skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
There is not much ebook piracy within Kindle ecosystem similarly as there is not much app piracy within iPhone ecosystem.

The piracy exists on both and is trivial for most readers of HN to perform, but for casual users of Kindle and iPhone it is a bit of pain.

Bezo is giving a particular viewpoint looking at the issue from Amazon Kindle window. That is, if you are a regular user of Amazon Kindle it will be very convenient for you to buy a licence to use e-books within Amazon ecosystem and relatively painful to pirate books.

If you are just a tiny bit technical you can easily strip Amazon DRM (used to be a simple Python script) for backup, in case Amazon decides to recall a particular book.

You can also pirate books on Kindle, but you will most likely need to convert books to Kindle format .mobi using Calibre unless you like reading misformatted pdfs. Again simple but for someone who is not actively searching and is happy paying Amazon, not something they would do.

On the other hand if you are using a competitor's device, it is relatively easy to find books to pirate in .epub format but the market share is much too small to matter.

I do not go out looking aggressively for pirate sites, but there are a few Russian based places(hint: library of biblical creation) where you can find pretty much any book released in the past 10 years, most books released in the past 10-20 years and some books released earlier. If you can't find it on that Russian site you can find it in Indian or Chinese forums. I am sure there is American ebook pirate scene too but I did not pursue the matter.

So it is a combination of factors: Amazon being the market leader with its closed eco-system and ease of purchasing, the lack of clear poster child for e-book piracy since the demise of library.nu 2 years ago, the fragmentation of ebook pirate market.

Disclaimer: I own multiple e-readers including a Amazon Kindle DX demo model that I reflashed into a regular one.
I don't like how browserify will only ever work by serving combined files. Granted it has source maps but it's still terrible that you just can't debug your app with individual files with it. Neither do I assume setting breakpoints works very well in it?
Google will never do that themselves, because it interferes with their own datamining business. XPrivacy will always be required to control your own data.
Overall I think it's good

Things I don't like:

* #6A0E0E is too dark for links, the color from hover effect would be much better (#BA2121).

* Front page right sidebar has too much links. I feel the latest news section should have "more priority". I often visit Django's website just to check whether there is a new release and blog post associated to it.
I think I accidentally a word in the title.
Sometimes, I've seen apps on the play store with a section explaining what each permission request is for with details of what it uses and why. Did you consider adding a section like that for VLC?
Me neither. I am 25 and have never heard or come across this site through Google or any other way. Judging from the upvotes this article has, a lot of HN readers clearly know and care about this. I am curious as to what demographic, age-group, was drdobbs popular with. Was it something like Slashdot which was popular back in the day?
I always wonder how much fuel this rocket needs for landing and if this reduces the maximum payload compared to the disposable Falcon 9. Find they ever release that information?
We _already_ do that in the play store description, of course.

That does not prevent the emails.
If you disable the google updater service, it stops chrome from intrusively background updating. Be careful though, as it often gets reenabled when you open chrome.
LiveScribe, as far as I remember, actually do OCR the text.
Thoughts on Open Source Contributions
Semaphores are useful for rate limiting - for example say you have a connections pool with an upper bound, so naturally the number of threads that can acquire a connection and do things with it is limited by the size of that connections pool.

And you don't necessarily need a mutex or to actually put the thread to sleep. Semaphores are also relevant when speaking of asynchronous stuff (e.g. Futures), in which case you can easily do CAS operations on an atomic reference holding an immutable queue of promises. Slightly inefficient under high contention, but non-blocking and gets the job done.
Except that on most tablets and with most "styli" your penmanship does not really work.
Most calligraphy effects depend on two elements: how much pressure you apply, and how fast you move on paper (this is especially true for Eastern calligraphy, but I suppose it holds for western styles, too)... pressure requires an expensive stylus, and a tablet that can interact with it (usually by Bluetooth) so it requires quite an investment (a cheap fountain pen will cost you 1/20th of it probably, a good roller gel pen would cost even less).

