skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You are raising a good point, but you are probably wrong ("this century").

Tracked vehicles run by joystick are now used operationally for IEDs. There are resupply and "lug extra cargo" missions that Big Dog is very close to fulfilling right now. There are "augment human teams" missions that smaller legged, tracked, and wheeled platforms are getting close to fulfilling. (Go into this building and look around, take up this position and guard this building entrance while the rest of the team goes in elsewhere.)

The humanoid robot can perform these tasks in a more versatile way, as mentioned elsewhere in these comments, because it can adapt to many real world situations where humans are present (e.g., doors, stairs, ladders, vehicles).
Handibot: Your Own CNC Router
Or you could fork selfstarter[1], which is what we used to allow users to reserve their username on http://microco.sm

[1] https://github.com/lockitron/selfstarter
There's an unwritten "unless it relates to SF" exception to that rule (see: the SFO crash last week), as so many HNers live/work here. This is only a few blocks away, I'm very glad it made it to the front page.
Sorry to hear. One of Bose's greatest contributions may be the Bose Suspension, which (to my knowledge) hasn't been put into production yet: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eSi6J-QK1lw
So? With a lot of us working a stone's throw from where this happened it's relevant. The majority of US startups making the apps and web systems you use work within a mile of this.
Use V8? It's open source, and written in C++, which there are open source compilers for.

What on earth is their gripe with Javascript?
Below 200ms? Still nowhere smooth enough to get to 60fps.
Same rep in the US. It is just the audiophile hipsters who can't wait to show how much they know by bashing Bose.
I have commented on these issues before and I feel like this one is being blown way out of proportion. We all understand why DRM is there. It is there so you can't rip the stream and save it and redistribute it.

But here is the thing that irks me about this. On the server end of things Netflix has been a rather amazing contributor to open source softwares. This boycott seems rather like shooting your self your own foot to stop an intruder.
CPU usage in the decoder is currently higher than Vorbis, though most of the difference is due to having less optimizations. As for the encoder, it's already faster than Vorbis and should become even faster in the future. I haven't checked, but I suspect the same is true when compared to MP3. That being said, the complexity is pretty much negligible on a desktop machine.
Technically it would require a separate binary program. The amendments to the spec define a way for the browser to communicate with such programs. So a non-DRM browser can still comply with this part of the standard.
HN shouldn't be your only source of information. This site is for technical discussion and other interesting things, not about local crime discussion.

Isn't there a SFBlog.org page where this would be more fitting? If not, why doesn't someone start one?
Study of H1-B job retention (pdf download)
I'm confused. What part of this causes an eyeroll for you? Did you attempt to read the words in a spiral instead of the standard left-to-right, top-to-bottom style most English readers prefer?
That is true, but numbers matter. There's a big difference between the NSA serving 10 FAA702/FISA orders a year on Microsoft for Skype intercepts vs. 10 million. It's targeted vs. wholesale surveillance. We know from companies' disclosures the upper bound is on the order of thousands, and is likely to be far less.

Put another way, there are some actual terrorists/spies/etc. out there, even if the number of terrorists is far lower than the government would like you to believe. If the NSA serves Microsoft with, say, 10 or 100 lawful orders a year to eavesdrop on those communications, is that something worthy of working with "dedication" to prevent? Probably not.

What the companies should be doing is encrypting what they can to frustrate wholesale surveillance. Which Microsoft isn't doing. Which I wrote about here:
http://news.cnet.com/8301-13578_3-57590389-38/

And here:
http://news.cnet.com/8301-13578_3-57591179-38/
> Without a W3C standard we might get several totally different, incompatible DRM implementations instead of one standard one.

The EME spec does NOT define a single standard DRM implementation.

The point of EME is to provide a single interface to a DRM module. The DRM modules will be entirely nonstandard, closed-source, and there will be many of them.

Google has its own DRM module, Microsoft has its own. So there are already two, entirely incompatible DRM implementations. And none of them work on other browsers. Even if other browsers implemented EME, the actual DRM implementations would not work on them.

So this is a step backwards, not forwards. It increases fragmentation.
That sounds interesting. Have any sources? I'd like to read up about this.
Yes, my credit card number does have spaces
RIP.

Are there any other faculty members (not necessarily at MIT) who have managed to start their own companies which became successful, and yet have stayed on as a faculty member? That itself seems to be a rare achievement.
> I'm surprised it got up voted here

A disturbing number of HN readers have batshit insane viewpoints on food.
As a ex sound engineer and now self described audiophile, I deeply admire and respect Bose products. Though expensive, I loved my Bose speakers till they fell off my computer desk onto the floor. The small cube satellite design with the sub on the floor, filled the room considering there such small size. They were good enough for me to mix and master with for my friends projects.

