I'm fixing up my resume(CV) after a few years and I want to target startup companies. It'd be great to hear from some other folks at startups that either hire or have been hired about what should go into a modern resume.

(And of course, you should have your portfolio/github/etc. That's a given.)
I wonder what would happen if you took it off and attached it to a random other car. Then the FBI would be tracking someone else illegally, in theory.
Camilla and Marc Spring/Summer 2011-12, Australia
Move on to the next question
Sweet! I am on that map.

I am also interested in SF meetups... Going to the rockhealth one tonight @ 130 townsend
nor are robots
Better a visible internal betrayal than a long datasuck by an "Advanced Persistent Threat"

The whole Anonymous thing was getting a little too big, IMO, and needed something like this to fragment it and make the kids involved start thinking about the rest of their lives. I hope a few well meaning but naieve people quit while they're ahead, wipe their disks, and realize that some government agency has probably been tracking them down for a while & that this is a blessing in disguise.
>Am I the only one absolutely terrified by that number?

No, unfortunately there are plenty of other irrational sensationalists.

>Malthus wasn't wrong in principle, just in timescale.

He has been horribly wrong in principle, as has every other pessimist who cried wolf for the past 3000 years. Saying 'the timescale was just wrong' is not an adequate defense by any means. Timescale is what matters and is the essence of all predictions.

Ask a trader: a prediction that oil will go up in the long run is completely useless if you don't define when that event will occur, and subsequently loose everything on a big short term dip that you were blind to.

Additionally, if your prediction is allowed to take "infinity" duration to come true, then it can never be disproven. And what can't be disproven is usually categorically not worth the thought.

To discuss particulars, the current evidence is technology allows us to produce TOO much food TOO cheaply, which is compounded further by domestic farm subsidies. Efficiency gains are so successful in keeping up with demand, that in Mexico City they buy corn from Iowa, even though they have cheaper farmland and local labor that could be utilized.

Additionally, many economists are currently considering the possibility of efficiency gains being so strong a factor that they lead to structural unemployment. This picture of runaway efficiency gains is the exact opposite of what Malthus had envisioned (constant\linear resource utilization massively outstripped by population growth rate)

>It's sounds science fiction-ey, but I don't understand how you can see data like this and then defund NASA.

All the nations economically developed enough to have a space program are rapidly decreasing in population. China, Russia, Japan are all on the decline, the US is only increasing due to immigration. It's economics 101: wealthy people have more economic freedom to invest in birth control and their time in things other than family. Additional children switch from being an asset into a liability when you have to pay substantial amounts for them to be educated and the opportunity cost of taking time to raise a child becomes higher. The S shaped curve has been in full swing in developed countries like the US and Russia where the vast majority of the land is deserted, without anything resembling a Malthusian scenario.
PHD Comics:Dark Matter
I never said if anything was right or wrong, nor did I assume any of it, I just asked if it was related. Good to know curiosity gets flagged around here.
(Note that I haven't been able to see the original video so far, so add salt to taste.)

> If you manage to make a single tab commit that much memory as a delta without Flash (remember, 13 MB to > 400 MB) please screenshot about:memory and get back to me.

I can understand this as a weak prediction, but it certainly doesn't work as a strong one. I can trivially make a tab use over a gigabyte of memory in recent Chromium by creating a gazillion nested objects in JavaScript. (I just did, in fact. If you really want the screenshot and/or source, say so and I'll post it somewhere.) Absent some default limit in V8 that I haven't encountered, I could presumably make it use unbounded memory. I can also create apparently-unbounded latency in a single tab's UI this way, by chewing up CPU in blocking JavaScript code, though this will eventually trigger the “page seems unresponsive” dialog box.

I would also tend to expect an exploit to potentially abuse the JavaScript engine by straining its limits, including things like pouring a large number of identical objects onto the heap to fill memory with exploitable patterns.
> It's sounds science fiction-ey, but I don't understand how you can see data like this and then defund NASA.

