skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You may not know what advocate means, but it can take steps to eradicate DRM, as if it is really always a bad thing.

Do I think web video and broadcast TV are different? Absolutely; definitely; unequivocally, yes. Obviously. Maybe not for technical folks; maybe not when usenet or FTP trading was your only option for content not music; but nowadays, torrent software and search is really damn easy and free. Broadcast also comes with a landslide of garbage between 95% shit channels and 33% commercial times; Netflix does not operate this way.

I think ebooks and music are totally different ballgames. You'll pay more for an ebook or mp3 album than you will for a month of Netflix; you think they can service you like that without some guarantees to content providers? I really don't know, but I know some of you are up in arms about Netflix having DRM, when it really isn't harming anyone. If you want to own the content, go do that; Netflix is only offering a non-ownership service.

$8 for 24/7, front-running picture-quality, enormous-catalog of content; it has DRM; it _never_ gets in the way of the service; it frankly works so good that owning the content would provide nigh a worse experience. Can you really explain to me the downsides to how Netflix has implemented DRM? What if they offered an additional cost to be able to download content for offline use, which is about the only thing I can conceivably imagine some might have reservations?
Neither. Go validate the idea first.
Yeah, it works on my terrible featurephone, and delivers a really extraordinarily good web experience all things considered. It's like a keyhole to the internet, except it renders everything more or less perfectly, unlike every other featurephone browser ever.
How do we do that when people don't care about privacy?
Do both :)
Gabe Newell on this point: “Economies get better the bigger they are,”

While this might be true in isolation, ie. a widgetbox with 30M sales is a strictly a better economy than the same widgetbox with 10M sales, I do not believe it to be transitive ie. Widgetbox @ 30M sales vs PlayBox360 @ 10M sales. This played out in the last console generation with the wii vastly outselling both the ps3 and the xbox360, but having an inferior library.

Smartphones and tablets are by no means new, nor niche platforms at this point (outselling every other gaming platform by a mile), but id argue that by and large they have failed to produce the kind of quality games available on say, the DS/3DS.

I cannot even think of one mobile title that measures up to even an average DS game.
"This competition will be good for us consumers."

Not sure how strong this point is.

For one the average consumer will miss out on more exclusives for the consoles you don't have.

For another you're going to get shitty ports on a lot of them.

Finally there will be an inevitable shakedown to 2-3 players and if you've invested in one of the losers well just ask the people that bought 3DO's and Atari Jaguars and all the other losers of the early 90's console wars how great that worked out for them in the end.

Game devs are already competing with each other for your time and dollars. Beyond that you only need 2 major consoles to put pressure on each other to keep prices honest.
I am American and I share this sentiment.
If there ever was a time to wait for version 1.1 of something, this would be it.
Great overview of simplifying development with standards focus (x86, unified memory, less tech hurdles to focus on gameplay over tech). Ultimately this will decrease development costs to focus that time on making better games.

>>
That situation led directly to the PS4's design philosophy: "The hope with PlayStation 4 was to have a powerful architecture, but also an architecture that would be a very familiar architecture in many ways."

In fact, this is something Cerny returned to again and again during the conversation. "We want to make sure that the hardware is easy to use. And so having the familiar CPU and the familiar GPU definitely makes it easier to use," he said.

Later, when asked about whether Sony considers the fact that many third party developers will also have to create versions of their games for the next Xbox, his response was, "when I say that our goal is not to create puzzles that the developers have to solve, that is how we do well in a multi-platform world."
Take a gander at David Addington:

http://froomkin.tumblr.com/post/54026897885
Which part was confusing?
Elliptical curve is faster too.
I'm calling you out. Attacking the arguer instead of the argument is a logical fallacy.

What you're actually implying, which wouldn't be a logical fallacy, is that my view is subjective, because of the circumstances of my (middle class) upbringing.

