skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I've been living without Adobe Flash installed directly on machine since 2011, and have to say it's the best decision I could have made for Flash. (I do, however, have FreeSMUG build of Chromium[1] installed in case I need Flash in some video streaming site that I occasional use. I dislike Google's Keystone Updater.)

From my experience, uninstalling Flash will let you see _less_ missing plugin icon than having Flash installed with Click-To-Play enabled. This is because once Flash is uninstalled, the browser will simply report to the website that the user do not having Flash and allow the website to fallback to no-Flash mode accordingly.

One biggest problem of having Flash and using Firefox was Vimeo videos because Firefox weren't able to play H.264 on its own, and Vimeo do not provide WebM. This is where it used to be the problem. However, fortunately recent Firefox versions now included OpenH264 codec and could play Vimeo videos without any problems.

Nowadays there are only handful of sites I need to keep Chromium installed, but the number is rapidly decreasing. With YouTube switching to HTML5 by default, I'd recommend anyone to try uninstalling Flash and rely on Chrome/Chromium when Flash is needed. You won't really miss much.

[1]: http://www.freesmug.org/chromium
If they misled the New York Times, then they've also misled the Wall Street Journal[1]:

> "Anthem’s Mr. Miller said the first sign of the attack came in the middle of last week, when a systems administrator noticed that a database query was being run using his identifier code although he hadn’t initiated it."

AnthemFacts was registered 54 days ago, which would be within the legal timeframe for disclosure that the Wall Street Journal notes in their article:

> "Federal law requires health-care companies to inform consumers and regulators when they suffer a data breach involving personally identifiable information, but they have as many as 60 days after the discovery of an attack to report it."

Lastly, some more "specifics" that NY Times didn't mention:

> "Investigators tracked the hacked data to an outside Web-storage service and were able to freeze it there, but it isn't yet clear if the hackers were able to earlier remove it to another location, Mr. Miller said. The Web storage service used by the hackers, which Mr. Miller declined to name, was one that is commonly used by U.S. companies, which may have made the initial data theft harder to detect."

[1] http://www.wsj.com/articles/health-insurer-anthem-hit-by-hac...
> How would a free software project 'pay it forward'?

As mentioned by the grandparent comment, GPG is in use by Debian, Ubuntu and RedHat package managers. Whether or not you count those three as free software they have plenty of money to pay forward to a piece of software that underpins their entire stacks.
Bolt’s Partnership with Y Combinator
I married a Jew (1939)
I'd suggest looking for smaller repos to contribute to. Much less daunting, much more opportunity. My small OS contributions have been where a small repo, owned by one guy, does mostly what I'm looking for but I want some feature or notice some bug. Then it is easy to work on it/fix and do a pull request. They're usually happy for the activity.
TrialReach Raises $13.5M Series B to Match Patients to Clinical Trials
You're right in general, but there are second order effects. The poor are more likely to spend all of their income than the rich. Also, even if there isn't a general increase in prices (i.e. inflation) there can still be a change in the relative prices. So for example, luxury housing might come down slightly in price as a consequence of the increased taxes, but entry level housing might come up to reflect new household formation enabled by the universal stipend.
Yes, you've fleshed out pretty much exactly the argument I'd been vaguely pointing at.

There's a tremendous amount of pricing and negotiating strength which comes from power imbalances that are misrepresented as market forces. Pitching these as "the market decides" both takes guilt and fault out of the equation and masks what's actually going on. It's a matter which Adam Smith was aware of and spoke of at length -- much of Wealth of Nations concerns these relationships and much of the rest of it is mis-read to studiously ignore this fact.

I agree with you that short-term contracts (a year, possibly two) should be the limit of what can be struck with an author or artist. Another is for mechanical licenses (the spoiler effect -- another element Smith considers).
Sure, why not? His (and his family's) life should be more important to him than you getting to use GPG.
I remember the press saying the UK can always revoke the diplomatic status of the embassy but that would create a diplomatic precedence and put UK embassies everywhere in danger.
If they are ready to waste money on lawsuits and later whine that they don't have money for improving the service because they wasted it on lawsuits - it's really their own fault. They should blame themselves.
How in the world did society even function before we had a unique number to identify people? It must have been utter chaos! Before 1935 (when the first SSN was issued), there was no way to borrow money, go to college, buy land, open any kind of account anywhere, or do any of the things that somehow we need a unique number for today.
Taxes have to go up to pay for this so there isn't actually more money supply than there was before, it's just distributed differently.
>this means that disability should be eliminated if this passes

That depends whether you think the point of disability benefit is to allow disabled people to survive, or to allow them have a comparable quality of life to an able bodied person.
PGP is source-available with a proprietary license.[0] It was only ever free to use for non-commercial purposes.