RIP Dr. Bose
Having read this article I can attest to the fact that it doesn't meaningfully add anything to the discussion around the value of MOOCs in general, or the new Georgia Tech/Udacity Master's in CS. It's basically just a fluffy opinion piece with the author spouting off about he doesn't like the Georgia Tech/Udacity plan and is certain it's going to result in a worthless MS degree. His vitriol is the element of interest.
If you have evidence that the "firewall, networking, and SAN gear" used by Facebook, Apple, Microsoft, Google, Yahoo, etc. have supersecret government backdoors, we'd be delighted if you could share it with us.
The first sign that a comment is bad is that it is a judgment.
Are people switching to DuckDuckGo simply because of paranoia? I don't care if Google knows whatever I'm searching for, it helps them improve their search results. DuckDuckGo's search is nowhere near as good as Google.
Think Distributed: A Distributed Systems Podcast
Airbnb, Zynga, Pinterest, Twitter, and dozens of other startups with employees probably reading HN are located within a couple blocks of that location, and there's a "shelter in place" order.

I think you can deal with it for an hour or so.
We'll see if this works as well as previous infrastructure projects in China.

"Liu Zhijun, China's ex-railway minister, sentenced to death for corruption"

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/jul/08/liu-zhijun-sente...

"China’s Bridge Collapse: Infrastructure Boom Raises Safety Questions"

http://world.time.com/2012/08/27/bridge-collapse-in-china-ra...

"China failed to heed rail safety warnings"

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/bbd56722-b78c-11e0-b95d-00144feabd...

"Grieving Chinese Parents Protest School Collapse"

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/17/world/asia/17china.html

About the specific proposed project mentioned in the link kindly submitted here, other news reports

http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/07/11/us-china-tunnel-id...

mention

"China announced plans in 1994 to build the tunnel, at a cost of $10 billion, and set to be completed before 2010. But more than 20 years on, the project remains stuck in the planning stage, the website said, without elaborating."
I specified Ars Technica as an example because I don't think Hacker News is bad here. In fact, I think HN's discussion about this issue has been great.

Whether or not the "LOL" "J/K" happened, the joke is obvious comedic hyperbole. I've had friends make really similar jokes. I'm sure you have too. My housemate shouts things like that over Skype while playing League of Legends. School shooters may write things like that, but so do plenty of perfectly well-adjusted teenagers.

I don't really have a problem with police making a visit, either. I don't think it's necessary, but if the police wanted to stop by and ask if everything's alright, no harm done. Still, there's a big jump from a police visit to searching his house and arresting him, and they seem to have done all three on the basis of a Facebook comment.

And if they found something really worrying, then they should be charging the kid with that. The fact that this is all they have implies that they haven't found that he's anything illegal. And if he hasn't, he obviously shouldn't be charged.
One day my dad spotted me playing Mech Warrior, and asked:

"Why bipedal war machines? That is stupid, just push them over and they now are useless."

After that, I never figured why someone would build a bipedal war machine, even though I still have my nerdgasms watching all the mecha anime, movies and games...

Anyone has a idea of why the hell someone would build a bipedal war machine?
> Clearly, DRM is required in order for them to license the shows we want to watch.

This couldn't be further from the truth now more than ever. DRM is required in the sense that their contractual obligations require it, but the technological and social requirement is just not there.

Why should the HTML standard be encumbered by something wholly unrelated? The copyright maximalists (including Netflix) need the web more than the web needs them.
Bose Pro Audio (where I worked for a summer at MIT) was always awesome -- we were doing audio radiosity calculations to simulate audio systems in CAD mockups of existing or planned buildings (stadiums, etc.) with various speaker placement, from arbitrary listener positions. Their speaker arrays were rugged, well engineered, etc. -- no one worries about "audiophile" stuff for venue audio or PA.

They also have a great reputation for car audio, where everything is essentially custom designed to the vehicle.
Except that his way all the traffic instantly switches, and your way you have to wait for DNS propagation, which about 15% of the users on the internet will not pick up for over a week.

DNS is an awful way to do failover.
> There is no negative. What is negative is the fact that people seem to think that netflix should just continue using a closed system made by Microsoft which doesn't work on Linux natively.

The negative is that the new proposal will also not work on Linux. It will also not work on other browsers, because each DRM implementation for EME will be incompatible (there are currently 2, incompatible of course, Google's and Microsoft's).
If I were to eat 300 extra calories a day and all that surplus was stored as fat, I'd gain 31 pounds every year.
Time to Advertise Your Private Offering? Not So Fast
One country invests $USD 42 Billion for infrastructure that will last decades, the other spends that much for a few months of an ill-defined war and spying on its own people.