The politicians who authorized the current pension structures for California state employees undoubtedly had similar data, so I imagine defunding NASA would be comparatively trivial short-term thinking.
No, it's not extremely likely. Given that most browser exploits utilize some sort of a heap spray, a growing memory usage is almost standard pattern for a browser vuln.
Privacy groups applaud Senator Rockefeller's "Do Not Track" bill
I forgot to mention - Chrome, it's written in a dialect of C, right? Ahahahhahaha!! and there goes any chance of security right there.
Come to Germany, Switzerland or any other country with the european Dr. system then. You don't have to take any classes or pay tuition. In fact, you are not a student. We don't call them students and we don't treat them as students.

But watch out for an appropriate Professor! If you're lucky you don't have to do any teaching. This is usually the case for non-university research institutes like those who belong to Max-Planck, Fraunhofer or Helmholtz. At universities it depends. In some cases, TA'ing alone can be a fulltime job. Other professors see you as cheap labour and you have to do lots of work for them that you're neither qualified nor motivated to. Examples could be applying to grands, doing PR or managing the labs computer network.

I've lately seen many top tier professor and students from the US coming to Germany. Part of it, I think is that the government has invested a lot more money on carefully chosen projects in an effort to catch up with the US. Another reason, is that they have become a lot opener to non German speaking scientist. When I took classes two years ago, even the young Professors where all German. But recently, I hardly see a German post-doc or Professor landing a job. They are all foreigners.

Anyway, in my experience, the German Diploma and Doctorate Systems is perfect for people who like to learn by them self. For the Diploma, you have lots of choices after the first years and often there is only one final exam. No assignments or midterms. You can pass a class with an A* without knowing how the Prof. looks like. How you learn the required content is totally up to you. I've often chosen good American books and video lectures over the lectures here.
And again, for the Dr. you can do what ever you like as long as your advisor is cool with it.

Actually, I found your quote quite confusing.
"I'm just not an academic. I learn faster on my own and from a blog or lynda.com than I do from an actual course..."

English is not my first language but academia = higher education / research, right?
To me this is almost a synonym with learning and discovering on your own.

PS: Its all not roses and unicorns, though. For instance, becoming a Professor right after your Dr. is very uncommon if not impossible. A US Phd from a top tier school usually is worth a bit more.
Google Page Speed Online has a shiny new API
I'll quote another bit of what I said: the members of Anonymous who are doing the real heavy lifting are probably not fools.

Anonymous is anybody that wants to be Anonymous, including people who have never been Anonymous in the past and will never be Anonymous in the future...but, quite a bit of what Anonymous has done required specialized knowledge and experience and intelligence. Those are the people the FBI would like to identify, and they're also the people least likely to be identified by a data leak like this. So, a leak of Anonymous IP addresses is really probably a leak of kids who haven't actually done much damage and a handful of Tor exit node addresses representing the people within Anonymous who know how to wreak havoc.

That's part of the strength of Anonymous. If there is a crackdown of any sort, it will snare a bunch of innocent (or close enough to innocent) kids, and miss all of the real targets completely. Law enforcement could only pin the blame on dumb 15 year olds so many times before it begins to seem ridiculous (especially since if they claimed to "take down" Anonymous by doing so, there'd be a slew of attacks by Anonymous just to prove no such thing had taken place and the people they'd arrested were innocent bystanders).
I think there is a very real danger of competition eating your lunch, but you can't let it frighten you too much, or let it stop you from executing on a good idea. It has been my experience that large companies sometimes lose their ability to rapidly iterate on a product. Maybe it's not even in their best interests -- if you have a killer product like Gmail, there's not a strong motivation to stray too far from the course. It leaves room for companies to take those risks, and find out where there is room for innovation.
SwellJoe didn't make any collective assumptions about their intelligence. Also the implication that 15 year olds aren't that smart doesn't seem that smart.
People seem to either love or hate the guy. But even his detractors have to admit that at times he can be disarmingly honest for someone in the public eye. This is a truly classic riff.
Sitting Kills You
my partner (astronomy prof) was watching this the other day. i'm pretty sure her students got to watch it too :o)

how are these made? is it done with prezi? http://prezi.com/
why not just do that now to help them get that market share, and some profits from the app store sales to boot?
I do the Pomodoro technique when focus is crucial... it's surprisingly effective. Something interesting happens when you have permissible but cleanly defined segments of time to goof off.
I had the luck of working in the same company as Riq many years ago. He is incredibly knowledgeable. Also as a person, he is such a nice and fun guy.
There were no elected representatives at this meeting. The LEWP is a subgroup of the non-democratic council, not of the parliament. That's one of the things that you have to be careful with the EU - many "politicians" are not elected.
You think the FBI is trying to catch bike thieves?
Knuth's "Man or boy test"
I seriously doubt Riq would be OK with a move like that.
The delay? The scroll bars?

