skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Even if used game sales would kill the business model and force AAA game producers out of business, I would say that the First Sale Doctrine is more important than the entire industry. If I buy a product, then I am free to use it, abuse it, break it, sell it, give it, modify it, or throw it away however I please.

If the AAA game industry cannot survive while used games exist, then I would rather the entire industry die than end up with a precedent of buying something yet not owning it.
Facebook eliminates sponsored results in search
It depends on what you mean from "servers of these US Service Providers", if that means a FTP site that they've set up or if it means "full access to any server of the provider's".
You mean like those problems that prolog is good at solving? Such as those describe here? http://dangoldin.com/2013/06/07/fun-with-prolog-priceonomics...
It makes sense when you take into account the ability to sell your digital copies, which current solutions do not allow. Otherwise, nothing is preventing you from selling your copy of Halo 5, unplugging your XBO and playing it offline for 1-2 weeks before the next mandatory check-in.

It's annoying, but the 24-hour checkin is a requirement to have used game sales for the system. You can remove it if you want to get rid of any chance of reselling your games, but that'd cause even more outrage.
Are you sure about that? I live in Scotland and I think I'd have noticed not being able to hang up a call because the other side didn't.
Actually, in the early days of cable, many channels had no commercials. If you wanted to watch commercials, you'd flip over to the home shopping network and play the "guess the final" price game with your buds.
Maybe stalling for more time to get more ABM's into syria with all the "confirmations" of chem weapons going around on the mainstream channels? Because I'm sure the FSB wouldn't mind to get more "clarification" from snowden, as well as anyone else curious about the inner workings of IC systems…
Python 3.0 has the Gradual module[1][2].

[1] http://ecee.colorado.edu/~siek/gradualtyping.html

[2] https://pypi.python.org/pypi/gradual
I agree it is a semantic distinction and that your characterization of what Google is doing is probably accurate. I disagree that holding this viewpoint gives you any grounds for attacking Snowden's credibility (as you have repeatedly done) or asserting that widespread claims of inappropriate NSA surveillance are implausible or technically impossible.
Yes. This is already how many communities are referring to it.
The other lesson is: Use open source solutions. If a company drops support for something that's open source, you have the option to pay someone else (or DIY) to continue that support going forward.
> That's ridiculous tabloid journalism

I don’t see any signs of that. It’s a report of what was said at one of the court hearings. If you have a more verbatim version of what transpired, I’d love to read it.

> MegaUpload [is a] "a repository for films, TV shows and books, where users could watch content without charge"

That sounds like a charitable description of what Megaupload was. They could’ve easily characterized it as a child porn and terrorism information ring.
GLFW 3.0 is out
And yet Hulu+, with more timely content is doing no where near as well as Netflix.

Hint: One of those services has ads.
And then wait 30 mins while you download the game
Sorry, I actually knew that -- I spent a few years of my life building production studios and doing audible spectrum tests.

Cheap humor though, I apologize.
That doesn't have much to do with supply/demand not applying to digital/low variable cost goods; the same phenomenon can be seen in, e.g., clothing. The concept that theft of clothing pushes up prices is pretty much as agreed upon as your example, but has nothing to do with the marginal cost of production.
Technically the Verizon "leak" was a leak of a court order, so it has some legal merit. We can debate if it's fair or in spirit with the Constitution and 4th Amendment to issue such a wide-reaching court order, but it's not warrant-less.
> It seems to me that what we need is not immunity from granting patents on software, but immunity from enforcing patents against software.

If we're not going to enforce a patent against software, why grant it in the first place?
Start Updating Your Apps for iOS 7. Now.
States’ Hospital Data for Sale Puts Privacy in Jeopardy
Limited term national identification cards the next thing?
The Astronomical Math Behind UPS’ New Tool to Deliver Packages Faster
I'd say having to pay Microsoft for a subscription to be able to use Netflix on the device is what killed it for me. My AppleTV pushed the Xbox 360 from the entertainment setup purely because of that(1): It wasn't the price, but the concept that made it so offensive.