Which one is the USA and which one is China? Depends which century you're talking about I guess.
You ask users to opt-into the process. DRM should never be opt-out.
The best line from the article was the opening one:
"Diet soda, it turns out, may not be the panacea for weight loss that we all thought — and many of us hoped — it was."

It would make a very nice lead in to an Onion article.
Ron Rivest (RSA Security) would be a great example of that, although he wasn't CEO of RSA (for long, I think).
I was kind of wondering if it was 'y', 'js' or 'p'. The 'p' of the older logo was more readable in my opinion.

Overall, I like the new logo more.
Sure as hell we shouldn't mandate broken standards (a propietary, obfuscated binary blob? You must be kidding) just to support someones ill-guided business model. We didn't with the many attempts of the music industry.
> I'm sorry, but I completely disagree. If netflix wants a way to add DRM so people can watch DRMed videos on the Internet let them.

By all means let them. They can even work with browser vendors to make it "work" on any platform that has their proprietary DRM binary. But there aren't enough ten-foot poles in the world to call that an "HTML5" "standard".
Exactly. Entering a vehicle was one of the challenges in the most recent DARPA evaluation of teams developing high level control software for this robot.
> Anyone has a idea of why the hell someone would build a bipedal war machine?

People get confused operating other body-forms, and when strapped into a waldo style remote rig they need something close to human for ease of use?
As long as the abuse of technology you speak of is them holding onto their power of making money off the convenient on-demand entertainment that they produce and provide, no I don't have a problem with that. Especially when that power does not include the ability to force the consumer to pay for said product whether they want it or not.

Wait, what exactly is the abuse of technology we're talking about here?
I could have written this word-for-word.

I am curious if asm.js is quick enough to produce code that could decode encrypted full-screen HD video on browsers whose vendors won't support the media extensions.

Pardon me for ignorance on this subject, but is there something about DRM that requires a plugin or component built into the browser itself? Could our answer to Netflix be, "Write the codec yourself using asm.js"?
Except that advocacy groups the HN crowd generally likes also draft legislation for the congresscritters to introduce. Here's the Electronic Frontier Foundation's draft bill -- "Initial Improvements to Aaron's Law for Computer Crime Reform" -- from earlier this year:
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2013/01/effs-initial-improveme...

BTW I'm hosting an event in SF with EFF on this topic later this month. On July 22. Details TK.

Point is the writing-the-bills issue (and even the reading-the-bills issue) is a symptom of the problem, not the actual problem itself.
That's like the tank cannon stabilization system on modern MBTs, applied to an entire vehicle. Wow.
>If your friends at work refuse to meet you away from work for your crucial sex talk, they may be uncomfortable with it too.

If someone is uncomfortable with something they should speak up. If someone says they are uncomfortable with something that should be respected (within reason).

Its not that hard when everyone just behaves as adults instead of spoiled sheltered children who cannot communicate with each other
If they hadn't fixed this with a patch, I could see a class action lawsuit on the horizon for fraud. You can't sell something as working when it is not.
For me, racism is a subset of a larger problem of "too much judgement, too little perception".

Christian teachings tell us to avoid judging others, Buddhists tend to take it even more to the extreme.

But the maxime of "no judgement" isn't about altruism at all. In the case of employers it's really not a good idea to sort by race or gender because it's too easy to miss out on talent that way.
That's fair, though I wonder if it would be more appropriate to level that at the droves of Aaron Schwartz/Ed Snowden/SFO crash posts that have been filling the front page this year.

Unlike all the other off-topic posts that make the front page, this one could have saved somebody who would otherwise be headed that way now. At least in my book, that justifies its presence here.
Still, must they push for DRM in Html5? Why don't they just make a binary client ?
Don't use the Web. Use a native app.
Sincerely, thank you for that enlightening info.
> > And thus it's entirely possible that a calorie-free substance, which has impacts on metabolism and how your body decides what to store, can impact weight gain.

> I disagree, and I'd like some credible referenceys. Unless you're talking about amphetamine sulphate.

This seems self-defeating. Surely, for a claim that a particular substance has a particular effect, I would like to see evidence. But obviously the notion that a substance could have such an effect is well supported by the existence of amphetamine sulphate - and unless you believe amphetamine sulphate is imbued with some magical uniqueness, other substances may very well have greater or lesser effects in the same domain (though greater effects we'd probably have noticed and tested and have conclusive evidence for by this point).
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The cost of sequencing human genomes is plunging - over 5x faster than the cost of computing; the potential impact on preventive healthcare and the medical landscape is boundless. The science is there but the scale isn't. That's where Counsyl comes in. We are building the technology platform to make genomics useful and accessible to everyone.