About the speed, I suppose it's less of a problem than pressure, but low-cost tablets would probably struggle with that, too.
The origin of grep
Stripe. Just how you think you'd do it, with a CustomerID field in the user (or company) table.

Don't sweat the possibility that you'll have to change payment providers one day. You probably will, and it won't be anywhere near as much effort as you think.

I once switched a couple of my services from Amazon Payments over to Stripe in the course of an afternoon, fixing up the fields, adding a PaymentProviderID column to the table, and rewiring the backend. It was in no way painful. Certainly less effort than it would have been to build in an abstraction layer ahead of time that would have been any help at all during the conversion process.

This is a great example of "you aren't going to need it" combined with "you're just going to build the wrong thing" combined with "quit fannying about building crap you don't need and actually ship your product". To pull off the perfect abstraction layer, you'd need to know not only the system you were integrating, but also enough about the next system that you wouldn't have to do all those things I describe above anyway. It'll take you just as much time to do the work up front as it would to do it when you actually need it, but in the meantime you won't have a shipped product.

In short, don't sweat it.
I use handwriting a lot, on tablets.

Handwriting lets you express in an artistic way, in some ways it is like voice, as it let's you use nuances.

We use mindmaps a lot, and graphs and drawings, storyboards. They are very powerful tools for communicating with other humans.

Text alone is so rigid, rational, absent of emotions.

(normal)Keyboards are very slow, if what you want is velocity, learn stenography.
This would make a great screensaver!
> People have figured out they can watch youtube without ads by installing adblock

I've seen AdBlock Plus fail on YouTube in a particularly annoying way--the ads that consist of a long video (often 2 minutes or more) with a "you can skip this ad in 5 seconds" overlay that counts down and turns into a skip button are shown--but with that overlay and skip button removed!

I recently installed AdBlock (at home) and AdBlock Plus (at work), and I'm not really impressed. At most sites, ads did not bother me. I installed these because of one particular site that was getting too obnoxious. That was gocomics.com. They started running frequent ads that expand on the left side of the page, which would often push the end of the comic I was reading off the right side of the page.

I'd much prefer if I could have these off for most sites, and only block ads on specific sites that I find overly aggressive. They support this, but there doesn't seem to be a good interface to manage it, and it looks like it would get impractical to deal with a lot of sites that way.
The ad is pretty selective in what they show I think. Here you can see a live demo translating between english and german. While understandable, the level of the translation is not as good as the impression you get from the ad.

http://www.sciencealert.com/watch-skype-has-launched-an-inst...
Like most of the media, someone being polite rarely makes headlines.

Linus spends much of his time being polite and helpful on many mailing lists, but it's his outbursts that make headlines, and convince the easily convincable that he's "rude".
It's obviously difficult to generalize about ads and I don't think ads were the way to promote Dr. Dobbs.

My personal experience with Google AdWords (take it as an anecdote) is depressing. 10 years ago I had a real and measurable ROI using it. Fastforward a few years and I didn't receive a single customer from them until one day I turned off all my campaigns. In parallel I received many customers from our blog articles, links, etc.

There is another force against ads: AdBlock. The use of adblockers is growing, more in our field.
Fortune 100 Social Media Accounts Are Compromised Every Business Day
This is very sad. Last time I had the same feeling reading closing down news from http://www.h-online.com/open/. Very sad that these people are finding it difficult to stay alive even though they provide top class content. Why couldn't they stay alive if Facebook can Google can live on ad revenue.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=noSOFIJdfwM
I should have said "the great filter explanation of the Fermi paradox is nonsense." There may be one or more great filters. There may be an early filter, or a late filter, or both. But that issue is orthogonal to why we see an empty sky. We see an empty sky because the amount of time between observing an extraterrestrial intelligence and being absorbed by it is so short that we should expect to exist in an empty-sky universe, regardless of how common life is.

