skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> It's open source [...] You can recompile it

Careful. Thats a somewhat empty response. It's technically true, but its an enormous barrier— even if someone else compiles it for you, how do you know their binary is trustworthy?

It's like saying that humans don't need oxygen to survive, because you can extract oxygen from the electrolysis of water. :)

You have to consider the tradeoffs users are presented with, and the _practical_ freedom to choose is lost far before the cost of the choice becomes infinite.

Fortunately in this case participation will be opt in, though perhaps market forces will make it hard to opt out— but if so the belief is that the same forces would just force you to use Chrome and miss out on the other choices that Firefox leaves open to you.
I am curious whether this would have happened if Eich were still the CEO.
http://pastebin.com/7TqNi0KU
Oh, so the web has given up and is now genuflecting at the altar of video DRM. Next up: picture DRM, because since we're protecting videos we should naturally protect still pictures too. You know what? We also have all this professional writing on the web, and anyone can just copy & paste that! That clearly shouldn't fly in our brand new DRM-protected world - authors should be able to control exactly who can view and read their texts, and copying is strictly forbidden. Screenshots should be blocked too. Browser devtools will naturally have to be disabled on the World Wide Web, as they are capable of hurting our benevolent protector, the almighty DRM. Eventually, we'll arrive at The Right To Read[1].

Or we could just not give the devil our little finger.

[1] http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html

Also, a reminder about the nature of this beast that everyone should be aware of:

HTML DRM will not give you plugin-free or standardized playback. It will simply replace Flash/Silverlight with multiple custom and proprietary DRM black boxes that will likely have even worse cross-platform compatibility than the existing solutions. In other words, giving in to HTML DRM will only make the situation worse than it currently is. Especially since it paves the way to an even more closed web.
But... Mozilla IS irrelevent without it's differentiating principles.

Microsoft sacrificed backwards compatibility with Vista and look where that got them...
You don't need to compromise every chip. You just need to compromise one. That's not particularly hard. You can use some fancy equipment to extract the private key, and then you can decode any video the chip could decode.

Or, if you want to be lazy, just hook a VGA cable up to a transcoder.
This might actually explain a very intermittent bug that I spent some hours on and never solved. A sort that would never terminate, and the best I could come up with was that for reasons I couldn't understand the comparison function was returning false when an item was compared to itself ... TIL.
Interesting. So literally, what we see here is Google pressing Mozilla to support DRM... Google... Don't be evil. Please? Pretty please?
I don't get it. iCloud has its faults but I rather like it a lot.

What's better about Panic Sync? To me it seems it's actually much worse than the simple to use (and never having to think about it) iCloud sync. Its also free and isn't tied to Panic. Panic sync on the other hand is is tied to Panic app so you will likely have to make a new account so it actually adds more hassle to the end user with no real extra features. Something great indeed!
It doesn't come with the browser.
Nonsense. http://www.gnu.org/software/gnuzilla/
Mozilla has been different in philosophy. It's the only browser created by a nonprofit, and it fights for open web causes all the time. I think people that care about that are aware of it.

But the facts remain that the vast majority of users don't care about the philosophical differences. When Chrome and Internet Explorer started shipping EME, almost no one switched browser. When Snowden's revelations came out, almost no one switched browser. Etc. etc.

edit: clarified what i meant
Well, even emacs is available for Windows. I guess not even ayatollahs are that extreme.

They may concede if they think it will help their great goal.
> If HTML5 video is going to rely on buggy third party DRM plugins, we lose the benefit that was the whole point of HTML5 video

Only HTML5 video that has DRM will rely on EME plugins. We've lost nothing. In fact we've gained. HTML5 video now has a strict superset of the capabilities it had before.

Without EME:

Flash HTML5
+------+--------+
non-DRM video | yes | yes |
+------+--------+
DRM video | yes | no |
+------+--------+

With EME:

Flash HTML5
+------+--------+
non-DRM video | yes | yes |
+------+--------+
DRM video | yes | yes |
+------+--------+
Then break them up. Or run new lines: it'll be easier than the cable buildout of a couple decades ago, we're richer and smarter today.