[0]http://www.symantec.com/connect/downloads/symantec-pgp-deskt...
Thanks for tracking this down, just donated $100 and probably wouldn't have bothered without a BTC address. :)
yeah, but that one was neither designed as a social safety net, nor is it big enough to function as one. It's neat, but it's so small that it's basically apples and oranges.
Previous discussion of Mincome, prompted by a different article: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8792192
most of my knowledge of this area is anecdotal (and personal). but it feels like, comparatively, that homeschooling as a methodology isn't doing a worse job than public institutions, as I've met people educated on both sides, some who have turned out great and some who have turned out not as great.

also, i was homeschooled (all 12 grades) and have a lot of homeschooled friends and general acquaintances. sure, some hold beliefs about origins that differ from the mainstream (i in fact, hold beliefs that differ from the main stream), and some decided to pursue careers and paths in life that did not require intense scientific inquiry, but many chose very scientific fields (doctorates in chemistry, biology, graduate degrees in math and engineering).

nearly all of them are productive members of society who can read, write and to varying degrees reason and think and act responsibly.

i say all that because, it feels like you're using "a real education" as a pejorative. but my experience has shown that most of the time, these people do get a "real education". what a person chooses to do with the knowledge he/she is given is entirely up to them.

my friends aren't unaware of the arguments for/against origins, global warming, etc... and they may be wrong, but that isn't because they weren't educated.
Reached milestones and ongoing development on Replicant [FOSDEM15] [pdf]
>I also think we need to change to way we think about critical software like GPG

Maybe the lesson here is not to license important software under such permissive licenses. Make it open source and free for non-commercial, require a donation if it is used in a commercial product. I don't really see how you can give something away for free and then expect companies to volunteer to pay for it.
> right now research tends to be focused on how to use
> colors more effectively, and how to use more colors in
> code rather than less.

I understand that deprioritizing interop suits academics because new "colors" are more vivid when they don't have to mix with old ones, and also that commercial vendors have an interest in platform lock-in. But as a working programmer, I'm not satisfied by that.

Microservices are an interesting development in this space, providing an architecture within which components with very different underlying semantics may cooperate -- it's not a new idea, but neither was AJAX. Other historically significant interoperability initiatives are CORBA, COM, SWIG and GObject.

Then there are the virtual machines which run multiple programming languages (JVM, CLR, Parrot) -- but it is very hard for a VM to provide a superset of semantics in order to support every last "color" for every supported language.

The project I work on, Apache Clownfish (a "symbiotic object system"), takes the opposite approach: instead of aspiring to provide a superset of semantic functionality, it provides a basic subset plus glue, and instead of aspiring to serve as a platform it is distributed as a library.

Working through issues like how to design an object system which is compatible with diverse GC/allocation schemes is fun and mind-expanding, and I'm looking forward to publishing some white papers. But I wish there was more existing research. If the state of interop were to advance, maybe it wouldn't be so expensive to migrate to new programming languages and the industry could evolve faster.
>and we don’t shy away from expensive hardware--we’ve funded companies building things like nuclear reactors and rockets, which will require hundreds of millions of dollars in funding to succeed

How does this make sense for YC to do?
This is a terribly injustice, and points to a larger systematic problem, that we software practitioners benefit greatly from the efforts of others to whom we barely offer anything back.

And while the media can help (as in this case) what we should be looking for are systems to help with the situation. My ideal would be a system that monitors my package manager activity, and then using an algorithm I control, allocates "pieces of the pie" to each package I install and use. Then I determine how big the pie should be, and how it should be funded. E.g. if I'm working for a company, I'd request as part of my contract that I get a $200/mo software budget. Or I could just fund it myself.

If even a small fraction of us did something like this, the open-source world would blossom, and injustices like this one would be eliminated.
Already in the works: National Strategy for Trusted Identities in Cyberspace (NSTIC)

http://www.nist.gov/nstic/

Combine this with a smartcard. I guess a lot of European countries already do something like this?
It seems like reducing socialism to me. Instead of the gov't hand-picking (centrally planning) benefactors of tax dollars, e.g. defense contractors or oil/ag subsidies, it's being returned to the people (and all the people - not just some according to their need or whatever).
I don't understand the notion regarding feedback from participants in the experiment. Evelyn Forget said that opinions from respondents may skew positive because those with negative experiences would be less likely to reach out to her. I was under the impression that consumers with negative experiences provide feedback far more often than satisfied consumers. Has that been debunked or am I missing some factor?
> having a floating point uOp look at more than two operands would have humungous implications for the architecture.

Actually, in HSW and later all FP ops can have 3 register inputs, they added one to support FMA.

