skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I guess we all agree that watermarking the viewable content instead of thinking about securing/signing the whole data file was not so smart in the first place.

When I download a video from the Google Play Store I can only watch it for 24 hours or so. I thought there was already a highly protected digital signature/encryption system involved. Why is that not used for reporter previews?
The Word-Space Model (2006) [pdf]
Internet of Anything: It’s Time for Everyone to Be Able to Hack Robots
Agile is like CrossFit: the techniques are sound, but the techniques really aren't the point. The point is to create a revolution by wrapping sound techniques in an us-vs.-the-world ideology that has strong emotional appeal. This makes it easier to sell trainership certifications, which are where the money is.
OT, but I'm stealing that quote! Made my morning :)
How do I not "wonder" what to eat? Not sure it's super obvious to me immediately from the site.
I very much agree. In an earlier job I used to work remotely from two days a week to going about couple of weeks without going to the office. This was when we didn't have children.

Now that we have a year old daughter and my spouse is currently at home with her, working remotely requires more thought as to the working conditions. Picking the days when my family goes out during the day work out as the best remoting days.
Biggest win I see is you could even be rid of the steam client.
Yeah. Scrum doesn't make management disappear, it amplifies it.

I saw meetings with middle managers (people who hadn't shipped anything significant in a decade) in daily meetings, going over burn-down rates of individual engineers and "expressing concern" through channels that someone was off their schedule by a couple of days. The daily scrums were just half-hour status-in-a-ring and some public shaming if you couldn't say that you did anything, so a lot of people made stuff up, or at least hedged by saying they'd completed 50% of the work or that tests were "nearly passing" (code for: my stuff is broked).

Oh, and in the mean time the build system we devs were using had been on fire and broken for three weeks and it was nearly impossible to get a working build. WTF?

I said, "We don't need Agile. We need an earthquake to collapse that wing of the building" (where the managers were; they liked to cluster).

We had Ken. Ken was there at the beginning for maybe a week, and for the next few weeks after that it was great. But we forgot that middle managers are still gonna manage, and that you have to fire them or they're still going to be there, you know, managing stuff, because that's all they know how to do.

And with the right tools, Scrum can be turned into the perfect surveillance state. (I stole that from another response in this thread, thanks).
> Github is full of "open source" project that carry no explicit license.

Some of that is intentional, some is not.

You may think that everything should include a license, but not everyone shares your sensibilities/values. There are plenty of valid reasons to not include a license, including "I don't want to think about it right now" and "I just don't want to assign a license".

Please don't spam everyone who doesn't agree with you. I hope Github bans this bot.
The problem with work from home is that you have to get past the one issue most offices cannot do right, the personnel issue.

As in, there are people who don't work well at work and management knows they likely won't work well if not worse if from home. However because personnel issues are hard these people linger on and stifle benefits that others could enjoy because no one wants to put up with the idiocy when they are told, so and so can work from home but you cannot.

To raise productivity first act on those who are not productive so that the rest of the team doesn't have to tip toe around a problem that has been to obvious.
Insurers adjusting policies to accurately reflect risk is fantastic. They already do it now with haphazard accuracy - I get a partial rebate on any farm share or gym membership, and smoking cessation programs are on their dime completely.
Interesting throughout. As I understand it, this policy is a tool for buying the Saudi ruling class time to reshape the society into somthing that is compatible with and competitive in the future, yet saudi-arabic.

Such Top-to-Bottom approaches are often loathed upon but I'd say good for them. Still, at some point the money spent on its citizens well-being will have to exceed the money spent on mistreating them. How many educated Saudis does it take to stand up for the whip-lashed ones?

Betting that transformation-process on the oil-market seems like a risky business to me.
I agree devs carry many dysfunctions.

But big-A Agile is a management school with its own dysfunctions. It diverges from small-a agile, which is basically a set of principles to help critique yourself with.