There is evidence that this is Flash. However, since everyone seems to want to attack individual parts of that evidence without applying Occam's Razor, I concede it could be something other than Flash. It could be Java, too. It could be a "standard browser exploit" too, whatever that is. Could be cosmic rays too.

The tendency to look for ways to prove me wrong with an alternate theory (which yours is) as opposed to acknowledging that multiple theories are possible with zero evidence aggravates me among technical people. In the absence of a disclosure we are both right.
> To this day, TV just absorbs me, I just can't stop watching. I become the caricature
> of an absent minded drooling zombie....

I can relate. But I've learnt to teach myself that TV is like a drug. It can be very relaxing to "turn your mind off" and "zone out" to TV. Sometimes you have had a long day and feel like you "need" some TV to help relax.

The truth is that TV is harmful. It is lazy, bad for your health, unproductive and a massive time waste.

What is scary is that you can watch 5 shows in a night and then the next day not remember any of the shows. That is why people watch reruns of TV shows - their mind is basically off the whole time so they can watch the same thing over and over.

*(TV is fine and healthy in moderation.)
this isn't the first set of game engine talent that zynga has acquired. very interesting to see what direction social gaming is headed.
Okay, great, you're absolutely right that an Array would have been a better choice of data structure, albeit marginally better.

That was not my qualm, and neither does it seem to be the qualm of other commenters on this page. Of course, I'm having to second-guess the reasons of other commenters because they were disinclined to note them, but am simply contesting the notion that the article is satirically bad.
I think you may have skipped some steps... Could you fill in the middle a bit? I'm confused.
You might say that morally it should come from consent, but descriptively, legitimacy comes from having a monopoly on force and not being totally, utterly hated.
How to Make Money in Microseconds
The "copyright lobby"? Where is the technology lobby? I'm disappointed in our industry, especially given the enormous market caps of tech giants.
one is not obliged to prove innocence in a sensible court of law
Except your "educated guess" right now has a good chance of being wrong due to the complexity of computing what time in your timezone corresponds to 2 pm in theirs.
I can fix it right now. Delete the flash player - problem solved. Chrome still works.
> Police don't really "protect" anyone

Sure they do, they discourage crime by finding and jailing criminals. Prevention is protection.
I find supervisord+gunicorn to be a pretty decent combo.
Equipment (computer, laptop, cell-phone+plan), and the ability to remote.

Honestly. I'm on 37k, and would take a pay-cut for the above.
so google can fix it for 99% cases with ulimit or similar windows thing. problem solved
What happens to all the Asian-American overachievers when the test-taking ends?
That's what I'm wondering about. The infant mortality rates in pre-industrial times were astoundingly high, but I don't see anything that tries to explicitly account for them. I guess they get rolled in with life expectancy (bringing the mean way down), but it would be nice to see an explicit formula for births_t.
No, Google can fix by not letting programs downloaded from the Internet write to arbitrary memory locations.

Actually, you can fix it, too: chromium is open source.
It's a perverse incentive, provided by the airline. I don't understand your point otherwise.
FYI, the industry has rejected the doublespeak term "responsible disclosure". Even Microsoft has issued statements denouncing the term. Most prefer to call that "coordinated disclosure". This accurately communicates the idea, without sneaking in someone's moral judgement.
Never thought Translation was such a sexy industry
they did say "exclusive"
Nice teaser - I'm very much looking forward to this coming out!

If you're wanting any beta readers, I'd be happy to volunteer =)
I thought Pwn2own didn't even try to?
maybe Govt is envious because Google is already more powerful and capable and certainly better liked than it!
You seem to only want to receive an answer that starts with "You bring up credible evidence, but maybe there's an alternate scenario playing out here, for which I believe the following holds true..." Now I can do that, but since we're all speculating, this is implied. No one is saying you're dead wrong, we're just posting alternate hypothesis and you're taking this very personally.

