skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
>DRM is software working against its own users. Why should we embrace it?

Steam is DRM. Steam enables me to download my games from all over the place, because their DRM knows that I bought the game at least once.

Not always a hinderance
Thanks for the post. What're you doing about Listen? I've been happily using it even after they've discontinued it. But I assume it'll stop working for good once Reader is shut down. I've seen other Podcast apps on my friends' phones who weren't "grandfathered" into Listen, and I'm not impressed.
Translation: "game developers are now strongly encouraged to use Azure for backend".
While I don't particularly like it (or Go for that matter) Dart is, if nothing else, a lot less idiosyncratic and plain crazy than JavaScript is.
> You lost the challenge with 11370 points against 11397.

Damn, I thought I'd beat you, but your last one was really close and made for all points I were ahead of you.
> DRM is necessary to help prevent capsule mass piracy

Nope: https://plus.google.com/107429617152575897589/posts/iPmatxBY...
I feel like we're not hearing the full story here...

This is precisely why accusations are so damaging, even if one is acquitted. People assume that there must be more they don't know, and the accused's reputation is forever tainted.
I think the future of journalism, like everything else really, will become decentralized. So instead of having one monolithic structure do everything from research and investigate journalism, to writing, you'll have all these pieces separated.

The writing will be left to the "bloggers" or people who just write and analyze from the sources they get. The "investigative" part will come mainly from leaks and whistleblowing - well unless the Obama administration has something to say about that, but I doubt they can stop the change.

Also, this policy most likely comes from US. I think it's really terrifying how easily the Obama administration can order assassinations. It's like they don't even care about laws and fair trials anyway. Don't like someone? Just eliminate them.
> I am OK with paying with my information.

To be more accurate, you're paying with your privacy. Of course, "information" does sound more pleasant.
TL;DR The guy's marketing is questionable, he makes misleading claims, hasn't done proper testing but the product or a spin-off still has the potential to be useful to many people.
> I hate to say it but Linus does seem—as one of the top 14% most vulgar users on GitHub—to be a tad foul-mouthed (with a particular affinity for filthy words like 'mick').

Is mick a filthy word? Linus probably often refers to a kernel developer named Mick, which then earned him this spot in the top 14%.
Are Current Web Design Trends Pushing Us Back to 1999? (2011)
Should confessions in the absence of evidence really be taken seriously?
it is easier to behave properly when you have a big pile of chips in front of you. when you don't have any chips, it is tougher. that's why the best get better and the worst get worse.
there are many of us in VC who approach things this way. they are the ones we like to work with the most. if you look at who we work with often, you can reverse engineer the list.
Ask HN: What are your favourite (exceptional) movies? 
Hi HN,

I find it difficult to watch movies that lack quality. On the same note, I enjoy watching movies and thus end up frequently disappointed.

Please list your top 5 movies of all time. Genres don't really matter, provided you are willing to qualify the movie with 'exceptional'. The order is immaterial.

Granted, quality is a subjective measure, but it is assumed that the intersection of our definitions of the same will provide some sort of list for fellow hackers who are looking to entertain themselves.

Also, please include one movie in the list which you consider to be a proper mind-fK. You can mark it with an (M).

Thanks :-)
If you pay for it with information, it is no more "free" than if you payed for it with money.
tabs are an infinite source of pain and inconsistencies...

Everyone must support the space character, it cannot be banned. But a simple commit hook to ban tabs can make indentation and alignment not get messed up over time with many collaborators with default-configured editors (that mess up and use tabs for alignment).
Hah - what a fun tool! I'm surprised to find out I'm in the top 38% most vulgar users on Github. I'd always told my teams never to swear in code so I'm probably in the top 10% most hypocritical user pool...

http://osrc.dfm.io/philjackson
Where's Carmen Ortiz when you need her, to put this guy in prison for 30 years?
Self driving trucks would be interesting, especially in the US where there are pretty long routes that don't need much driver interaction.