One might then argue about the prevalence of extraterrestrial intelligence based on the age of the universe and the fact that our light cone apparently does not contain any other intelligent life. IMHO a sample size of 1 isn't that interesting however.
Doctor's who toke, toke Kush
Ah, semaphores. I recall in my operating systems course we had to implement some simple concurrency patterns using semaphores as an exercise -- for instance synchronize a group of processes so that idle processes gather into groups of N, and when a group is ready, N-1 threads of the group does TaskX(), and 1 thread does TaskY(), and when they're done, they go back to the pool. Then we implemented the same using usual mutexes and condition variables. I encourage everyone to do that, to see how one of the approaches is much more complicated than the other. Linus says that almost all practical uses of semaphores is when they are just used as mutexes, and rightly so -- implementing concurrency patterns based only on semaphores is a total pain.
> In order to make the Falcon 9 reusable and return to the launch site, extra propellant and landing gear must be carried on the first stage, requiring around a 30 percent reduction of the maximum payload to orbit in comparison with the expendable Falcon 9.

From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpaceX_reusable_launch_system_...
There's a pretty massive difference between being watched and/or sanctioned by some strange, foreign, powerful figure and being "surveilled" and disciplined by loving, interactive parents with whom you are emotionally bonded and who also otherwise care for you, provide for your every need, painstakingly explain wrong and right, etc.
You do realize there is already heavy, impression-based competition going on in the ad market (google "real time bidding", for example)? That is exactly the kind of disruption you are asking for. AdSense is usually only used to fill remnant inventory; any big publisher uses a hybrid of real time bidding, direct sales and ad networks nowadays.

Running your own ad server is a big, big liability. While running a news website is mostly a read-operation, adservers are extremely write-heavy (every adview results in at least 2 write operations). Do that 10 time for every page view, and have 100 pageviews a second during peak times, and you suddenly find yourself becoming and engineering company instead of a publishing company.

Anyway, the scenario you are describing to "disrupt" to ad market is exactly the scenario we had in the 90s. Everyone was using phpAds, which could be embedded directly from within php, and advertisers ran almost exclusively CPM based campaigns. What happened? Publishers found out that their adserver was eating >95% of their server resources because frankly, adserving is HARD, and advertisers found that their ROI was crap because people didnt click ads.

The real disruption is already happening, in the background, far away from where the public looks -- real time bidding has completely disrupted the adserving market in the last two years, and more and more ad networks find themselves becoming irrelevant.

Disclaimer: i was co-founder and cto of an adserving platform.
UBM would have to want to sell it. I'd be surprised if they didn't try that already. But could certainly win themselves some major points with the community they are selling other stuff too. I know someone there, will see if they know anything.
I generally agree with you.

"sometimes easy testing is not actually useful and useful testing is cost-prohibitive."

While I agree here, too, I think that the situation where testing is not useful happens very rarely in practice. Everything can break, and when you think it cannot be possibly be wrong now, a future regression might occur.

I think badly written tests are a different problem. I.e. tests that for example assert on the serialized string and hence take a lot of maintainability effort to adapt to changing production code. But then there is nothing wrong with the test per se, its just badly implemented.
Did UBM attempt to sell DDJ before taking this step?
This is why it's increasingly important to not only test your code, but also develop useful vulnerability scanners. I know, it sounds impossible to write a complete vulnerability scanner, but many companies would pay for such a thing.

Existing solutions are either lacking or way too difficult to operate.
The normal kind.
Would be nice if you could request "you're using an older version of Android so we need more scary permissions".
Basic Emacs Tutorial
Google’s Unified Privacy Policy Draws Threat of $15M Fine in the Netherlands
That's true, checking all `rake routes` for proper CSRF handling is a trivial job but would help to spot the bug in 5 seconds.
> Existing solutions are either lacking or way too difficult to operate

Give Netsparker[1] a go.. couldn't get much easier then this!