(1) Though as a side benefit the AppleTV devices uses a small fraction of the power that the Xbox 360 used.
I'm all for using DDG on principle, but google search results are still far superior.
The engineer bases his argument on an assumption that is usually erroneous:

The price of a product is related to its cost.

This is a logical assumption, but almost always false. It is far more commonly true that the price of a product is dictated by what consumers are willing to pay. If the PS4 version of game X sells for $59.99, it is more than likely that the Xbox1 version will sell for the same price, because people will perceive both versions as having the same value and be willing to pay the same amount for them both.

What Valve does with Steam prices is something different. New releases still cost roughly the same as traditional DVD copies bought in stores. Bargains start to appear on titles once they reach an age where a lot of stores stop stocking them. It is true you can get heavily discounted games on Steam, but this is totally unrelated to the lack of a used-game market. Somebody simply realized that a) A title nobody is selling makes no money and b) gamers will spend money they wouldn't have otherwise if they think they're getting a deal. Put a and b together and you have a recipe for profit. This also eliminates demand for used games. Why buy a skeezy dog-chewed box when you can get a steam-download for the same price or lower?

Don't get me wrong. If MS builds a curated steam-style store for the Xbox it will undoubtedly be a great thing for many (although not all) gamers. However, lower prices on new titles will not be one of the benefits this move brings. This is really just a grab for dollars that currently go to the used market, and it will likely work.
Unjustified fear is not a rational basis for policy.

It's not the synthesis method that is at stake here, it is the engineered biological system itself (system referring to a gene, regulatory sequence, genetic pathway, or organism). The kind of innovation involved in this kind of engineering is precisely what the patent system is designed to protect, so that it can be monetized while also disseminated. Without patents these innovations will remain trade secrets and hold back the progress of synthetic biology. Without patents private companies may not be able to justify investment required for innovation. Without patents inability to monetize inventions reduces the overall economic impact (return on investment) for public financing of life sciences, which in turn removes a powerful incentive for government financing of research.

For instance, a company finds a compound that fights cancer. The company invents a way to synthesize or purify this compound and sell it. The patent protects the inventor and allows them to recoup the investment. This is widely accepted. Now consider that company engineers an organism that can produce the compound in large bio-reactors. The modified organism - and in particular the engineered DNA sequences - are completely analogous to the chemical manufacturing process, and should be similarly protected.

Moreover, consider that the second process may remove a need to use the organic carbon precursors necessary for chemical synthesis (fossil fuels), or eliminates a toxic by-product of chemical synthesis, or is much cheaper and therefore reduces the cost of the compound, benefiting the public. These are real world consequences of synthetic biology protected by the patent system. They don't seem so scary to me.
Google sharpens ax for Chrome Frame in 2014
> In fact, I use HMAC for my password databases, too. It’s overkill, but it lets me use a standard library that likely makes me safer in the long run.

Actually, it's underkill. HMAC is too easy to crack to be used as a password hashing scheme.

http://security.stackexchange.com/questions/16809/is-a-hmac-...

http://security.stackexchange.com/questions/3165/hmac-why-no...
Regardless if this is actually legitimate or not...

> "* Without actually thinking about how convienent it would be for the majority of the time to not find that disc your brother didn't put back...*"

First off, it's "convenient". Secondly, that's a horrible argument when those consoles are meant to be geared towards mature gamers that would never have this issue.

And as others have mentioned, you can't play both sides. Either you go all digital and have this model or you don't. If you try to play in the middle, you're always going to be screwing someone in your audience over.
Does condition 8115 mean you can't check your work email while travelling?
How Kodak was bankrupted by one of its own innovations
Unpaid No More: Interns Win Major Court Battle
That's not universally true - there's a remarkable amount of TLS/SSL encrypted email-in-transit, either via STARTTLS ESMTP commands or SSL over port 465 (and 993/995 for IPAM and POP3).