Stuff with fixed and repeating routes like buses (or airport shuttle buses) are also interesting imo

It would also be cool if down the road (pun not intended) a care could detect if the driver is drunk and switch to selfdrive mode.
By principle I prefer software that's free as in freedom of speech and services that are managed by non-profits.

However, you're not talking about "free as in freedom of speech", but rather about being a cheap bastard.

Nothing wrong with that, I am and will always be a cheap bastard myself. BUT sometimes being cheap is different from being frugal and can have a negative effect on your bottom line.

My Dropbox subscription costs as much as 2 Starbucks coffees and man, let me tell you, I drink a lot of coffee. In exchange I get a good Linux client, a good iPad client, plus unlimited history of changes. I also trust them with my data, for now at least.

With Google Drive you may think that you'll always have alternatives to move in case they shut it down. However, by supporting Google, you're contributing to a possible future where no alternatives are left. Also, in case Google ever cuts you out of your account based on a malfunctioning script that calculated some probability that you may be violating their TOS for one of their dozens of services, you will not have the moral right to bitch about it, because you knew the associated risks.
Tough. You're saying the seller should make less income just because you want a hardback book?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5747657 (the similar user names seem to be a funny coincidence, I'm not related to that person in any way)
Not better, but different
This game is addicting!
http://www.geoguessr.com?v=eyJ0b3RhbFBvaW50cyI6MTUxMzMsInZlc... (15133 points)

I have to admit I found "Antibes" written on one of the posters and got 6k points just for one guess.
This is, at best, a first-pass alpha, but a highly promising one. Further, the student apparently understood the reason for the errors and offered an inexpensive way to fix them. What would you have wanted int the title?

"Student takes Google's self-driving car and offers the potential to make it $71,000 cheaper contingent upon correcting a misidentification issue that causes a possible failure rate of 6%"

Yeah, that would be so much better ;)

It's OK to take a little license with a title and try to summarize the main points. Maybe just adding the word "potential" in there would be enough, but some user named lololinternet would come along and claim how misleading the title is because ...
As a Google Reader refugee, I've tried out Feedly and Newsblur, and at the time Feedly was closer to what I wanted from Reader. Now, the redesigned NewsBlur totally ticks all my boxes, very nice.
Perhaps there is a lack of appreciation of generics at Google in general. Go entirely lacks them, as another data point.
"making you do anything we want for days"

Days? I believe the median is 5 hours. The decision may then take days... but that's not the same thing.
Actually, investing can be absolutely fascinating stuff and learning can eat plenty of your time. There are many schools of economics and different people will tell you different things, sometimes on opposite sides of an argument, all can be very interesting.

Try finding some videos of Peter Schiff, Marc Faber, Jim Rogers, Kyle Bass on youtube. Or read them. They are all in favor of gold, hard assets. Now, there are plenty of others strongly disagreeing with them who are very interesting to listen as well.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ykT3z2qy1LI
i don't want to disclose confidential information publicly but we did the first three rounds with Spark alone so we did way more than pro-rata in those and then we did pro-rata in every round since.
It seems his vulgarity surpasses his C skill!
not gonna sit and go back & forth, but prisons are growing because of current state levels of 115% capacity & federal levels of 136% ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_incarceration_rat... )

I'd say they are "all filled up"
Sometimes I feel I'm on repeat here but Steam isn't necessarily DRM. There are several DRM free games on Steam that use it only for distribution.
Limiting the zoom function (top right, yes) is a good rule for a speed run. I think I did this playthrough in about 5 minutes. (I also discovered the variation by accident, as I posted below.) Altering the skill vs luck knob this way makes competitive mode a little more accessible to casual players.

And it's also a bit of a geography test. I guessed Moscow (wrongly, it was Minsk) and had to test my knowledge of where in the giant unlabeled shape of Russia that was. Similarly, pinpointing Montana out of all North America (with no country or state boundaries) is a lot harder than guessing "somewhere in Montana" when you can see the outline of Montana.
You are mixing different things into each other.