When you hire a manager (or "Scrum Master" whatever), they must convince top management to give them a job. Which is why Scrum Masters brag about their bosses "believing in" Agile, like a bishop happy that the king loves god. Then they impose some system which requires their highly visible involvement.

(That said, the Agile described in this article diverges from my personal experience.)
A Nod to the Smart Home: Elbee Controls Devices with Head Gestures or Voice
It's roughly 2-4 hours worth of meetings in 2 weeks. That "destroys" productivity?
"'How long will that bug take to fix?' is like asking 'How long is it going to take to answer 23 across in next Sunday's crossword puzzle?' It might be fifteen seconds, it might take all day; until I have a chance to look at the puzzle I'm just pulling numbers out of my ass."
.

I find this attitude to be a little disingenuous. Obviously every bug cannot be estimated perfectly, but the majority of the time there is some initial data to make a reasonable estimate with a margin of error.

For instance to name a few:

- Past experience with the module associated.

- Whether or not it has been reproduced locally.

- Similarity to other bugs that have come up in the past.
Vatican Reportedly Rejects New French Ambassador, Who Is Gay
Sorry about that! Once you sign up for a plan we survey your preferences and then our chef/ dietitian will prepare something for you everyday, so there's no menu. Think of it like having a personal chef who unveils a new masterpiece for you everyday =)
I worked from home for 4 years in my late 20s. It's brilliant. There's one thing I wish I'd been told at the beginning: You really have to strive to maintain your social life. Work hard at saying yes to going out and doing things. Do not make the mistake of believing that online chat, gaming, forums, and Facebook is the same as meeting people in the real world. If there's one thing that working from home does, especially if you have a job you really enjoy, it's that it makes it exceptionally easy and fun to just sit write code (or whatever you do) for 14 hours straight without actually talking to anyone face to face. That will absolutely destroy your social life.
An eager beaver at one of my client's is introducing Agile as a "Waterfall silver bullet."

I see right away one Agile defect: It prefers near-term "user story success" over long-term investments like creating debuggable architecture.

Why spend time now making things easier for the rest of the cycle if it's not a priority in this iteration?

Why write "gdb" when "gcc with printfs" will work fine, even if it simply requires more sprints?
How to Watch HBO Outside US – A VPN Can Help in This Regard
Pan Galactic Division
At $2,500, Canon’s New 4K Camcorder Is Actually a Bargain
Yep, I would agree that it would be very unlikely that a civilization capable of launching them, WOULD launch them. We are nowhere close to being able to build these probes ourselves, but already understand the dangers of doing so. Even assuming that VN probes WERE launched by some civs, who is to say that they aren't stopped by other even more advanced civs before they can become a problem?

Overall, my feeling is that there are 2 things which cause the 'dead' universe we see.

1. The Great Filter is the evolution of intelligence. Since we are here, its easy for us to assume the evolution of sentience is normal, but the dinosaurs were around for almost 200m years and got nowhere. And if not for a string of lucky events, we wouldn't even be here, wondering these things right now.

2. Advanced civilizations prefer simulation and dont need to colonize the universe at all, I think this would be even more likely if the first point is true, since once you understand the physics of the universe, see that its a cold dead place and you are bound by its physical laws, simulation has a lot more to offer. I would love to invent my own universes, simulate them, and be able to watch and manipulate them with omnipotence.
I already posted this on /r/button a while ago, but:

"In [the The Robbers Cave Experiment], the experimental subjects—excuse me, 'campers'—were 22 boys between 5th and 6th grade, selected from 22 different schools in Oklahoma City, of stable middle-class Protestant families, doing well in school, median IQ 112. They were as well-adjusted and as similar to each other as the researchers could manage.

"The experiment, conducted in the bewildered aftermath of World War II, was meant to investigate the causes—and possible remedies—of intergroup conflict. How would they spark an intergroup conflict to investigate? Well, the 22 boys were divided into two groups of 11 campers, and—

"—and that turned out to be quite sufficient.

