skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'd be curious if anyone has a Sparc guest running Solaris 10/11 on a Mac..
> So basically if you're reading HN, the title probably doesn't apply to you.

Maybe not directly, but a large chunk of todays employees suddenly doing unnecessary work will cause troubles for all.
AMA request: Evad3rs
Those are some good links, thanks. Are there clear distinctions between these four areas? It seems like the separation is a historical artifact, when they're all basically doing the same thing.
Probably some mixture of the two.

I certainly know hippy type people who would care about stuff like this at an ideological level but are not technical enough to understand the specifics and would struggle to identify whether the video they are playing on their computer is DRM protected or not.
Really, why? You wouldn't hire someone that has some "language aesthetic preferences", although a bit different that the mainstream ones? He said "preventing me for ever liking Python" not "I'll never touch it because of this".
Convenience Before Freedom: How Tech Companies Are Slowly Trapping You [Opinion]
Copyright is 300 years old. Before that, restrictions on copying were enforced in England through publishers monopolies. We have had some sorts of protections on copying almost as long as printing presses have been available to make copying possible.

And separating Google out in this is ridiculous. Google wants to make money off content too. They just do it by using other peoples content to spy on you and sell you out to advertisers. Yeah, far more noble than Sony just charging me for a copy of some movie. Indeed, I'd argue that the inability to effectively protect content online has made things worse. It has lead to companies like google that monetize privacy instead of companies that directly monetize creative works, because the former is logistically easier.
I think you nailed it. If the arrow was simply pointing down, it could help.
I've always seen this as a social problem - why, when we automate things, does the demand that people have jobs persist? Surely if there's less work to do then everyone should be working less, not finding new things to do. There's an implicit assumption in our society that everyone must work, even when there is nothing to be done. Productivity is put on a pedestal when it is just a means to an end - undesirable means, at that.

I strongly believe that putting people out of work and allowing them to continue living comfortably will bring hidden benefits. There will be more time to think, reconcile and determine the best path to take as opposed to mindlessly doing as much as possible just to earn enough for bread and shelter.

Bertrand Russell wrote a good essay on this - In Praise Of Idleness: http://www.zpub.com/notes/idle.html

As a software developer, someone who will stay employed in the coming years, I'm willing to give up some of my salary so that the newly unemployed can continue to survive and do what they want with their free time. They pay people in our profession more than enough to live well. Unfortunately, I haven't found a decent mechanism to make such a contribution, aside from helping family and friends. There really ought to be one - a voluntary communism, so to say.
Numerical optimisation with Kangaroos (1993)
Best. Thing. Ever.

Running smooth in Chrome Canary.
I'm always looking forward to Perl6, waiting for its stable version, for 10 years.
TPB got trolled in such an obvious and fat manner?
Unbelivable.
Data Science: What's in a Name?
works fine for me which browser are you using ?
> but they've been allowed to place limits on downloaded content such as iPlayer not letting you store content forever.

To be fair, that just follows existing UK copyright law on 'time shifting' which is explicitly mentioned in the law (as allowed) and has time limits.
"we spend so much time of our days dealing with viruses and general Windows headaches"

Rather than maintaining all this enterprise stuff to fight off the Windows tar-pit of viruses and dreaming of a day of MS Office on Linux, why don't you switch to Macs which require no such special effort to stay virus-free and already have MS Office available?

Am I missing something here?
I use redis for this exact reason -- I prerender over 2,000 page templates twice a day, and store them in RAM. The app server has to do a little processing before sending the pages to users -- it picks a different template depending on whether the user's logged in or not, and then substitutes the user's info into the template (for logout/profile links). The session info is also stored in redis. This lets me reboot the server and be ready to serve pages again almost as soon as it's back up. With all the data, redis uses about 300-400MB RAM on a 64bit Debian VM.

I use a VPS for my site, and on a VPS, the only thing you're allocated that you can depend on always being available is RAM. The processor cores might be shared with a busy user, and you can't always depend on high disk I/O speeds.
Many, at least according to this thread: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5230636
This is less to do with the "public" internet as accessed from mobile/desktop browsers; it's about enabling the next-generation of HTML5 based interactive TVs and STBs to interoperate with already deployed DRM and encryption platforms, such as TDT premium in Spain, Top-up TV in the UK, and various CI+ based cable operators across Europe.

The DRM is already out there, HTML boxes are already out there, some sort of API is going to happen (even if not through the W3C then through some organisation like HbbTV or OIPF) and if the BBC sticks its fingers in its ears and ignores this then it risks being stuck with an objectively worse API that its luckless developers will end up bashing their heads against at some point in the future.

(Incidentally, this is the thread from the last time this came up; https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3620432 )
"Content (of similar quantity and quality) will in fact still be created, in spite of that business model dying. You're not likely to convince people of this, I believe."

