skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The difference is that if a server running HTTPS is hacked, the attacker can modify the JavaScript at will. With an app that's signed offline, this isn't possible; you could even redistribute it on an untrusted mirror.

Also, in theory, an independent auditor could rebuild the app from source and verify that the bits match, and do an independent audit of the source. So signed apps are more verifiable.

The trusted base for a signed app is (browser + app + app signer), not (browser + app + server), where the server might be a virtual machine in the cloud and you need to trust the virtual machine host provider too.

This doesn't matter most of the time because you have to trust the server anyway, but in the case of someone wanting to encrypt something on the client that cannot be decrypted on the server, it does matter. Encrypting on the client is mostly pointless unless the client code is independent of the server, which requires it to be independently signed.

There is still a cert chain of course, but it's a different one where the developer's private key doesn't get uploaded to the server.

Signed apps are fundamentally not how the web works. The argument here is that the web is basically broken for client-side encryption and the app store model is better for things like secure email or a bitcoin wallet.

But since most app store apps aren't open source and the open source ones aren't independently audited in practice, it's not clear it's a practical difference.
>You think Disney or anyone else will invest if they lose their copyright protections in 60 years?

Is this an appeal to imagination?

Yes I do, because I'm going to speculate that most of the income derived from a creative work is extracted in its first 60 years, and going to mention the historical fact that none of the media created 60 years ago was expected to be marketable 60 years later, and was often just destroyed.

So I don't think Disney would invest if they thought they couldn't make money from product 60 years later, it's just the truth. If your view of the issue requires as an axiom that all creativity would stop under a measly 60 year copyright term, it is clearly wrong.
> The US will not perform economic espionage as long as the US has a technological edge

Spying on the head of the EU-anti-monopoly investigations against Microsoft and Google is already industrial espionage.
> In an online marketplace it's far far easier to accept bitcoins than credit cards because you have no fraud risk, which is a HUGE problem in online retail.

I currently work for a large online marketplace. A very typical fraud scenario (maybe the most common) is someone collecting payment for an item that they don't actually possess. This would only be harder to deal with and correct if the payment were disbursed to an anonymous seller in bitcoins.
The reason why people should get excited about Bitcoin is not a bubble or money, but rather a something completely new. Large group of people put financial rules into software and agreed that they are going to use these rules without external central entity and enforcement.

If this continue to roll, same might be applied to many other areas I believe.

It is just my random fantasy at this moment, but why we will need enforcement, if we will have guarantied income in bitcoins and laws system built same way as bitcoin (i.e. opensource and agreed to use by most people) and law enforcement as a function of guaranteed income amount.... Just random thought.

or finally having AI which can exist on its own, buy components of its environment (i.e. machines, networks, etc)

I believe what is emerging right now as a Bitcoin is much wider phenomena than just a way to avoid pay taxes and inflation.
It's not SATA, it's PCI-E, which is a lot faster.
My thoughts on SF after living here for six months
I realize it is not equivalent. I never said it was. It fulfills the needs I have and is a very nice set of hardware.
How Overwatch is Bringing Real Time Combat Gaming to Paintball
awesome article!
By far the most unbelievable thing about 1984 was how competent the government was.
The Rust compiler itself and Servo are the two largest. There are a bunch of smaller projects on GitHub too, if you search.
I'm currently working on my third book, a book about neural networks and deep learning. Here's the first chapter:

http://neuralnetworksanddeeplearning.com/chap1.html

It'll be free online once complete, but I raised money with an Indiegogo campaign (about 10k). I'm self-publishing, in part because I wanted full control over the book. This gives me the ability to experiment with in-text videos, and with other tricks. For instance, when a reader clicks on an equation reference in the text, the relevant equation appears in the margin, as a reminder. Clicking on the marginal equation will take you to the context in which the equation originally appeared. This cuts down on tedious back-and-forth.