But also: why are the physical lines a separate market from wireless? They are very, very close substitutes – bits are bits. And advancing tech or clever to-the-curb (but not to-the-premises) buildouts could make wireless broadband fully competitive with the wired networks.

If the wired incumbents get fat and happy on a position of temporary advantage – for example for bulk video delivery – then those potential wireless advances will see more investment.
EFF is basically Walter Sobchack in this scenario to Mozilla's dude.

EFF: Has the whole world gone crazy? Am I the only one around here who gives a shit about the open web? Dude. This is it. Let's take that hill!

Mozilla: what's the point, man? why should I die on this hill?

EFF: it's a fucking important hill dude. Unchecked DRM aggression.

Mozilla: what about my browser market share?

EFF: What the fuck are you talking about? Browser share is not the issue here, Dude. I'm talking about drawing a line in the sand, Dude. Across this line, you DO NOT...

Mozilla: Well, the problem is... They're gonna kill my browser share! Man!

Donny is the open web I guess. His death was predestined by circumstances and certainly not the Dude's fault. Also, I think it would be best if no one tells the EFF how DNS works.
The world wasn't using h.264, it was being forced to move to h.264, and Mozilla eventually caved, like they're caving now.
Comcast Exec: "Whatever an Internet 'Fast Lane' is, We're Allowed to Do It"
the things people visualize w/ D3 never ceases to amaze me
Some of the links I posted to stack overflow; the top-voted answer there (as of this writing) was wildly incorrect, claiming it to be a mistake. It is not.

Any invalid calculation produces NaN as opposed to raising an exception/signal because that would be non-portable (especially in the early 80s). The goal was that a correct algorithm on one platform or in one language would translate and be correct somewhere else. Further, some algorithms depend on being able to probe a function to find its bounds, requiring them to be able to locate the out of bounds condition without halting execution; doing that in a safe, portable way is actually quite hard unless you do it in software as part of the spec, hence NaN.

If NaN==NaN, then (NaN/NaN)==1, etc etc and you still end up in a world of nonsense as far as naive algebra is concerned. This is just some of my fellow programmers whining and crying about having to think about floating point, the same sort of complaining I hear about Unicode (and full of just as much self-sure awful advice that produces wildly incorrect results for everything except the complainer's specific use case).

http://docs.oracle.com/cd/E19957-01/806-3568/ncg_goldberg.ht...

http://www.eecs.berkeley.edu/~wkahan/ieee754status/754story....

http://cnx.org/content/m32770/latest/
Hey, that’s my answer! /wave

Strangely, I was just adding some more material to this answer as I’ve never really been completely satisfied with it; then I flip over to hacker news and there it is. Anyway, if anyone has other IEEE-754 questions, I’ll try to answer.
Before you join this discussion -- read the third answer posted, it is the "most correct" one.
Thanks for taking the time to comment.

We're in the very early stages of the app, thus the limited information. However, Hohm brings together a complete solution to organize families. Some of features will include:

Metadata manager for digital files,
Family Activity feed,
Family Location Tracker,
Family Photo/Video Archive.
> Netflix/amazon/hulu as they grow their own original content could get to a point where they can disrupt distribution (more than they already have). But all of them already have a culture of drm so it's not clear that they would follow a similar stance as gog given the chance.

Yes, I was thinking about that. Netflix sounded apologetic in their W3C discussions, blaming the need for DRM on the publishers. Let them prove that with actions - when we'll see DRM free content that Netflix owns, it would mean that they themselves don't want it. So far I see no indication of any movement in that direction, so their arguments don't sound sincere.
The person who wants the information is the one causing the removal of the content - not the government. It is not about the government trying to suppress information. The government (or court system) is acting on behalf of the individual.