Steam is a software/store to purchase (not sure if purchase is the correct term) video games. Steam requires you to use an account and all your purchases are logged in it. So when/where-ever you use that account, you have access to the games.

Steam forces you to authenticate online with your account before you can use the Steam software to run the games. If you fail to authenticate or if Steam decides to remove your account or else, you cannot use Steam. That is the DRM part.
To me, there are two issues at hand and the first is whether this statement could be called harassment. I'd say yes, as a part of a larger whole, it can definitely be harassment.

The second is whether law enforcement might call something that should be protected speech harassment and I'm sure that they will and do from time to time. In this particular case I have no problem with calling it harassment if the other allegations are true.
everyone contributed but it was David, Marco, and the entire Tumblr team who should get all the credit for this
View dozens of Google Calendars in one Gantt chart
And what’s the point of XMPP if you drop federation?
I immediately had to think of Kurt Vonneguts "Player Piano" published in 1952, with similar a theme of automation of all production (by "taping" actions) and the impact of that on society. It also briefly mentions a "third industrial revolution" in which even human thought will be performed more efficiently by machines.
How Apple Avoids Taxes Through R&D Spending
I just wanted to put it in comparison with the 10000x, YC got with AirBnb and Dropbox.
That is neither self-hosted nor free open-source from a quick look at it.
From Mary Jo Foley's blog:
Xbox Live does not run on Windows Azure; it runs on its own servers in Microsoft's datacenters.
It's a racial slur against the irish. Somehow I doubt that's how linus is using it though.
'Mick' is slang for Irish; it's a racial slur. Your theory seems more likely.
This is actually valuable and useful feedback for any information product authors out there (which includes me, sometimes).

Some people just want a physical thing. It might be irrational to want a physical thing, but if not getting a physical thing is holding them back from giving you money, it doesn't really matter how irrational you think they are.

I've heard this in other venues too, usually accompanied by "so I started offering one, and I made a startling amount more money".

Question, Swizec - would you pay $39 for a physical copy of the book? That would cover printing costs and (just about) the additional labour.

(Of course, it's also a valid decision on the part of the business owner to say "well, I don't want to provide a physical thing: it's too much hassle". Maximising profit is not always the ideal route.)
Your issue is not knowing JavaScript. No point to blame a JavaScript linter.
when you are Linus Torvalds, you have to be able to violate a bit the code of conduit :)
I loved it when he gives a finger to Nvidia :
http://www.wired.com/wiredenterprise/2012/06/torvalds-nvidia...
Using free software to host services yourself is hardly being a cheap bastard. You are paying for the hosting part yourself.
You can always have the Any type + a runtime tag on the box if you really need it.
>Steam is DRM.

That is a common mischaracterization of Steam but it is technically incorrect.

Steam itself is the distribution platform (authentication/payment system and package manager). It can be used to deliver both DRMed and DRM-free content [1]. Valve's own DRM (called "Custom Executable Generation" or "CEG" for short) is part of the Steamworks framework; many games published on Steam do use CEG and some games also include third-party DRM on top of or instead of it [3] but it is not mandatory to use CEG for your game for it to be published on Steam.

Now, you could argue that Steam encourages the use of DRM but that's a rather different discussion.

[1] http://www.gog.com/forum/general/list_of_drmfree_games_on_st...

[2] http://www.steampowered.com/steamworks/

[3] http://pcgamingwiki.com/wiki/The_Big_List_of_3rd_Party_DRM_o...
If the founder came out and said, "look ive been trying this for months and its great.. now you can try it with me...", that would be fine. But I agree that some of these claims are too much for something that is so unproven.
> Someone who is hellbanned can come back with a new account. Or, if they feel it was a mistake they could write a short email explaining this and asking for an unban.

Um, are we talking about the same word here?

