skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
In the US, the DMCA more or less makes it illegal to reverse-engineer DRM regardless of how easy it is to crack.

The DRM could be as simple as the code being "A" to bypass the DRM and if you do so, you have broken the law. Even providing that "A" to someone else would be illegal, look at all the silliness over the dvd copy protection fiasco. Therefore, they don't even have to pretend that the DRM is strong, just saying it's there is probably enough.

It's one reason printer cartridges have chips that communicate to the printer. Reverse-engineering that to provide third-party cartridges is illegal. Well, it used to be, I'm not sure over current policy as the DMCA has a back door for exceptions.

For PC games, the DRM is often employed to prevent piracy for the first two or three weeks because typically that's the highest level of sales. After that point it is usually cracked but sales often have dipped anyway. In some cases the DRM is removed in a patch at some point, often because the DRM causes problems for people who paid for the game, which kills long-term sales. Ubisoft recently changed their policies on having a seriously strict DRM to one that is more flexible; many thinking because it hurt their sales and that it was useless anyway.

No one thinks of DRM as a long term solution since it is only a matter of time before someone cracks it.
Thanks, I'll make the appropriate changes.
Absolutely, that makes it all the more impressive to me.
Eurozone Greek Debt Bailout
As someone living in New York City, the lack of public transit integration is a complete showstopper.
11 Remarkable Female Entrepreneurs Uncover Major Startup Marketing Mistakes
Indians copy Hacker News with HackerStreet India
Attachment size limits aren't there just to fuck with you. Sending large files around between web clients is okay, but if you send a large file to an outlook user they're going to have to sit there waiting for it to download before the rest of their email comes in. And then it's going to make their PST file exceed the maximum PST file size, which in a poorly managed system (i.e. most personal computers) is going to cause data loss.

Also, my parents used to use an ISP-provided email address, and it would silently drop any messages that included a file that exceeded their maximum attachment size. So any time i tried to send them photos, they'd never get the email. Limiting attachments to a fairly small size is just being a good citizen of the email network.
Ask HN:  How do you secure your preferred web or app stack?
Most web or app frameworks are not entirely secure out of the box. Of the ones you know well and use regularly, what do you do to secure the default install/config?
LeanMarket (YC S12) replaces 2 martini lunches with RTB for mobile ads
THE DOCUMENTATION IS IN ANOTHER CASTLE!
This is lovely. Very welcome.

Sending and sharing files are two of those things that are just now sluggishly rolling over to discover that it's a new millennium.

Dropbox and Drive are making great strides lately and I'm really thankful for it. Using Dropbox to have the same "folder" across three computers is the first time synced sharing ever felt intuitive enough for my (71 year old) father to regularly use, and now he can use this to reliably send larger files to people without any worry of fouling up permissions (that would otherwise be difficult for him to understand).
It looks like that delimits an 80 char width.
The author of this linked article has made an error: he assumes dcurtis' flatware is inordinately expensive. It is not; traditional flatware really is absurdly expensive.

Much of the author's article is based on this assumption. I'd suggest he familiarize himself with "wedding gift"-style flatware. Then do a rewrite because I think there is a good argument still to be had.
Silicon Valley's dirty secret - age bias
plug: my friend built a chrome extension that does a superset of that - it is called Cloudy and integrates with filepicker.io which lets you choose files from multiple cloud storages:
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/cloudy/fcfnjfpcmno...

disclaimer: I work for a Google competitor
Can someone explain to me why this is at the top of the front page despite a website devoid of useful detail, while this completely fails to catch on: http://scummos.blogspot.de/2012/11/kdev-python-14-stable-rel...

(Seriously, check it out - KDevelop's Python plugin and Microsoft's PTVS are currently the two projects doing serious work on static analysis of Python for live editing purposes. Here's a nice subthread comparing the two: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4725634)
This reminded me of my father. Expensive things only complicated his interactions with other people, because of our ability to potentially break or abuse the object.

There is a sweet spot in-between the highest quality, and poor craftsmanship. As well as between expensive and cheap. I like to operate somewhere in the middle.
"Cue intends to replace Williamson with an entirely new management team overseeing Maps, the report says."

This sort of comment always ruins the fantasy for me. Its pretty rare, because it's often ill advised, to replace the "entire management team" unless you're completely changing the direction of the product. However, it is often the fantasy of engineers working on a team that has execution issues that the company would just "fire all the managers and let us get our work done." That fantasy comes from not knowing what the managers actually did, and that usually comes from poor communication.

Outside management would not know who was doing what, or how well they were doing it. So replacing all of them is like changing six different things in a misbehaving program and hoping the bug will go away. If it doesn't you wasted time, if it does you have no idea which of the six things fixed it.