I don't think that argument holds water. The subjectivity or not of things is probably too big of a discussion to really tackle on hacker news, though.
>There was a big long thread about this yesterday. Also, it's not cool to go into a preemptive sweary rant on your own submission.

Says who? Because, if anything, HN users seem to agreed with and voted for my comment (or "rant").

>Finally HN guidelines are that you should be selective about the quality of your submission; 'topinfopost.com' is a news aggregator (bad) that's chock full of conspiracy theories (worse). Other front page store is include photographs of ghosts and that the civil war in Syria is a Zionist plot. Seriously? This is your idea of a reliable news source?

I don't follow topinfopost, and could not care less what else it has on it, as long as the story I submitted is OK. Which is. You can corroborate it in other, no conspiracy outlets.

Not to mention that some of the very same issues emerged in the well known Aaron Swartz case -- and your arguments here are so generic that they also trivialise that instance of prosecutorial abuse.

>Stop wasting our time with this bullshit. The maximum penalty for vandalism in California (which is what this case is about) is 3 years. It isn't possible to get a 13 year sentence for vandalism in California.

Which is beside the point. You shouldn't be threatened with outrageous charges in the first place, no matter what you will actually get.
Many universities now have 1 administrator for every professor or more.
Worse than a troll, he is a pedant, who, since the books agree with it, and it's "by the books", can't see no deeper fault here...
Not everyone cares to go to a military academy...
They don't have to. You're sitting right there.
And the US Government criticizes China (and Snowden's possible presence there) under exactly these terms.
Building Products With Soul
It's wrong to think that without publicly-subsidized education, most people would not get any education.
Have you fought yet?
The Future of Fundraising
That was my initial thought too, but ultimately I have no problem with them simplifying the logo to make it SVG-friendly, even if the first pass results in an oversimplification. In a few years, the next pass will probably be done in SVG first and might get a little more detail back.

>The first step in the rebuild was to go in and strip out all the detail that was using blend mode layering such as multiply, screen and overlay – mostly found in the tail area 1. As stated, a key goal of the redesign was to make it work flawlessly in SVG as well as open up the possibility to rebuild all the internal structure using SVG and CSS gradients.

>Having reduced the logo down to its shape-tweaked forms 2 and softer gradients, we continued to remove any detail we thought wasn’t critical to the overall image. This tied into another goal of having the image hold up with greater clarity at smaller sizes.
Umzug nach wordpress.com und zurück | Helmut Hirner's Notizblog
Any civilization (including our own) can break a sphere from the inside.
How to Automate Birthday Reminders
"Where you start in life doesn't matter"

How can you possibly say that?
Show HN: Git vs Git - create tabular data comparing multiple github repos
The Buccaneer
The Rocket Company
Oops, j/k didn't work for me because I had Vimium enabled.

facepalm
Right. And I thought I said it pretty clearly:

> To be quite honest I don't see the internet usurping them either.

I mean, OK. The internet is a big damn deal. But it's not a quantum leap as the printing press, steam or telegraphs were. It has antecedents in all those three technological revolutions.

The printing press was the first time knowledge could be cheaply conveyed to masses of people without needing someone to manually sit there with the learner and communicate with voice. It totally upended the concept of how individuals could receive their education. It didn't replace the university.

Steam was the first time that production and transportation could happen faster than muscle power or wind could move objects. It didn't cause a meaningful change to the university model.

Telegraphs did to thought and knowledge what steam had wrought in the physical world. One could be anywhere on earth and communicate to anywhere else on Earth within the hour. Minutes in some cases. You could use it to form communities of like-minded learners, and people did exactly that. It didn't unseat the universities.

For some reason, the concept of a vertically-integrated, physically co-located community of scholars and students seems really, really hard to shift. Technologies come along and modify this or that part of it, but students plucked from Bologna in 1088, from Oxford in 1167, Harvard 1636, Sydney 1850 and so on and so forth would find that the modern experience is broadly the same beneath all the pizazz.