"Content" was created long before copyrights. Technology may have changed and opened the door to new kinds of entertainment, but if you are looking for an example of how entertainment might be created in the absence of copyright, you need look no further than a history book.

How will movies be monetized? Maybe we need movie theaters to deliver a positive experience we cannot easily duplicate in our homes. Maybe we will see an increase in serials -- you do not get to see the next installment of a popular show until a certain amount of money is paid. Maybe there is some radically different way to monetize movies that neither you nor I are creative enough to come up with. As long as we cling to copyright, however, we will not only never see such things, but we will continue to see great systems and technologies killed in the name of copyright enforcement.

"Content (of similar quantity and quality)"

I think we can strive for something of better quality than what we see today. The majority of today's mainstream music and movies are not particularly high quality -- formulaic plots, formulaic melodies and arrangements, a heavy focus on special effects to make up for bad storytelling and unoriginal music, and a general lack of creativity.
>Whether design or implementation is the hard part depends entirely what kind of software you're building. Think of something like Google's self-driving car. I can't imagine that the hard part of that is just sitting down and writing the code.

That's kind of what I'm talking about. You can't get a patent claim on "a self-driving car" -- and if you do the patent office has failed miserably. Software patents don't cover the overall product, they cover the building blocks you use to make one. And each of the individual building blocks is not the hard part, the hard part is the overall implementation -- assembling them all into a cohesive whole that accomplishes the major goal you set out to achieve.

You want someone who starts with the Google self-driving car and sets out to copy it to have a hard time of it legally, so that they decide instead to do their own independent implementation and have their own costs (and maybe advance the field themselves) so that they can't just undercut Google having done no R&D, but at the same time still make it so that they can do an independent implementation without infringing. Those are the two important criteria.

Copyright pretty well does the first one. If you can't just copy Google's code out of their car and put it in yours, you have to write some tens of millions or more lines of code yourself. And then you have to test it and stamp out the bugs, which is by far the most expensive part of producing software in practice. (I expect this goes double when the thing you're making is a car.) Patents don't really add very much on top of that -- if someone is already doing an independent implementation, having to work around a patent is a small incremental cost, especially if the issued patent is not so broad that it covers the problem itself rather than a specific solution.

Which brings us back to the trouble: In order for the patent system to do anything for software R&D, you can't just have one patent, you need thousands. Which thoroughly violates the second criteria -- now no one can do an independent implementation without accidentally stepping on some fraction of the outlandish number of issued software patents. To clear yourself you have to clear tens or hundreds of thousands of issued patents, but to sue you the plaintiffs need only find a single patent for which you failed to do so. And to shake you down they don't even need to do that, as long as the cost of proving they're full of crap in court is more than the amount they're demanding for a license. These costs vastly exceed any possible incremental benefit over copyright of having software patents at all.
The main problem is then you have people that work and envy the ones that don't.

Let's be honest, wouldn't you prefer for someone to just pay you and you could do whatever you wanted? Go skiing, hiking, learn Ember or Haskell? Bu in this scenario, you are working on another CRUD application that will make a few more data entry people redundant which will go skiing, hiking, learn the guitar, and you will be stuck at the office in Java land cursing Hibernate (or whatever framework you hate).

We as people are quite jealous of each other, promoting a society where this would happen as standard either grind it to a halt (those that can work would refuse).
In Defense Of Email
I'll have to admit, I could not for the life of me tell if the entry was sarcastic or sincere. He seems to think there is only one WebKit, which numerous articles following the news of Opera's switch has made clear isn't the case.

He is also assuming that because every major browser is using the same engine, everyone will suddenly magically agree with one another on how to do stuff. Chrome and Safari uses different versions of WebKit, and trust me, it won't be long before Opera will use its own version of WebKit as well.
Schedule change. Today's project is to see is qemu running a big endian PPC delivers acceptable performance for testing software in a bigendian environment. I could retire an old Mac Mini PPC running Debian.
Mrs Todd read the notes and handed them back to the detective. “My son might have killed himself, but he did not write this,” she said with some calm.

The notes were surprising, she said later. One praised IME and its management. Another apologised for being a burden to his family. Neither sounded like Shane. One, Shane had never been a burden – “he had excelled at everything he put his mind to,” Mrs Todd said. Two, “he hated the way IME was run and the way top management treated people.” Shane’s girlfriend later said she was sure Shane’s last moments were not spent lauding IME. “He hated his job,” she said.

It's always amazing how in (possible) conspiracies like this, the perpetrators make one simple mistake that so clearly gives the whole thing away.
Wow, thank you for this. It seems to cover everything I could think of (plus a whole lot more) so is a ToS still necessary if you use this? What's the difference?
> Object.observe will make it fast even if you're batman.

