skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> For better or for worse, these types of distribution agreements are fundamental to how the media industry works.

They are not fundamental at all. They are PRed as such. Yet, counter examples of DRM-free distribution disprove any need for them.

> It's likely not changing any time soon because as you said, it makes the owners of this IP a lot of money.

It can change depending on competition. Advance of crowdfunding helps artists and independent studios to release their works without involvement of thick-skulled publishers who drag this DRM insanity into the distribution. Most indie releases are DRM-free. One can ponder why that is. They also need to make money, so one can't claim they have less business sense than legacy publishers.

For example, in computer games there are more and more DRM-free releases coming out each year. And this already includes funded by publishers, and not just indie games. With more competition releasing something DRM-free, there would be more reasons for publishers to change their attitude. With movie industry that doesn't happen yet because competition is still weak. Most publishers are a tight conglomerate of related companies which follow the same policies and agree on common terms. It can be enough for one strong disruptor to break that situation.
On the subject of Not A Number, is it a good time to recall Gary Bernhardt's excellent "Wat" piece?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HAw2jU4de2A
I don't see the point. I was anticipating something more like Overtone: http://vimeo.com/22798433
I've taken it one step further and actually learned basic furniture carpentry. I'm primarily a UI designer by trade but I found the skills easily transferable. In an odd way it's no harder than the basic layout CSS I write every day.

The big different of course is that when I mess up with wood I can't just erase everything and redo it. Woodworking has taught me to slow down.
Too Busy? Or Just Right?
Don't worry, it seems Balanced did as well ;-)
I am also a strong non-fan of faking persistence mechanisms in testing. If you're faking it, you don't actually know that the real thing will work.
Hi Bahman 2000,

We are so sorry to hear you were effected by our growing pains. We have improved the process regarding our billing and sincerely apologize for any inconveniences this issue caused for you and your family.

If there is anything we could assist you with, please feel free to reach our support team 1-855-728-4569, 7 days a week, 5 am - 5 pm PST or support@homejoy.com.

Best,
Team Homejoy
I agree, and perhaps misspoke there.

However, I find that I have a limit to the number of hours I can program a day, and a number of hours in meetings I can have in a day, but the two don't interfere with each other much so long as I'm taking care of myself.
I agree Exec used to know what they were doing, but since they've been merged with Handybook my experience is similar to everyone posting about HomeJoy.

I actually have been considering giving HomeJoy a shot because Handybook has been so terrible and a waste of my time. But now reading the stories here I'm ready to go back to finding a local cleaner who I can rely on.
I'm going to guess you didn't read the post
Collaborative Social Medias Taking Over?
I really like the suggestions on how to crowdsource a11y improvements:

-Go Mouseless for an hour
-Check Order of Elements
-Surf The Web With A Screen Reader For An Hour

http://www.globalaccessibilityawarenessday.org/participate.h...
Like others here I'm not sure if this is a joke post or not, but... the TerminalAdapter example is not an abstraction. It's simply reimplementing a very specific protocol that implements "render" and "redirect_to". This protocol is not something that could automatically be adapted to other scenarios than HTTP — say, to a mobile app or to a desktop GUI app. The terminal, for one, might "render", but it cannot "redirect".
The death penalty seems merciful by comparison.
Don't worry. We did a blind selection. We did not know which gender the person has when selecting the talks.

We just wanted this for our statistics to get a feeling if we needed to work on the CfP while it was open to get the outreach we wanted it to have.
This applies to both goroutines & native threads, right? I guess with both you could periodically re-shrink the stack / release memory back to the OS, but I don't think either go or any native threading system I'm aware of does that.

It would be interesting to do this for native threads at the kernel level: it's very similar to swapping, except for stack data you could just throw the data away if you could figure out that it was indeed dead.
As an aside, he got very good at drawing since it's all he does.
Thanks, I'll check it out. It looks like a good read, but I'm not sure it addresses my question, which is probably because I was unclear. I've struggled with how to ask it for a while.

