skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I believe this is the case also. There is a Quora thread on the pros and cons on raising kids in the bay area[1].

[1] http://www.quora.com/Is-Silicon-Valley-a-good-place-to-raise...
It was happening in the 60-90's time-frame.

So people were productive without higher level abstractions, but then they moved on.

Likewise, people were once productive using languages without generics during 60 - 2004(Oberon, C, Java < 1.5, Turbo Pascal, Modula-2), but then they moved on.
It's possible the false sense of security is worth more than people think. It lets them say "hey, we tried".
I distinctly remember being upset about DRM in the '00s, back when it was being used to place onerous restrictions on content that people had ostensibly "bought" (CDs, DVDs, AAC audio files, etc.). Now that it's being used to prevent people from saving streams... I hate to say this, but please remind me why I should be upset? I never had any illusion of "owning" a stream. Not only that, I would rather stream than own in most cases.
Interestingingly it seems Youtube is still using Flash in its pre-roll advertisements unless I'm missing something obvious. Those videos get the 'f' from flashblock and won't view unless it is enabled.
So what, what guarantees you get a EME module of your OS of choice?
I'm not convinced most people that can't use gpg "properly" are able to use OTR "properly".

As for facebook, as long as they keep the XMPP access open and supported[1], at least they do support OTR. Unlike eg: google.

I don't really understand this "gpg is impossibly hard"-stance. Yes, security is hard. Why recommend OTR? Don't get me wrong, I love OTR -- but verifying OTR keys, and transporting identities across devices (eg: when getting a new phone) is pretty difficult too. Are you saying wrong use of OTR is better than wrong use of gpg, because most people that use OTR use it in a way that allow for MITM anyway?

[1] https://www.facebook.com/sitetour/chat.php
The benefits of html5 video are practical ones: it simply works better than flash does. It plays without stuttering, the audio works properly, it doesn't steal my mouse focus. Also, it doesn't get webcam permissions by default, or all the other crap that comes along with flash. Sure, its still DRM, but flash was terrible for plenty of reasons that aren't DRM.
> Wouldn't the better play be to spin off the product-market fit business before doing your pivot... especially if the business was a 100+ million one.

Potentially, but that also undermines your ability to use the existing business/user base to seed growth for the new one.
I've donated to the project in the past, I wasn't aware of just how far in the hole he was until today.

Also, I just cloned the repository and it's a bit of a mess, if anything I'm ashamed that I haven't been doing anything about it directly.
Because it's a lot harder to make a competing web browser now. You'll have to buy the secret binaries from one of the DRM providers, if they'd even be willing to sell.
I'm surprised there are so many, I would have expected that keeping up with the changes in the tax law would be a pretty expensive barrier to entry, especially given the IRS sometimes isn't totally sure themselves. Although it seems like the vast majority focus only on the 1040EZ which I guess radically simplifies things.
Over the past couple of decades I have become more inclined to stay in a position due to the fact that I am not feeling the need to make more money or climb the corporate ladder. I wouldn't take a job that was going to be boring but I also know that a job is often what you make of it. My experience has always been that there's always challenging work that others don't want to take up because it's not on their career path, not high profile, and etc.
Over thousands of years of human history, new technologies have changed the ways people communicate, from language to writing to the printing press, and so on. Every change shifted the economic balance, so things that once were prohibitively expensive became easy, and people who derived economic benefit from former scarcity became disadvantaged.

I hear what the proponents of DRM-encumbered browsers are saying - media streaming companies control huge chunks of our popular culture, and significant political power, and it's expedient to give in to their demands and stop threatening their business model. But when I look back at the last thousands years of technological progress, I cannot bring myself to say "yes, this is good enough. We should legislatively freeze our technology at early-21st-century levels forever." Our civilisation has benefited from technology so much already, I can't in good conscience deny people the benefits of future technology, even in exchange for the right to stream Game of Thrones.
You forgot

>a url with a JavaScript exploit

>a url with a img/css browser buffer overrun

>a url with cross site scripting

I see no difference.

EDIT: Actually I do. I is easier to exploit users that can't wait 3 minutes.
It's on me to deal with coworkers honestly and without prejudices based on their place in the hierarchy within which they work. :)
Is your reply a good example of how to a express an opinion?
The basic principle that we have lost is that the standardized part of the web has always been fully open. You can look at the source of any page, figure out how some cool CSS or javascript trick works and copy it. You can download any image you see and modify it. This in contrast to, for example an iPhone app, it's closed, unmodifiable, secret, hostile to tinkerers. Flash video was closed but it was not a web standard, this is.
Yes, EFF, we're still not living in a content wonderland where Hollywood studios send their blockbusters to people's browsers in naked <video> tags. Shocking, I know.
At 31, I feel like I am just now leaving the 'young talent' group, but not yet considered older. Standing in the middle, kinda, I think I can see both sides. To help deal with the agism issue, my hypothesis is that if you can zero in on the exact misconceptions they might have about you, or older programmers in general, and demonstrate that you don't fit that mold, you're in.

