skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You can say the same thing about strong public key cryptography as well - "if you can read it, you can copy it" - but that doesn't say anything about the encryption technology itself.

In the case of DRM, we are not in general interested in the received material being secret to us whereas in the use of traditional public key cryptography we are. The incentives are not aligned in the case of DRM, no matter what technology is used.
Oxford cop busted on drug charge
Nice. Thanks for organizing.
Sadly, one has to combat the paid shills that dominate the punditry. Good science has to be put into soundbite form and propagated. How else would it be explained to your average citizen?
The term "effective" is defined in the DMCA:

1201(a)(3)(B) a technological measure "effectively controls access to a work" if the measure, in the ordinary course of its operation, requires the application of information, or a process or a treatment, with the authority of the copyright owner, to gain access to the work.

So, even trivial measures like the broadcast flag or SCMS[0] are covered by the DMCA's anti-circumvention provisions. Similar laws in other countries have similar definitions.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serial_Copy_Management_System
I've disabled the proactive chat as many found it annoying. Thanks for the feedback.
Just got acquired? Adjustments to make when working for a Big Co.
Code points aren't letters.

Consider the following sequence of code points:
U+0041 U+0308 [edit: corrected sequence]

That equals this european letter: Ä

Two code points, one letter. MAGIC! You can also get the same-looking letter with a single code point using U+00C4 (unicode likes redundancy).

Not all languages have letters. Not all languages that have letters represent each one with a single code point. Please think twice before calling people "morons."
Maybe we should just stop killing each other.
Karmaloop Hires Webcam Strippers to Livechat for Cyber Monday Campaign
Considering the post has already drawn such comments as

> " He was right about so much, you have to wonder if he might have been right to list-slap that gal."

you might be correct.
When you go to another country and openly wage war upon the US, you make yourself a military target. You don't get to wrap yourself in the constitution and enjoy all the procedural protections of the criminal justice system under such circumstances. If Anwar al -Awlaki had felt his life was in danger, he could have just turned himself in to a US consulate and asked for his legal rights.

As for his son, I blame the father for taking him with him to live in an Al-Qaeda stronghold, and effectively using him as a human shield.
> I've never understood the emphasis on this point.

All human lives are equally important from a moral perspective [1].

But from the perspective of a country's government -- any country, not just the US -- their own citizens' lives are the most important.

Imagine a man kills a woman -- a random stranger he met on the street. It's a terrible crime.

Now imagine a man kills a woman -- his daughter. Most people's gut reaction is that this is a worse crime than the previous example, because a parent he has a moral duty to protect his child.

Likewise, a country is supposed to protect its citizens -- so killing its own requires a stronger justification than killing non-citizens.

I'm not going to take the discussion off-topic by taking a position on the circumstances under which it's justifiable for a country to kill its own citizens or non-citizens. I'm just saying that a country's justification for killing its own citizens needs to be at least as strong -- and usually stronger -- than its justification for killing non-citizens.

[1] This paragraph is completely off-topic. "All human lives are equally important" sounds like a good and simple axiom for a value system. But it's interesting to try to think of situations where any of several people could be sacrificed to prevent some great evil, and the group figures out reasons to sacrifice some person or people with certain characteristics in preference to others. For example, "save the women and children first" is often said in disaster movies -- which implies their lives are somehow more valuable. Based on this anecdotal evidence, it appears that real human value systems often don't follow this axiom.
That was my thought too.

In theory, OTPs are nigh uncrackable.

In practice, they suck.

1. The XOR text needs to be as long as the plaintext.

2. The XOR text needs to be truly random.

3. You have to distribute the XOR test somehow. Remember all those spy novels where they burn the codebooks? Yeah.
Baker Project is so far the closest I've seen.
but shouldn't that have happened by now? DRM has been shockingly pathetic since at least the 1990s, maybe longer.
The man was highly intelligent. Often intelligence and social skills seesaw (obviously not always.) What he did was wrong by what we know now, but I don't think it came from malice.
> Two code points, one letter.

Yes I under stand there are million ways to display the same shape using various unicode. But how does that make code point counting impossible?

AND if you explictly using COMBINING DIAERESIS instead of single U+00C4, counting diaeresis separately is wrong somehow?

Why don't we make a law stating that both ae and æ is single letter?
That's obnoxious. I've actually never tried to read the message board on my iphone.
You've moved the goalposts:

u'\U00021613'

This is a UTF-32 code unit, not a UTF-16 code unit. Even UTF-32 doesn't help when you have combining characters. I suggest you read dietrichepp's post again, he's talking about Normalization Form D.
the "proprietary video encryption" algorithm: for the first 15kB, each 1kB block has its initial bytes xor'd with the string "RANDOM_STRING".

Any minimally competent developer could have implemented this particular design during, and for the price of, their lunch.
A human may call the kill order, but that order is based upon information the robots/computer/machine gives them.