Like anything involving people, it is merely a cost of society that makes us better off if we accept it as the cost of doing business. There are many costs like this in society. For example; your neighbours are outrageously noisy and unwieldy and are making it difficult for you to sleep. You have tried asking them to keep the noise down. Our society has has a slow and expensive process to come to some sort of resolution. Rather unnecessary since your local government and police have better things to do. It's not really their fault, you just happen to live in their catchment area.

Rather than just accept that people can do what they want or without regard to others, a pleasant society provides solutions to social issues like this. Without it, life would be less smooth.

Google has many engineers and big datacentres, I am sure they will manage.
Well, you have to admit it's a delightful instance of the Streisand effect. A small consolation for this otherwise unfortunate development.
It's the reporting that is breaching his privacy.

And yes, that is what makes this ruling so incredibly dangerous.

Whilst personal privacy is important, it needs to be balanced by the right of the broader society to know things. I think this ruling swings to far away from the "right to know".
I dislike the fact that NaN taints other numbers - for precisely the same reason.

Much better, in terms of early failure, would be signalling NaN or something like...

...

maybenan_double maybe_nan = 0.0 / 0.0;
double x = 1.0;
if(is_nan(maybe_nan)) {
fprintf(stderr, "maybe_nan is NaN\n");
return 1;
}

double not_nan = from_maybenan(maybe_nan);

double y = not_nan + x;

...

Of course, there are other dimensions in which this is not better, but I don't like silent propagation if it might stretch over a lot of code.
What's the reason to prefer Mozilla if they're just going to implement all the crap too? Might as well try to figure out the combination of plugins that will make Chrome comfortable. It'll sync with my Android phone easier anyway.
I meant it a bit further. Not just disabling the EME external module, but disabling all related code in Firefox itself on the build stage. While functionally it won't make much difference, it would have more of a symbolic nature of making a point. Plus such builds would guarantee that it can't even be enabled at all (without user's knowledge for example).

If there would be build switches to disable that, I'm sure Linux distros with similar to Debian policies will ship versions where it will be disabled altogether.
Net Neutrality does not require ISPs to charge the same price regardless of how much bandwidth a customer is using, and it does not prohibit ISPs from having rates on a sliding scale in order to penalize heavy users (as some water utilities do).

Water utilities btw have "pipe neutrality", i.e. it's none of their business what you do with the water you are paying for, and they certainly can't shake down dishwasher manufacturers for money to compensate them for the water that's being used by their customer's dishwashers :-)
> That is kind of like in grade school, being banned by the teacher for reminding another student that they shit their pants.

That is so oddly specific that I have to ask: were you the kid that shit his pants, or the one who had to be told not to remind the kid that he once shat his pants?
It would be even cooler if rather than it being all white it was colorized.
What browser do you recommend I load that URL with? :)
“In the spirit of this discussion, I trust that you will not mention my clients’ names in your article.”
RTMP support is on our roadmap (and actually exists inside the SDK in a disabled state), and our live transcoding backend will have the ability to restream to any arbitrary RTMP endpoint in addition to the other outputs.
They should keep their browser open. Most people that use Mozilla know why they're using it. They would also understand how to install an official Firefox plugin to get crappy EME websites to work.
'Flappy Bird' to Return as 'Less Addictive' Multiplayer Game
Did I read that correctly? One website had 400 iframes? FOUR HUNDRED? Not 4, but 4 HUNDRED? Surely there is a better way.
Definitely thinking about it now.
The EFF stance is a little shrill. Remember how FairPlay and Zune were going to create proprietary music forever? Didn't quite work out that way.

End of the day, content is a commodity, and like any other commodity, prices are falling as the supply expands. Unless it's a Pixar movie, most films in DVD/Blueray are in the $10 range within weeks. Digital rights for new releases are as little as $3 when you buy with physicial media. Access to Netflix's catalog costs less than basic cable.

So I don't care about this, I do care about the trolls under the bridge (ISPs) who want to extract a toll for transit.
Request HN: maintenance messages of form "when this post is $n hours old"
For maintenance messages, could they be of the form 1 hour maintenance will begin when this post is $n hours old - and including how old it is, like an ordinary post. eg:

maintenance will begin when this post is 1 hour old

This avoids users in other time zones from needing to work out what "PDT" is, and how to convert from it to their local time zone.
Mozilla has not abandoned their principles, they have compromised them.