Some younger engineers will worry if older engineers lost their hunger for learning new technologies. In their position, they are well aware of what is fashionable, or even just current best practice. This is mostly because as new people they go straight to the new stuff. For example, new programmers don't learn SVN, they go straight to git, and github is a way of life.

So, right or wrong, it is a red flag to them if they see or hear about people advocating what they consider as outdated approaches.

But, importantly, they also read books by the folks who are 20-30 years older, but never lost that drive. They go to talks by these people and take notes, buy their screencasts, and brag about what they learned. They want luminaries to guide them. So, maybe, establishing expertise over what they consider important is a way around this misconception the youth has.

I imagine you could send positive signals by fixing or improving some popular open source project. Maybe write some interesting toy code, a game, or something that solves a development problem, and add that to a personal site or your github account. Any way to demonstrate what someone with 40 years experience can do, in a context they can see and interact with should do the trick.
Certain companies have been extraordinarily interested in implementing WebCrypto without mandating HTTPS. Which is to say, a man-in-the-middle attacker could trivially modify the JS that calls WebCrypto and cause different operations to be performed.

My suspicion is that they have contractual agreements with the non-technical folks in the studios that they have to "encrypt" content, and the technically-competent redistributor has no direct interest in the crypto being sound. If the API gave them 256-bit military-grade AES encryption, but only in ECB mode, they'd probably use it.
Yet somehow intel, nvidia, amd, and a thousand other companies manage to do just fine in CA, where non-competes are largely unenforceable.
Right click -> Save As is a tad easier than finding a torrent.
What "most companies" are doing is mostly irrelevant in the larger picture. You're talking about proprietary networks and how they are shuttling their users around, while the interesting things are the opening up of real information and creating linked, collaborative, open ecosystems where everyone is free to participate. That's happening on the web, not in Facebook's latest iOS offering.
Then take them with the plastic/metal/glass, which needs to be sorted anyway, and sort out the batteries when you do the rest. IIRC the first 90% of the sorting is done by density anyway, and I'm sure that technique would be pretty effective at separating batteries (very dense) from milk cartons, tin cans, and takeout containers (less so).
In something like semiconductors, the main competitors have tens of thousands of patents and each infringe each other 500 times over. It is essentially a wash.

Competitors suits are only a good idea when you have a clear patent advantage. That is why Apple and Google got blitzed during the smartphone wars. They didn't have a phone patent portfolio like everyone else, since they were new players. It's the reason Google bought Motorola.

Also, semiconductor processing is hard to reverse engineer so there are legit trade secrets that are kept.
While true, and saying this as someone that likes C++, the reason many of those applications are written in C++ is that the choice of imperative languages with AOT compilers is not that big.

I remember having to fight to use this new strange thing called C++.
I can totally validate this concern.

I have a really good friend who's a Javascript pro. Like mad scientist Douglas Crockford good. He's also in his early 50's. He's been hired at some of the largest corporations and has done some absolutely amazing work.

But he never sticks around longer than 6-8 months for the very reason you cite.

Just like in his current gig with a huge financial institute where he completely rewrote all their tools in Angular and Node in four months, and then basically said he was bored and the company was moving too slow for him!

He's currently looking at starting his own app development company and doing his own thing finally, which he really needs. He just has so much talent and experience, he had a hard time finding anything challenging anymore. And since Javascript developers are in such high demand, he can come and go when he wants to - something his experience and talents allow him to do. Something someone in their 20's or 30's just can't compete with.

We both currently work in the midwest, and the tech scene here is really vibrant.
Firefox, which is open source, both sandboxes the Adobe decryption module—giving the browser control over the world that the Adobe module sees—and fetches it at startup from Adobe's site. It seems almost impossible that you'd be unable to hit the same URL from your own browser and put it inside your own sandbox such that the module can't tell it's not running inside Firefox. You have the hard constraints that the module can't examine the outside world except through the sandbox, and the sandbox itself is open source.

Edited to add: Widevine, the (Google-owned) decryption module Chrome uses, has no license fees. http://www.widevine.com/
Show HN: A reference tool for headphone enthusiasts
Oh seems like it would have been just as easy to grab census data for the past 50 years and run through last names by decreasing frequency.

Here I thought you had found a unique zipcode.
Why are they calling EME "locks"? It isn't locking anything. It's obfuscation. The most relevant physical analogy would be smog. They should call it what it is; digital smog.
Flash for Chrome uses the PPAPI and is sandboxed.
A great deal of Mathematics were done in tables, vectors and matrix, that mapped (probably because of a feedback loop) so well the imperative indexed loop that it's not surprising they'll love it.