However, this is irrelevant. The scenario basically everyone has been talking about is exploiting a microcoded instruction. In case you are unfamiliar with the term, when the CPU frontend reads in an instruction it deems microcoded, it will stop decoding normally, and instead reads a sequence of ops from the microcode buffer that corresponds to the microcoded instruction you just executed. These ops can be anything the cpu can run -- it would be completely possible to emit a bunch of floating point compares, instructions to and their results, then take this result to the integer flags and do compare and jump on them. And for the longer microcoded ops like fp transcendentals, it would probably be possible to hide all these ops in the shadow of the normal ops, so that there would be no increase in latency.
I found this piece to be pretty much garbage. OMG only rich people can get a ride from their wife!!!!

The article should have been: You gotta be a mechanic to own a cheap luxury/sports car.
Why is there no Kickstarter equivalent for ongoing open source projects instead of just new things?
>It's easier for businesses

Far simpler not to even bother at all.
Wait, why is Tilt on the list of startups helping out with hardware expertise? Aren't they a crowdfunding company?

https://www.tilt.com
“Stop Supporting ISIS”: Anonymous Kurdistan Hacks Turkish Govt. Websites
Cool stats. I wonder when I'll be able to use my ECDSA key...
I'd guess that it's part of a diversified approach. Yes, they are capital intensive, but YC isn't the one who will be investing the hundreds of millions, and if one of these is successful, then I'd say it's likely to be hugely successful and a worthwhile return for YC.
Those are some rather interesting documents, thanks!

In 2013 FSF paid $ 689,239 in salaries and, astoundingly!,
$ 48,995 in credit card fees.
Whether he's been cheated or not depends on your values. Many people cheerfully give up revenue maximization in order to perform some service they perceive to be of great value. You can't really have a meaningful political movement without such people.
Which able bodied person? The idea behind some of our middle class social programs seems to be more in the nature of a climbing harness than a safety net. Why is someone who was once well off but fell on hard times entitled to more help than someone who was born into hard times?
No longer maintained, sadly.
I agree that they're not terribly practical ways to program (I wouldn't use them in production). Still fun to play with.
Apple is finally killing iPhoto – and this is the replacement
A company and it's customers are both victims when it gets hacked, but when it has millions of customers the external cost of poor security is so great the bad outcomes seem inevitable.

However, there would be less harm from these kinds of breaches if consumers were not obliged to prove their own innocence whenever someone loaned money in their name without rigorously verifying their identity. If someone claims to have loaned a bunch of money to me without ever interacting with me, the recovery of that foolish loan should really not be my problem. It would still be bad for an insurance company to expose private information, but there wouldn't be such a tremendous incentive to steal, agregate, and distribute this kind of data if there wasn't so much easy money in it.

Stolen credentials of the kind described in this breach are valuable largely because there is an asymmetry of effort favoring thieves: it's so much easier to borrow money in my name than it is for me prove my innocence that the process of borrowing money with other peoples' identity can be done in bulk, and to some extent automated. This situation is only sustainable because the lenders have shifted the responsibility of authentication onto their customers, retroactive to the issueance of credit. Identity verification prior to extending credit to a debtor is trivial and automated, while retroactively proving fraud has a large cost to the debtor in actual human labor.

It seems like payment systems and consumer creditors have colluded to force a Faustian bargain on us: to gain access to utilities and payment systems you have use credit, even if you don't want it. Therefore, if you want to be able to have municipal water, a place to live, or a phone, all of which are practically contingent on credit rating even if you pay with cash, you have to protect your credit rating.

It would be nice to decouple payment systems from consumer credit, but we won't. Nobody, whether they are a buissiness or the state, can afford to cross the credit card companies or the ratings agencies. They are buisiness titans with big lobbying clout. If you get taken by theives, it doesn't mattter if you're a consumer, a big corporation like Target, or a government agency like the VA, you're going under the bus because the status quo is too profitible to fix, and security is your problem. Nothing can be allowed to slow down the issuance of easy credit, or to create the slightest friction in CC transactions. Look what just happened with chip and pin? We can't even _opt into_ a pin for CC transactions because it might confuse us. While we're on the subject, go read about what happens to people who to try to build alternative payment systems that cut out MCVISA...

How many data breaches would there be if bad actors had to take the trouble to personally hassle each of the millions of people they had data on before they could take our money?

Probably some, but how much would we care who knew our SSN's or addresses if they couldn't easily be monetized?

Some, but less, I think.
Trademark has much more substantial free speech issues than copyright.
In reality he always played the "hero" as the only person who could fix the primary system, only because he built it so terribly in the first place.
> Software developers have this sort of circular firing squad where nobody wants to be the first to keep their source closed and try to charge for it.

Er, the first to keep their source closed and try to charge for it happened a long time ago, and there are huge numbers of developers at firms from one-man shops to massive megacorps still doing it today.