Additionally Object.observe will make Ember way of the data binding obsolete. So there will be another big Ember API change in near future.

Object.observe adoption for Angular apps will be transparent. Only the framework code will be updated. Maybe it is already updated.
How are salesman obsolete? Will a person that wants to pay 50k-500k a year for software+services really not want to talk to someone?
Finding my way around Shenzhen
You're right on both counts. I would never perldoc my private code...I already don't use it for installed modules. So that's a personal preference. The prototypes issue is spot on. They're ignored during compilation when dispatching isn't clear ($obj->method() ... which subclass?). Most of my subs aren't called that way, so I do get argument checking, which has saved my butt many times, so I just make a habit of always using prototypes. They've been useful for me: that's all I've got there. I could easily be wrong.

And that goes for my whole coding style. You could easily say it's wrong to use "@_" the way I do, which I feel is incredibly convenient. I'm not saying it's a best practice. Maybe it isn't. But for me, it presents no obstacle, and I feel the code is perfectly clear. In in fact, having to enumerate every single argument merely to pass them along, in the same order, to another sub...to me, that seems like a terrible idea. Some people prefer that verbosity (or clarity, if you like). I don't think it's necessary.
The Best Usenet Providers Of 2013: A Review
Obama says patent trolls “hijack” and “extort;” So do something, Mr. President
Your entire comment made me happy, until that last line.

Large almost-monopoly molochs suck. Is it really the only way?
I mostly looked at GAs and GPs. Evo strategy has some interesting mathematical stuff.

Basically GA and GP are the dominant strands. And there's a key difference.

Genetic Algorithms are historically about finding paramaters into a function. You have some function f(X1 ... Xn), and you are trying to find the best set of parameters X1...Xn. So a common representation is a string of floats or integers or whatever, and then you do the crossovers and mutations based on positions in the string.

Genetic Programming is about creating new functions. So instead of a string of parameters, the genome is (usually) a tree of instructions to be interpreted. You do mutations by swapping node types, crossovers by chopping subtrees and moving them etc.

One artefact of the historical "parallel evolution" (teehee) of these fields is that GP practitioners use crossovers much less than GA practitioners.
This guy sounds like a sociopath, and his characterization that massive unemployment is ultimately "a good thing" is mystifying.

Even in a hypothetical post-scarcity world, there are things to do, and objectives to pursue. The question is just whether your survival and well-being are dependent on your pursuits. Transitioning the world to a place where one's job is not a major part of one's identity would be a massive, and probably misguided effort.

Also, it's also pretty clear that this guy doesn't understand the graph he has posted here: http://techcrunch.com/2013/01/26/america-has-hit-peak-jobs/

That's a static snapshot. It's not like there is a fixed group that is always in the top 2%. In fact, one would hope in a meritocracy, there is a healthy flow in and out of the 2% that keeps people striving and attempting new things. A world where there's a permanent fixed elite is a world of stagnation.
Bill to drastically expand public access to federally funded research
I doubt they would say anything publicly, but it seems like the reported sale price Twitter would be an answer of it's own.
I know it's anecdotal like your own post but I saw an Anthony Bourdain Singapore episode and he said it was one of the worst possible places for libertarians like himself. I know I hate it.
The guides are synced with the API now. But I feel like you essentially need to read every section before you can get a feel for how to put together an application.

There was a quick start project I found at one point which looked like what I wanted, but it was not in sync with the latest guides / api so I couldn't use it. Not sure if that has been updated now, but there is no obvious link that I know of and I don't remember where I found it.

edit: here's the quick start project I was talking about. https://github.com/emberjs/starter-kit/ Unfortunately it doesn't look to be up to date.
Here's a more banal prediction: construction will add about two million new jobs between now and 2020, health services will add five million, other services about 13 million, mining another 25,000. There will be declines in manufacturing and agriculture, but only in the tens of thousands, because honestly, we've already gutted those industries. (Meanwhile, there will be proportionate gains in those industries in other cheap labor countries, indicating this isn't a tech thing.) If anything, post some magic moment where general purpose robotification (google "PR2") is super cheap, manufacturing will flood to... dunno... whatever country is best at keeping the lights on. Maybe Japan? (Excluding weather events, they have about 1/1000th of the grid disturbances we have in the US, it's freakish - but then maybe it's unfair to exclude weather).

Basically, trends will continue exactly as they have, and as exactly as almost every trade theorist predicted at the outset of globalization. We're getting out of manufacturing. We're doubling down on services. It has very little to do with technology.