[1] https://www.netsparker.com/
> Why should a calculator (for example) know if there is incoming call?

Because it's running on a phone.

Remember those cool requestAnimationFrame side-channel timing attacks. I think it'd be pretty hard to hide at least certain things like these from an app if it really wanted to know. In this case I think it's pretty fair to just give it an API call for it.
How Pakistan school massacre unfolded
Estimates are overall payload to orbit is reduced by around 30% with reusability. Dry land landings are more economical for SpaceX, but have further reduced payload to orbit.

I understand the portion of total fuel required can be worked out from that and knowing a little about the rocket specifications.
Fake2db – Generate fake but valid data-filled databases
Just wait. Evidence suggests it is impossible to send mail without also providing remote code execution as a service.
Build your own middleman extension to make static sites more awesome
looks nice but i noticed a bug, pushing enter triggers a body.scrollTop(0) (or however that works)... maybe you're missing a event.preventDefault or something?

minor gripe: i like h1 h2 h3 buttons not just H
ThoughtWorks Technology Radar – languages and frameworks
Mind Your Busy-ness – The disease of getting things done
What is the probability of getting picked/funded by YC for a Start Up?
Given the fact that
1. I have never been to US before nor attended a reputed Business School
2. I am not a techie, but can understand the basics
3. Possess a very good Idea and dying to create something great
The World beneath our feet
STM and message parsing do require the low level primitives: CAS (CompareAndSet/Swap), LL/SC (Load linked/store conditional).

Morealso STM doesn't solve the transactional problem that you face with using locks (mutex). Overall STM is just a fancy thing to have but hardly solves the big problem of transaction boundaries.

Message passing is easier to reason about due to global ordering but then you need some FIFO queues that are built upon some kind of mutex or spin lock... or Lamport based one (using for single producer-> single consumer one)... or some variant of Michael & Scott queue, etc.

In the end underneath you have to do the metal, so they cannot be 'considered harmful'.
'Fast Track' to Nowhere: Congress Shouldn't Give Obama Power to Ram Through TPP
How exercise changes our DNA?
The brand (DDJ) should have no bearing on such a site's popularity past it's initial launch. Indeed, to associate oneself with such a brand is to guarantee a level of quality of journalism that, if not met, diminishes the DDJ brand, as well as the startup. You'd best be willing to live up to this standard before trying to co-opt the DDJ brand.

I'd say that, in all honesty, you shouldn't need the DDJ brand to achieve what you're suggesting. Just start a "blogger community focused on newer tech (Ruby/JS/Python/Rust/Go/Closure/Scala) with the same writing pleasure to "medium" or "svbtle"" and see how it goes.

Don't try to ride on the bootstraps of a decades old brand that can thankfully still retire unblemished. A rarity in these times.
> We encrypt data in motion, but not at rest (yet). Since this is a beta product we wanted to get it out there first with a free version that would bring the barrier down and allow us to learn as much from users as possible.

So I read it as meaning that data is not encrypted at all on disk (i.e. no privacy). This does render the service useless for, not all, but many use-cases.

>> No word on how to restore or access backups when the backed up host has failed.
> That's also included in here[0] - that feature is still in testing and hasn't been released yet.

I hope you're kidding :-)
Everytime I see one of these I think I should do more with https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7863271

Yes it's useful to know what jQuery is doing underneath but the whole point of it is that you don't have to worry about that and can concentrate on on the rest of your build.

Sure, you might not need it and there are other alternatives, both as plain JS and with other libraries, but it does it's job well and will always be easier for others to pick up when coming onto a project.
Art is derived from culture. Subconscious, no, that's old hat. Just think of art as 'reality' with substitutions consisting of a selected subset of permutations of commonly used contemporarily composed and defined symbols. It's all swappy metaphor. We exist in realty first. Art may enforce culture, but reality comes first. Otherwise, insanity, literally.
The first step is just to observe how much time is spent on testing. We have basically no clue about this. And our first study with students has also shown that they had no clue about it.

