skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Tell HN: Complaining to companies DRM is not useless
Especially with the recent events where some repositories got DMCA'd for being DRM-bypass tools, I often see comments saying that no matter what you do, no single company will listen and try to go the DRM-free route if they were not on it from the start.

I just wanted to share at least one instance where a company went from DRM-heavy to DRM-free:

In France, we have a small streaming company that specializes in japanese animation, a market that is still plagued by piracy for historical reasons in the country. Even ones that could be watched for free legally are often pirated in order to avoid ads or waiting a week.

So quite obviously, when they decided to add a way to "buy" content, it was DRM-heavy. The files was linked to your computer and if the company closed, I assume they would not have provided a way to unlock them. They were even sending legal letters to those that shared DRM-broken files.

This is even less surprising seeing Japan loves DRM. However, after years of complaints, they actually listened. No idea how but they achieved making the japanese right-handers accept that they allow downloading DRM-free files for all their content against a one time fee of 1€/25 minute of content, including movies.
The content is 1080p and with higher quality than the streamed version, and they link the purchase to your account so you could re-download the file if you erased it by mistake.

I know what applies to niches may not apply to bigger markets, but at least in some cases, boycott and complaints work if they are done in good faith. Want things to change ? Do your part. Not simply through petitions but by trying to make general public aware on social networks.
Air travel is a better natural competitor than highways. Ultimately highways are already sunk costs which can be seamlessly upgraded to work with new tech (ie more efficient, and soon electric, cars). Air travel is heavily taxed rather than subsidised, and yet it's still preferable to road travel over long distances, for the simple reason that it's faster.
Greece :)
> I'd pour all of our subsidies for Deutsche Bahn into it in a heartbeat.

congratulations, you just got a few high-speed links between half a dozen cities at the cost of rail infrastructure for the rest of the country (a large part of the subsidies goes into boring regional services). The answer to "our rail infrastructure should be better maintained" is not "dump all the money in shiny unproven high-tech".
We haven't invented a new form of transport since the Second World War, don't you think we're overdue?

No. There is no schedule for the delivery of new forms of transport that we can be overdue on; they emerge when technology and economics make them possible.

A new transport technology can emerge if it can demonstrate that it is better in some way relative to existing technologies. It would be great if Hyperloop can do something like that, and R&D should be encouraged. But it’s not at all clear how it could effectively be better than existing solutions.
I feel you are misrepresenting what happened. As I understand it the PRC did not want this conflict and tried to prevent it, but failed. They were basically forced into the conflict by the Soviets and the Americans and suffered immense losses.
LPDDR channels are weird. https://www.anandtech.com/show/16226/apple-silicon-m1-a14-de... shows "8x 16b LPDDR4X channels"

Which would be the same width as dual channel DDR4 – 8x16 == 2x64 :)

Also it's completely ridiculous that some people think it might be HBM. The presentation slide (shown in both anandtech articles) very obviously shows DDR style chips, with their own plastic packaging. That is not how HBM looks :) Also HBM would noticeably raise the price.
Hyperloop solves two problems that challenge the adoption of high speed rail.

1. Infrequent departure times. There are about 100 flights from New York to LA a day. Plenty of departure time options. Are there going to be 100 departure choices with a train? No, it would probably be 15 at most. In Canada, we have relatively fast rail between Toronto and Montreal, two of our major cities. Even with similar travel times all in, they struggle to get people on the trains because of the lack of departure times. There are about 50 departure time options by air.

If you can have 30 people a pod, then you can have tons of departure options or even could be flexible about them.

2. 367 miles per hour is slow for a country the size of the USA. That is 7 hours point to point from New York to LA. Probably 11 hours with stops and not being able to go that speed along the whole way.
It's painfully obvious this article was written by an investor for several reasons:

1) They define "growth" as a stage that goes AFTER raising money. As a founder, growth (planning, executing) should come before you ask for a single dollar (unless you're something like a hardware startup that needs bigger upfront investment). I write about this topic extensively [1] and one of the main differences I found between successful vs. failed founders is whether or not they found viable acquisition channels from the moment they started. Also, in many cases, raising money (too fast) was associated with a bigger chance of failure.

2) They associate a "startup" with getting financing rounds. 0 mentions for bootstrapped founders. Last time I checked [2], a startup is "a company or project undertaken by an entrepreneur to seek, develop, and validate a scalable economic model."

A better title for this article would be would be: "There are only 3 startup stages for funded startups requiring bigger upfront investment".