The have compromised them because they feel they need to do this to maintain relevancy. Principles are of little use without power.

To those that say: Mozilla changed the web once, they can do it again.
I say: Mozilla didn't change the web by resisting change, but by embracing it and finding better solutions.

I think we should be spending less time condemning Mozilla for compromising, and more time finding ways that Mozilla can use their power to solve the huge problems that are created by DRM.
But a particular chip will only have the keys for a small number of videos. When you buy a movie, you download that movie encrypted with a unique key, and the unique key is encrypted with your device key. So compromising one chip won't give you any kind of "master key" or anything especially valuable. The movie can be stored anywhere, when you need to play it you will pass the encrypted key to the device and the device will use it to decrypt, decode, and then send the movie directly to video output (possibly re-encrypted with something like HDCP, although that's a broken scheme).

The chip will also not send high-definition output to VGA, so you will need to do better. Basically, you have to hack the hardware.

I'd like to clarify that I'm not defending DRM, just that circumventing DRM is not as easy as people in this thread intimate. I think the reason why DRM will fail is because of economic pressures: the cost of deploying millions of devices designed to protect ubiquitous data against a small number of highly intelligent and motivated cryptography experts and hardware hackers.
If we have platforms A and B, and A is more aligned with your interests than B, then we have an advantage in having everyone on A rather than on B.

You're presenting a false dichotomy: "Either Mozilla doesn't compromise anywhere, or they might as well go away". Things aren't black and white.
Yeah, I think I was just confused. An off-by-one error in applying negatives, I think.

Thank you for the article. I found it interesting to think about.
Or, by forcing developers to provide a DRM-free alternative Mozilla would bring about a competing technology that would at a later date come to dominate and kill the DRM proposal.
Yes; plenty of them [1,2,3,4,5,6,7].

[1] http://writers.stackexchange.com/questions/7797/what-is-the-...

[2] http://integrity.mit.edu/writing-code

[3] http://software.ac.uk/so-exactly-what-software-did-you-use

[4] http://uark.libguides.com/content.php?pid=155080&sid=1780817

[5] https://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/resource/560/10/

[6] https://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/resource/560/25/

[7] And many, many more at: http://lmgtfy.com/?q=citing+source+code. I apologize for the snark, but it is a not-too-abstruse and rather common question that is very easy to figure out online without any special or prior expertise; and so I think contributes very little to the discussion.
Maybe I'm missing something, but what's so bad about EME? I think it's a great idea that copyrighted material will be protected. I understand that it becomes "closed web" in a way, but it's not a big deal for me. Frankly, I can think of a few places where it could be useful, even.
Philosophy isn't just speech, it's deed. This, right now, is a deed.

They should put as much energy into propagating their ideas as into redesigning the interface to look like a Chrome knockoff. Cultivate some dial-a-pundits that TV people can count on for an opinion about the Internet. Have a thinktank. Aggressively fundraise. Expanding the userbase is the answer, not chasing corporate behemoths.
Was this close to biting... well done.
For those who do not know, there is an EasyList without element hiding rules.

https://easylist-downloads.adblockplus.org/easylist_noelemhi...

With these rules firefox's memory usage only goes up from 290MB to 412MB, instead of 1.5GB for the website mentioned in the article for me.

The downside is that this list has a more limited coverage than the full version of the list.
That, of course, does not save you from other problems with Flash and the way developers have (ab)used it. Crappy/useless widgets on screen that serve only to eat your CPU and batteries, including banner ads and the like.
4.3 on OSX? Do you mean 4.1?

I recently jumped to mac, and have been using OpenGL for a long time under Windows.