How many people have died from bad code, thats more worrying.
Not that strange, Github implements much of the Emoji set using different shortcuts, see the reference here:

http://www.emoji-cheat-sheet.com/

Before I read the article I guessed that maybe the icon set had some licensing issues for Github. Luckily, not so! (:smiley:)
Tom Preston, the co-founder of Github had some interesting things to say about the benefits of open sourcing almost everything that the company creates. http://tom.preston-werner.com/2011/11/22/open-source-everyth...

But a deeper question is what problem are you trying to solve with another PaaS product that is not already served by the likes of Heroku, Dotcloud, Stackato, OpenShift, CloudFoundry, etc?

The last two (OpenShift and CloudFoundry) are already open source PaaS solutions that you can use either on-premise or hosted externally. Read more on my post comparing these four providers. http://appsembler.com/blog/paas-bakeoff-comparing-stackato-o...

I can tell you from experience that building and supporting a PaaS is a lot of work, and I think it will be difficult to make it sustainable unless you are offering it as a hosted service.

The only other provider that I know that is not offering a hosted PaaS is ActiveState's Stackato, and they have 15 years of experience selling to enterprise customers.
It's still not a drop-in replacement, but it's close. You need to include more modules than just the core for eg. ajax or transition effects (the official modules are all available from http://zeptojs.com and/or the github linked there). I maintain a pretty hefty Backbone based web app where we use Zepto for mobile/non-IE to save on file size, and serve the exact same code but with jQuery for IE. In about a thousand lines of code, there are only 3 or 4 edge cases where the code paths diverge for a line or two, and they're due to IE peculiarities rather than Zepto/jQuery conflicts.
Try this on the MBP:

* Connect to the 2.4Ghz network

* Hold "Option" and click the wifi icon in the top menu

* Note the "Transmit Rate"

* Repeat this for the 5Ghz network

When I first setup my Time Capsule I noticed that my Mac often times was attaching to the 2.4Ghz network. At that point I separated the networks and did the above.

Low and behold, each time the Mac picked the 2.4Ghz network it did so because it had a higher transmit rate than the 5Ghz one in a given location.
A known issue, I remember listening a talk where Gokul at Facebook used to position themselves as mid-funnel company. The entire online display advertising space today is direct response & bottom of the funnel as search advertising. Companies like Vizu (now Nielsen) is trying to address this measurement of brand lift, question is do brands believe in them!
One time pad requires the key to be as big as the plaintext. This looks like a weak variant of the Vigenere cipher.
> The mind can determine the truth value of some of these, so the mind can not be encompassed or modeled by an algorithm.

Do you have an example of this? I have an extremely difficult time comprehending it. Also, I was under the impression that there weren't necessarily propositions that are not algorithmically possible to reach, but rather, there are always propositions a given algorithm cannot solve.
Funny that when we think of inbreeding we think of low IQ as one of the common characteristics.
At the college where my wife is a professor (small liberal arts school of perfectly average quality... very typical for its type) the pay of the administrators is considered competitive while that of the professors is considered less than competitive.

The average administrator makes a low 6 figures, the average professor makes about $50,000 to $60,000, teaching positions are constantly frozen, contributions to retirement frequently withheld (this way they can claim they maintain salaries while still cutting costs... looks better on the surface) while the number of administrators just keeps creeping up.

I suspect that as smaller colleges turn to a more business oriented way of operating, out of desperation to increase enrollment and raise funds, this trend will continue. The administrators at my wife's school operate more and more like C-level executives at a corporation while the faculty are becoming the worker bees of the hive. The two groups used to occupy a similar level with full professors being on par with the higher level administrators.
> The goal is to provide a lightweight high performance JavaScript on a native JVM.

Can somebody please explain what a "native" JVM is?
Impose a law and someone will break it.
It probably sounded good when they came up with the idea whilst drunk.
Proposed spec of the next version of RethinkDB's protobuf
It is in need of disruption, and it's a wicked problem. There's no simple solution and no easy starting point. Perception is definitely something that needs to change, but unfortunately behavior is much harder to change.

Another aspect of the problem is tenure. It is (extremely) difficult to fire a tenured professor (or admin for that matter). When things get tough universities have a hard time downsizing if necessary.

A resulting, and somewhat funny, problem is what universities tend to do with tenured professors who just aren't good at what they do anymore. What do you do when a professor with tenure isn't good at teaching or research? You promote them.
The reason it's important is that regardless of whatever else the purpose of the laws of the US are to protect US citizens and maintain their rights. That's a fundamental, founding aspect of our country and heavily embedded within the constitution.