How can they do that? The whole point of a hell-ban is that for them everything looks normal, just the way it should be if nothing had happened.

Unless they happen to stumble upon it (viewing from another IP, maybe a friend emailed them), there's no reason to assume any action at all is required.

That is my whole point: the useless waste of time in order to even find out you were hell-banned.

As soon as you start noticing your comments haven't been getting any replies or upvotes for a couple of days: start getting nervous. You might've tripped a mod, they are often fair, but they are also human, and that's a couple of days of comments that the large "showdead=0" majority of HN simply hasn't seen.
http://www.geoguessr.com?v=eyJ0b3RhbFBvaW50cyI6MzkzMSwidmVyc...
My first guess was so close. Others, not so much. I thought Africa was America, and thought Australia was Africa.
Seems the site does't cache results. And just hit the rate limit.
Insurance companies will charge a good bit less for insuring self driving cars, since they're already statistically safer than most human drivers. I imagine that that will help out adoption.
Since no one else is writing the obligatory HN "I like the idea, but it will not work." comment, here it is.

I really like the general idea of a way to validate websites for privacy issues. In the best case they should even do this client side. But I think that they need to figure out two rather hard problems, one economically and one rather philosophical.

The economical problem is, why should any web site owner use it. I simply do not see a strong incentive.

And the philosophical is, what is actually meant by freedom? I see a lot of edge cases besides DRM which are sketchy, like user tracking. But to reliably stop user tracking, it is likely necessary to ban cookies ( which have of course a lot legitimate uses). And JS is a different can of worms, it can be used to spy on the user. The list goes on, iframes and third party content? Does freedom HTML get tainted by it?
Yes, but I think it's a more wide-spread issue.
Comparing languages of the European school with languages of the Anglo-Saxon school, it seems like the wide-spread anti-intellectualism in the US has a large impact on language design quality.

I remember that Dijkstra had some pretty good article about it.
Nomenklatura - Data Matching and Reconciliation Made Easy
Jappix looks really nice. Is there a lightweight Android client that polls every few minutes for new messages? I would need to be notified about new messages when the phone is inactive (screen off). A browser is too big for that.
It's a racial slur against the irish. - Only in the US. If you were to call an Irish person a mick anywhere outside of the US you'd be met with a confused look and them re-introducing themselves with their actual name.
Alright guys thanks! I guess when university recruiting tells you apply again in 6 months, you'd think that means apply again to the company in 6 months.
Absolutely this. I used to be passionate, in the first months of my (poorly paid) first job. I won't commit the same mistake again, I learned quickly that life is more important than work.
Two wrongs don't make a right. Hiring is broken in general and it's even more broken in SW and engineering. Not only hiring is broken, but most exams and tests are also broken. It's always possible to cheat, game the system or fake. When we were students all of us experienced studying a subject just before an exam and immediately forgetting it afterwards. Exams don't prove that you really know the topic. More importantly, you may still fail at an exam when you know the topic well but not prepared properly. The underlying assumption in these hiring processes is that the interviewer knows the difference between a good hire and a bad one, therefore she knows exactly what to test. This is far from reality. The truth is that the test is arbitrary and the candidates are expected to comply.
> I still haven't worked out what I'm going to do about Google Reader :(

I've been using Feedly since the Google Reader announcement, and am quite happy with it.
You know what else enables you to download your games from all over the place? A file that you put on any of the free or paid file hosting services. For example, I bought Machinarium, downloaded the file and put it on my private online drive.

Steam prevents you from re-selling or even gifting the games you licensed, or from buying and playing games without having all your usage data being sent back to them.
Slightly irrelevant, but I immediately thought of this CollegeHumor video sketch about a self-aware Kinect when I read the article:
http://www.collegehumor.com/video/6452454/kinect-self-awaren...
> But looking at the way people deal with risk makes me wary.

One of the problems is insurance. Right now, everyone needs to have insurance to drive. If I accidentally hit a pedestrian or rear-end another driver they can claim on my insurance.