The solution here is pick one person to lead the effort and manage them. Give them a clear mission, whether its 'ground truth' (accuracy), glitz, or feature parity. Set standards for quality, and then let them get it done.

Nothing in my career has been more frustrating than having a senior manager tell me "We want you to solve this problem..." and then when I came back and said "Ok, I need this, this, and this." and gotten push back from them? If the feedback doesn't come back as a discussion, and instead comes back as a simple denial, that is when you realize the problem isn't at your level :-).
Nice try, Microsoft.
Windows 8 signals transition to a touchscreen world
While I do like the look of the perfect spoons, I am an advocate of owning the worst. Actually I make my own bowls and plates, so while they are "perfect", it is okay to smash them, as I can always make another. When folks come over for a meal, they can pick the color and shape of their plates and bowls. And yes, my "silver" does come from the second hand store. Eventually I would like to cast my own utensils too....ah, too many hobbies, not enough time.
What is the site? Are those pageview numbers monthly?
I definitely agree with your thoughts on this, but I guess I wanted to add that Linux most definitely _does_ have human interface guidelines -- they're just not the same for every flavor of Linux under the sun. Granted a lot of Linux apps tend to be "cross-environment", or just cross-platform in general, so it's less obvious than on Mac, for example.

But GNOME definitely has them[1], and newer projects which have dedicated themselves to a really solid HIG are gaining a lot of traction[2].

[1] http://developer.gnome.org/hig-book/stable/
[2] http://elementaryos.org/docs/human-interface-guidelines

I guess the issue comes down to more people needing to _care_ about them :)
Your point is definitely valid. But Rust in particular does not have a large, complicated runtime. It's pretty small (it's just thread support, basically), and it's going to get smaller over time.

It would be great to formally verify the runtime and task infrastructure. In fact people have started to create (small, incomplete) Promela models of the message passing infrastructure. However, it's lower priority than figuring out what works from a pragmatic standpoint and implementing it at the moment.
Wing IDE is great
A simple, beautiful theme for Gitweb
Ahh, back to the Google problem.

There are so many issues here, and a big one is the misconception that forcing people to use their legal name (or in Google's case, their "name-shaped name") will somehow improve the "quality" of comments. Not only has that been demonstrated to be untrue[1], but it also hurts people who have quite valid reasons (including personal desire) to keep their names or personas separated.

One other thing to keep in mind: it is not the name which is used that changes how you speak, so much as the context in which you speak. For example, a lot of sites started forcing "Facebook only" and noticed a change in user discussion/comments; I'd argue that this change was less the display name someone used, and more the fact that their discussion became viewable by people outside the scope of the non-Facebook website. Think about how context matters: if you are (for example) homosexual and closeted to your family, would you change what you wrote, knowing it could be shared with them?

There are many many more elements to this, and yet the bottom line is I think that not only do these moves by Google reflect incompetence at the executive level and a clear disconnect with the real needs of real people, but they also demonstrate a lack of respect for the things people need most online: agency and free speech.

I've spoken publicly at several conferences about this, and am now working to establish a "NymRights" working group within NSTIC, an online standards organization. If you're interested in this issue, volunteer!

-aestetix

[1] http://english.chosun.com/site/data/html_dir/2011/12/30/2011...
I'd guess it's due to KDE's general lack of popularity. Typically, nothing done under the KDE umbrella gets noticed.
The correct way to do this would have been to make anonymity optional, then rank anonymous reviews lower than those with identity. Google knows how to rank stuff.
Bloomberg: Apple Fires Guy Responsible for Crappy Apple Maps
You see, I'm not saying that buyer protection is bad, but the payment provider companies should offer the same level of support to merchants. Now for a buyer (legit or fraudulent) it only takes couple of clicks to get their money back. And it is virtually impossible for a seller to dispute this.
Thanks for the feedback, this is currently a landing page we give to our customers we meet face to face. We're working on something more consistent to answer questions like yours.

quasardb is a key/value store.

It is (a lot) faster in a multi-client context that the engines you listed and can handle entries of any size (provided you have enough space on the servers, of course!).

It's fully symmetric which means the load is equally distributed and replicated on all the nodes (no master node).

If you have more question feel free to mail us (don't want to highjack this thread).
I will second Leanpub. I'm going straight to them with anything. It's just fantastic.
I'd say his main demographic is your conservative / libertarian who has little to no faith in government. Socially drudge tends to be moderate; fiscally, very conservative. Sort of a "keep your government hands out of my pocket" type attitude.