"The researchers' original plans called for the experiment to be conducted in three stages. In Stage 1, each group of campers would settle in, unaware of the other group's existence. Toward the end of Stage 1, the groups would gradually be made aware of each other. In Stage 2, a set of contests and prize competitions would set the two groups at odds.

"They needn't have bothered with Stage 2. There was hostility almost from the moment each group became aware of the other group's existence: They were using our campground, our baseball diamond. On their first meeting, the two groups began hurling insults...."

Eliezer Yudkowsky, The Robber's Cave Experiment: http://lesswrong.com/lw/lt/the_robbers_cave_experiment/

Distressing how well it fits, isn't it?
What was your company doing before switching to Agile?
I'm surprised they just send out DVDs with content... HBO have a streaming service, creating a preview section shouldn't be hard. Up to reporters to get a decent connection to stream...
I have been at home as an independent dev for almost 15 years and I love the flexibility..BUT, there is one thing that work-from-home people almost universally agree is a drag. When work is just a few feet away, it is hard to draw a line from where work ends and life begins. I hate the fact that the first place my kids ever come looking for me is my home office.
Not very clever.

Get two leaked copies, and mix them up. Use the credits from copy A, or hell, even chop off 11 milliseconds from them. Then mix and match scenes... even chop off a few ms from some randomly selected scenes.

I bet you wouldn't even need the two copies.
Every methodology fails from pretty much the same reasoning.

The saving point of Agile is breaking tasks into reasonable sizes, long enough to actually get something done and short enough to rearrange as needed sooner rather than later, and to delay interruptions until they can be evaluated and other tasks completed. I can't get to what I need to do if the relentless onslaught of self-important "do this _now_!" interruptions are handled as they occur; Agile provides a sane way to say "get in line" such that important issues are addressed in a timely manner relative to other issues and without compromising other stuff that also needs doing (those that never reach the top of the interrupt stack, but without which long-term progress won't happen).
The Golden Ratio: Design's Biggest Myth
>Agile development is about making connections to your team members: individuals and interactions over process and tools.

See, this kind of vague, fuzzy feel-good description is exactly why it seems to me that the one thing everyone seems to agree on about Agile is that everyone else is doing it incorrectly.
The answers you have already to this are good enough to give you an idea of what's going on. If you want to dig further and actually have a look at what's going on when an http vs. https session is established, grab a tool like Fiddler or Wireshark (or Charles(?) on the Mac) to actually have a look at the traffic as it's transmitted and received. I'd suggest starting off easy with Fiddler or Charles as you won't have to trawl through a bunch of raw TCP traffic to figure it out, they're nicely filtered to HTTP/S traffic. Once you've figured out Fiddler, then dig further with Wireshark. Both tools are invaluable for debugging web traffic. There's a couple of tutorials that allow you to act as a man-in-the-middle on your own connection to sniff the SSL traffic and figure out what's going on:
http://docs.telerik.com/fiddler/Configure-Fiddler/Tasks/Fire....
These tools are really useful in helping you understand further exactly what's going on.
"ever since IBM started undercutting RedHat on support and stealing their customers open source companies have stepped away from having consultancy as their only form of revenue."

This hasn't really been Red Hat's only form of revenue, generally it's been subscriptions + qualified builds, etc, they've had proprietary software from time to time too. Red Hat Network and "getting the bits quickly", also.

Though it always seemed to me a large chunk of business revolves around banks, with major needs in areas like realtime, needing access and changes from some of the very strong kernel developers Red Hat typically employs. Smaller companies won't need support, banks are mandated to require it, and have very technical needs. This isn't "how do I chown", it's often very specific performance/timing/hardware related things.

While things may have changed, I remember Oralce making some noise, but not really getting any traction, and I don't really think IBM was a big predator in any case. Customers would know they didn't have the specialization.