The best I can get is an OpenGL 4.1 context on an up to date Macbook Pro (May 2014).
This is the truth. There has been no effective movement against DRM. The EFF is more guilty than Mozilla in this case because fighting DRM is a core function of the EFF's, while adapting to established web standards is Mozilla's primary function.
The whole personal computing ecosystem as it stands today seems like a huge failure of imagination.

http://www.ultratechnology.com/scope.htm
The biggest problem with ML is that it takes time for it to react to the new fraud patterns/schemes. While rules engines have their limitations, they also have one big benefit: they allow to block recognized fraud really fast.

So the actual question here is whether the ML for detecting fraud is better than a flexible rules engine and goods analysts/statisticians. In my personal experience, statistical analysis and anomalies detection effectively handles majority of the fraud. I would be interested to see a more detailed analysis of Sift Science performance with some numbers for false positives/false negatives for example, though (of course) it is probably proprietary information.
It's not clear to me whether the tree is mapping the paths of the maze or the walls - the transformation makes it appear as though the walls are being mapped but that doesn't make sense.

I wonder if this works backwards - given a tree could you construct a maze? efficiently?
I think you just agreed with the comment you said "that's not true" to.
Google was a valuable contributor. But a lot of Google's commits were not necessarily that high value to non-Chrome ports of WebKit. They had forked code paths for a lot of things (so changes on their side of the #ifdef fork don't help anyone else), web platform features that were not necessarily of interest to others, and refactorings that did not turn out for the better. We have since ripped that stuff out. They did also contribute a lot of very valuable things, most notably security fixes and new web platform features that were useful. In fact, we sometimes still merge stuff from Blink (and they sometimes still merge from WebKit). But hacking on WebKit is a lot more fun now that we don't have to argue about how things affect V8, or the Chromium process model.
Pixelmator, Sketch, Omnigraffle, Logic, FCP, Motion, are pretty solid creative tools.
Can someone explain how DRM on HTML5 would work?
http://pastebin.com/83VApbAw
I prefer the sound of DRM over addons/plugins/applets/whatnot, to be honest.
This is absolutely still a free market. You want the content, you're going to make a choice in what you're willing to do for that content. If it requires you to pay for it or it requires you to install a plugin or it requires you to use a browser that supports the streaming of it, those are all choices you can make. That's the idea behind a free market.

Maybe you should look up the definition of "free market economy". If DRM is part of the price of viewing the content, that's part of the economy. Non-DRM protected content is still available, in the same market, but is generally less sought after in the same way that people are usually much less interested (if at all) in content that does not have a price or is completely free. If something has value, the creator usually wants to receive that value for their work.

TL;DR: This is exactly a free market economy. Anybody can provide content. There is no price fixing. Access to the content is not government controlled. Etc. Etc. The only thing standing between you and the content you want is what the creator/owner of that content wishes to receive from you in exchange for the content, be it money, DRM embedded in the delivery tools, etc.
Mozilla doesn't have a choice. Let's say Firefox has 30% of users. The argument is that sites will not use DRM, because they'll be losing revenue from 30% of their users, and therefore Mozilla saves the day.

But, what happens if Google says they'll accept that challenge, and they're willing to lose 30% of revenue from something like YouTube in the short term. They implement DRM on YouTube, and Firefox users can no longer watch videos. What happens? Firefox users start converting over. Where to? Chrome, which falls into Google's best interest. Now, that 30% loss keeps getting smaller and smaller, and Chrome users start increasing. Fast forward a year, and Firefox only has 10% of the users. This continues to shrink until Firefox dies.

Sadly, this is what happens when we give Google and Facebook too much power, and the ability to run the internet. It's our fault for giving them that position, and not developing or supporting alternatives. If you want to fight back, you need to give Mozilla a better position to stand. Sites like Wikipedia, Imgur, etc, need to run banners for browsers that support DRM, and block users, or encourage them to switch to a DRM free browser, like Firefox. Take the wind out of their sails, before they try to do the same to us.
Despite his failings at leadership I will admit, Eich was pretty damn adamant against EME. If he was still at Mozilla he could have had led a lot of pushback at the W3C.
Give me the specs of the DRM system so that I can implement a tool for my OS to be able to watch the movies.