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The vast majority of our operations are powered by our own custom-built infrastructure on a Python/Django/Postgres stack, from ordering to lab processing to billing. We’re building new tools, new workflows, and new infrastructure to solve the challenging problems of a technology startup involved with not just bits, but also interconnected physical components like lab robotics and patient samples.

Don’t be intimidated if you don’t have a genomics background; solving these problems fundamentally requires software solutions. We’re looking for the best and brightest software engineers — strong generalists with solid CS fundamentals and practical software engineering intuition — to help us scale up genomics to billions of users.

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Android-powered STB transcodes 4 channels at once
Wherever you work, whatever you do, you have to trust the people you work with for that relationship to be ongoing and productive (i.e. staying out of court). It sounds like you have a problem trusting women not to take you to court rather than a problem with the court system. Which sounds an awful lot like misogyny.
How? Wouldn't that require an Apple developer account?
Seems like that also falls in line with some of the points made by Thiel in his debate with Andreessen [0]

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0yztBoNQRYo
Teardown: What's inside Google Glass?
Seriously. How did this get past the USDOJ antitrust division?

It hasn't.
How are the encryption proposals "closing" the standards?

Also, I'm seeing a clash of connotation between encryption for DRM and encryption for PRIVACY. Is encryption only good when it is protecting the freedom of the user, not the producer?
For every person who says their company failed because they didn't listen to customer feedback, there are the same amount of people who say their company failed because they did nothing but follow the demands of every single customer. Success lies somewhere in the middle. How do you know where that middle is? That is the $100,000,000 question that you can only learn by a process of trying and failing. This is why these unsolicited "advice" articles are worthless.
A serious attempt to implement strong DRM will inevitably go way too deep into the hardware and software stacks.

http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~pgut001/pubs/vista_cost.html

Sony once tried to implement DRM using a rootkit, remember?

Also, the movie industry pushed SOPA and PIPA.
Contractual obligation is exactly what I meant.
I'm surprised that on HN people cannot distinguish between Netflix business need to use DRM in their content delivery system (which is undesirable but defensible), and Netflix nefarious scheming to break the open web in order to make that an easier delivery system for DRM-ed content.

It's like defending a company that wants to dump toxic waste into our drinking water with the argument "well, they have to leave it somewhere".

Screw that. They want to use DRM, fine. But not at the expense of a free and open web.

This isn't about DRM. This isn't about copyright. This isn't even about greed. This is about power and control.
Um, I think you repeated the statement while trying to refute it. DRM is required for them to license the shows by their contractual obligations.

The social requirement is there in that the market wants the product that has contractual obligations. To meet that demand requires a change in technology.

I need the web to work the same way that Netflix needs it to work so that we may both benefit from it.
"In 2011, to fulfill his lifelong dream to support MIT education, Dr. Bose gave to MIT the majority of the stock of Bose Corporation in the form of nonvoting shares. Under the terms of the gift, dividends from those shares will be used by MIT to sustain and advance MIT’s education and research mission. MIT cannot sell its Bose shares, and does not participate in the management or governance of the company."

Wow. Respect.
Just because your JavaScript interpreter is open source does not mean that its license infects anything that it runs. Nothing about identica vs twitter is about your JavaScript interpreter, in that excerpt.
I don't get the extra emphasis on Netflix here either.

Netflix are part of the content industry, it's not that they're the best of a bad bunch, they're actively more open than some artists.
Your body does not digest fat and turn you into fat, just like it does not digest broccoli and turn you into broccoli. Whats actually important is carbs vs protein. You wan't to eat things that are high in protein and low in carbs, theres many schools of thought that say fat doesn't matter at all anymore. You can learn more by searching for Paleo and Ketosis on Google or Reddit. Disclaimer: I'm not a doctor or dietitian just sharing whats worked for me.
Maybe I missed it, where did he say his name implied he had kids?
I will be interested to see the results. But why is this in Ask HN? Seems to me it should be a regular thread.
This so obvious I'm amazed that it isn't discussed every time this topic comes up. Programmers seem to think that there is something "dirty" about adjusting your language according to audience.
You haven't convinced me that I'm made some highly incorrect giant leap of faith in logic, and I clearly haven't convinced you that my ideas aren't outlandish. Thanks anyhow, though. It's taught me to be more specific in my arguments.
A contractual obligation that requires something is a requirement, regardless of the technical possibilities. DRM has never been required to do anything from a technical standpoint, so far as I'm aware.

Not to say that your other points aren't valid. I'd rather not see anything resembling DRM ever. I just want to point out that a legal obligation such as a contract does make this a valid requirement for Netflix and other digital streaming services.