skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Philip Morris and his dividend play
Philip Morris is the second largest tobacco company from the world that has a good reputation because of its formidable brands.
If this is passed, can't we just grab the firefox source and delete the drm crap and fork the HTML5 specs? To hell with the W3C, we just fork and route around the problem?
I don't think it's limited to new graphic designs. Any kind of change at all is met with instinctive vitriol.

If posts looked more like "These bits are good. These bits need work. These bits should be scrapped entirely." then it would be easier to call them constructive. As it is, they just seem uncompromisingly conservative and pointless.
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Encrypted S3 Storage Filesystems
You can't do almost all of the things (facebook, gmail, etc) that the public has become very accustomed to and relies on as everyday conveniences with end to end encryption. Perhaps with some massive backing of major corporations and decades long education efforts you could make a little headway into surveillance-proofing all communications
I think you are missing the scale of these data collection programmes. For instance, if you are in north Germany, some of your traffic will be routed through Sweden (because of Telia), Sweden has the FRA law[1] and the Titan Traffic Database[2] which means your traffic gets intercepted, stored and handed over to American authorities for analysis.

Why aren't you as angry about Sweden doing the same thing to your communications? It was not even a secret matter.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FRA-law
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Titan_traffic_database
Sounds like they have two goals. One, make adoption as easy as possible for merchants. Two, make the experience not suck (we're used to cash and credit cards so the experience has to be better than using them).
To an extent yes, though I think it is a concept that registers quite deep to the point where our reaction is at least partly instinctual (the old fight/flight response) to it'll not become totally ineffective.
Maybe it is extremely difficult, but it's also fairly common regardless. Transplants are being done every day. If someone cannot be fixed in any other way - that's often a "cheating" way out.
The head is technically dead for a short time and kept refrigerated. Also keep in mind there is no signal to be received by the brain in the first place since the spinal chord has been severed.
Social Media Privacy & How to Stay Safe
> "more privacy" BS -> the proprietary DRM plugin is much less controllable by the user than Flash and Silverlight

Please explain.
Not this hyperbole again..

Browser interfaces for integration with third party security mechanisms is actually a good thing. There are advantages to having custom client side encryption/decryptions schemes that don't have to live within the scary execution environment that is the browser but can be used to augment web page content.

This does nothing to force web users into accepting DRM. If you don't want DRM, don't use services from organisations which enforce it and don't install any of their stuff. Your browser will still work.

Hollywood wants people it's products to be used via DRM schemes. This will happen whether it is via a web page, a standalone application or dedicated set top box.
And "cillum dolore eu fugiat nulla pariatur." is "that produces no resultant online applications."

WTF!
Ironic - Chrome only recently started supporting do not track didn't it?
I don't really understand the problem here. IMO Netflix is doing the fairest thing it can with DRM. It isn't selling us rights to own these videos/movies. It is granting us the right to stream the content, and doing so at a rather fair rate. Unlike the movie industry it isn't screwing us over with high rates and questionable rights limitations to things we own. I don't like the idea of yet another plugin either. But as far as I am concerned Netflix is one of the least guilty companies when it comes to using DRM to violate our rights. IMO they are doing it right and fair.
The firefox source won't contain the DRM crap. It is such that Mozilla cannot support it. Microsoft and Google (browser vendors) are colluding to freeze out Mozilla.
Hmm, actually that makes perfect sense as a reason to rile up the proletariat, never considered that angle.
Also, the plugin is a users choice to install. The DRM in the HTML5 specs would be deeply incorporated inside the navigators codebase. It should be a choice, not an obligation. If you are like me, and try to keep the proprietary stuff to a minimum on some of my laptops, then I would not use this version of FF/Chrome. I would have to use a forked version without the DRM specs (which i think would be a way of sticking it to the W3C).
Great point.. unfortunately, he's giving away his Darkness Springs games for literally nothing, completely destroying the market for indie games while also completely destroying his message. He seems to be very much part of the problem.
Yelling into the abyss i fear. It's relatively well accepted economics that product pricing tends toward the marginal value, which for software is near zero. Either need to accept that mass marketing means low margin, or find an under serviced niche where margins can be higher.
Agreed. Surely Netflix doesn't care ultimately, but studios are only going to sign contracts with them if they have things in place to guarantee it's all secure, i.e. DRM. There's surely no way that Netflix would fight for this, and then LOVEFiLM wouldn't use it as well?
You don't even need to do that. Simply don't install DRM systems on your computer. The HTML5 specs do not mandate installation of any DRM whatsoever.
The Australian Democrats had a deliberate structure along those lines, although less revolutionary than what you're proposing. They'd been a successful minor party for about thirty years, but imploded from in-fighting about ten years ago.