On the other hand, watching Gilbert Strang videos, I had the feeling that his views on maths were very FP-ish. Splitting matrices into sub-matrices, combining them with higher order operations. No i,j,k index ever to be seen.
8 won't even be the outermost loop once 99 is completed.
Honestly, it's more about finding a results based org. I've worked with a lot of different companies and some are very culture fit and some are very results oriented. You will never get a shot at the culture fit crowd so go for the results based crowd. Flood your resume not with experience as much as real results and value you have created.
Why that HBR article did not mention Walmart as an exception to their "Better before cheaper" rule?
Three Rules for Making a Company Truly Great
Your assumption here about going from one DRM implementation to many is wildly off the mark.

There have been several major video DRM solutions in widespread use for many many years including Adobe's Access (in Flash, and other places) Microsoft's PlayReady (in Windows, X-box, Silverlight, etc.) and more recently Google bought WideVine for its DRM offerings and has spent the last 4 or 5 years building that into the Google Chrome and Android platforms.

Pretty much every major video streaming service was/is using a different DRM implementation. That's nothing new at all.

Your suggestion that somehow there's going to be a shift from one to a lot more DRM providers thanks to EME is uninformed and unfounded.
Look, if they want to make a plugin that understands their DRM scheme or some standalone app that's basically just a scaled down browser with support for a <drm_video> tag, they can tilt at that windmill all fucking day for all I care.

But I still need a <video> tag that works like an <img> tag in that there's at least I format supported by all major broswer venders that works for that tag, that lets me easily save the video for offline viewing, and is completely unencumbered by patents or licensing issues, so anyone else can make a browser supporting it. If that means I have to use a tag called <supercalifragilisticexpialidocious> instead of <video>, I don't really care. I need that functionality. The web needs that functionality.
Are you experienced with the language?

I can't parse it either, but I don't know if "readability for a beginner" is a metric I care a whole lot about in a programming language.
10 useful resources for Facebook game creation
> For people who use GPG for e.g. securing transferred documents that might be called in court

If you have legal compliance issues like that, surely you have enough money to pay someone to maintain a tool (even a GPG derivative!) that promises never to break backwards-compatibility?

It seems like people are angry that something that was maintained for free is no longer being maintained for free. Given that they have never lifted a finger to help out (either financially or by providing code), that seems a bit petty.
That is a fair point, but I would also consider that a (limited) victory on par with the (limited) victory of moving from Flash to EME, and I wish it got more press. The people who are implementing sandboxes are doing massively effective work to improve the security and privacy of everyone using the web. Chrome has been quite active here and I don't think they can be thanked enough.

That said, PPAPI is Chrome-only; EME is a standard, and Mozilla's implementation even outlines a way for other browsers to integrate the EME module Mozilla uses, plus their sandbox, into their own browsers.
>I met one of the founders (I can't remember which of the two) at a conference in 2010

The article says Fab was launched June 9, 2011.
I submitted that article separately on HN:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9013328
Right click -> Save As is only possible after you've paid.
> ...the driver is unsigned and has to be installed with kext dev mode enabled on Yosemite. If you don't know what that means it's probably not a good idea to go further.

That's fine - but why not explain how to do this? People are going to google it anyways - may as well offer a sane tutorial on how to do it.
Show HN: Kolor – JavaScript color manipulation lib
Sort of. The big difference is that forth is still reasonably widely used. Much more so than factor, not that they target the same domain.
I like the order in which they named the culprits, Apple, Microsoft and Google, while referring to dominant browser vendors.
EFF, please do what you preach. Be honest and accurate. If you have a soft-corner for Google because it pays money, Google has a soft-corner for technologies which give you money. Of course the free-as-in-beer leering majority at HN loves Google, so bring it on with the downvotes.
but even before that, the issue was the company either tried to be smarter and game the system by not patenting their methods and calling them trade secrets... or maybe it's a new necessity because of China? i don't know. what matter is that either they had patents and with a former employer or not, they can crush Samsung. or if they tried to be opportunistic and threat it as trade secrets to game patents expirations or need to publish methods... than they should just shut up and lament not paying that guy more.
In memorial of Fab, let's all take a little time machine back to this HN gem when @betashop (Jason) wrote a blog post [1] defending allegations in Bloomberg [2] that he blasted the entire staff of Fab several times with threats they'd be fired, and then proceeded to continue to defend the practice in person right here [3]

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20130806013728/http://betashop.c...

[2] http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2013-06-24/fab-com-s-...

[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5942543
First, it is simply not true that the standardized parts of the web have been fully open. There have been scores of proprietary features, including those with no source availability or even documentation, that have become web standards because browser vendors built or reverse engineered them and web developers used them.

Standardization is a good thing, but you're being a bit selective claiming web standards have always been open and source available. It doesn't always happen that way. It didn't happen that way for image codecs, for example.