Let's apply Occam's razor: a) There is no reason why Flash (or another plugin) needs to take up a large amount of space on the page. If I were to write a flash exploit, it'd be a 1x1 object with whatever ActionScript that triggers the vulnerability, no need for a large area. b) VUPEN is a bunch of extremely talented folks and I believe they have little to gain by posting a fabricated exploit video. c) The delay can also be caused by a rather advanced heap-grooming technique, it can be JS garbage collection invoked many times, it can literally be them trying the payload numerous times. Implying it's probably flash is just as speculative as we're being.

Relax man, no one's disagreeing with you to be an asshole, no one's trying to argue with you, we're all just speculating.
Stop putting ads in everything. Ads suck.
Actually, you can fix it, too: chromium is open source.

Good to see this tired claim getting its play in this thread. I wondered how long it would be until it showed up. I think everyone who says "go fix it, it's open-source" should instead be required to come back with a diff within 24 hours.
These guys seem to be focused on getting kids in who will most likely be acquired if successful by a big company. Very few of these seem to be poised to be stand alone companies.
Excellent! Very useful.

I often find myself in the situation where there are a few interesting links that I decided to open and read later and, after I'm done reading them, I'm not able to find the discussion so I have to search HN.

Plus it keeps me from having to open 2 tabs for each link. Thanks!
The Govt in question is obviously the US Govt. They want to know how to break Chrome, and every other net-facing app, so that they can hack your computer and spy on you, whoever you might be. Did you know, the CIA does do espionage?
They are. For example, in this[0] crash report (found with a quick Google search), on line 77, it clearly shows that the WAKWindow function is inside the WebCore binary (statically linked). You can also find this by running class-dump on a copy of WebCore from iOS: there are many linked-in WAK classes do not have source code released as the GPL requires.

[0]: http://pastebin.com/GvFVfWHV
I'll be very interesting in hearing what the Supreme Court has to say about all this. Consider the following worst-case scenario:

1. Supreme Court rules that use of GPS tracking devices by law enforcement do not violate 4th Amendment.

2. Future court rulings find that tampering with GPS devices amounts to interfering with a police investigation.

3. Law enforcement starts planting GPS devices directly on persons, such as in a purse, or when miniaturized further, in wallets or attached to clothing. Maybe these devices only capture data "when in public areas" and are eventually declared legal.

4. Since they cannot be tampered with, police begin attaching wristbands to citizens stopped at routine traffic stops who they suspect of crimes.

Sounds far-fetched, but not when you consider the amount of surveillance that goes on already via cell phones and credit cards.
Sadly, one aspect of security is psychological acceptability. If nobody will do the secure thing, it's not secure.
s/ those who are willing to pay / those (ONLY) who asked for and funded research into such a hack /
20k loan for 6% and the founder has no software experience?

Doesn't sound that appealing to be honest.
All true, though, as far as I know, hunters and gathers who manage to survive childhood still die quite early, no? [1] They appear very healthy but thats partly because there are pretty much no grand parents. I might be wrong about this.

Also, a diet high in animal protein might make you very fit but it is thought to be a cause for cardiovascular disease [2].
Actually, afaik, this is the reason why government still gives out these fat making, carbohydrate rich, diet recommendations [3].
They might make you obese, but on the other hand, if you might live a sportive life just to suddenly die of a heart attack.

[1] I can't recall if it was Diamond, Kevin Kelly in "What Technology Wants", Campbell in "The China Study" or someone else, who wrote about this. Can anyone back or correct this?
[2] This, Im sure you will find in "The China Study" by Campbell
[3] Lustig and also Taubes in "Good Calories, Bad Calories"
...and funnel more money into the copyright lobby.
I guess you could approach this kind of question from a risk/probability point of view. Not everyone who practices guitar becomes great at it, but some do, so if you practice guitar you expose yourself to a potentially big upside (assuming you actually want to be a great guitar player).

I can't think of a potential upside that you expose yourself to by watching TV (other than the immediate gratification), but maybe there is something.
Let's say that, like most everyone else in the world, they already know how to break firefox and internet explorer, etc. They don't want to spy on your net, they want to steal your files.