They're a useful case-study for talking about ideas around direct democracy. See http://www.adelaide.edu.au/apsa/docs_papers/Others/Gauja.pdf

The causes of the party's decline is controversial. My take - that they ran into scaling problems when their parlimentary party grew large. Parts of their parliamentary party felt hamstrung by a membership who were free to take positions on issues that weren't well-considered or practical. They needed to move quickly on issues, and the direct democracy process stalled them. The federal parliamentary party went rogue, and a large section of the membership felt betrayed. This killed the collaborative culture that was the heart of what they stood for, and the party collapsed in infighting.

I'm pretty frustrated with the way freedoms are being eroded in the west, but direct democracy is not a strong response to this. It's complicated, ripe for gaming and diffuses responsibility - bad qualities. When it fails, people will look to a "strong leader" who "gets things done" to replace it. Danger.

Keep thinking though, because there will be better models out there. I suspect that if you could draft a new constitution, you could produce a free society with strong real democratic qualities using a structure similar to the old Icelandic Commonwealth - basically lots of statelets.

The major weakness of this kind of system is that it's hard to fight big wars, even to defend yourself. That's a reason that the awesome original Articles of Confederation were replaced with the current US system.
And if you want to use netflix, just use something else than Linux and/or Firefox. It's perfectly fine that competing OS vendors (like Apple and Microsoft) make linux less attractive by way of a standard. It's also perfectly fine that competing browser vendors (like Apple, Microsoft and Google) make firefox less attractive by standard. In principle it's always perfectly fine if monopoly holders band together to exclude the competition. We're all down with that. Ohyeah, IE6 was so good, why do we need anything else?
"We are sorry but to view this webpage you need the following browser DRM plugins:

"Microsoft Secure Video version 1.5 (Windows 8.1 only)"

"Infowarx Secure Web Photo JPG Manager (win32, mac 10.7)"

"Adobe Secure PDF PRO plugin"

Thank you for visiting website-of-the-drm-plugin-ip-protecting-fragmented web, have an nice day"
> Everyone does support

I once worked at a company who did this. It was terrible on the developers. It destroyed productivity. It destroyed flow. And it was really just a way to plaster over not having clearly defined software goals and processes. If you develop software in a _professional_ manner, you can really do amazing things for the customer without making your 6 figure salaried senior programmers answer phones and tell people to try rebooting their windows machine.

The developer doesn't need to 'hear the voice of the customer' if the customers needs are being accurately transformed into proper specifications and plans by competent technical leads. The developer will meet the needs of the customer through creating excellent, testable, modular and clean code that excels at meeting the specifications.
You are right there, but I blogged about why I made the game free here: http://www.irrlicht3d.org/pivot/entry.php?id=1367
I even posted the sales details: http://www.irrlicht3d.org/pivot/entry.php?id=1370

In short, after 5 years, the game makes more money through ads when it is free, in contrast to selling the game directly.
> the best way to manage a team is, in my opinion, is to not manage them.

This is one-view of management. It's called the "hands-off" manager. He trust him team to get the work done, and operates in a sort-of hands-off way.

For the longest time, I felt like this was the right way to manage teams at technology companies, but recently I read a piece that argued that the middle ground -- ie. somewhere between being hands-off and micromanaging (the other extreme), was ideal.

Now I'm not so sure myself if this is right, but it's cast a bit of doubt to my long-held notion that off-hands was the best way to go.
Kinderen en hun rapport:het is niet altijd het resultaat dat telt
Is such an outcome so terrible? Yes, it will be unfair if some humans are smarter, stronger, and healthier than they otherwise would be. But these people will be a massive benefit to the rest of humanity.[1] We'll end up with smarter doctors, lawyers, scientists, and (gasp) politicians. If you think at the margins (would it be better if people were smarter or dumber, on average), the answer is clear: Human enhancement is almost certainly a good thing. Anyone who says otherwise is in the same boat as those who worried about the implications of vaccination, antibiotics, and stem-cell therapy. These technologies do have downsides, but the benefits are so much greater that we're all glad they were invented.

Personally, I'd rather live in a world where more people were smarter than me. While it would diminish my own status, humanity would be able to solve more of its problems.

Finally, you assume that enhancement technology will remain expensive indefinitely. Historically, new technologies have gotten cheaper over time. While not everyone will be able to afford enhancement at first, it seems likely that it will follow the same trend as Internet access, smartphones, gene sequencing, and countless other technologies once reserved for elites.

1. See http://www.iratde.org/issues/1-2009/tde_issue_1-2009_03_rind... for a study of the effect of high IQs on economies.
flash and silverlight have gone trough an evolution where they are obligated to respect a users privacy and not to allow doing arbitrary things (like installing a rootkit on a machine) because of that.