My two earlier books were both published in the traditional way:

+ A book for general audiences about networked science, "Reinventing Discovery: the New Era of Networked Science": http://www.amazon.com/dp/0691160198 Published by Princeton University Press.

+ A textbook about quantum computing, jointly with Ike Chuang: http://www.amazon.com/Quantum-Computation-Information-Annive... Published by Cambridge University Press. No e-book at all when first published (2000)!

Both were written with LaTeX, and included many illustrations. "Reinventing Discovery" was actually rekeyed entirely by the publisher, but the textbook was produced from our LaTeX copy.
I write fiction, which is a totally different beast from the non-fiction stories you'll find here. Also, I self-publish, so that's even more niche. Still, here's the thousand-yard view of sales.

My first book was sold on Amazon, and podcasted for free on Podiobooks.com. The initial sales were enough to make my car payments for about a half year. Around that time, Amazon made some changes to their ranking, and I dropped in sales by about half. Subsequent books have had the same results (big first few months, but only about a hundred or so per month).

The way you make the most of that is by writing more, and all the normal marketing stuff that you can find online (build an audience). I'm a big fan of Podiobooks.com because, even though it's a bear to do a full audiobook for free, their audience is fairly large and devoted.

As art goes, I was lucky in that I met with a Hugo-award-winning artist (Cheyenne Wright, Girl Genius) who liked my work enough to help me out with covers. I commission each work with him, and he's been a great help to me there.

In case you're interested, here are my books: http://www.amazon.com/Brand-Gamblin/e/B003P4CEFM
TEPCO Quietly Admits Reactor 3 Could Be Melting Down
How to Stick to Your Financial New Year's Resolution
There is no evidence Disney is canning movies because they won't be able to profit from them 60 years from now. They are not thinking that far ahead (because they can't); you are deluded.

You keep bringing up fair use, but that does not apply to public performances.
I disagree with all this negativism that is taking over lately. I think that there are several very positive trends for the tech sector:

1 - Big data is coming age. People are becoming more realistic about what it means, Data Science is becoming a profession, and the hype is being replaced by results.

2 - It has gotten even easier to learn how to program. Udacity, Coursera and StackExchange continue to improve. The resources available for the resourceful have multiplied.

3 - The IPO market is back. Facebook's investors no longer feel burned. Twitter's investors and employees are doing great. The better the IPO market, the more money that gets recycled into technology.

4 - We are aware of the privacy beast. Some view this as terrible. Awareness is actually the first path to fixing the problem.

5 - SF may be seeing hostility towards tech firms, but the tech scene is thriving and being welcomed with open arms in NYC, Austin, Boston, and perhaps even Tokyo.

6 - It's been a good year for gay marriage, which is the defining civil liberties battle of the day.

7 - Computer Science is a trendy major. Stanford undergrads flock to it. Harvard's cs50 competes with intro to economics as the most popular major. Every that this occurs, our technological capability as a society increases.

Yes, there are a lot of reasons for 2013 to have been crappy, but I'm optimistic about 2014.
A disappointing percentage of links go dead, thereby making the answer useless. This problem increases over time.
paintballing is being taken to a whole new extreme
I haven't seen the case law, but from the following commentary, I'd say the issue isn't so clear-cut:

> However, if the service provider becomes aware of a "red flag" from which infringing activity is apparent, it will lose
the limitation of liability if it takes no action. The "red flag" test
has both a subjective and an objective element. In determining
whether the service provider was aware of a "red flag," the subjective
awareness of the service provider of the facts or circumstances
in question must be determined. However, in deciding whether
those facts or circumstances constitute a "red flag"—in other words,
whether infringing activity would have been apparent to a reasonable
person operating under the same or similar circumstances—
an objective standard should be used.

Source: http://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/CRPT-105hrpt551/pdf/CRPT-105hrp...

So, the defense that infringement is "impossible to verify unless the owner of the copyright gives a notice" probably doesn't apply. If the site owner reasonably should have known of the infringement, safe harbor protection is forfeited.

