skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I've been thinking about it lately and I've decided the problem isn't inherently DRM itself. The problem is that when companies use DRM without giving back and, in particular, use horrible invasive DRM that is a pain for the genuine customer.

Case in point: Steam. Steam is basically one big DRM wrapper that also prevents resale. However, one key difference is that it offers multiple advantages to users in the form of unlimited redownloads, community features, not requiring a CD, no DRM driver ugliness, banning hackers in multiplayer games, works as a decent launcher and also has an extremely convenient online marketplace. The end result is that it has been given a much warmer reception than the typical DRM scheme - people are willing to give up some of their rights in exchange for the added convenience which is a much fairer trade. I'm not saying Steam is perfect but it seems like the direction companies like EA should be going.
True, I don't disagree with this statement - but I just don't think it necessarily shows the full figure.

There are a lot of people who once the file is complete, stop torrents - which would make this seeder/leecher number a lowball type figure.

I don't have any experience with games or software as the only thing I download is tv shows (only the ones I can't actually get in Australia.. I'd pay for them if I could get them) but from my experience, as soon as a show is uploaded it has a huge seeder/leecher ratio, but several days afterwards, that number appears is always considerably less.

For some anecdotal evidence, one TV show I was watching in particular had stopped being shown in Aus but within hours of it being "released" online I was seeing up to 30k seeders at times, yet several days later that number had dropped considerably down to 3k.

I just quickly typed Spore into mininova and looked at the top result by seeders and it shows the downloads as over 144k just off mininova alone, although no doubt a few of these would be incomplete, but given mininova's "market share" compared to say the rest of the torrent sharing community, the figure in the article comes across as incredibly low still.
1. spreading the truth is silly. 1pt jfoutz
2. if he can write, then he can X. you never addressed that point. clearly he can write, you've implicitly accepted that evidence. therefore he can comb his hair, and all the other things you asserted he can't do. 1pt jfoutz
3. you're certain that you're correct -- i'm one of the most open minded people you'll ever meet. you would be shocked by the positions i have flip-floped on. 1pt. jfoutz
4. McCain does have trouble typing. my dad surfs the net, he types with his right index finger. sophistication != manual dexterity. tom brocaw. hell, i don't know how to explain it to you. 1pt jfoutz
5. who gives a fuck about Obama? 1pt - jfoutz
6. typing == presidency? this is subtle and I'm not sober enough to address it adequately. The argument goes something like -- if you can't type, you don't understand computers. if you can't understand computers (demonstrated by lack of typing) it's unlikely you can understand large bureaucracy (afaik that's the fed.) if you can't understand that how can you be an effective president?

you may be right, i don't think so, and i'm not really able to construct an stellar argument right now, so 1pt anamax

5 vs 1. jfoutz wins. totally fixed. i sympathize because i'm a liberal. and also i won so i'm feeling magnanimous.

anywho. if you're ever in albuquerque, drop me a line. jfoutz@gmail.com. honestly, i'd love to get in this discussion in person. I'll buy the beer. heck, i think i owe you one anyway.

I'm going to claim victory now, because it's time to play guitar hero. I'll take the absence of response as acceptance of your failure to support any argument, and any response whatsoever as a desire to buy me beer.

thanks again,
jfoutz.
I think many developers believe they must avoid crashes at all costs and add try/catch blocks to catch the Exception base class, which initially sounds like a good idea but usually just hides subtle bugs which are 10x harder to fix later.

This article does a great job of classifying exceptions and explaining when you should, and shouldn't, add try/catch blocks.
I agree. You've got only 8 couples over only 10 nights. That's short and a small sample. Also there's no detail on what they did when they slept apart. For example, perhaps the men went off slept in a 5 star hotel and pampered themselves.