Students relocate to be near a community of scholars. They pay for access. The scholars read aloud. The students take notes. The scholars test the students and write letters of introduction that verify that the student knows the subject.

What has changed throughout that long string of technological revolutions -- technological revolutions that destroyed the universality of the Catholic Church in Europe, revolutions that destroyed feudalism and absolute monarchy, revolutions that totally upended the whole model of the entire world -- is almost nothing. Hardly any damn thing.

Given that the internet is new only in degree and not in kind, forgive me for being skeptical that it will do away with such resilient institutions.
Since you look like you could use some support, I just wanted to drop in and say, that was a really, really good comment.

What I like is the focus on looking at empirical evidence and then forming the right abstractions based upon that evidence.
Thou doth jest. Most western countries are lap-dogs to the US, and almost certainly exchange spying data with the US so that they don't breach their own privacy laws.
This will have little impact with US allies.
Logging support for Meteor with Winston
How to Optimize your Customer Service Communication
I think there are two takeaways from this

1. A timely reminder nothing is perfectly secure

2. Don't use session tickets. Store nothing on the client except a random key. You will cock it up.
Graph Databases (free E-book)
5 characteristics of a good IVR system in a call center
I'm finding it hard to decipher the point you're trying to make other than the fact that you're dissatisfied with... uhh... things in India. No argument there. I am too.

The discussion at hand was about the small set of people who perhaps have the capability to get into IIT's but for various reasons don't manage to get in the top 2% in that particular test. I asserted that such people end up in other decent colleges (and there are plenty of good ones outside of the IIT system and they still form only a fraction of the sum total of Engineering education in India) and generally tend to end up in good to great careers. Any opinions on that discussion ?
I'd argue there are still better games on PC that is open, consoles are really just secondary for the best games. Yes there are some awesome titles on there but some of the indie ones are just as fun (Fat Princess, Joe Danger). The better shooters are even still better on PC (Battlefield, Valve games (L4D, TF2), Call of Duty etc etc). With enough time and in a few short hardware cycles the new consoles will be as powerful as mini PCs sitting next to your TV but open markets, then we'll see some fun, fun fun.

The question is, if id software was a small or medium company today, would they be able to afford getting onto a controlled environment? Would Valve have existed on a closed, publisher happy market like consoles are? (they built off of Quake II)

Now there are lots of exclusives and games that are killer on console (Little Big Planet, Halo) but they also have immense budgets. It is not a small/medium sized company playground. No risks are taken there.

I also loved Red Dead Redemption and GTA games but I always have more fun on the PC, so sad Red Dead never made it there.
games are not aiming to be 99.999% uptime reliable software.
The Clean Coder: A Book on Professionalism and Attitude
Classic Yacht Charter, Feadship Sultana
He's actually doing it the right way: looking at lots of empirical evidence and forming the right abstractions from it. That's how science is done, and it's how philosophy should be done.

You are free to present contradictory evidence and conclusions if you think he's made a mistake.

He's not talking about evidence limited to his personal, one-on-one interactions. He's talking about all the evidence available to us, about people in society.
I don't want the app. Arrg! I am on my iPad and I can't get to what I assume is a web interface to this... Only a big ugly page with half-showing icons for how to download the android or iOS apps. Why can't I just exit out of the offer and see the desktop version? Rawrrrrr!
I'd never considered blister packs as an impulse control measure before; I had assumed it was for ease of dosing/packaging, and perhaps longer shelf-life (The US approach of (until relatively recent automation improvements) manually counting pills into a bottle always struck me as inefficient).

A short transcript[1] from the podcast agrees though, and there's a currently previous[2] and ongoing[3] research into packaging/impulsivity.

There's some other research as well that shows that restricting pack size of OTC paracetamol/acetaminophen reduces suicides, too[4]

[1] http://www.freakonomics.com/2011/05/17/why-cant-you-buy-a-bi...