[1] https://firstpayingusers.com

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Startup_company
Yay! Happy to share this with more people! Let us know if you have any questions or feedback :)
Instead of hyperloop, why not Japan SCMagLev? That things is actually getting build for commercial operation right now.
what's the pitch vs an airtable wich i already use ?
Even if you think of startups within these stages, no two startups is going to have the exact same journey. Each startup has an incredibly different experience and timeframe flowing from one transitory phase to another. This is why bridge rounds exist, and how companies like Slack come into existence after offering to return money to investors.
There is a command (not freeze) that dumps the exact versions deployed, similar to a lock file. I never used it, because it doesn’t work well across operating systems (e.g. do it on Windows and try to use it on Linux). This is less of a Conda problem and more of a Python problem - same package name/version has different dependencies on different architectures.

But manually curating the dependencies has been painless and works fine for me and my team for almost a decade now.
> Politicians have no will to fund old technology

Then get a nice Ralph McQuarrie or Syd Mead style artwork to sell it. It's not about the thing itself, but how it's perceived.
You could realistically see how a quantum computer can be improved. Hyperloop has no realistic end goal.
Mixing tracing GC with other forms of memory is an open research project. Doesn't mean it hasn't been "done", for example Google has talked about getting their GCs to interop in Chrome, but it's (a) really hard and (b) so far results are, at best, "mixed".
'overdue' is obviously a rhetorical device in this context. Otherwise I agree. I find however that bashing people trying new things and pushing the envelope very distasteful, especially from Americans whose culture historically supported ventures that would have been mocked in Europe, and especially from people on a website built for technologists and entrepreneurs!
Yeah but you have to remember the population density of the us.

It's main population centers are west and east coast, with nothing but farmland in between.

For them any system needs to be a lot cheaper per mile.

Also the only reason why we get some ICE tracks, is because of the 1% and politicians that want to have a convenient way to commute to and from work.

Everything that is not a major business hub just get's left out.

And remember when we tried to get a proper Transrapid track? It was the only thing Sheuble ever did right, and he got ridiculed for it.
Right now, you're getting 0 from the sale. You can afford to let them take months to pay you.
Spotify has amazing algorithm of suggesting new music.
Give it a try and you will have some new good music.
It's a symptom of modern supply-side economics.
It's all about job creation. The people who are working on this project are the only ones getting anything out of it. It's CaaS 'Career as a Service'.

The people who work for this company are probably a bunch of kids whose rich daddies wanted them to experience what it feels like to succeed in their careers and so daddy kept injecting millions of dollars into their projects.
But their career is about as real as a roller-coaster ride in a Disney theme park.

I've worked for many different companies over the past decade and I've seen this everywhere, over and over.

Nowadays, when I look for a job, the only question I ask myself is: "Do these founders have rich daddies?".
I only work for companies whose founders have rich daddies because they're the only ones which can 'succeed'. It doesn't matter what the project is or whether it adds any value anymore.

It doesn't matter how much value I can produce in any other capacity because other people's daddies have access to the money printer and no one can compete with the money printer.
THe support is good on the XPS. Everything works out of the box (apart from the standard linux trackpad multi touch issues.)

a word of caution, the 2019 13" has a stupid[1] keyboard layout. They cram the pageup/down keys above the left right keys. This caused huge amounts of issues for me, making it unusable. If this were to be fixed, it would be a very compelling machine.

[1]subjective
No one will die from not having meat for every single meal. Especially the climate could actually benefit from reducing meat intake, given that especially cattle are a large impact on co2 - not to mention all the rainforest in South America being razed for beef lots and beef feed material.
Case in point: Putin. Authoritarian but he simply fucked the whole country with his isolationist, antagonistic decisions.
German here. ICE rocks. Until like 2 years ago, I used to travel long distance nearly every week, often all the way across germany.

The problem is not the ICE or high speed rail connectivity, the problems arise at the edges, when you need to switch over and travel the last few miles. For example, I used to travel from Berlin to Hamburg for on-site work. The leg from Berlin to Hamburg was faster than the connection from Hamburg Main to the client site.

Certainly, there’s delays, but I’ve done the same trip by car and it constantly took longer than by train, I had very few trips where I didn’t end up caught in a traffic jam somewhere on the autobahn. There’s a bit of a perception problem: nobody notices if you’re late by five minutes if traveling by car because no one has such an exact expectation for car travel.

Delays in train travel also have a problem that is exacerbated by the timetables of the DB: In an attempt to make travel times seem shorter, there’s often insufficient buffer at places where you need to change, so that a few minutes of delay will result in an hour of layover. Combine that with lack of maintenance on the rails and you get unfavorable results.

None of the problems would be solved by hyper loop or any other technology. It’s a result of misaligned incentives.

Still, with all the things wrong in planning, maintenance and political incentives around it, high speed rail still is the best way to travel medium and long distance.
I think for the next year to two years, backend development on ARM Mac will come with some additional pain. There will always be some package with a C extension that doesn't compile on your platform (for example).