Also, this news is from 2006. But it gets worse. If you go find the paper you'll find this abstract:

"Introduction: So far only a few studies (e. g. Meadows et al 2005) have focused on the interrelationship between bedpartners and its effect on sleep and sleep quality. Previous studies were either restricted to women's perceptions and experiences of sleep (Hislop et al 2003) or to interaction between parents and children.
Method: The current investigation examined how sleep and sleep quality is influenced by the presence and absence of the bedpartner over a period of four weeks. Couples were young unmarried students (mean age: 25; range: 22 - 26) with no children and no history of sleep disturbances. All subjects filled in the Pittsburgh Sleep Quality Index (PSQI), a standardized sleep anamnesis inventory as well as the MEQ- questionnaire to evaluate morning- or evening- chronotypes. Sleep-wake patterns were continuously monitored by wrist-worn actigraphs and all subjects completed a sleep diary including a standardized self-rating scale for subjective sleep and awakening quality every morning. During the investigation period subjects were instructed to spend at least 10 nights together and 10 separately.
Results: Preliminary results from three couples (out of 10) show a significant reduction of subjective sleep and awakening quality in the co-sleeping condition as compared to the nights slept alone. This tendency was observed in females as well as in males. Co-sleeping also reduced objective (calculated by actigraphs) and subjective sleep efficiency (sleep log data) with a more pronounced reduction in females. When sleeping alone women have more sleep epochs associated with movements than men. In nights spent together in both females and males the mean activity score increased but the changes were not significant.
Discussion: The current investigation examines both gender differences during sleep/wakefulness and the physiological and psychological impact each partner has on the other during sleep."

Key phrase: Preliminary results from three couples (out of 10) show a significant reduction of subjective sleep and awakening quality in the co-sleeping condition as compared to the nights slept alone.

So this is based on just three couples in fact.
If you're looking on public sites, keep in mind that they all tend to archive the same trackers. So make sure each torrent you add up is unique and not the same one being reported multiple times from various places.
Disabling DRM after opening week is not at all a bad idea.

iTunes DRM has been broken repeatedly. But the latest incarnation has survived multiple years, despite large incentive for a public break. It's been hard enough to break that what has been done has been kept private, for commercial reasons. Like it or not, it's a success story.

DirecTV had an active cracking community 7 years ago. Then they contracted a famous cryptography team to develop what appears to be a white-box crypto scheme implemented directly in hardware gates. Nobody has been able to do anything with it since. It's a major success story. What was there in 1999 wasn't so much a "community" as a cottage industry, and now it's dead.

BD+ actually has been broken. Title. By. Title. Even if that trend continues for the next several years, it's still a win for Blu-Ray, because SlySoft hasn't gotten a crack out within opening week yet, and they have to dedicate a team to refreshing their product at the whim of the publishers.

I don't have a moral concern about DRM. I'd rather use unencumbered CDs. Sure, I'd also rather not pay for satellite TV. But as a CS problem, it's really interesting. The things that people say make it "impossible" actually make it Hard. Hard problems are fun, and we learn from them.
I did, otherwise that number would be in the several millions.
hrm. I'd personally prefer a phone that actually worked.
Obv you've never smelled a two day old fillet.
Pretty cool that this is a non flash based editor, building something like this in pure javascript seems like a fairly large task...the flickr drag and drop works surprisingly well too.
For that matter, Ruby and C both have continuation support.
This goes to show the value of actually watching users when they sit down in front of your system. Even though 'Click Start to Shutdown' seems unintuitive to all of us programmers, the usability study showed that it's what people expected. You can't really fault the Windows designers for following the users existing mental model rather than trying to change it.
Hardware control is done through the internet because it needs to be controlled remotely. The LHC is enormous so you can easily be 10 Km from your the hardware. Not to mention the hardware is also sometimes controlled remotely by researchers at other facilities such as Fermilab. Also we should remember that CERN has pretty much everything hooked up to the internet because they invented it. Which makes the whole situation pretty ironic.
Well I was actually talking about writing queries that involve a join or two. Thinking to myself "I can get this by grabbing all these via joining on that where x = y" doesn't take very long, but typing that out can be annoying if you do it often enough.

Of course, if you are constantly writing 8-way joins with fun things like group_concat in the select clause, I guess it would require a little more thought than typing. Also, I'd imagine the people that spend their days writing stored procedures, triggers, and the like spend more time thinking than typing, but I can't claim to be one of those people.
Thanks for further fleshing these out; I think you're right that the three are success stories.

Just to play devil's advocate, can you think of anything (reasonably popular) for sale on iTunes/Blu-ray or shown on DirecTV that can't be found free (illegally) online? What do you think about the darknet paper?

http://crypto.stanford.edu/DRM2002/darknet5.doc
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Tried this. Still got timeouts.

