skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The receipt scan idea is an app I have wanted for ages, though I don't think OCR is good enough to handle all the cryptic abbreviated product names on a standard super market receipt. It would be cleaner if the printed receipt included a QR code linking to an itemised list for download, but that approach may have some privacy issues. Better would be to transfer a text file from the point of sale system to your phone via NFC.
DRM was and always will be pointless and insulting, no matter how elaborate it will become. Because it's not the right way to treat customers.
They still sell 300+ MM of the things globally; PC's aren't going anywhere. The market will shrink to allow room for other players (tablets, etc), but it will never die off.

I've been reading about the death of the PC since the early 90's...and I'm still waiting for them to go Tango Uniform.

I'm not going to hold my breath.
If you are interested in hardware components these people have decent products
http://www.hardkernel.com/main/products/prdt_info.php
note that, flash playback is still the default at most websites because HTML5 video playback generally sucks. its less efficient and provides a lesser experience in all major browsers.

Eventually this will change, but still.

That and of course, that NO single benefit is worth giving way to DRM. NONE. DRMs are a terrible invention from all points of view.
No one should be OK with DRM if we want this garbage to be gone. If we are OK with it, how can we expect brain dead publishers to understand that it's not needed ever?
Probably 30 websites and 1 app, which happens to have a very good web version (Google Maps).
Be The Dumbest Person In The Room
I understand that POV, but one would think that for $3.2B Google could have reinvented Nest ten times over. What's so unique (and protectable) about Nest that would make it worth what Google paid? Is their IP so broad and deep? Is there some fast-closing window most of us don't see? I'm boggled.
TBH I think "free software people" (whatever that means, really..) would have every right to refuse to negotiate and just refuse DRMs.

I don't see any pride is finding a middle ground for the sake of saying "look, we're trying to be helpful!"

But then, that's just me.
Two steps: 1)Get a job at Google. 2)Meet the founders in the weekly TGIF.
I'm not okay with DRM.

It will never work on all devices. It will never work with all software. That's the nature of DRM. It's made to block playback on non-approved devices/software (and generally is a PITA even with approved stuff).

There is an alternative which works on all devices and with any software. its called "not using DRMs".
I can understand trains a bit more: you can do other things. But driving is a slightly active experience, and at least you can sleep in the train if you need to.
People who make things don't want to have to make them multiple times. That was one of the main reasons that devs hated IE6 - you essentially had to redo or make a shadow version of whatever you'd already done to get it to work for everyone.
You're actually including those quotation marks in your query, right?

Because if you search for "Debian 6 foo", you should only be seeing results that contain that exact phrase (on Google, anyways).
Standardizing DRM is bad because it prolongs its usage and makes it easier to apply. DRM shouldn't be helped in any way. It should be made harder to use for those with bad intentions who wish to proliferate it, not easier.

The problem with avoiding is, that many don't understand why they should vote with their wallets and boycott Netflix, Steam and other similar services which proliferate DRM. Many readily and gladly use them. Either because they don't understand the unethical nature of it, or because they are getting used to the police state mentality, which they accept for the price of getting some service. Unfortunately, the later seems to be the case more and more.
Insight into WordPress Blog spam
Well, this very push for DRM on the web is to change exactly that. It's to force you to use DRM-only content.

So - yeah.
I've been wanting to use 'jj' to enter normal mode on the command line for some time. This solution actually didn't work for me, but adding the following to my .zshrc did:

bindkey -M viins 'jj' vi-cmd-mode
I suppose that the title assertion is to be expected. DRM only works if you don't know how it works.

~~~

I'm not sure I see anything wrong with DRM per se (this could be my fever talking), there are probably good uses I'm too dim to think about, but I do think it's unnecessary as part of the HTML specification.

There's no industry or company that has switched to DRM-free content, that I know of, that has failed or suffered because of it:

* Music is largely available DRM-free now, thanks to Amazon's MP3 store (at the least, I'm sure there are others)

* For games, Steam makes it easy to avoid SecuROM Hell

* Despite DRM, all of Netflix's original series House of Cards was available on The Pirate Bay within hours of release. This doesn't seem to hurt Netflix's wish to create more content, or police it more heavy-handedly. (Maybe they would if they could)

For that matter, I think in the modern case every single time a business went DRM free it turned out OK. Isn't that right? In all modern cases, maybe after 2006-ish, DRM-free businesses were accompanied with an easy way to get the content online, and sales did not seem to suffer because at the end of the day piracy can appear (or be) shady and people (rightfully) don't trust shady websites, even The Pirate Bay with all of its popups.

I wish we had better numbers. I would like to see a real analysis on all the reasons people don't pirate and instead buy on Steam. I wish there was a good way to convince media businesses at large.

But I guess this is all water under the bridge, and I'm preaching to the choir.
I like the woodgrain bezel. It looks like a device from the movie Her.
In MacTerm, command+option+click will move the terminal cursor in the same way by simulating keys. It also moves “up” or “down”, for applications such as text editors that understand vertical arrows. There is even a preference setting that attempts to move the cursor automatically to wherever you drag and drop text with the mouse.

(Note: I wrote MacTerm.)
How Caffeine Can Boost Your Memory
> “People who are really serious about software should make their own hardware.” That’s never been true of Google

What about the pluto switch or the custom servers? Sure, they don't make chips or maybe don't even do PCB layout and all of that stuff, but I'm sure they have great hardware designers and embedded software people, no? I didn't even mention the google glass, mobile devices, and self-driving cars.

EDIT: Got it. Thanks. Was too eager to respond..
Trans-Pacific Partnership
> Others have documented an interest in extending it to other media types.

Sorry, I guess "strictly" was the wrong word. Rather, it is designed particularly for the streaming video use case.

> We don't know, as long as the requirements are secret.

True. But I think a pretty good idea can be had just by looking at the current state of the industry.

> It'll happen regardless of the W3C.

Exactly. Having the W3C head the initiative is the best thing that could happen to it, short of it not existing (which as you say is impossible). Not compromising on ideals is nice, but not when it stands in the way of what is best for the user (or in this case, least bad).
According to Wikipedia[0], there are at least 50 cities in the USA where at least 16% of _households_ do not have a car.

It appears to be feasible for those households to do without a car. I guess that some of the individuals within the households that _do_ have a car don't use it on a day to day basis. Moreover, even if 100% of households need at least one car, taxes can be levied on a per-car and per-mile basis, attempting to limit the number of cars per household to the minimum feasible level.

[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._cities_with_most_h...
How about the embed tag? What big differences do you see between implementing EME vs the embed tag?
Sounds really interesting. If you have anything open source you can share, I'd love to see it!
China Conducts First Test of New Ultra-High Speed Missile Vehicle
If you got a list of the most common supermarket codes/abbreviations and used them as a dictionary to train your OCR program I think you could do OK. I think there is a reason grocery stores generally don't let you see your purchase history even though they record it with those shoppers' cards: that sort of information would make it too easy for customers to comparison shop. So I would operate under the assumption that grocery stores wouldn't be falling over themselves to support this sort of app, unless it got really popular.

I've always worried more about the scanning part. Ideally I'd like the app to work with a cell phone camera only, but I have no idea how feasible getting a sufficiently clear picture of an arbitrary length receipt is.
Charter Offers $61.3 Billion In Cash And Stock To Acquire Time Warner Cable
He never got to saying what he liked about Monsanto, or why it is good, or why it's not evil.

He mostly says lots of people call lots of companies evil, it's not just monstanto people call evil. Okay, sure. And then he says genetic engineering isn't new, we've been doing it for thousands of years (umm.... okay, I guess you can call that genetic engineering. But there wasn't any intellectual property ownership in it, for one difference in social context.) And Monsanto isn't as big a company as you might think, he says.

Okay, I'm still waiting for him to tell me what he likes about Monsanto, other than that they are huge. But I guess that's it, why did they sell to monsanto? Because monsanto had the money to pay, and the money to support their continued work. Okay, fair enough, that's a pretty typical answer to "why did you sell your company." Am i supposed to be impressed?
it's a play on "light-emitting diode", retaining the same superficial form but generating an absurd image in the process. in the context of coming up with titles for an april fool article, it's brilliant.
How do you get politicians to care about privacy? | Technology | theguardian.com
Are there any commercially available Linux-based tablets out there that people can recommend?
Predictious - The Bitcoin Prediction Market
He mentions that in the second-from-last paragraph:

> The software that Google was most serious about — web search, Gmail, and so forth — ran in the cloud, and with the company’s legendary data centers, they effectively built their own hardware.
Doesn't Ghost work on MySQL?
How Twitter's improving a country's morale