In a second step, we can think about which implication testing time might have on quality. As you said correctly, more time does not necessarily correlate with better quality or higher productiveness. Maybe there is a certain range of testing efforts that can be associated with good quality tests? E.g. if you spend less than x on testing, your tests are likely to be bad. If you spend more than y on testing, it might be worth investigating whether you have unusually high testing targets. Or your tests might be extremely hard to maintain.

I think the answer is Janus-faced and there is no single, simple answer (see also "Testivus on Test Coverage", http://www.artima.com/weblogs/viewpost.jsp?thread=204677).
> Launching it all at once from Earth does not seem like the safest or most efficient answer to getting a very large mission payload into space, given current technology

Or any non-scifi technology that we know of. The rocket equation is harsh.
There was once a time, back in the mists of history, when we had to print our websites out and buy them from newsagents.
Curiosity detects first burps of potential life on Mars
Former Employees Are Suing Sony Over ‘Epic Nightmare’ Hack
What if the simulation of the fidelity required surpasses the energy and time available in any sensible host universe? If the slowdown in a simulation universe is say 10, then it doesn't need many nested universes before life would never get the time to form in the client universe before the host dies (though of course you could set up the universe from 10 seconds ago, which seems like a cheat).
https://forums.adobe.com/message/4262734

Hmmmmmm..... So from what I gather here, if the ActionScript is using the regular getURL[1] that call is passed to the browser and will be proxied. But if flash tries to open up a raw socket[2] on its own, it won't know about the proxy and will just fail(or reveal your true IP)

1. http://help.adobe.com/en_US/AS2LCR/Flash_10.0/help.html?cont...

2. http://help.adobe.com/en_US/FlashPlatform/reference/actionsc...
This was perpetuated by our kids' school and our kids actually explained the rules to us. It made me extremely uncomfortable. It has a certain "presence" about it that is tied to the story of its supposed purpose. I find that it absolutely brings this strange feeling of opening your home to an outside influence. That description is somewhat vague, but the feeling is absolutely real and visceral.

So, there is the authoritarian component. Beyond that, I didn't like the idea of this little thing intruding on our responsibility as parents and, to some extent, usurping our authority by presuming to share it. It is odd to defer to this silly little Elf. We don't need an Elf to help us raise our kids, thank you very much. I'm also not a big Santa fan for this and other reasons.

So, in some ways, this thing is conditioning parents as well. We have been "put upon" by our school to continue this, which lends a subtle pressure to conform to societal norms, no matter how new or questionable. And, in this case, that norm is to defer to some outside authority, with whom we are completely unfamiliar.

All of this is made even worse by the fact that it is the product of one person's imagination, and was meant for commercial gain.
Detractors of Google Take Fight to the States
> All the limits you've ever perceived may be arbitrary choices of the simulation

Such as the speed of light? That's the simulation tick rate.
Terror Threats Over ‘The Interview’ Are Quandary for Sony
I think "know" over "learn" used by the grandparent is important there; probably they were made to learn it for coursework, they want to be allowed to continue only having to know that much and not learn further.
Maybe you can avoid the child's anxiety by making it look more like a visit, with you staying awake and waiting for Santa to come.
‘A Great Moment’: Rover Finds Clue That Mars May Harbor Life
Of course you don't need jQuery, if your customers are happy that you target only one browser specific version.

I think the rest of us will rather keep on using it, or similar library.
That was a pretty interesting read.

Random question, does anyone know what some more active newsgroups lists are today or has it all slowed down?
TWITTER FOR BUSINESS
Fully agree with you, it is worse actually as even between versions of a specific browser, behaviors change.
Or the way we look at people who thought heavier than air flying objects are impossible by laws of physics.

Did any people actually think this? That would be weird, considering how we are surrounded by heavier-than-air flying animals.
Symmetry presents a physics twist on the craft of cutting paper snowflakes