Let's say that a software bug results in someone getting hit and injured by a self-driving car. Who's liable? I am not sure that this is FUD, so much as a genuine question. It is because driving is risky that drivers must have insurance. Presumably most people would want self-driving cars to be insured if there was a chance of failure (even planes, one of the safest forms of transport, get insured against crashing).

We could very well have a situation where cars self drive, but drivers are still expected to pay attention to the road and 'drive' to avoid liability.

I suspect there's going to be a lot of lobbying on both sides before mass deployment of self driving cars.
What makes you think this method won't generate long-term sales? Unless I'm misunderstanding what you mean by that, your prediction runs counter to my experience and the experience of other information product vendors I've had discussions with.

(Although your suggested method definitely works too.)
The comment I replied to does NOT mention hosting free software by yourself, a route with which I agree if you're so inclined.

The comment I replied to mentions preference towards Ads-enabled services, just because they are free of charge and when a subscription to a service that keeps your data is the same price as 2 coffees, that's being a cheap bastard dude.

Also, in case this term offends anyone, it wasn't really meant to be insulting. As I said, I'm a cheap bastard myself. For instance I take advantage of a lot of available freebies, like Heroku's free dynos. I'm also a free Google Apps user and haven't made any attempts to escape Google's silo. Nothing wrong with that. But in regards to the price you end up paying, sometimes cheap stuff ends up costing more.
"Also, I see it as a great way to control calories. I don't have a weight problem, but most people I do just eat huge portions and snasck. Measuring out powder will help them."

Most people eat huge portions and snacks for the physical pleasure the underlying food brings, not because they rationally think "I need huge portions to get my minimum daily intake of carbs/fats/vitamins".

Thinking that people with a weight problem will switch to a flavorless white goop it's just not realistic.
Google Apps fo Business Drops Price for Indian SMBs
That was pretty close but i just pipped you.

http://www.geoguessr.com?v=eyJ0b3RhbFBvaW50cyI6MTE2ODEsInZlc...
As a Brit, I've never heard of it meaning that.

Is it as in "taking the mick"?

Taking the Mickey Bliss -> Taking the [censored for fear of turning up in the top 17% of vulgar HNers] --> related to it being slang for being Irish? Maybe not then.
Kudos for creating and maintaining one of the most important pieces of software used on the Web today!
1. Read Later/Instapaper.
2. Manual garbage collection.
3. Tab Ahead. Sublime Text's »Go To Anything«-like Chrome extension to help me navigate through the unavoidable mess of my open tabs. https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/tab-ahead/naoajjeo...
Review my project - github like version control for Excel
Hey guys,
this is a little side project I've been working on, would be very grateful to get some feedback. Basically, it's a github-like platform for Excel workbooks, i.e. people can put their spreadsheets under version control (via simple drag & drop) and get proper diffs on value, formulae, formatting and VBA changes (merging is on the agenda). I know Excel isn't particularly hipster but it's still very, very widely used in companies, something that won't go away quickly. And from my own experience the lack of an appropriate, user-friendly version control system is something that contributes a lot to the Excel mess. So I thought rather than fighting Excel, I'll build something useful around it. Any feedback much appreciates. thanks, Bjoern
"No link. As far as I know, no reporter has ever cared about the story and so it is reported nowhere."
And even with reporter such story would be silenced fast. False rape accusation stories are always silenced (just like most of domestic violence stories where perpetrator is woman) since it "misrepresents women, and makes them afraid to report rapes". In where I live if such stories end up in bigger news sites they are removed in a few hours. And we don't even have feminism here...
It's not just you. Almost my entire interaction with google reader is hitting the space bar. After hitting 'u' to get rid of the rest of the ui.

Newsblur does the spacebar thing, (Feedly doesn't), but I can't see a way of getting rid of everything but the river of news.
He added that feature last week. Copy the "let others challenge" link.