PS: If you have a high school diploma or less, you are fucked. Your best move was to start advocating for trade assistance or aggressively progressive taxation ten years ago.
W3C is an industry consortium of for profit companies. It is not some utopian political organization.
My understanding is that a C-Corp also has much simpler paperwork around tax time.
Good idea might try that too...
am using firefox
Exactly; closed source and patented.
Show HN: TurnTable.fm SSB App for Mac built with node-webkit
The DRM spec will presumably be open

Isn't actually true, as I understand it, the integration points to DRM will be standard and "open" but the DRM implementation can be a black box as currently proposed.
Patent trolls operate in the legal and judicial branches. He could have some influence in congress but this is literally not his job. If you want someone to do something, look at the congressmen not the executive branch.
IANAL, but some basic details:

There needs to be a strict separation between the corporation and the people behind the corporation. As part of this, the LLC's finances need to be kept rigorously firewalled from personal finances — never pay a corporate bill from your own pocket, for example, or vice-versa.

You also need to follow the formalities of a corporation by keeping formal records (minutes, shareholder acts, etc.).

If you fail to do either of these things you, in addition to the LLC, can be sued, and you can lose personal assets. It's called 'piercing the corporate veil'. A great run-down is here:

http://www.nolo.com/legal-encyclopedia/personal-liability-pi...
Haven't people basically been saying this since computers were invented? Hey lets try it again, probably right the 300th time!
Python and Ruby both have garbage collectors and can deal with reference cycles. Perl only has reference counting, leading to programs that leak memory due to reference cycles and needing to hunt down where in the code you're creating them.

It's the only high-level language I know of that only has reference counting for memory management.
>Do you believe in unions then? Unions are pretty much the same thing. They inflate wages and force companies to pay workers a wage that would otherwise be much less.

That's the neoliberals or naive american's view on unions.

People all over the world would beg to differ.

Unions restore (some) of the imbalance in power between the employeer and the individual worker.

The protect people that need a job to feed their families against blackmail from those offering a job, and force companies to pay a wage that would otherwise be much less (at the threshold of substinence, if there weren't any unions around, such as it was in the 19th century).

Unions have also won many cherished rights, from prohibiting child labour, to the 8-hour work week, to work safety measures...
"I've always seen this as a social problem - why, when we automate things, does the demand that people have jobs persist?"

This is a interesting question - and something I have seen brought up on HN before. Some have brought up future policies:

- Guaranteed income (something perhaps like the equivalent of $30000 to everyone)
- The end of minimum wage

I surmise that real human potential is actually wasted for the sake of "people having jobs" - whether that is them acting like automatons or going through the motions (example: driving 50 miles to sit at a desk and browse social media).
Show HN : Migrate Posterous blog to Tumblr in few clicks
Hopefully this will bring some smile to lot of folks out there to move their posterous blog to Tumblr.

Its a clean & safe way to migrate. Almost all post type is supported and posts are queued once Tumblr limit is reached.
Definitely a interesting take on sharing data over a LAN but I would be worried about the repercussions of using broadcasts to move a large quantity of data on a larger network, cool for smaller/personal networks though.
I started as an LLC and had to covert to a C-Corp. Paid a lawyer to do it, but it really wasn't hard at all. Of course we also didn't have many assets at that point.
"You can fork it" is pretty outdated as a concept. Today, with DCVS, we have "you can create a branch, then both continuously rebase from upstream, while continuously submitting pull requests to upstream."
That's a great point. Perhaps one resolution is to take turns working instead. One person goes on the grind for half a year, then the one they were supporting takes over and they get to indulge in life instead. The sense of fairness would remain that way. Only issue is that both people need to be highly skilled (since low skill jobs will be the ones to go). Another approach might be that in every family there will be at least one person who is capable of doing complex technical work - they could support their family and, in turn, their family could take care of some of their immaterial needs. In other words, the giving would be an act of love, not a transaction which is balanced on the books.

I really don't have a good solution for this, have not given it much thought. It's a complex problem. Perhaps the issue is that we are currently locked in this state, as a society, and need to reach a certain threshold before the character of it changes. I'm not quite sure what that looks like or how to get there, but I get the feeling that it is achievable. There must be better ways to live than this. What we have now just isn't good enough.
Working great on a macbook-pro with Windows 8. :-P
I was having a discussion about this topic with an economist friend of mine. His theory was that if one took automization to its complete and logical conclusion, the only people left employed would be "soft" creators like artists and clergy, plus creators of hand-made goods which in that world would fetch an enormous premium. We'd also see a boom for experience-seekers, like tourism and sports.

Ultimately I think we're inexorably heading towards that kind of reality. The question is how long will it take, and will it be a peaceful conversion or a violent one. Personally I think innate human greed, pettiness, jealousy, and tribalism is going to make that shift unpleasant for the generation stuck with it. I hope I'm proved wrong.
At the expense of battery life and performance as _compared to native applications_.