I work as a programmer, and I find I'm constantly lost with regards to basic things (to others) like how the Internet works, and Apache, and threads, and performance issues, and a whole host of other vocabulary words and terms that everyone takes for granted. I'm not really concerned (right now) about learning about recursion or a mergesort, for example... I just need to learn this common, everyday stuff that everyone else seems to know. I feel like I don't even know enough of the basics to explain what I don't know.
Completely agree with you. Many of the tests don't do any kind of assertion, simply ensure that an exception isn't thrown on the invocation of a method. An interface defined in a static language would render the majority of these tests unnecessary.
of course, email us at info@paralleluniverse.co - thanks!
I'm not sure it scales like that for that long, sure there are benefits of familiarity with a language or system, the major changes in productivity I've seen come about through cross-skilling you can only expect the majority of devs or BAs or whatever to reach a certain level of competence when constrained to their core roles, encourage them to develop skills outside their usual BAU activities and the mutants you get back are an asset both in individual productivity and team redundancy.
Did the NSA help kill UWB?
Exactly what I thought: www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html
Hi. You don't have to change the library in order to make it work through fibers. You have to wrap it. In case it has efficient implementation of the async-api you have to implement the fiber-synchronous using the asynchronous api. If it hasn't you have to wrap it with threadpool. You can take a look in the implementation of the JDBC wrapper here: https://github.com/puniverse/comsat/tree/master/comsat-jdbc
> (The NaN may be coming in from a data file | over the wire | from another process prepared under an entirely separate floating-point environment that didn’t have traps enabled).

........................................if NaN is incoming from a data file, then tadaaaa there's your way to make a NaN to compare to. I can't believe we're still playing that game.

> I’ll give you one where == is appropriate but where you want -0 == +0:

And how would that example work for x very close to 0? Even in that example, you'd want |x|<eps. But anyway, I'm not even sure that having 2 zeros is a great idea either.

> If NaN == NaN, how should NaN compare against zero?

It shouldn't. < is an operation that works on the abstraction that floats are kinda-sorta real numbers, and NaN isn't so NaN < x should be an error.
I can understand the sentiment if the goal is to prevent someone mail ordering an AR-15 kit and a plastic %80 lower, then drill a few holes with a battery powered drill, assemble, spray paint it pink, slap a hello kitty sticker and off to the shooting range.

I have no stakes in the gun kit regulations so I couldn't care less if they ban them or not but banning machines would be akin to banning chef knives just because you are not working in a restaurant and the knife can potentially be used to stab. Have fun slicing tomatoes with a butter knife. IMO they are regulating the wrong parts of the equation deliberately and have no intention to alienate large swaths of certain demographics. I am only interested in this debate's entertainment value, so popcorn it is.

I don't see a machine ban on the horizon.
Ubuntu 14.04 review
awesome! I know that BLAS is now working on ARM. My RPi debian distro came with mathematica.
Our level of investment in all our other public infrastructure is dismal: http://www.asce.org/failuretoact. Why would investment into internet infrastructure be any different? Indeed, it'd probably be worse. Remember, the electorate skews older than the overall population, while I'd bet internet usage skews younger.
Well, one thing I learned from all this recent TDD related discussion is that almost nobody is aware of this book [1] and the entire school of TDD it spawned.

[1] http://www.amazon.com/Growing-Object-Oriented-Software-Guide...
Nice, it would be cool if repeated keystrokes would produce bad sounding notes or ugly noises to encourage you to use a more appropriate commands. Example: a lot of jjjjjj sound bad but 6j would sound nice.
What happens if it turns out that the treatment is fatal in 30% of cases? A trial of 2 would not necessarily show this type of thing. That is why one cannot extrapolate this without much more information i.e. more trials.
The command line is a textual interface, and both code and data can be represented as text at a low level. It would seem that this is a good thing for efficiency and usability, as it minimizes context switching between interface paradigms, and offers direct access to a low level representation of the system using a high bandwidth input device (a keyboard).

I still think textual interfaces are a great thing for those reasons, but I don't believe they are the best thing in many cases. Yes, they are very capable and customizable, but have serious weaknesses with usability, especially when working with data of higher dimension.

I don't really think of it as text versus graphics, but rather an issue of data being represented in its best form for doing some particular work with it, and having the best interfaces to those different forms and the work. The traditional one-domain/one-application GUI model is unsustainable for this purpose, and has the weakness of constant context shifting. Composable visual interfaces are an anti-application paradigm, and more focused on data flow. To avoid problems with pure visual programming environments, symbols would still be considered the best representation for certain work (like editing text and working with logic).
Has she blogged about her experience anywhere? Would love to hear more.
Treatment Tracker
Cached version, as the site is currently down for me:

http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:0-I-y0x...
Except if the person you're negotiating with is willing to pay more than your initial offer. then they would happily pay you less than what they expected to
Show HN: Recent HN startups on one page. Autoupdated
Can I use this to pay my employees and contractors instead of using a ACH direct deposit service?
Google to release diversity data about its workforce
> And make no mistake: it is always about supporting the hypotheticals, never about supporting what's actually really needed by the system.

> The lighter-weight frameworks we have now in languages like Ruby and Python do have abstraction to deal with changing out bits of technology, but they've reached a point where they abstract only the things that experience has shown are likely to change, and support only the changes that are likely to happen.

So is abstraction always about supporting hypotheticals or only when you're exaggerating?