Anyway, if I had to use a broad brush, Red Hat support is more key to Red Hat than consultancy - but yes, though they produce lots of products, they aren't a product company.

I think Red Hat is somewhat unique in this regard, as they are one of the few that HAVE scaled that way. Nebula seemed to be a product company, but it may have been true that their products required too much hand-holding to scale.
I have a friend who fuels airplanes for UPS, I don't think he is going to get to work from home anytime soon.
9 Things about null in Java
Taking on a new development process in the middle of a project is much harder than starting on a new one. In particular, as you mentioned there's an issue of legacy bugs. There's mounds of information available suggesting strategies for taking care of this, but ultimately you'll be in an unfortunate transition while you're still handling legacy bugs that makes it hard to move forward.

Most of my experience with agile is in the XP flavors, where the mantra is no bugs. I know it's hard to believe, but I promise it's an achievable goal if the whole team single-mindedly works towards that goal.

You're right, estimating is hard. The thing is, people are actually really good at relative estimation, it's absolute estimation that we completely suck at. That's the idea behind estimating in points: you free yourself from trying to think "how long will this take me?", which you'll inevitably get wrong, to "is this harder or easier than this other thing" which almost always is pretty easy to do.
This must be one of those posts you only understand after you've been primed into some obscure context.
Stephen King: “Everything You Need to Know About Writing Successfully”
"One thing is pretty clear, even though investors look interested in European startups, they don’t get serious unless you’re also based here. I wanted to invite a very knowledgeable investor to our startup showcase and he didn’t even blink while telling me with a big grin “I’m not interested”. I found it really funny...'

Comment a little more on that if you would. Do you think it's because of the tax and legal complications or concern about the potential to attract future talent? I've heard similar comments quite a few times now and it adds to my existing curiosity. You kind of need a first person narrative to be able to get a good picture. Thanks
New Chinese Cyberattacks: What’s to Be Done?
How will that survive transcoding? What if you bump it down to 477p resolution?
Indian scientists create driverless car in record-breaking 28 days
Majority of US imports come from Canada. American reliance on Middle Eastern oil is small.

America is down to 27% imports: http://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.cfm?id=32&t=6

America imports roughly three times as much from Canada as it does Saudi Arabia: http://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.cfm?id=727&t=6

America currently has 690 million barrels in strategic reserve (It's silly to assume that Canadian imports would ever be cut off, but if the 3 million barrels elsewise got cut, we could potentially last for years on the reserve).

That 690 million barrel reserve doesn't count the nation stock of oil. The United States is experiencing a massive oil glut with the oil inventories currently at an 80 year high (and sitting near maximum national capacity) at 482.4 million barrels of inventory. http://www.arkansasonline.com/news/2015/apr/13/tanks-full-of...

So yeah, the US imports about 5,000,000 barrels a day (strong majority of that from Canada), but has over 1,000,000,000 barrels of oil stored inside our borders as inventory and reserve.
> and the only tracking set up HBO seemed to be a watermark in the bottom left corner of the screen.

If they only had the one obvious watermark, I think HBO was hoping that maybe the people getting the screeners would think that there is more than one way they had the video tracked. Either the person who uploaded didn't care, or didn't think about it.

Its worth noting HBO has been on a path to make content available on the internet even without Cable (HBO now). probably a good long term strategy. There are always people who want it sooner, and free!

This is why we can't have nice things..
How to sell your company – Advice from the former CEO of LoveFilm
Wouldn't a simple re-encode break any sort of stenography?
Darpa Artificial Intelligence Search for Crime on the 'Dark Web'
Thanks for share, I haven't hear of this.

--

It always amazed me how the missing features on HN created a bunch of side-services!!

We are a truly creative gang
Signal/noise issues would favor a low power omnidirectional emitter placed near a receiving dish, roughly in the known signal path. It could overwhelm the real signal by favorable inverse square intensity. Put the emitter on a drone.
Exactly, Amazon understands and targets the majority, and they wind up very satisfied. This article lost me at "you’ll find hundreds and hundreds of people asking, begging for Amazon to change this." Ooh, hundreds! Amazon has manufactured at least 10 million kindles by now.
> It's meant to be recipe for collaborative, relaxed, friendly environment. Not a pressured hot house.