I don't think there's a way to guarantee your mail always travels over TLS/SSL secured connections, but I suspect more of it does than you think.
Reminds me of a TED talk[1] were he ends up discussion the use of git or similar tools in the government.

[1] http://www.ted.com/talks/clay_shirky_how_the_internet_will_o...
Long term goodwill I suppose.
Greenwald's twitter feed of the last few days confirms this (in my mind) - many tweets praising those who are praising Snowden, comparing him to Ellsberg, etc, about how a survey shows X% of Americans think Snowden is a hero. It's not really what I would have expected of a journalist at a major newspaper.
There's no question that they're monitoring upstream traffic. In fact they may still be doing the old ECHELON trick in which the US eavesdrops on non-Americans, the rest of the world spies on Americans (among others) - and then everyone swaps the data received.

But in the light of the PRISM documents it's even more likely than it was before that the NSA doesn't have the ability to decrypt HTTPS, or at the minimum that the US considers it too important to risk giving it away by using it on routine Top Secret signals intelligence. (And/or maybe too resource-intensive to use for that.) The strongest evidence for this is that we haven't heard anything about such a capacity yet from Snowden, Greenwald et al., who all have the full PRISM deck (along with other documents) in their possession and would surely tell us about it if they knew of it. So either 1) the PRISM slides do mention the ability to decrypt SSL or SSH streams but Snowden and the journalists haven't picked up on it (not impossible given the apparent incompetence they displayed over "direct access"), 2) it's too sensitive to mention in a self-aggrandising Top Secret overview of upstream and "direct collection" Internet signals intelligence, which probably means it's not in use (or at least not in regular use) for upstream collection or 3) they really don't have it.

A supporting reason to think that they don't have it, or hardly ever use it, is the apparent emphasis on "direct collection" in the PowerPoint. Why go to the hassle of dancing the frenemy minuet with Google and other fairly-anti-surveillance Silicon Valley firms when you can just get what you want from upstream collection at the apparently more-accommodating telcos? This isn't conclusive because even if you could understand all the traffic into and out of someone's Facebook account you'd still like to be able to see the internal state of the account, in particular so that you'd know what they'd been doing before the upstream surveillance began. But I think it's at least as likely that the whole new focus on direct collection is a workaround for the fact that, thanks to SSL and SSH, upstream collection just isn't what it used to be back in the days of ECHELON.

As the slide said, You Should Use Both: direct collection to give you access to US-company servers, probably bypassing the HTTPS problem, and upstream access to give you data, probably only unencrypted data (email!), that passes through the US without going to a US-company server.

(If you want an exotic alternative theory, you could speculate that the PRISM document is a fake, a limited hangout http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Limited_hangout by the US spooks, maybe precisely to direct attention away from their ability to decrypt HTTPS streams. But this now seems unlikely, for example because DNI Clapper would surely have to have approved a managed release of a set of documents that both gave away the Verizon metadata surveillance and so also implicated him in perjury.)
TweeterSpy - it's what Twitter Analytics and Bitly can't tell you
It's so strange. I don't think I could name a single company or even product that I'm not ambivalent about. I may prefer X over Y, but everything has irritating flaws.

I don't pretend to be some emotionless paragon of objectivity. It's just...criticism is good. I try to even highlight my own flaws, so they can be addressed. It's far more useful than trying to ignore problems.
That is a great summary. Thank you for writing this up!