The moral is that you need to be proactive about removing infringing content. Yes, it's true that YouTube doesn't take down every offending video. But they (at least claim to) actively monitor for infringement to the best of their abilities:

http://www.youtube.com/t/video_id_about

Disclaimer: Don't take my advice here as a comprehensive guide to DMCA compliance. My comments are a far cry from that.

Edit: I should add that I'm not offering an opinion as to whether the OP's site violated the DMCA, or whether the RIAA's takedown was valid. My comments were meant to apply generally, not to the OP's specific case.
For all the people out there who are thinking about bitcoin as a payment technology: If you assume that customers get paid in dollars and that vendors will have to use dollars to pay their taxes, pay their employees and buy the raw materials for their products (reasonable assumptions, I think), then a payment consists of one conversion from dollars to bitcoins by the purchaser, and one conversion from bitcoins to dollars by the vendor.

Those two transactions will have associated costs. Exchanges take out trading fees and the market makers on the exchanges will want to see some profit as well (you will see this reflected in the bid/ask spread). The total cost for the transaction will be 2x the spread + exchange fees. People keep touting the 2.5% charge for using credit cards, but they don't compare it to a similar value for bitcoin. It clearly is not 0%. Exchange fees alone are can be something like 0.5%. If we double that (two conversions, remember) that's 1% just in exchange fees. Unfortunately, I don't have good numbers for bitcoin / dollar spreads because I don't watch that market very closely.

So we have 2.5% for credit cards and 1% + spread (unknown) for bitcoin. And with credit cards consumers at least get some protection in the case of fraud. Does anyone else have a better model for bitcoin transaction costs?
Paul Graham and the Manic Pixie Dream Hacker
This is an excellent point.

Is the Stack Exchange model perfect? No.

Does it reward what the article's author calls "obsessive twerps" more strongly than it does anyone else? Arguably yes.

Can it be substantially improved upon? Almost certainly.

Is it nonetheless an enormous qualitative improvement on its predecessors? Good God, yes!

The article's author brings up the old saw about giving a man a fish versus teaching him to fish, and that's well and good. But sometimes you just need a fish.
Such an online marketplace should have an escrow included then if they wish to use Bitcoin as a payment method.

I believe the Silk Road(s) have used such systems.
Do you think Madonna uploaded those videos?

I'm not asking "is it mathematically possible?" I'm asking "do you really think Madonna, or Madonna's agent, uploaded that video?"

The court system very rarely works on the concept of "well, it could have been legit." If you buy a bunch of speakers 90% off out of the back of a van in an alley with their serial numbers scratched off, "well, it could have been legit" will not fly very far.
Cortex M developers G+ community
Questions for peer founders:

As a developer and solo founder, I just can not finish a serious project in one year. For example, it took me two years to get version 1 of torapp guilloche designer (www.torapp.info). We did not get consistent/significant customers and need a new product to survive.

To evaluate more ideas and to be familiar with respective areas took me another year easily (without deep knowledge in the area, how can you beat your competitors?).

So how can you guys roll out a product in 3 months? How can you quickly pivot? (pick up ideas and evaluate them quickly)
> If you google "Python training" you're going to get books, sites that offer training from 2.5 to 3.3. And those are recent sites (like 2012+).

That's because these are all still valid versions of Python (which are still shipped with OSes). Most of the concepts you learn in Python 2.5 are still valid in Python 3.3; the changes weren't that dramatic. There are still strings, the control mechanisms didn't change, logic still uses the same operator precedence, the syntax didn't change...

Yes, there are now byte and unicode strings (as there were in Python 2), yes, print is now a function, yes, a few functions now return iterators instead of lists, and yes, a few functions/packages were renamed. Pretty minor changes, in the long run; breaking changes yes, but still minor for all that.

> Everyone should jump onboard the python3 wagon.