As a non-Mac user (and someone who develops for ARM targets of all sizes) I'm really happy about the situation though. Apple is forcing developers to not be able to assume processor architecture any more, just because what they're developing is aimed at desktop. Lots of software is going to become more portable and we'll all benefit. In the meantime though, I'm going to keep developing on x86/64.
Students rebel against remote test monitoring during pandemic
https://archive.vn/VIt7Y
You guys are terrible at hiding COI.
Slightly off topic but collaborative programming seems to be a big unsolved and ignored problem in programming.

A recent HN discussion on microservices had people saying (paraphrasing) “it’s the only way we can collaboratively build software”.

Programming languages currently seem to be built for programming as a solitary activity. Seems to me that programming languages could be designed with the aim of solving the large scale collaboration problem.
The alternative to Go having generics is not "a simpler language", it is "people reimplementing generics with their own code generators" à la https://www.reddit.com/r/rust/comments/5penft/parallelizing_...

You may not want more powerful languages, but as soon as a single person wants the power, they'll craft it themselves no matter what (and then it may end up being one of your dependencies :-) and the effect will be pretty much the same - you'll have to work with generics anyways, but with homebrew instead of "official" ones).

So I am very very not convinced by the thesis exposed in that article - people will use whatever tool they find to automate what they think is automatable in the process of writing programs, even if that means creating ad-hoc AutoHotkey scripts that type repetitive macros according to a certain pattern (true story :-)).
Having more powerful languages means that you have to spend much less time trying to inspect whatever eldritch horror combination of tool the people before you used there as you just need to check the language docs or StackOverflow.
The Shinkansen is an existence proof that high speed rail can be fast, comfortable, and always on time (and while by no means cheap, affordable for many). I often wonder what Japan did uniquely that makes this possible.

But building trains that run in a vacuum doesn't appear to be a necessary attribute of running a successful high speed rail service.
No opinions here, but as a thought experiment to get a perspective on the other side, what if it was indeed stolen? Of course in reality there is no proof, but that's the danger of conspirations: in that case, you are on the good side, here something like "trying to prevent communists from taking over America with fake votes". Until the "truth" on facts is agreed (here no fake votes), both sides live in their reality trying to make what is right given their respective premise.
No. That would be making an incorrect assumption, that the best of the best want to work as a civil servant...
Pressure wave moves at speed of sound. Lightweigh capsule gets destroyed just by derailing at 500mph. Any bad event will put down ALL trains on track. And rescuing people trapped in 100 miles long steel pipe...

Hyperloop is a nightmare!
It totally is a concern for them. Too much road congestion, and the fancy private transportation is less enjoyable.

I honestly had the feeling that Munich, home to an unnamed automaker, was treating public transit pretty much like that. Too much congestion? Let's improve public transit! Congestion just right? Stop investing in public transit.

I feel the incentives for the government are super wrong. Every car brings taxes and parking fees. The latter often goes directly into the municipality's pocket. No wonder public transit is as it is.
It would have to for the comment to make sense.
It would also mean creating a table goes from a single statement to a bunch of them.
The problem with history is the lessons are long, complicated and easily tainted by the historian's bias.

And, interestingly, in politics people tend to look into history for grievances rather than looking for what works. One of the interesting trends that characterises China's current successes is decades of asking "what are other people doing that is working?". That seems to make them a little unusual.
... which is not a hyperloop.
I just want nice generics not scary ones :)

I’ve managed to generic myself into a corner before with type constraints in C# as an example.
Not familiar with the technical details, how are they gonna handle stopping a hyperloop at 1200km per hour?
The Shinkansen is built on pylons in many places especially where it goes over low-lying farmland and through cities, so I'm not sure this is a good reason.
While semantically weak languages are appealing at first, all they end up doing is encoding the intrinsic problem domain complexity implicitly. This results in “brittle code” and the inability to adapt.

In short, powerful languages exist because they need to exist.
It's fun to think about useful languages that are not computationally complete. I am writing my PhD thesis about Datalog used as a general purpose programming language, specifically for robots and microcontrollers. And you know what? You don't need to be able to simulate a Turing machine for a lot of tasks. On the other hand, you have guaranteed termination.

Excel (without scripting) uses a terminating (and therefore incomplete) model of computation and it still manages to do a lot of heavy lifting in the real world.

I wholeheartedly agree with the author that declarative languages and Domain specific languages are great, and even if they do not have a (hidden) embedded lisp, they can still be useful.

Once you are in a computationally complete language (and you don't just use a subset of language features that is "easy"), most problems are generally undecidable. Turns out, that's a bad property for static analysis.
Oh, come on. Yes, Panasonic carries part of the partnership when it comes to battery cells manufacturing. Tesla is still heavily involved in decisions regarding cell chemistry, and exclusively involved regarding battery pack design and manufacturing. Avoiding fires, charging quickl, ensuring battery longevity and making sure you get the most miles per kWh into the pack are largely battery pack issues.