I much prefer Hacker News, btw, compare the coverage on Reddit ;-).
I'm not sure it's a forgone conclusion that poor people voting for non-democrats is a vote against their economic interests. Legions of economists would disagree with you on that. To be sure, legions more would agree, but you can hardly take it as a given.
The dropping of seeds/leechers on older torrents is a given for BitTorrent. Torrents are a particularly bad way of finding older material to pirate - not necessarily older in age of content but more the torrent file.
Agreed. Personally, I pirate lots of things I buy anyway because the DRM becomes a pain (Adobe and Microsoft products, for example). What's interesting is that I pirated Spore because I didn't want to put up with the DRM and the European/Australian/etc. edition was out on torrent sites before it was released in North America (for the record, I purchased Spore Galactic Edition and Spore Origins for my iPhone...). I'm not sure why companies want to give their customers a headache. I've had huge headaches dealing with genuine Windows installs that went away when I just pirate WGA cracks for XP and Vista. It's not cool when pirates have a simpler time than legitimate customers just because the companies want to discourage pirates so badly they're willing to sacrifice customer satisfaction in the process.

On the other hand, I'm very unlikely to pirate something easily available on Steam..in fact, I'm not sure I ever have. For exactly the reasons you outlined.
I think the certificates that CO2Stats buys actually do what you described as a "real" offset. It entices traditional energy suppliers to invest in clean energy.
I take a very simple stance on this and all DRM-related matters: I buy something, I own it. I can install on 20 computers if I have that many. Play my music on 10. Use the object I paid for without being connected to the Internet or any other nonsense. License key? Fine, whatever, not that it's really a deterrent.

If I can't do that I download it at-will, for free, sans any sort of protection and the seller gets jack. A very simple system where (a) seller/creator doesn't do ridiculous bullshit to keep me from using their item and (b) I reward them with money.
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I've run psych studies at MIT. 90% of subjects are MIT students, unless the prof specifically has to get a broader cross-section in which case the study becomes annoying, expensive, and delayed.

All general social science is implicitly the study of college students.
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I love my tracker...

908 Seeders
33 Leechers

and it's 12 days old.
I'm still thinking about how to phrase a question around "free"
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That's right. Also, I wonder if they asked these couples whether they usually slept together or not. My own experience suggests that this is all a matter of what you are used to.
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a) Home users don't have Windows domains

b) Nor can they set up offline folders easily
I don't know how humans slept in those hundereds of thousands of years (or millions depending on where you start counting) during which the human race has evolved. What was the climate? How did they defend against enemies? And most importantly, which habits related to sleep affect the likelyhood of procreation most? I must say, I don't know nearly enough to decide whether sleeping close together is the historical norm.
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What are you using instead of SQS, if you don't mind me asking?

I've looked at Starling (Twitter's message queue written in Ruby) but not much else (besides SQS).
Okay, but that doesn't answer my question. Why does it seem like most hackers have an Obama sticker on their site?
This really is fun: I installed SPORE on my Mac and there is no copy protection whatsoever. I don't even have to keep the disk in the drive to play it.
It seems there are two conflicting trends that affect the use of threads for parallelism: One is that the amount RAM available to a typical machine grows fast and thus in-memory data processing becomes more important. The other trend is that some smart people prefer a process model over threads, which excludes working with a lot of in-memory data or at least makes it hugely more complex (working with shared memory blobs, no pointers, none of the usual data structures, etc).

I for one feel very restricted by languages like Python, Ruby or PHP because they effectively force me to use the process model for parallelism and prevent easy sharing of in-memory data structures between threads. So even though I like these languages I use C#, Java or C++ for most projects. Others may of course have different scenarios and different requirements.
there is a reason Windows dominated the market
I hope they figured it out eventually, though? It is not that hard a skill to learn.

No offense, but I think there are a zillion other things that would be more important to simplify.

Hasn't Joel even argued that shutting down the computer should be unnecessary in the future anyway?
Is it really that unintuitive to click the start button to start the shutdown procedure?
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Anyone remember the clearification ads/shorts with Demetri Martin for microsoft vista.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h4b2QNnVrY0&eurl=http://e...

They were brilliant, so much better than the new bill/seinfeld ads.
One of Steam's biggest value-adds for me is that I don't have to reinstall or manually update any games. There's no registry cruft, so you can move the Steam folder across Windows installs.
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I agree with most of the points presented, but I just cannot agree with point 2. In fact, the second point comes across as more like hey-you're-awesome mumbo jumbo that I would expect from motivational speakers.