[2] http://oai.dtic.mil/oai/oai?verb=getRecord&metadataPrefix=ht...

[3] http://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/NCT01118208

[4] http://www.plosmedicine.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fj...
The only purpose of session resumption is performance, right? I thought someone published a report recently that real-world servers don't get enough successfully resumed sessions for it to even be worthwhile, particularly in a world with crypto hardware, SPDY and HTTP keepalive.

Wouldn't it be easier to just disable TLS resume than to figure out how to do it right?

edit: It was another agl article, https://www.imperialviolet.org/2010/06/25/overclocking-ssl.h...:

Since the session information contains key material,
it's never cached on disk so the attempted client
resume rate, seen by Google, is only 50%.
Yes, he agrees with you. I got that.
If it works, good luck to them. However I'm scared that this kind of thing will empower China and Russia at the expense of the US. If you think that the US is bad, those two are global hegemons you really do not want to have.
"Says you, but my experience contradicts it. You have not convinced me."

Your experience is dependent on several factors including how willing you are to listen to and engage people with different lives than your own. I can close my eyes and shout that there are no colors, but that doesn't invalidate everyone else's experience. Don't pretend like you have an authoritative background to make general conclusions.
That doesn't make any sense. Don't their employees already have access to that information?
I'm not the guy you're asking, but I'll weight in. I think happiness is much more related to self-esteem and self-efficacy than it is to how much money you have.

For this reason, I think it's common for people born at any station in life who are successful relative to that starting point, to be happier than people born at a higher station that are not successful or are motivated by the wrong things.
You shouldn't be threatened with outrageous charges

He isn't being threatened with outrageous charges. There is a law against graffiti [1], the prosecutor claims to have evidence that he broke it repeatedly, and he's being charged with that.

What are you outraged about? That he's being charged for writing it on the sidewalk? Sorry, in CA the sidewalk is considered the property of the building owner, who is also responsible for its upkeep. That he wrote it in chalk? chalk still needs cleaning up, but since the effort involved in down that is actually trivial his sentence will be adjusted accordingly. That he is being charged with 13 counts? Well it seems he went and wrote his messages critical of the bank at least that many times during a 6 month period.

Is it bad that the prosecutor is wasting time on what is essentially a frivolous case? Yes. Is there any risk the guy is actually going to jail for 13 years? No.

1. http://www.leginfo.ca.gov/cgi-bin/displaycode?section=pen&gr...
UK government backs IVF technique that uses DNA from three people
> I cannot even think of one mobile title that measures up to even an average DS game.

I more or less agree with this. The major problem to me though is the input mechanism. Touch works for casual games like Angry Birds and Candy Crush, but have you ever tried playing Another World?

I hold out some small hope for an Android console, if it standardises a reasonably good controller.
The first email service
Electronic mail, most commonly referred to as email or e-mail since approximately 1993,[2] is a method of exchanging digital messages from an author to one or more recipients. Modern email operates across the Internet or other computer networks. Some early email systems required that the author and the recipient both be online at the same time, in common with instant messaging. Today’s email systems are based on a store-and-forward model. Email servers accept, forward, deliver, and store messages. Neither the users nor their computers are required to be online simultaneously; they need connect only briefly, typically to an email server, for as long as it takes to send or receive messages.
They did the same thing after the collateral damage video was posted on wikileaks.
are they not ? If your game crashes constantly no console vendor will let you have it on their platform and PC gamers are also turned off immensly by games crashing. Imo any game developer has to avoid it at all costs.
Military Defence Skill Test
This is not the traditional text of Lorem Ipsum, save for the first sentence. The actual translation is far less exciting. The only thing I noticed it that it translates something with "train" while I don't think a word for that exists in Latin.