No, they shouldn't. You should never risk your production critical code just because a language wants to evolve. Perhaps this is a difference from Ruby (particularly Rails) where there appears to be an "evolve or die" philosophy, whereas Python says "we're here when you're ready, but we're not going to ignore you". It honestly makes me happy to work with Python, where I don't have to chase down a production fire because a developer decided to make a breaking change.

I will personally move to Python 3 when it's prudent to do so - when the environment I develop for supports it natively. Until then, I'm glad I'm not being forced to move ahead. It makes my day to day life as a developer simple.
> The website/apps I’m talking about was called HypedMusic, which provided an interface to listen to free, unlimited music, create playlists, and share said playlists with your friends on the website or Android and iPhone apps.

Rephrased to be more accurate:

"I built a website where 99.9% of the value provided came from someone else's investment and work which I used without compensating them."
> The thing is, there's a lot more that goes into a viable product than just the core features.

Yes, yes, YES! I'm doing this now, and just figuring out the "business" side of the product code is so much more work than the core idea (which is simple to code).

And getting the actual sales/marketing/accounting/admin/etc stuff is going to be 10x worse, I am sure.
Outrage at JFK as Customs men smash a musician’s instruments
My wife's response: "Although, really, Ayn Rand fan fiction does not sound like that much fun."
Actually wifi does work that way, notwithstanding the odd word 'crash'. It's entirely possible that so much bandwidth is being used by the Google network that his network has extremely high packet loss and is effectively useless, especially if Google is using better gear (like directional antennas). And you're aware there's only actually three channels, and each bus wouldn't be using the same one, right?

But sure, use a partial understanding of technology to generate a narrative in which this guy has only a self-created problem, and take from him the benefit of the doubt. Then we can turn off our empathy circuits, reject this very dear example, and continue pretending that its workers (and users) are not pawns of a malevolent Google.
Works from 1916 and before are public domain? Not a bad start.

It is a really great to read the beautiful color version of the *First Six Books of the Elements of Euclid" online for free.
https://archive.org/details/firstsixbooksofe00byrn

Meanwhile it is selling on Amazon for up to $100 http://www.amazon.com/Oliver-Byrne-Six-Books-Euclid/dp/38365...
By what mechanism do you imagine Stack Exchange-style sites starving out more detailed and comprehensive treatments of individual subjects? The proposition would seem to require the assumption that all programming can be reduced to cookbook recipes.
If you believe that the FCC clearly unambiguously has the legal authority to advance Net neutrality regulations, then why would Congress have wasted its time drafting (and almost enacting) a law that would have given the FCC the legal authority to advance Net neutrality regulations?
Eric Schmidt makes 2014 predictions, says mobile has won
His edit wasn't rejected by mods. It was rejected by other users who have the power to review edits. A mod has a specific meaning within SE sites.

If he'd raised an issue on meta, I'm sure a real mod would have sorted this out, or he could have just used the same account to make this edit.
...currently.

I don't think most people are interested in Bitcoin primarily because of the utility it currently provides and the infrastructure that has so far been built.
A year in Matrix Factorization, Compressive Sensing and ML
There is no reason we cannot have credit card like things that do not pass plain text authorization. I believe some places have already switched to useing smart cards which leverage cryptography to proved identification without revealing the secret. I'm not sure exactly what crypto is used in practice, but as a proof of concept you can imagine this being done with normal public key chryptography.
uhm, well OWC is always good for it: http://eshop.macsales.com/shop/SSD/OWC/
Over the last year or so I saw that the community has become too pedantic. I have tried to start some (what I thought were) valid system related discussions by asking open ended questions. They were closed as too open. Having seen some very open ended questions on stackoverflow show up on HN and other places I was really disappointed with it. The users close questions without giving any reason why or how to ask the question properly. I don't ask questions on there frequently and but the quality of my questions has remained the same but the way the community approached it was really different.
> Who says this?