The DRM plugins being more or less directly supplied by the MPAA have no restriction or expectation whatsoever. Users can't execute arbitrary code on them (maybe) but the providers of the plugin can very well install rootkits on your machine, and they're not obligated to give a user any control over the privacy and inner working of the plugin.
If I told my daughter should would be getting it back home she sure would be disappointed when I dont have the ice cream to give her. I basically could not abstractly threaten my girl with violence since she had no concept of it.
It's 'just' a couple of scrolling images for the vertical and horizontal vapour, and a rotating image for the swirl where they meet. Very effective indeed. I'm impressed.
Well, it should query more from Google. I often find it is almost identical from Bing, with poor results. That's the major problem. A minor one is it is very slow but I can live with that.
Well Google is also a company that stores full history of everything and hands over stuff to the NSA, so in the bigger picture the point is moot?
Netflix have never been especially interested in selling to Linux users. Whether or you have this specification is immaterial.

If they can't have this, the alternative from their point of view is not stripping the DRM. The solution is standalone player applications or something else.
Youtube celebrates LGBT pride with custom logo
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Why is the RECORD icon always round and usually red?
Even if you don't use Facebook, you may have a shadow profile
I doubt they are aiming at the PS4/X1. Making hardware was never Google's forte and you need to be very good at that to compete with either system.

My guess they want another pass at Google TV.
That's why I did this;

https://github.com/etherael/phoneme

It's not perfect, but I think the first step to widespread crypto adoption is getting people accustomed to the workflow of fully encrypted email. Phoneme + mailvelope is not a huge jump from the current gmail experience and just that initial taste might be enough to get more people on the right track.
"the bridge" is a fantastic documentary which looks into issues, and talks with some of the people who lost family to depression/suicide on the Golden Gate bridge. Well worth watching

[edit] http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0799954
While it might be better for you to just make it free, it's obviously worse for the market as a whole. The people you're complaining about on the app stores have the exact same excuses - they tried to sell it, few people bought it, so they just made it free. Now everyone expects it to be free. So their next app and your next app now need to be free, too.

It's actually worse than that - it looks like your primary customers would be game developers (you're selling editors for 3D apps, javascript webgl, audio libraries, etc). This means that you are directly competing in your customers' market with a free product that you are supporting from the money your customers are giving you. You're de-valuing their market while using proceeds from them to de-value it further. Woops!
"What's more, Ecuador offers the United States economic aid of $23 million annually, similar to what we received with the trade benefits, with the intention of providing education about human rights" well played, Ecuador.
I love the wonders of space, I grew up watching Star Trek Voyager. What continues to amaze me, is the drone programs we have, I just wonder when we'll start advancing our drone programs for space.

Ever since I was young I used to think aliens existed, but that aliens used some type of biorobot to explore. Kind of like we do with rovers, and satellites...just not in the image of us.
For whatever reason people have a very different relationship with travelling in their own car and via some other form of transport. The perceived cost of a trip seems to drop for a lot of people, both with regards to price and time. Perhaps less so in the millennial generation but in the preceeding generation there is a very strong association between owning a car and personal freedom.
>It's relatively well accepted economics that product pricing tends toward the marginal value, which for software is near zero.

Do you perhaps mean the marginal cost? I don't see any reason that the marginal value to the consumer of software would be near-zero.

In any case, I'm not sure I agree - the marginal cost of AAA video games is near-zero, but the market price is $40-$60.
These "defendants" are doing so on behalf of the rights owners so they are able to show you their content.

At the moment they can't, would you like to have an option to watch this content or not?
That's... horribly pathological. I'd even claim that's bordering on being unethical. Also, it's like the facebookey "like" button, in trying to paint everything in rainbow colors.

There is an issue with media pileup and lack of respect, but sometimes just because reporting is negative doesn't mean it's not real. In fact, you've just mentioned a huge social problem (rape) that happens even in first world cultures and is relevant whether we like it or not, that you decided to filter out.

Which is the usual case with the "irrelevant" "negative" reporting that we can't "do anything about". Actually, usually we can, but it's small, won't stroke your ego, and it's easier to hide your head in the sand and pretend nothing's happening. Because paying attention to food you eat, clothes you wear and electronics you buy is hard and isn't making life more enjoyable for you or anyone you know.
So if I understand this correctly, Netflix's crime is that they give us instant, unlimited access to all the movies ever for ten dollars a month, but in a way that means I might need to install software on my computer?

Bastards.
And now netflix is also not interested to be streaming to FirefoxOS, Firefox browsers, Opera, Ouya, and upcoming new device from Kickstarter, and so forth.
This is great. I'm really happy to learn about WALS. I've been interested in constructing a practical standard language for humans for a long time. This kind of survey of what works seems essential.
I accept Netflix and Steam over cable/movie theaters/gamestop the same way I accept nuclear power (over burning fossil fuels). They are really the only solutions that have any non-zero chance of succeeding in our present day economic/political environment.