Implementing a switch statement and hardcoding references into 10,000 line modules with different behaviour (e.g. different rules for different jursidictions) is untestable and unmaintainable. Abstraction has value in these scenarios. And just like everything, it can be abused (e.g. abstracting over 3 scenarios with 5 lines of code in total to support a particular once off business case that is going to be discarded after running once). That doesn't mean abstraction no longer has value.

Furthermore, languages with static type checking require different styles of testing and coding (e.g. abstraction) vs languages with dynamic type checking. Neither approach is universally better for all problem solving. Criticizing features of well designed code in one language that wouldn't be necessary in code written in another language is like criticizing a car for having wheels given that boats do fine without them.
Why I love Twitter (or so I thought)
Would you mind talking about your reasons for switching from ExtJS to Backbone?
Show HN: My WordPress mobile menu plugin, really nice one.
Hi guys,
I want to show you my WordPress plugin and possibly get some feedback.

URL: http://griffinthemes.com

I didn't like mobile menus in modern responsive web designs. They are either an unusable <select> element or a cropped menu with a ugly jerking animation. Once I saw an article on codrops with a off-canvas navigation menu which I really liked. I recreated that idea from scratch to get a good performance and made it a WordPress plugin to see if there's an interest in it.

I tried to sell it on CodeCanyon but that didn't work very well. They decided that this is a 'blatant copy' of a codrops menu ( despite my request to review the code ) and shut down my account with a dozen of purchases. :(

I wan't to know what do you think of it? Is it useful? Should I make it a standalone javascript library?
Frameworks are like cookbooks. They teach you how to make meals.

It's way more fun and tastier to make your own meals.
You can hit scroll lock to lock the mouse to 1 screen. As long as you game on the synergy server machine there is no problems.
Happy to see someone support this approach. I think both approaches have their valid context. If you know a lot about the negotiated value then making the first offer is great because you can anchor the bargaining. But if you don't know then it's better to wait for another offer and get yourself anchored, because your own assumptions might be way off the scale and of course if you know less about the topic than your negotiation partner then of course you need to pay a little extra at some point anyway.
Using math to determine America’s most gerrymandered congressional districts
"Independent studios get it way better."
On that note, may I suggest to those of you who are not already consuming comedy, the very best kind of comedy (the funny kind), from Louis CK to start doing so here: https://buy.louisck.net/
Public funds will end up paying for a large portion of those phase 3 trials because the biggest customer of the those drug companies will be government programs. If the trial is not successful that the government will still pay a large portion via increased prices for other drugs. (Plus there's forgone income via the extensive tax subsidies for health care spending.)

I don't know why we go through this kabuki process of pretending there is a functioning market in places where the government is such a dominant player (see also defense contractors). Why not just cut out the middleman?
The idea would be to allow the end user to do anything they wanted with the product but to price discriminate between different users and different use cases. So it wouldn't be less convenient , simple more expensive in some cases but perhaps cheaper in others.
Yes, it could all boil down to an instance of Adsense.
I now realise that there was actually a link to the Github repo, couldn't find it before. You might want to place it in a better position since I didn't see it at all first.
1) Artists getting paid is not a consumer need. It's an artist need. It's also a middleman need; take a look at what fraction actually goes to the "artists" some time.

2) DRM is commercial control over hardware and software, as it's only available with "blessed" software.
GC object graph.

Golang case: 1 object, no child nodes. Nothing to do. Code that does not need to run is the fastest.

JVM case: visit array object and its 100 child nodes. JVM's GC still needs to visit all nodes of the graph. What actually takes time in GC is all those L1/L2/TLB misses and extra page faults caused by following the object graph. If all objects happen to be on a different cache line, L1 spills happen after just 512 references on Intel Sandy Bridge, Ivy Bridge, Haswell, etc. (and sooner in reality). Those extra loads from L2 are not free.

So, in this case Golang needed to visit 1 struct (object). JVM needed to visit 101 objects.

I wasn't talking about object lifetimes at all. I was talking about memory layout and point out in golang you can have the objects sequentially in memory without need for pointer indirection (references).

Thus generational GC doesn't have anything to do with this. Gen GC just something nice to have when a limited call graph generates a lot of temporary objects, i.e. garbage.
It would be great if one could somehow ensure that the original content creators would receive the money (similar to http://flattr.com), not the people who submit links. That would require some moderation though. I think it's fine to receive only internet points for submitting a link instead of materialistic value. If the author of a submission does not accept payment the donations could be used to break even with server maintenance and moderation costs.
You are right, I've deleted my comment. IRS doesn't allow capitalizing unearned revenue if you pay taxes on cash-basis.

But it's not fair to tax payer because then on expense-side, IRS actually forces you to capitalize your prepaid expenses whether on cash-basis or accrual-basis.