Since you jogged my memory, here's one person who has said it: Richard Clarke, U.S. National Coordinator for Security, Infrastructure Protection, and Counter-terrorism 1992-2003 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3769442

> we can be sure that any country capable of doing economic espionage has been doing it, is doing it, and will continue to do it, no matter the rules, no matter if they get caught, no matter the hypocrital public posturing of their leaders.

Why can we be sure of this? Simply from a rudimentary game-theoretic analysis? Isolated incidents of industrial spying aren't enough to show that this activity is as ubiquitous and inevitable as you say it must be.
Am I the only person on the face of the earth who feels like they've had many more technical/reliability issues with Linux (perhaps the blame lies with distributions in particular) than with Windows, over less time?
Just want to point out that it's not fair to call the government incompetent here, when the issue is more complex. I see the sidewalks being cleaned every morning only to be covered in filth again the next day. And it's hard to deal with the homeless issue when New York is buying bus tickets to San Francisco to deal with their homeless.
The article we're commenting on has nothing to do with bitcoins. So again we get back to the issue of reading comprehension.
I like the sound of that a lot. If your copyright is really profitable, you should be able to afford to pay for its protection.

Should this perhaps apply to patent law as well?
Yep. Time to do something different.

I just did this last year when another DNS provider pulled the same shit.
How good is Goteo
A particularly dangerous approach to "Where was it published": The original Wakefield paper was published in The Lancet, which is as good as it gets. It was retracted by the journal, but that fact is occasionally omitted.
> You think Disney or anyone else will invest if they lose their copyright protections in 60 years?

Yes, because people did when copyright terms were shorter than that, and virtually all of the income from most things subject to copyright is derived in the first decade or so.

> Copyrighted work is subject to fair use and a number of other exceptions such as academic/scientific purposes.

Academic/scientific purpose is a factor in evaluating fair use, not a separate exception. And DMCA anti-circumvention provisions make it a crime to make it possible to get access to copyrighted material (when it is distributed in particular forms) beyond what the copyright owner chooses to allow even if the purpose of that access is to make use that is covered by fair use or other exceptions to copyright.
I just published a data science book:
http://amzn.com/111866146X

I went through Wiley, which is a very traditional, large publisher (my editor is the same as Mitnick's and Schneier's). You seriously limit the royalty rate you're going to get this way, but you're going to extend your reach and marketing ability. So it's a balance, and you need to figure out whether reach or per-book royalties are more important. If you have a small audience and you know you can reach each and every reader yourself (maybe on Twitter or HN or Reddit), then self-publishing may be the way to go.

I chose Wiley, because the audience for my book is broader than most data science books (since it's spreadsheet based), and I wanted to get it in front of your average BI analyst perusing at Barnes and Noble.

The big publisher also did a great job with layout, the book feels great with its matte finish, I had two paid tech editors, a regular editor, a project editor, and a bevy of proofreaders. Big help, that.

But don't be mistaken...the onus is still on you to market the book as well. And it's going to take a lot of marketing to make this a viable career (or even a viable supplement to your income). It's an incredibly taxing way to make a living I'd imagine, and I'm super happy to have a great day job.

Rather, my reason for publishing was that I saw a need for the book, and I knew I could write it. And it took a full year from starting to get it out. So it took a year of hard work, and it'd be a miracle if I cleared twenty grand on it. Not the most lucrative endeavor, but extremely personally satisfying.

To answer some of your other questions, the publisher released in both paper and ebook. Pictures in the book were a real pain in the ass. I spent forever screencapping and re-screencapping spreadsheets. Ugh...
Here's one model that could work. Think of Bitcoin as analogous to physical cash. Cash = small casual payments in offline world. Bitcoin = small casual payments in online world. (btw, the original Bitoin paper says this pretty explicitly). I don't keep my savings in (physical) cash. I keep some spending money there. Similarly you will have your internet spending money. You'll converts to and from USD occasionally but not on every transaction. Maybe some people will store value in Bitcoin but they will be the exceptions.

But ultimately smarter people than me will figure out the right model. That's the beauty of software platforms.