Here we have a situation where, to put it in the least glamorous light, a US citizen may be summarily executed for little more than being outside of US soil. That's a bit harsh but it's compatible with the track record so far. And if a US citizen has no protections outside of US territory then that implies non-US citizens have even less protections. To say that such a scenario is distressing is to put it mildly.

What happens when, not if, other countries build up their drone fleets and engage in similar low-level warfare throughout the world? Will the developing world become a de facto 24/7 battlefield contested over by the developed countries? Will the lives of most of the world's citizens be subject to nothing more than the whims of some bureaucrat or soldier in a richer, more powerful country?
Breaking repeated XOR with a string is a variant of the Vignere cipher or the Vernam cipher, depending on how you think of it. Either way, breaking it is a freshman cryptography exercise.
Intrade bans U.S. customers due to claims of regulatory pressure
When a giant brand leaves a hole, what happens next?
India’s ‘Aakash,’ Now Made in China
"Are you claiming the world is working-as-intended?"

I don't think I mentioned intent. And perhaps that is where we share different world views. The current state of API design an implementation is an artifact of the processes used in designing software. I don't think there is an 'intent' any more than scarcity of a good "intentionally" drives up its price.

You're blog entry is a call to action to design better APIs but you also want the rapid evolution and flexibility that you employ in delivering product. My observation is that good API design practice by its nature takes time, just like gestating a human child takes 9 months.

So choose, better API or faster code evolution? Hard choice. Most folks are over in the "faster evolution" camp.
That's my point: nobody cared about CDMA vs GSM and now we're all worse off because of it.

If we had all agreed on TDMA early on that would have been a bad call, but IMHO it would still be better. All those TDMA towers simply became GSM and UMTS towers. No one makes purchasing decisions based on compatibility, but if compatibility were enforced (just as AT&T is forced to allow you to dial a Verizon number), the market would be more competitive and the service would be better.
> DRM seems to just be a monkey-patch to try to get that marginal cost to be non-zero.

Yes, that's absolutely what it is. As a society, we seem to believe that information can be owned. We get angry at each other for 'stealing jokes'. Fanboys around the world are up in arms whenever another platform copies some feature from their beloved. Plagiarism is an accusation which can ruin a career. We have always felt entitled to do what we please with the fruit of our labors, and we feel no differently when that fruit is information.

We have all had bad experiences with DRM, but we've all had bad experiences with technology in general. Especially here on HN, why does the conclusion have to be "DRM is intrusive and impossible to do right anyway" instead of "What an opportunity for a non-intrusive alternative"?

I'm not saying the second option is right, but why can't it be?
Why do you automatically assume he is a jerk? Do you know more about his personal life than what was mentioned here? How do we know she wasn't a horrible person and this is actually a gracious response?

I really have no idea, but I think it's pretty unfair to make character judgements from a single note out of context. Human relationships are complex.
A two-character sequence for a smiley face that should be compatible with everything in existence:

:)

Problem solved. Why is this front page material (#6 as of this writing)?
No C, no Perl.
(my comment on the Arduino blog, cross-posted here)

Massimo, you asked the Arduino community for comments, so here’s mine.

It’s obvious that Dimitri isn’t trying to do you or Arduino harm. Did he over-represent his team’s association with Arduino? Perhaps, though not to the degree that you claim, and your repeated accusations that he’s a liar go over the top.

While you’ve made it very clear you don’t like the term ‘Smartduino’ this is a slope that Arduino has navigated before, trying to find the happy medium between building an open platform and community of developers and manufacturers and protecting your own intellectual property.

Regardless of where Smartduino falls on that line it clearly doesn’t fall very far away from it. So again, whether Dimitri is right or wrong he certainly doesn’t deserve the lambasting bordering on libel that you’re dishing on him.

For someone who has such a leadership role in the Arduino community, your actions today have done a very poor job of promoting it. At the heart of the Arduino movement is the idea that hardware development doesn’t have to be about huge companies that build walls around their IP with lawyers manning the battlements.

This is how THEY solve their conflicts. This is not how WE solve our conflicts.

Got issues with how the Smartduino project represents itself? Talk to them. Work with them. Don’t try to whip us into a frenzy of torches and pitchforks because every single person in this community is trying to expand it and move it forward, a sentiment I see throughout these comments, but not in your own words, where I would most expect to see them.
JavaScript Control: lies and wizardry
Show HN: I built a website that lets you freelance for bitcoins
I'm not entirely sure I believe this. Yes, for predators and such drones it makes sense. But the military already has weapons like the sea whiz that seek, aim, and fire all on their own[1]. No human pulling the trigger or picking out targets. Granted, the Sea Whiz is anti-missile. But it's only a matter of time until it becomes self aware and targets whatever it wants....