Sure, they have their downsides and there are way better solutions that one can envision, and they are light years better than the things they are meant to replace and our world isn't ready yet for the better alternatives.
> I expect several foreign countries to ban American tech company operations

That will probably not happen.

But what will happen, and have a small but ultimately significant effect, is that American companies will lose some contracts, by the narrowest of margins in a decision... contracts they would otherwise have won by a narrowest of margins... due to the fallout from the NSA surveillance scandal.
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CITATIONS, RESSOURCES / NEWS du FRONT, JAVASCRIPT, JQUERY, HTML/CSS, INTERNET / CROSS PLATFORM / SERVER, TOOLS, PERFORMANCES (Link i have cross-compiled for a presentation here), DEDICACE, GOOGLE, MOZILLA / FIREFOX / OS, RSS READER ;), MEDIA / NETWORK / SOCIAL, PRIVACY / PRISM / EUdata / …, SNOWDEN, ANTI-PRISM, MESH NETWORKING, POLITICS / MEDIAS / BULLSHIT, WORLD ON FIRE, ON SOUTIENT, FABLAB / HACK / RANDOM, HUMOUR
And thanks to HTML DRM Netflix will now remain the only provider with a non-zero chance of succeeding. Great Job all around, pat on the back to the monopoly holders. Well done.
Pricing is indeed a hard problem. Given the competitive nature of App Store, you can't raise price on your own. People have been used to cheap apps. One solution is paid update.
Is fragmentation to client applications "Install this .msi/ Buy this from the app store to play content" better than fragmentation to browser plugins?

Seems like an arbitrary distinction.
No, it's being shut down soon.

But seriously, yes I would have happily forked out had I been given the option.
Why should it query more from Google for people to 'take it seriously'?

Edit:
It is through tracking that Google gets results that some people see as being superiour to those of DuckDuckGo: Google's model of you makes them think that they know what you want to see, and they give you those pages.
Netflix isn't the problem here, the studios are. They're the ones demanding DRM and holding Netflix et al hostage unless they get it.

If you don't want DRM, then don't consume content distributed with DRM in any format, rather than just targeting a specific format. The boogeyman here is the studio licensing content to Netflix with DRM requirements and distributing DVDs with DRM. Stop consuming their content.

The distribution channel isn't the bad guy here. Making them out to be just obfuscates the issue.
Well, it's a 2D game (my products are usually for 3D), but you have a point there. I was primarily writing about the app stores, and it is a web game, but you are basically right. Never though about that.
I can walk down any number of streets nearby and get approached by people with bags full of professionally pressed DVD's of movies pirated by filming a cinema screen. Or I can install a bittorrent client and get HD content everywhere anyway. Access isn't stopping those who are willing to put in a minimal amount of effort to get the content.

It does, however, stop people like me from subscribing to their service, as I refuse to pay for a service that is hampered by DRM this way, as from long experience as a Linux user, relying on formats that are not open and unencumbered is pretty much guaranteed to cause annoying hassles for me in some way or another with uses that I consider completely reasonable, and that does not include storing copies or distributing the content to others in any way.

It's a nice try from Netflix. Dropping Silverlight is great. But it's not enough.
I think we should have expected that Mandarin is weird but Cantonese is very normal - in the same way that Japan has a weird primary writing system, but its secondary writing system (Hiragana) is one of the most regular in the world. In fact the same reasoning could apply to Hindi - it's (or was until recently) a secondary language in India, with English as the language of government. Do other countries with two languages follow the same pattern? E.g. I would predict from this that Afrikaans would be a very non-weird language.
It's always been an issue that they are not interested in minority platforms, nothing here changes that.

Why do you think they will no longer support firefox browsers? I can't find any source for this.
The amount of money you make from the ads is irrelevant to the consumer. They still see the price as $0.
Absolutely agreed with this. Opened the comments just to mention that while I agree with most of the article, Sqwiggle would be a huge no-go for me. And that's essentially why. Even aside from the big brother aspect, I wouldn't want it for the same reason I hate those setups where you put two desks back to back and get to stare at your buddy across the table from you while you're trying to concentrate. It just doesn't make for a productive work environment. I don't want to have to think about what I look like while I'm coding. I don't want to have to worry about how it looks if I walk around while I'm thinking instead of sitting at my desk, or if I go to the bathroom too often or whatever.

Google is actually doing away with online status as they move from Talk to Hangouts, and while it originally bothered me, I realized that I leave my status set to away all the time anyway! Having it advertised when I sit down at my computer - the exact time when I'd prefer people not bug me unless necessary so I can focus on what I'm doing - is counterproductive and useless anyway since I'll get their messages just as easily on my phone, and if they're important enough I'll answer them whether I'm busy or not.
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