He heavily influences a lot of conservative politics, as his reach is massive. Many people think he helped drum up Romney support with a specific narrative across his site in the 2012 Republican primary (whether or not he was paid is up to which conspiracy theorist you speak with).

A link on his site can result in millions of page views
You appear to be unhellbanned, congrats.
I agree with everything in the article. I'd add one more thing: encourage students to use an IDE. Whenever you write code, you should be able to compile, run and set break points with a single click or keystroke.

The first thing I do when I help new CS students is to show them how to use an IDE. One guy that I taught XCode to went from an F one semester to an A in the next.

Side note: don't force new students to use VIM. It just adds one more layer of complexity to an already complicated subject. If they want to become keyboard ninjas, let them do that on their own time.
Hey guys one of the founders of Slant here.

We are just getting started and a lot of the functionality we want is missing, but I'd love to hear your feedback on the direction we are taking with the site.

We eventually want to be the home of information StackOverflow is closing for being too subjective for their Q/A format.
The unexpected cost of success - FT.com
With Codecademy, you can just begin lessons. My experience with edX, Udacity, and Coursera is that the class is structured, so you can't work at your own pace.
I thought the author was suggesting that maybe flatware isn't worth that much. There being a bunch of expensive flatware in existence is just a straw man's rebuttal to the point that affordable flatware works just fine.
We've also found people are less likely to give up if they get help at the right time. Many people at the beginning get stuck on simple bugs, but don't even know the right question to ask.
Approval Voting mostly solves the "strategic voting" part that almost forces you to choose the "most likely to win" candidate, or if you hate that one, the one closest to him, while eliminating the spoiler effect, and giving 3rd party candidates a much higher chance of winning than with current traditional voting systems.

http://www.electology.org/approval-voting

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Approval_voting
I agree that having projects weighted high would benefit those who got unfair levels of help. That's probably the main reason it isn't done already.

Maybe that could be helped by the author's suggestions on how to make the written tests better. Or by having timed programming exercises as part of the test.
I'm going to guess you're based in the US, because the two big Linux desktop camps are indeed somewhat split along the continents as far as mindshare goes. Makes me wonder about the exact breakdown by geographical area of the HN readership :).
The question is always to what degree others are contributing to a website so it is still run by a "single" person. In most cases there might be a person checking in on the servers on a regular basis that is paid through the hosting fee, etc.

Plus there are not dictatorships on the internet. People vote with their feet and are, especially on an anonymous site such as 4chan not locked in, like they are with Facebook profile/networks.

If there were something describable as dictatorships on the internet, I would argue that it is those sites that try to impose their own values and judgments on their members, and not 4chan (and to a minor degree reddit), which (in most parts) only rule is to avoid completely illegal themes.
Mostly common (to me), but there's a few good ones in there! ^x^e could be my new favorite!
That's not what their "please donate" campaign told me.
This is how email could work too. The sender would host it (by himself or in cloud) and the recipients go fetch it when they want to read it. Updates and comment threads all collect into the same place. No spam either since nobody would be pushing tens of megabytes of messages to your inbox.
Also, there's this: http://papers.nber.org/papers/w15220
Check out more than 100 real-world robots in this iPad app
I'll be interested to hear how the Leanpub output compares to Scrivener. The Scrivener pdf looks decent. There are a few line spacing issues though on the example I saw on Amazon.
Is it the manager in charge of the back end or the actual app? Because while the backend is shit, the app is really great.
I don't think the comedown is harsh for non-recreational doses. Also, you only do the therapy sessions during the high, so the serotonin depletion shouldn't matter much.

There is very little evidence that MDMA at therapeutic doses causes any more damage than all of the other legal prescription drugs like prozac.
Show HN: The PDF Machine - My project website that converts documents to PDFs
I've been working on various underlying components for this for a few months now. The components are part of a larger vision, but this site is the start of it.

This site is a very simple concept - upload documents and they're converted to PDF for you. The remainder of my plan builds on this, so I'm wanting to make sure that this core feature works really well. So, I thought that there's no better way than to launch it as a stand-alone website.

It's currently free to use until I can feel like charging for it is the right thing to do. I require sign ups because it helps me to keep documents organized on a per-user basis, and it future proofs the site. I'm also interested in any feedback positive or negative! Thanks.
Drudge (and his site) got famous by breaking various news related to the Lewinsky scandal during the Clinton Presidency.
Your comment wasn't the least bit fair to michaelochurch

>So that clarified to me that actually you a) believe women are inferior

There is absolutely no way your quoted portion could honestly be read in a way that suggests that. "Empirically, most of them seem to be men" explicitly disavows any attempt at explaining the difference.