Second, plug-ins most certainly are and have been a Web standard.

NPAPI was implemented in multiple browsers from multiple different vendors and has been used by dozens of major software companies and thousands of lesser companies, commercial and open source, for browser integrated features.

That you don't consider de facto standards to be standards doesn't mean they aren't.
wrong, they should patent it. let the hobbyist learn how they do, and prevent competitors from copying.

they tried to have the cake (don't patent, don't publish) and eat it too (not pay people and processes enough to protect your trade secrets)
When Cameron wanted encryption to be illegal, would that mean EME would also have been illegal?
I believe you're going to learn a new language for future problems, and I strongly recommend Rust.

If your performance (throughput and latency) requirement is not very critical, language really doesn't matter. Even scripting languages like Python, Javascript or Ruby performs very well by spawning servers on each cores.

But if your performance requirements goes serious, I believe you will get unusual bottleneck (e.g. GC, VM, memory usage pattern, specific hardware,... ), then you'll want a kind of "full-control". In this case, the only traditional choice was C/C++, and that's why many large-scale companies like Google and Facebook are using C++ internally.

Anyway C/C++ cannot provide enough level of safety that required to provide good productivity. As a workaround, you can use a sort of dynamic checkers (sanitisers), but the dynamic checkers are very immature, and fundamentally dynamic.

A new, and the only current alternative for this case is Rust. Rust provides far batter safety from first at "compile time". It also provides far better linguistic constructs and semantics. But the language itself is immature.

Anyway, (1) there is huge demand for this kind of features from C++ community and (2) Rust is completely engineer community driven (3) and fully open-sourced. So I expect the maturing speed of the language will be incredible that never been existed in language history. And it's fully open sourced.
Facebook will soon be able to ID you in any photo
Absolutely. I have had the pleasure of being the junior person sitting next to someone who was close to retirement. His perspective of, "Ok, what are we really trying to do here?" was invaluable. The best teams are always genuinely diverse and seek to really get to know what's special about each other.

One suggestion: don't worry about dating yourself by talking about old tech you once worked on. For some reason the older developers I've worked with take a while to getting around to telling you about the time they wrote LISP in Genera on a Symbolics 3640 for cutting edge CAD/CAM/simulation tools at Boeing in the mid 80s or whatever (such cred!).
How College Education Became a Luxury Good
Not being a physicist (not even close), I find it amazing how within just ~100 years, "our" model of the universe has changed so drastically.

I once read that sometime in the late 1800s, people assumed that they had basically understood how the universe works, and that all that was left was to fill in some of the blanks.

And now look what an increasingly strange (and wonderful!) place we find ourselves in.
The Ars article ends with:

"A real audit of the [GnuPG] code would be great," Green said. "The problem
is it would be really expensive and I'm not sure it's worth it."

I wonder what Green means as the alternative to auditing the GnuPG code. Doing nothing? Or could he be arguing that it would be better to start from scratch? Is there a replacement in the wings? Or even as a glint in someone's eye?
You have that functionality thanks to the <video> tag and H.264 and AAC in MP4. That seems to meet all of your requirements. Am I missing the problem? EME and DRM are not required to make that work in Firefox, IE, and Chrome.
It definitely is in a tightly locked cage. Firefox even generates the device fingerprint itself rather than allow any machine access. An EME module cannot access the Internet, nor store data to the hard drive. There's a detailed writeup here: https://hacks.mozilla.org/2014/05/reconciling-mozillas-missi...
The purpose if DRM is not to stop people from illegally copying. The purpose is to control and manipulate the legal users and limit their freedoms they would otherwise legally.

Yes, DRM developers lie to us and claim that this is about stopping infringement. But that's only a pretense. They know that it only impacts non-infringing users. But they like having more control and power over the non-infringing users.

See http://www.defectivebydesign.org/faq#purpose
For Widevine, it looks like the following would be required:

Completion of legal agreements
Delivery of a Widevine documentation package
Technical discussion to understand the device type, chipset, and review the Widevine robustness rules
Exchange of libraries, SDKs, and integration documentation
Keybox request and fulfillment (as needed)
Client integration testing

For piggybacking on the Firefox binary, maybe that would work but sounds like something you might get a cease and desist for.

Anyhow, if everyone agree to make the binaries 100% free as in beer (like Cisco did with H.264), then that's better than nothing and makes writing new browsers easier.

But the future is in new devices, operating systems, and virtualization. Being provided binaries limits freedom to make new things. And of course who knows what backdoors are in them.

(Edit to add: this is a great discussion, http://www.reddit.com/r/debian/comments/25kbi7/next_firefox_... -- note that the tracking/privacy/backdoor issues with this are huge.)
Didn't he only want encryption without a government backdoor to be illegal?

I don't really think anyone has a problem with giving the latest episodes of Homeland and Downton Abbey to our political elite.