"Good ideas alter the power balance in relationships, that is why good ideas are always initially resisted"

I don't think a blanket statement like they are always resisted is quite true. For example, a simple test would be:

2 people are caught in a house fire, person A says "lets get out of here"... person B would have to say "no, lets stay here" for this statement to be true.

Similarly ideas can be resisted because they are actually bad ideas.

If anything, I would say that people are more or less resistant to change, unless there are very obvious reasons for change.
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Though not many lonely people have good childhoods.
It ain't the future yet. (Well, for most people anyway; I don't think I've restarted my computer in weeks).
I find that using the clan tag to prepend your preferred candidate is quite effective. I am known as [RonPaul2008]cookiecaper in Quake Wars, and have a Ron Paul spray in TF2. I've heard three or four people say Ron Paul clan signs and sprays influenced them to learn about the dude, so it seems at least somewhat effective.
Amazon's Mechanical Turk seems like a good way to gather training data.. and it might even be cheap enough to use instead of a trained model (at least at first).
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I went to pre order Red Alert 3 the other day, the $120 nzd collectors edition. I was typing in my credit card when it clicked - wait... EA... DRM. I did a Google, found out it uses a relaxed version of the Spore DRM (5 installs), and killed the order. My cofounder said to buy the game and use a pirated version, but I refuse to support this crap, and that's with the sequel to my favourite game of all time. They are nuts if they don't think this happens.

What has the world come to when the pirated version is the version that does not install spyware?
Even if 99% of people are smart (or in this case, not dumb) enough to figure out a feature, that doesn't mean that you can guarantee that the other 1% will get it. I'm guessing this user falls in the < 1% category. Maybe it makes for a funny story, but it's hardly representative of a normal user. If 99% of your users figured it out, move on. If Microsoft waited for 100% of their users to figure out a feature, we'd still be waiting for the one guy staring at power button and wondering what to do.
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Well, if the 'specific request' had been in any way shape or form 'specific', maybe. It wasn't, so I recommended something that's a great hacker book in any case:-)
If I'm not mistaken, it was Tcl that did the 'Perl' thread model first. It does it quite well, too, IMO.
It seems like you're over analyzing the point he was trying to make. I've seen his point to be true in the corporate environment time and time again. The problem with the standard org chart is that there is one person who is identified as "boss" and with that comes the implication that he generally knows best. If someone else has a different or contrarian idea it kind of goes against the established power structure and has a potential to cause problems.
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Usability studies also show the cunning of the average user. It's difficult to know if what you have presented to them is good design or 'good enough' to allow _most_ users to cope. Combine this with people's knowledge that they are in a usability test, most people's desire to please authority figures and the natural skew to any process where you can affect outcome in your favour and usability studies become a mine field.

Windows is an exercise in 'good enough'. That's not a bad thing for a commodity OS. It doesn't mean that it should win any accolades though.
Well, the idea comes to my mind that, if it could be done for $600 (or even $6000), then it's a side project that any developer, anywhere could do in a month of spare time if they had the idea. You can't patent/trademark an idea either so, if you can build it for cheap, someone can copy it for cheap as well.

Looking at your specs, I don't necessarily agree that you'll need $25k minimum. It seems pretty simple to me too; $1k-$3k for the right person seems right to me to get you your beta then another $1k for bug squashing and $x/mth for maintenance.

What I don't get is that (a) you aren't the developer, (b) you aren't wanting to write copy, and (c) it doesn't seem like something that needs a salesperson making calls, so what's your role? Rhetorical question really.
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I guess this: "We are currently unable to serve your request. We apologize, but an error occurred and your request could not be completed."
"Ready for prime time"? Erlang has been used by Ericsson in one of their flagship products for years, as well as by Motorola and T-Mobile. More recent examples are Amazon and Facebook. There are lots of people out there getting real work done with Erlang, many of whom say that doing it in anything else would be a major pain.

The line number issue may be an oversight, but in no way is it a flaw or something that's not there because the OTP team don't know how to do it. Concentrate on the real issues, such as the ones Joel Reymont is talking about.
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It would be cool if we could get a plugin that implements the Gecko/Webkit engine :-)
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I've read too many stories about ad arbitrage and the massive amounts of money these guys make. It seems just a few notches above email spam, but damn if $155k/mo profit isn't tempting. I can't see myself working so hard to pollute the internet, even if there is good money in it. I'd rather spend my time creating things of genuine value.
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