But then again, the longer this confusion lasts, the longer before it becomes obvious to everyone that Tesla has a significant in-house lead on this technology, so meh.
So when this is done you'll get 20-30 people in a pod, but it will be faster than other railways? Why are they optimising for latency over bandwidth? What actually is the point of this? Just so that a few very rich people can live very far from work?
>And most importantly of all. It's not gonna be explosive, unless you rip the thing open with a bomb and you're right next to it.

And that's precisely what makes it unworkable with regards to safety. Burying the tubes is an option but by that point you would be looking at rail instead.
You can record data coming to the LCD panel or record the TV screen by a camera. With just degraded quality. On the other hand, I can't even take a screenshot of DRM-protected content on Android which can be very annoying sometimes.
I'm not sure if I've ever found a worst piece on HN. There may be valid criticisms of Hyperloop tech, but they are not in this article. It's just low effort sarcasm and strange arguments based on a very silly strawman.
I agree with this completely, unfortunately I'm using a Mac. I'm leaning towards keeping my current Mac running as long as possible in the hopes "everything has all blown over" before I refresh
I'd be impressed if they could get a docker on the Mac working with not absolutely crappy volume mount performance.
I too have bad experience traveling Basel - Cologne route with DB. At this point, I switched to flying or renting a car. The thought of traveling with DB gives me shudders.
It's definitely impressive performance for an ultrabook - my concern right now is external monitor support.

I use an eGPU for the sole purpose of running triple monitors. It's a docking station, and the whole setup works brilliantly with my 13" Macbook. Productive workstation setup at home, super nimble laptop on the go.

Apparantly these M1 chips don't support eGPUs and don't even support two external monitors, let alone three. I know it's asked a lot, but what's "Pro" about that?

Completely negates any of the benefits of M1, which is a shame because I really wanted one.

edit: You know, if they don't resolve this then the final round of Intel Macbooks with the non-butterfly keyboards are going to be the holy grail of laptops to a lot of people for a long time, just like the pre-butterfly ones with the ports still are.

Multiple external monitors, eGPUs and bootcamp... that's a lot to lose, man.
Not the case. The base site is in simple HTML, the illusions are made with the Cappuccino framework and Michael Bach (the creator) is a frequent participant on the Cappuccino mailing list as he creates these illusions.
Well timmed.
I love my Lenovo T4xx. Linux was a breeze to install.

I just wish the Fn and Ctrl keys were swapped. Although you can change it in the bios.
I've been using HxD for years - would love to see a comparison vs Rehex.
Sure, the faster the better, but as long as there is a couchette option 11h doesn't sound half bad.
> 1 bar is acutally not that bad.

That does not mean anything.

The weight of a 1 cm² column of air is 1 kg. So 1 ton for 1 m². Let's say a square profile hyperloop tunnel 1 m high decompressing will be the equivalent of dropping one tonne for each meter. The shock will propagate at the speed of sound.
> If the answer is no: good 13" Linux-able laptop suggestions?

https://puri.sm/products/librem-14/
I don't how much the main stream media are reporting the real underlying issues surrounding these 'on the surface' storms. It is definitely not 'capricious' for us to know in Zhejiang. The 'unofficial / underground' finance world has long become a problem. Big news such as the sentence of Yu Ying, a multi-billion yuan business woman https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wu_Ying, revels a large unregulated network in the east region (nicked named '包邮地区' because all products shipped from here have free delivery). China is definitely lacking in terms of regulation and laws (for non national bank related financing). If you visit my region you will see so many (private/independent) banks operating pop up in the past 20 years. Lending is potentially a very big risk. With Ma's famous optimism and cartoonish ambition it was obvious the gov will step in, the timing is definitely catching a lot of attention...
> breaking DRM is against the law even if an individual piece of content isn't copyrighted

This is not the case actually; the problem is that while breaking "protection measures" on a non-copyrighted work may be legal per se, DMCA 1201 will still hinder development of tools to break such protection, as long as these same measures are being used to provide effective protection on copyrighted works.
I feel you.

For IM specifically, one thing you could do (if the IM platforms you want are supported) do is to set up a Synapse homeserver with bridges and then you have everything (encrypted or unencrypted depending on config) in a SQL database. May not be worth the overhead depending on your hassle-tolerance if you're not interested in using matrix.org otherwise (I recommend it though).

At least a lot of the annoying groundwork is already done. If you do hit some snags, bug reports and PRs are generally very much appreciated in the bridges projects.
Well, you could do that, and then it would catch fire. No problemo.
But the bulk of the infrastructure cost difference of the original hyperloop paper vs. the CAHSR project it was offered against wasn't due to use of pylons, it was due to the fact that the proposed hyperloop didn't serve communities between the termini at all, and didn't come anywhere near the urban centers at either terminus.

This, of course, also made it useless for literally any purpose.