Even without the context of minification, I like your use of Blobs to instantiate a Web Worker.
I think the problem here is how important physical retailers are as partners in actually selling the console. You don't want to piss off Walmart/Best Buy/Game Stop too much or they might not stock your device.
Yup, and it is not like Microsoft has never threatened to shut down DRM servers before.
Some Questions For and About Edward Snowden
My apologies if you're not particularly bothered by diction, but I believe you mean "false equivalence" rather than "false equivocation". Equivocation means "beating around the bush" or "refusing to give a straight answer".

http://mw4.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/equivocation
Real time implies natural searches as entered by users. These have been normalized.
It is difficult to follow the code that's been added when all the deletions/diffs get in the way.
Spartans were pretty manly men and homosexual relations were expected of all. It's probably not so much the bed stories as the public behaviors that became associated with it when it was limited mainly to actual homosexuals.
Actually, I saw recently that the reason for the price difference is because Aussi minimum wage is around $17/hr where as in the US it's around $8, so your pricing is inflation adjusted against common wages. I still think the pricing is inflated on digital content across the board though.
Show HN: The Mean Visualized
People don't sign up for Netflix because it's ad-free,

Speak for yourself, please.
HSTS allows a site to indicate that in the future it should always be loaded over a secure connection, so you only have an interceptable connection the very first time you visit that site. Both Firefox and Chrome allow sites to add themselves to a list to "preload" HSTS enforcement, so even that initial connection which is man-in-the-middle-able doesn't happen.

I don't see them in the current lists, so DDG should contact Mozilla and Google to get added to their preloaded HSTS lists[1][2] so all connections will automatically happen only over HTTPS.

[1] http://dev.chromium.org/sts

[2] https://blog.mozilla.org/security/2012/11/01/preloading-hsts...
OT: you write "UML has essentially become analogous to cursive. You learn about it early on, and its important to have a notion of how to read it. But ultimately, since we don't use it every day, we basically never use it."

I come from Germany, where nearly everybody handwrites in cursive for text longer than a few words. And I must say: it's a lot faster than writing in block letters (of course writing in shorthand would be even faster - I don't understand why this isn't taught in schools anymore - my father could and took this as elective course).

So: what is the reason why writing in cursive is disliked in the US?
Thats actually what I had settled on using, and I think its a fine tool. But even umlet doesn't make writing and viewing large UML diagrams...pleasurable? In the sense that we have tools like vim, word, excel, and chrome that are very polished and allow you to get to work quickly and accurately. Even with umlet, i find myself worrying about the interface too much.

I suspect its more of a problem with the fundamental design of UML though. I think if there was like, a UML-lite spec or something. To me, i feel like UML is to what I want to use as XML is to JSON (or csv for that matter), if that makes any sense.
Longer, in most of the United States.
I agree with your assessment of whether the Guardian claimed direct access, or if they claimed the NSA claimed direct access. But I don't like how they went about it:

"The National Security Agency has obtained direct access to the systems of Google, Facebook, Apple and other US internet giants, according to a top secret document obtained by the Guardian."

They're not any less guilty than other papers, though. "Categorical statement, according to Source" is a common construct in journalism. But I don't like it, because it de-emphasizes the uncertainty in the statement. Reversing the phrases would put the correct emphasis, I think.
I can't tell whether you're being facetious.
>On the PC with Steam the publishers are willing to drop the price to compete with piracy, but assuming the Xbox One is not cracked to the point of a Dreamcast, I can't imagine them ever allowing Steam-like prices.

Yup.

Prices are lower on Steam mostly competition provides downward price pressure.

If Microsoft opens up their system to self-publishing and lets devs set their own low prices, including offering steam like sales, then that would maybe produce lower costs. Used games is a red herring.

Large publishers probably don't want downward price pressure on the platform. Look at IOS where even 3 dollars is considered expensive. To them, restricting pricing and availability to keep prices high is a feature that may encourage them to go with one platform or another.

I'm not totally averse to that argument either -- I hate what the f2p model has done to game design on IOS. Right now Steam is a great middle ground and I hope they can maintain that.
The N.S.A.'s Prism Remains Opaque
Correct. The "significantly better", for better or worse, is likely to be "allows you to share content with your friends that you aren't really allowed to by law".