Actual Lorem Ipsum [0]:

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipisicing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis aute irure dolor in reprehenderit in voluptate velit esse cillum dolore eu fugiat nulla pariatur. Excepteur sint occaecat cupidatat non proident, sunt in culpa qui officia deserunt mollit anim id est laborum.

Actual translation in Google Translate: http://bit.ly/127UkCu

[0]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lorem_ipsum
> but, er, browser gc's are not tuned for this purpose at all, so not sure what that tells you.

It seems to me that the goals of browser GC's are essentially the same as those of Dalvik: allow Web pages or phone apps to hit 60 FPS. To this end both SpiderMonkey and V8 have incremental GC's. (They actually have an easier time of things because they don't have to deal with multiple threads sharing a single heap.)

SM shoots for 7 ms for incremental time slices, as I recall, but in practice the major collections can lead to pauses longer than that. Incremental isn't a panacea in practice; in high allocation or high-CPU-load scenarios you either get pauses if you're soft-real-time or you starve the mutator for resources (which can drop the frame rate of the game) if you're hard-real-time. Ironically, decreasing the time slice can sometimes make the pauses worse, because when you're in an IGC slice more stuff is barriered.

> Metronome, and other garbage collectors, can do consistent bounded near-real or real time time collection with bounded CPU usage.

Dalvik doesn't use Metronome (or Azul C4, ...). It uses a concurrent GC for minor collections but sometimes has to stop the world for major collections, last I looked (granted, my knowledge is ICS only, so perhaps there have been improvements since then).

(Note that I'm not trying to argue that GC's are bad, or that Dalvik's GC is bad, or that a sufficiently good GC wouldn't be good enough for most games; those are questions that would generate more heat than light to debate. I'm simply pointing out that game developers' concerns about Dalvik's GC are not unfounded or imaginary.)
The hardware DRM you are talking about, is HDCP. It is required for Blu-ray.
You just broke your child
I'm not invalidating anything you've observed - I'm just challenging your conclusions.

One of my friends left home (when he was ~19) with little more than the shirt on his back, a pickup truck, and ruined credit. He managed to rebuild his life, and he did it all on his own. This was ~15 years ago. Great guy!

I don't want to get too autobiographical on you, but I didn't have the smoothest time myself: I bombed out of college before my first semester was up. I spent years working (and not on anything that you could call high-paying). I went back to school as an adult, graduated with distinction, and got a better job. I'm 32 now, and I've met enough people to know what I'm talking about.
The only two really big games made with Java are Minecraft original and Runescape original (still a huge MMO on the web). However most have ported away to reach more platforms. Java is no longer a good option on the web really even.

Memory management is a huge problem pushing performance. You can still write efficient Java by doing things like no newing of object in ticks and stack arrays but gamedev is heavy in management of memory access/organization, stack vs heap allocation and other things that take lots of work or are too hard to control in Java or other GC platforms (C#). Though there were a ton more XNA games (C#) than Java even today but that has since been discontinued. Windows Phone 7 also limited its potential due to no native access and requiring XNA only games. Android didn't really take off in games until the NDK in Android 2.3 which was deemed a game developers OS. iOS had it right since the first SDK allowing C/C++ and Objective-C or Objective-C++ which allows mixed that I have seen in all custom engines for iPhone.
Writing Idiomatic Python Book
Don't buy content from these publishers then. They are nothing without customers. When they'll realize that having customers is better than having DRM - they will throw DRM out.
I like Sean but I think he could have headed off a lot of criticism with way fewer words, probably sooner.
Let's just go with "accurate enough". 99% of Wikipedia's wealth is in its capacity for lifelong education and general reference (as an "exobrain"); no one claims it's a very reliable fact-checker.
Firstly they can operate without any DRM. Secondly DRM is never OK. The problem with putting it into the standard is in prolonging the life of this sick trend.
I know both languages and I am just as efficient in C++ as I am in Java. I am less efficient in Java when I have to performance tune some bit of code that resides beneath ten layers of abstraction.