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sea_whiz

edit: that gun looks fantastic: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iAw82h-IhdQ&feature=fvwre...
You know, I wonder if the massive failure of people trying to do fizzbuzz getting reported widely has lead people to memorize how to do it.
It is more complicated I think even in the case of Einstein. The period of strained relationship mentioned coincides with the period during which he was building up General Relativity (which he published in 1916). Given the intensity of work that would've been needed for that (all that gorgeous new math and physical insights!) with wrong turns to avoid in every move, it is well conceivable that his marriage was placed at risk. This list might even have been his way of expressing that his life priority is finding a unified theory of everything.

Now when I write that, does our welcoming of his great contributions need to make us guilty of also endorsing morals we perceive behind this "list of demands" he made of his wife?
Is there any evidence that the information provided by any technology for a drone attack has been inaccurate because of a bug or bad code?

It's not like the government is using machine learning to categorize likely terrorists and then blowing them up in their homes.
> See? Expected, broken behavior you get when splitting on character boundaries.

Yeah, like your Jamo trick is complex for a native CJK speaker.

Thought Jamo is hard? Check out Ideographic Description Sequence. We have like millions of 偏旁部首笔画 that you can freestyle combine with.

And the fun is the relative length of glypes, 土 and 士 is different, only because one line is longer that the other. How would you distinguish that?

But you know what your problem is?

It's like arguing with you that you think ส็็็็็็็็็็็็็็็็็็็็็็็็็็็็็็็็็็็็็็็็็็็็็็็็็็็็็็็็็ is only one character.

IMPOSSIBU?!!!???

And because U+202e exists on the lolternet so we deprive your ability to count 99% normal CJK characters???!??!111!

Combination characters is normalized to single character in most cases, and should be countable and indexable separately.

If you type combination characters EXPLICITLY, they will be counted with each combination, naturally, what's wrong with that?

Or else why don't we abandon Unicode, every country deal with their own weird glype composition shit?
What Happens When You Mash Up Instagram and Google Street View?
The video starts off a tad slow as Perrin finds his legs, but at ~2:30 the pace picks up and he begins to demonstrate an amazing tool he's been developing.
> Why do you want to count Unicode characters?

Text editing and rendering. Some parts of the system cannot simply treat Unicode text as an opaque binary hunk of information.

> Why do you care if it is fast to do so?

Efficient full text search that can ignore decorative combining characters.
I'm pretty sure CPython reference counts objects. Also Objective-C -- as in GNUStep, if you aren't using a Mac server.

EDIT: There's a downside to reference counting in that either you or the runtime does the retain/release calls very often, whereas a mark-and-sweep collector would just touch each object once per collection. So reference counting might not be faster overall, but typically avoids long pauses. What you probably really want is something like Azul's JVM, which has a kernel extension so they can collect memory concurrently, resulting in shorter pauses than sweeping and faster overall time than reference counting.
This was really well articulated; thank you for writing it. I find piracy/DRM/copyright theft/etc difficult to wrap my head around, in the sense that I have trouble deciding where I stand on many of those issues. The "information deserves to be free" thing has always rung a bit hollow to me, but

"Its not just easier. A copy has zero marginal cost. That makes it special and
different than anything that came before. DRM seems to just be a monkey-patch
to try to get that marginal cost to be non-zero. I'm not saying that it
deserves to be free. I'm not even saying that I think it should be. I'm saying
that it IS free. We don't want it to be, because our economic models don't
support it (yet), but that's its natural state."

makes way more sense.
This is the second (that I've seen) submission of this horrifying idea. Classifying the commodification of homeless people is beyond politically incorrect- it's inhumane and representative of a total lack of perspective typical of so many of those who are privileged enough to attend institutions like MIT. For those behind it: adding a disclaimer to your site that suggests your actions are in good faith only further confirms, to me, your total lack of awareness about what it means to be disenfranchised in this society. Instead of resubmitting this link after your first entry got so much flak, why don't you try and exhibit even a minor degree of awareness and take the site down? You're shaming yourselves and your institution.
It all comes down to economics. Buy a beater bike, and sure, you can secure it well enough. (Mean time between stolen is low enough you don't care too much.) Buy a really nice one that everyone wants, and good luck with that.

Popular, recently produced media has too much value to too many attackers to protect. A celebrity's self shots -- same thing. A game console by Microsoft or Sony -- same thing.

> But it's absolutely possible to make it so insanely complex and difficult that no one will ever break it

A more accurate way to put it: If you make the return on effort ratio low enough, the probability of someone breaking it goes down, and it might even go down enough for you to get away with it for a useful amount of time.
I have no idea why they're using "average full professor salary" as a proxy for comparison, since full professors are a tiny minority of faculty.
Yes, you bought them together, but you still bought them separately in the sense that you were not married to a particular CPU depending on the motherboard you purchased (although it can restrict your option to varying degrees, of course). Now you are stuck.

The bigger worry is if they start to shut out third-party MB manufacturers. I don't get why the author of the article assumes they will, however.