This is probably the only single thing that a federated network can offer that would appeal to non-geeks, at least at first. One might hope that people might "come for the piracy/porn, stay for the free speech".
Sometimes HN discussions are really funny.

People are up in arms about a free product from a company with an established track record of killing products, having nearly zero customer service and not caring about financially hurting businesses who use their tools (no-recourse account cancellations, etc.).

That's just too funny. What, you didn't know this could happen?
Still no evidence in your comment.

Repeating his "I had to make X big to support all of wsgi/http so anyone who made a similar framework but much smaller has made it incomplete or too succint and clever in a bad way" is not evidence.

You say:

>bottle's smaller size means either the implementation is incomplete or the implementation is too clever or both.

That's a statement of fact (actually a dichotomy of facts). What's the evidence to support these are the only two possible options?

The mere fact that Armin had to make Werkzeug bigger "owing to complexities of wsgi/http" is not proof.

To take it as proof is to assume his coding (and understanding of wsgi/http) as the golden standard by which the Bottle developer should be measured.

Who said this is the case? For one, it took him a year after Bottle to support Python 3, so he might not be that focused, anyway.

My problem is that, the way he and you say it, "incomplete" implies broken or lacking, whereas "too clever" implies fancy tricky code that's too succinct for it's own good.

How about the third option that he needlessly convoluted Werkzeug to work around wsgi/http edge cases that no one really faces, whereas Bottle has been pragmatic about it?

Or the fourth option, that Werkzeug is needlessly verbose, whereas Bottle is not "too clever" but just as clever as needed?
at least when i last had to use them, none of the free uml tools were much good, but enterprise architect is not very expensive (at least in some editions) and surprisingly good. it would probably have been able to auto-create your uml for you from your code base, for example. and it's much more than a diagram editor - it's a tool to help you construct a "database" (in some abstract sense) of your design, which can then be rendered in various ways (as diagrams or code).

http://www.sparxsystems.com/products/ea/ (i've never used uml "from end to end" - in terms from the article i mainly communicate with shareholders. i'm also unrelated to EA - just have happy (well...) memories of it. in fact, apart from intellij idea, it's the only software i've ever paid for, i think).
Why do you trust any binaries you've got? Where did your first-use/bootstrapping compiler come from?

And even if you wrote your own OS and compiler from the ground up - who wrote your BIOS? Your network card firmware? Your disk controller software? Your CPU microcode?

We _all_ abdicate our trust-chain _somewhere_
It's not semantics at all. The "scope" is infinite. The government can get pretty much any information that exists pursuant to a valid warrant or subpoena. That has been true since the founding of the republic, and was true in England for hundreds of years before that.

What matters is how direct that access is. Does the government have to submit a warrant to get user-specific data, and then gets that data back in a drop box like system? Then there's nothing illegal, surprising, or even sketchy about that. Can the government get direct access to Facebook's servers without going through their legal department? Then that's a big deal!
Fun fact: it was a design goal of the SHA-3 competition not to have the hash be vulnerable to length extension attacks, which obviates the need for constructions like HMAC that apply the hash function twice.
"Even if this latest “pivot” is successful — and a lot of people think it’s a stretch — the company would be reduced to helping other people make the boxes used to ship the devices that will take the photographs of the future."

Marginalization epitomized.
There's obviously that, good point. I also think we can't forget the price point.

I buy my iPhone games for $5 at most. Steam usually has a lot of promotions and discounts, so I get lots of games for under, say, 15 bucks. Physical media games are usually way above these prices.
They simply want people to use Chrome, makes business sense now that they have a stronger usage. They have the option to run old IE apps within Chrome to hopefully get more corporate feudal empires to switch. They are also giving some time to migrate off it rather than just shutting it off.
I can only imagine how many times he had to practice saying this without breaking into hysterical laughter before he could do it in front of the press.
There is also another lawsuit filed by interns against Conde Nast for lack of payment:
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/14/business/media/two-ex-inte...