The vast majority of work environments cannot be described as relaxed and friendly (hell, most of them probably aren't all that collaborative). Far more could be described as pressured hot houses.
The classic success cases for Scrum were projects that had (a) been done before, and (b) been done by the same team.

So they had lots of experience.

If you ask an assembly-line worker "How long is it going to take you to install this transmission?" they'll be able to tell you within a few seconds. But that's not engineering.

If you ask someone who's written essentially the same app five or six times before "How long will it take you to finish feature X?" they'll be able to tell you with pretty high confidence.

If you ask someone, "How long is it going to take you to finish designing and implementing that gozzlewog?" they won't have the foggiest idea. Ask them again, when they've re-implemented it a few times, and they'll have an idea then. Until then you can decompose the problem and do analysis on the pieces and make assumptions, but you still won't know how long it'll take until it's done because the industry has been doing this for like 70 years and the one thing we know is that scheduling unknowns and unknown unknowns is still very, very hard.

Scrum works if you've done it before. Apply it to green fields or systems with known wicked behavior, and you're likely to fail in quite a few ways, including pissing off your developers and boiling off the good ones for better work environments.
Of course we have no idea if they used steganography or not, right? He bases the article on the idea that they have no tracking info except the watermark, but I don't see any evidence that they don't know more.
I'd suggest the "About" page needs a lot more text and description and examples - I'm not going to sign up on some vague prose promising some kind of IFTTT-like with unknown services and rules.
How can people so easily assume that the watermark was truly the only tracking present? HBO wouldn't immediately come out swinging even if they knew who or where the copy was leaked.
How do we know they're not using techniques like this?
Interview with the winner of Go Challenge #1
This assumes you know the method they are using. As the post mentioned, a few milliseconds + or - at the end of a scene would not be noticeable and the overall timestamp would still be constant if "self-compensating offsets" were used.
While using the millisecond length of things would be clever and would catch which copy it originated from while it remained secret that was how you were doing it. As soon as it was known it is not much harder for the person ripping the copy to shorten all the scenes by a random number of milliseconds than it is for them to blur the watermark.

I mean this could be a good addition to the current tech used in something like Cinavia, which is the most robust system I have seen and if not already doing it could easily identify individual sources. But the inaudible audio and steganography used in that system just seem much more of a pain to circumvent than using lengths of scenes as a serial number of sorts.
I did some semi-extensive research to find something to use in-house for our mercurial repositories (with potential to switching to Git because so much more is available). I went with Phabricator which also supports mercurial and is free to setup in-house. It's quite a spectacular product, I recommend checking it out. Kallithea needed an update (especially for UI), but the capabilities and the look&feel of Phabricator make it very useful.

https://www.phabricator.org
It's a bit hard to encode millisecond scale differences in scene or credit lengths - when the video is quantized to ~40ms frames...
Getting stuff done, but in the eyes of management not fast enough. Just guessing but this seems to be the rule.

If you really need agile it will not help and if your team already rocks agile won't improve it, likely you'll already be doing something like it but customized to your needs.

I've seen a couple of fairly efficient teams utterly ruined by switching to 'agile' and I've yet to see an inefficient team become more efficient by deploying it.
Some or several of the points you raised probably fit more into the "chance to look into the puzzle" phase so that doesn't really stand to reason against his point 100%.
Why tell us that?! :(

Why did I start this thread?
To be honest, when I heard that the files were protected with a watermark, I assumed that they actually meant a steganographic watermark. I thought that this tech had been adopted into the industry ages ago, I'm rather surprised if it isn't the case, given the arms-race between the media and illegal distribution.
I would be more excited if it was open source.