Did you read the next sentence/paragraph?

> In a sense, Google has always followed Kay’s adage. The software that Google was most serious about — web search, Gmail, and so forth — ran in the cloud, and with the company’s legendary data centers, they effectively built their own hardware.
Any standard makes it less messy and gives them more excuses to continue pushing it instead of admitting that it should be dropped. It's absurd to promote standards for unethical practices.
I'd be game, and don't already know of one.
Everyone hates blog spam no matter if it’s comment or trackback spam but I thought I would look into it and see if there is any common elements and yes I’m amazed how much it’s still used. So I thought I’d gather some comment data from this blog but also SEOMeetups.com.au that is regularly spammed as people try to build links and drive referral traffic back to their affiliate links, social profiles, youtube clips, clients websites and their own sites.

I managed to export and filter 10,119 spam comments and started playing around with the data in Excel to see what insights I could learn from blog spam left from the 31st July 2011 until the 12th January 2014.
James Gosling grades Oracle's handling of Sun's technology
The Road To Geekdom
What about when you need it to show you something? Better to have that HUD and not need it than need it and not have it.

But then again, it would be really hard to stay off Reddit and Hacker News with those on all the time :-D
After switching to OS X after spending years using Windows and then Linux, I have forgotten the feelings about keyboard shortcuts in both ease of use and consistency across applications on Windows/Linux.
> they are a business negotiation.

The fact that you (and others, obviously) think of this as a "business negotiation" is part of the problem. Many of us see Free {Software,Standards} as necessary for a free society, and as such should be considered some kind of "right" similar to those listed in the 1st Amendment.

The idea that we should "negotiate" away those rights is obviously not something that will be taken seriously, for much the same reason you may laugh at the idea that you should negotiate away part of the Bill Of Rights.

Also, for many of us not directly involved in the creation of standards like these feel like we're being handed an ultimatum: go give up on the entire concept of Free Software and run some binary blobs from an industry that has already shown itself to be incompetent and malicious (XCP, etc), or become 2nd class citizens on the web destined to be cut off from various parts of modern culture.

So yah, we aren't willing to negotiate on some of these critical ideas. The idea that movies or other entertainment could take priority over having a free society is at best lamentable and at worse /fighting words/.
Yes, Cocoa text fields by default supports EMACS keys such as C-a, C-e
Google 7 Nest deal, privacy issues for the Internet
A machine to replace fast food burger flippers
W3C's reputation went out the window in the minds of all serious software developers with the concept of HTML5's "living standard" aka, no standard. This is the kind of standards we can expect from a standards body in the industry. The only solution is to start again from scratch, maybe on top of TCP/IP only.
Wouldn't another option simply be making it so that Netflix et al are in a position that they can't move forward to these new standards with their licensed stuff, but everyone else can? Them being the only ones left using Flash/Silverlight would probably give them a good incentive to push back on their contracts...
Besides, those wood computer screens were way too deep and way to small. 80" curved half way around you monitors for the win.
> Silverlight has nothing to do with DRM

You are technically correct ("The best kind of correct"). However, the only places where Silverlight still enjoys any use is, as far as I can tell, in streaming services to PC and Mac (e.g. Netflix) - and in those places, the only reason they preferred Silverlight to Flash or HTML5 video is .. DRM.

So practically, Silverlight is on life support maintained by DRM. If e.g. Netflix decides to drop DRM, you can bet they will stop using Silverlight and switch to something more portable (e.g. Flash or HTML5 video).

Statistically, Silverlight use has everything to do with DRM.

(weak analogy: Guns don't have anything to do with causing bodily damage. They just shoot projectiles at high speeds. In this thread, we are discussing personal safety)
I'm not making any kind of judgement or assigning blame, just stating the fact that free software is fundamentally incompatible with DRM. I'd prefer to see EME get killed. But as a practical matter, if we go into a negotiation with nothing that we're willing to concede, we can't be surprised if it stalls immediately.
Edit: and oh, we are anonymous when we say that... you know, just for our own protection...

- are we going to see a day where a SWAT team raid your house for unclear reason, you are being tried under secret court that you have no influence over, and decision is made by an anonymous judge or secret jury (for their own protection, of course).

Crap, I say: capital punishment for everyone, even if it was only a jaywalking!

/sarcasm.
It will work for you if you pay it. And 'it' will be paid by a autonomous corporation a few million of us own collectively.
It's hard to think of an app that is more device-centric than Dropbox, which exists solely to sync files between devices. And yet, it has a web interface.

Think of the most popular mobile apps. Do they have a web interface? Chances are, unless it is a game, the answer is probably yes. Facebook, Gmail, Instagram, Twitter, Google Maps, Pandora, YouTube, etc.

The Web is not going away. It's just becoming the default, lowest-common-denominator channel.
India’s Finally Polio-Free. Here’s Why it Matters.
>>but one would think that for $3.2B Google could have reinvented Nest ten times over.

Google is a very big company. I think they are already 50,000 employees in strength. A company so big is not very good at this 'inventing' stuff. There are likely a few engineering oasis somewhere in Google, but the bulk of the company is your ordinary mid level managers, controlling people at grass roots. Their likely goal is to cripple innovation with full force to prevent engineers from looking smart. Add all kinds of pointless bureaucracy.