The idea that closed-source for-profit development is a novel idea that violates norms in the software development community and that everyone is afraid to try is cute, but, you know, completely contrary to the actual facts of both the current state and history of software development.
I dont see a way to contact anyone there. Can they please add bitcoin?
Building a Social Network on Rails
>I think people would donate if they knew about it.

Oh certainly, I use GPG on a daily basis, yet it never even occurred to me that such an ubiquitous project would have trouble gathering funds!

I tossed in a donation as soon as I saw the link in the article.

---

I remember jOOq (a Java SQL DSL) had similar troubles raising donations. They ended up moving to a commercial licensing model for 3.2+ that provides connectors for "enterprise" databases as well as professional support.

Had I seen a banner asking for donations, I would've gladly donated what they're now charging for licenses. -- It is an excellent library.

However I feel like the tooling does them a disservice. When the library can be added by tossing a few lines into `pom.xml` and having Maven fetch it, and the API can mostly be figured out w/ javadoc and your IDE's autocomplete: how many developers will even visit the project homepage and see a "We need funding!" banner?
Lack of funds doesn't even sound like the biggest problem here. If the project relies on one guy, what happens when he's gone? Seems like something this important should have a higher bus factor.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bus_factor
That's the truth. I went to s particularly safe middle school, so when we had a random weapons sweep with metal detectors, only 3 students got caught. I was one of them; I had my little 1" swiss army knife, one girl had a steel nail file with a sharp point, and a mexican kid had a 3" folding buck knife.

Me and the girl were white honor students, and we were let off with a stern warning, and our "weapons" were handed to our parents. The mexican kid with poor english skills got sent to an alternative school (the kind for disciplinary risk kids).
That's a really interesting question, and I'm not sure what the answer should be. According to the authors, the B2 intermetallic forms in small particles during recrystallization at 900 C because of the influence of the nickel, so you might expect a similar high rate of particle nucleation in the wake of the melt pool, resulting in small, dispersed particles. Then again, you might get coarse intermetallic phases instead, resulting in a brittle weld.

In either case, the advantage of the B2 particles is that they allow a high degree of strengthening during work hardening, which would be done before welding. Any subsequent heat treatment would tend to undo that work hardening.
Here's something I think should get more love and is pretty relevant: a service that will automatically pay a percentage of Bitcoin donations for every submission to a GitHub repository: https://github.com/WhisperSystems/BitHub

So if you donate to Open Whisper Systems, you can see that your donations are going directly to those that are contributing to the project, and you get paid more if you're contributing more. I've sent in a few PR's to their iOS repo, and it'd be awesome to see it implemented in other privacy OSS projects. It's obviously not a perfect system, but I think it's a pretty cool way of funding OSS.
My favorite type-driven websites from January
The author claims that parallel has been replaced by xargs -P. While some of what parallel does can be replicated by (modern) xargs, it can't totally replace parallel (for example, parallel can do load limiting). However, there is the much more powerful/flexible GNU implementation of parallel <https://www.gnu.org/software/parallel/>. I don't know which came first. Beware that some of the flags are different!

The author claims that mispipe has been replaced by shell features (in the case of Bash, "set -o pipefail"), and I agree with that. But beware that pipefail has slightly different semantics than mispipe! (the mispipe manpage explains this).

The author neglects to mention/realize that the behaviour of pee can be replicated with tee and Bash features:

tee >(cmd1...) >(cmd2...) >(cmd3...) >/dev/null

Also, there is another implementation of chronic called cronic <http://habilis.net/cronic/>. I believe cronic came first, but I'm not sure about that.
$60/slot from someone that is likely making 5-10X that an hour in their day job via base salary (not including stock grants) is a bit ludicrous. I like the idea, but you really have to charge what the time of these people is worth. On one side, this pricing will likely only serve to further the interest in the product from a customer. On the other side, you may actually get real significant talent onto the platform, not people who are trying to run a consulting business.

How about this - pay the expert a portion of the salary. The $/hour would make a bit more sense, and the 'experts' aren't going to laugh at how overrated the recruiter is in the process.
You can emulate late binding in these languages (though the required types are quite clever) but letrec does not do this directly! In particular, letrec is closed immediately—you cannot extend it later.

In particular, you don't actually need or want letrec to encode open recursion. That's most of the fun :)
Which is why there's an explicit form of the GPL for libraries; the LGPL.

There still exists uncertainty and ways around it (You can execute GPL programs or write shell scripts so that GPL programs execute your code) such that you don't have to distribute the major parts of your codebase, but the GPL has an explicitly different version for libraries that are supposed to be linked in to non-free software vs libraries that are cores of GPL software.
I always felt like this case was argued wrong. Don't argue it's not "limited", argue that it "doesn't promote the progress of the Sciences and Useful Arts".

There is no possible argument not involving time travel by which we get more works created through retroactive copyright extension of already existing works.