So I don't agree with this but it's law and you are right.
I completely missed the Github link in the bottom so my bad.
You can also run Emacs as a daemon, and connect to it from both graphical and tty sessions. So you could ssh into your desktop and (with emacsclient), work with the same instance running on your X desktop.
An alternative way of using unit tests is this: Selective Unit Testing – Costs and Benefits http://blog.stevensanderson.com/2009/11/04/selective-unit-te...

The main idea there is to unit test logic, but not unit test "coordination-code".
Hi Breakingcustom,

Its regrettable to hear that you feel we were not able to resolve your concerns. Please accept our apologies as we truly want every client on our platform to be satisfied with their service.

We'd like to be see if we can fix this, but are unable to locate an account with the information available here. If you would just send us a quick email - attention to Escalations - with your contact information, this would allow a member of our team to follow up with you.

Best,
Team Homejoy
markpneyer.me is a blog i've been updating. i wrote that thing years ago during the "feeling alienated and alone" phase; here's a link to some of the good stuff:

http://markpneyer.me/about/
Simon Peyton Jones – Haskell is useless
Well, they could probably turn off the lights from time to time. Night vision cameras aren't expensive compared to all of the other costs here...

"Thomas Silverstein has been locked under the tightest conditions in the federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP) in total isolation since he murdered a correctional officer in 1983. The lights are kept on 24 hours a day in his cell."
They're wearing protection!!
Sure it would. Apple would have not been keen to develop a technology that relied on illegal copying to start with.

Copying music CD's was a grey area, but it's a grey area that you can do in a semi-legal capacity. There was no reason legally that Apple couldn't create a CD ripping process in iTunes. It's the user's responsibility to not use it illegally.

However, if CDs were encrypted, Apple would get in trouble if they broke that encryption to let you copy CDs to your iPad. You could find some more shady 3rd party tools that would work around it, but Apple's whole model is that it's easy to use and that it just works. Having to download an illegal 3rd party tool to rip your CDs and put them on your iPod isn't something they would do.

Similarly, iPods have had video playback for ages now, but there is no method to copy DVD video to your iPod through Apple's tools. You can pop in a CD and it asks you if you want to import it into your library. You pop in a DVD and it just asks if you want to play, no option to import. If they let you import it, they would be breaking laws. The brand is established, and was established by the simple copying of music, so it's not important that it can't copy video as easily. But if it couldn't copy music easily, would it have even been a thing?
Wall Street has an expression: "Bears make money; Bulls make money; Pigs get slaughtered." Its OK to leave a little money on the table.

If I'm willing, even happy to take the job as described for 100k, that I might have pushed him up to 125k is probably not relevant. Other factors in the job will be more important by that point.
BTW, Postman is really cool.
I read that article from PG.This is not a submarine - it just a puff-piece by 20 somethings. There is no trying to paint the conversation like "suits are in vogue again" to add stealth or mystic.

To fellow hacker news readers/posters - please do not post anything from BI, they are most of time light on content and context.
Okay, but how does that fit in with the non-binary view of gender? If it came back 90% male and 10% everything else, I'd guess that you'd conclude that you need to do more outreach, but would you come to the same conclusion if it came back 50% male and 50% female? What if it came back 90% no choice and 10% everything else?
Actually, SDMI was supposed to foil that scenario; fortunately it didn't work. Also, the analog hole is so cumbersome that it would have made "5,000 songs in your pocket" pointless.
Apple, Google and Dropbox are Leaders in EFF Privacy Report
You can reach our support team 1-855-728-4569, 7 days a week, 5 am - 5 pm PST or support@homejoy.com.
Nationalizing anything nearly always leads to lower quality. Compare the toll roads in France to the "free" autobahns in Germany. The French toll routes are far better maintained. Another case is health care, compare an NHS experience with a hip replacement in the UK with a hip replacement in France (or the US.) In the UK, the waiting list is measured in 6+ months, while in the US or France, it is almost immediate. For a more extreme example, have a look at Venezuela's nationalization efforts. Nationalization of anything is often a bad solution. The government doesn't have a profit motive, thus they have no incentives.

However, that being said, the big question is if the Internet is a common carrier or not. (I would argue that it is.) Apparently Ted Cruz and Al Franken agree as well. Nationalization isn't the answer, the proper framing of the industry is what's really needed.
Wrote this because HN is updating very frequently and I love to check for new startups and services.. they bring me fresh ideas :)
Trolls may well be willing to pay to play, and corporations definitely will, but it seems to me that it might accidentally dampen attempts at casual or in-depth conversation. The fewer people who participate in a community, or become invested in it through interacting with other users, the quicker it'll die.
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