This is the problem I see with a lot on threads on the topic of social justice here and places like reddit. Some have a pervasive need to read everything in the worst possible light, even going to the point of inventing enemies to support a narrative of widespread persecution.

>All in all pretty standard for a top comment about gender issues on HN.

I'm not sure what you expect from a forum such as this. There simply isn't much to add in terms of the socialization aspect of this article that hasn't already been hashed out in other threads about gender issues. This study doesn't really add any new information that would warrant another discussion on the issue. Discussing how everyone is affected by lack of assertiveness in general, and specifically in salary negotiations will likely have much more utility, thus comments along that line get voted up. There is nothing to be read into this.
If it was down, how did ya post? And how would we see your post?
Also, here are some more quotes on the influence of commercial funding, showing indirectly that the file drawer effect combined with the methodology produces results that are much more biased and of poorer quality than non-profit funded studies.

"Studies repeatedly document bias in commercially sponsored research, but the medical journals seem powerless to control the scientific integrity of their own pages. In 2003, separate studies were published in JAMA and the <i>British Medical Journal</i> showing that the odds are 3.6 to 4 times greater that commercially sponsored studies will favor the sponsor's products than studies without commercial funding. And in August of 2003 a study published in JAMA found that among the highest-quality clinical trials, the odds that those with commercial sponsorship will recommend the new drug are 5.3 times greater than for studies funded by non-profit organizations. The authors noted that the lopsided results of commercially sponsored research may be 'due to biased interpretation of trial results.' They cautioned that readers should 'carefully evaluate whether conclusions in randomized trials are supported by data.' In other words, doctors are warned that even the best research published in the best journals <i>cannot</i> be taken at face value." Source: Overdose America, p. 97. Citing <a href="http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/12533125>Scope and Impact of Financial Conflicts of Interest in Biomedical Research: A systematic Review</a>, <a href="http://www.bmj.com/content/326/7400/1167.full>Pharmaceut... Industry Sponsorship and Research Outcome and Quality: A Systematic Review</a>, <a href="http://jama.jamanetwork.com/article.aspx?articleid=197132... of Funding and Conclusions in Randomized Drug Trials</a>

"In the case of calcium channel blockers like Norvasc, for instance, one survey of seventy articles about their safety found that 96 percent of authors who were supportive of the drugs had financial ties to the companies that made them, whereas only 37 percent of authors who were critical had such ties." Source: The Truth About Drug Companies, p. 107, citing <a href="http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJM199801083380206>... of Interest in the Debate over Calcium Channel Antagonists</a>

"A team of reserachers at the Beth Israel Medical Center in New York have examined the outcome of clinical trials as a function of who had sponsored them. They found that approximately 75 per cent of drug-company studies showed favourable results for their own drugs, but only 25 per cent of them showed favourable results for the product of a competing company. In studies that are not sponsored by a drug company, the success rate is approximately 50 per cent." Source: The Emperor's New Drugs, p. 62, describing <a href="http://journals.cambridge.org/action/displayAbstract;jsessio... between drug company funding and outcomes of clinical psychiatric research</a>

See also:

http://jama.jamanetwork.com/article.aspx?articleid=202867

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17550302
Can a programming prodigy disrupt the offline world as well?
This is about as blatant as copies get. But real question is, doesn't the word hacker in the name mean conversations that mostly transcend geographies. So, what's the need for this?
I've been working on various underlying components for this for a few months now. The components are part of a larger vision, but this site is the start of it.

This site is a very simple concept - upload documents and they're converted to PDF for you. The remainder of my plan builds on this, so I'm wanting to make sure that this core feature works really well. So, I thought that there's no better way than to launch it as a stand-alone website.

It's currently free to use until I can feel like charging for it is the right thing to do. I also require user accounts because it helps to future proof the service by allowing me to organized files on a per-user basis.

I'm also interested in any feedback positive or negative! Sorry for the initial posting with the incorrect URL, too. I specifically meant to not do that but ended up doing it, somehow. Thanks.
I find this idea of a lack of ECC memory on servers disturbing... This is the default on almost all rack mountable servers from the likes of HP or IBM. Of course, people use all kinds of sub-standard hardware for "servers" on the cheap, and they get what they pay for.

I haven't seen a server without ECC memory for years. I don't even consider running anything in production without ECC memory, let alone VM hypervisors. I find it pretty hard to believe that EC2 instances run on non-ECC memory hosts, risking serious data loss for their clients.

Memory errors can be catastrophic. Just imagine a single bit flip in some in-memory filesystem data structure: the OS just happily goes on corrupting your files, assuming everything's OK, until you notice it and half your data is already lost.

Been there (on a development box, but nevertheless).
Data from LHC suggest the collisions may be producing a new type of matter