Spending $3.2B in such ventures in such set ups only leads to a heavily delayed project. Clueless MBA's turned project/product managers enforcing their brain dead ideas in technology areas. Other managers venturing into gold digging, lazy people being elevated as abstract thought leaders etc.

Its best to just to buy something from outside and give them autonomy.
Daily coffee might enhance memory
The article covers this - instead of a future where desktop computers have all disappeared in favor of uber-duper-VR-AR, the desktops are still alive and well. In fact the main character does all his work on one, and also has one at home, big screen and all. When he must be shown something (and this is demonstrated as uncommon in the movie) he has the screen in his pocket.

In the movie the full power is available to you when appropriate, and gets the hell out of your way when it's not. Instead of something that invades every corner of your life with useless noise (see: modern smartphones) you have your own personal AI who filters, manages, categorizes, and gatekeeps all of this information for you, and communicates it to you only when appropriate, and in the least disruptive and discreet way.

The AI rarely ever needs to show you anything. You don't need a fancy HUD that tells you to turn right, when you have a voice saying "hang a right up here" as if there is someone walking shoulder to shoulder with you.

IMO the movie shows a technological future where we've gotten over the cool factor of technology and are more interested in getting it to work for us. Screens need to be just big enough - they don't need to be humongous. Computers communicate to you subtly and efficiently, instead of impressing you with technical wizardry. I for one look forward to this.
If Silverlight is predominantly used for that reason (which I believe it is and http is not at all), it's a fair characterization.
Steam can't be considered DRM free in many cases, for example because they don't let you backing up installers / packages, so if the service closes down you lose your collection. The only completely DRM-free gaming distributor is GOG. Humble Bundle and Desura are mixed.

You are right in general though. Going DRM free not only won't hurt any publisher, it will only gain respect from customers and will improve the quality of their products in a sense of improved usability, because any DRM means a crippled product (i.e. limited platforms availability, inability to make backups and etc. and etc.).

The problem is, that most legacy publishers are rarely customer focused and think that DRM helps their profits. And unprincipled distributors like Netflix are ready to oblige. But the irony is, those publishers only hurt themselves by continuing using DRM. It's mostly innovative publishers, or self published studios (and crowdfunded projects) that have common sense and avoid using DRM. Luckily some distributors are also principled enough to reject DRMed products from publishers. But such are a minority still.
> For games, Steam makes it easy to avoid SecuROM Hell

Steam is not DRM-free. It's just gamer-accepted DRM.
Well, I certainly hope that future tablets have general purpose docking stations and enough capabilities to drive MS Windows forever from the home. I can do quite a bit on my Nexus 7 with a bluetooth keyboard already, but it needs a way to set it on a table and connect (with or without wires) to a larger monitor and other peripherals when I'm home. And it needs 200 to 300 GB storage instead of 32 GB.

How having an OS that doesn't drain the life out of low wattage CPUs will kill the web I'm not sure. Mac and Windows have apps, but we still use the browser for a lot of things on those. (Linux sort of has apps)
Non-sapience of the main computer might be a UX feature, since being under the constant observation of a sapient AI could be... disquieting.

It could also be a security feature whereby they keep a firewall between the semi-sapient AIs on the holodeck and the non-sapient AI that runs the ship. That would explain why the crew was emphatically not cool with Geordi's proposal to turn over the ship's navigation to the computer in the episode "Booby Trap".
It becomes the defacto standard when it's adopted by developers, it's adopted by developers when their boss hires them to adopt it, they hire people to develop it because they are assured a return on their investment. Why are they assured a return on their investment? Because they decide what the standards are.

It's the same old regulatory capture game since before, but now it's divorced from government support.
Imagine having a baby elephant! A 120kg (260lb) 85cm (33 in) baby elephant.

Actually there'd be a tremendous market for perpetual puppies and kittens. Even if their life span is a little on the short side.
They just bought a ton of robot companies. Now they are buying a company who can do consumer products - home automation stuff, in fact. They have Ray and that 512 qbit quantum computer. I can see what they are doing, I think. They are creating Google Robot. They were always going to do this. Google-Bot. Android. The challenges to go to the moon.

Oh, and iGoogle.
Kittens forever. Would sell like crazy, then they'd get their butts kicked out on the street.

Maybe when they discover how to maintain the playfulness of a kitten in an adult cat forever...
I have a hard time believing Nest sold due to scaling issues. I find an easier time believing that they did not have the money to achieve their (expensive) vision, and selling to Google was easier than raising a massive round. It's the classic "our product is good but doesn't make any money; solution: double down." Nest has a huge staff for what it currently sells.
It refused to run for me insisting that I relink my machine, and then taking me to the website to do so where that then gave an error. It was only this morning that I finally managed to get things running again.
This touches back to Gruber's assertion that Google is getting better at what Apple does best (device design) faster than Apple is getting better at what Google does best (web services).
My previous iPhone is 4 years old(3GS, now I have a 5S), and I couldn't back up my texts because the backups are encrypted, and password-protected. I could swear I never put a password on them, but now I have no idea whether I really did or not. I don't know if it's something I can still extract off my old phone :(
Same word of caution I always give in these threads:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5085850