Silicon Valley and YC don't exactly have a stellar reputation for ethical behavior. Having a "pirate website" at the top of the news page doesn't exactly change that perception.
I totally get that journals are evil, and charging money for research generated with public funds is questionable. It's very frustrating as a small entity needing to view articles, and being asked to cough up $25-50. That said, there are legitimate alternatives (like emailing the corresponding author, or professional society memberships, or alumni library access, or DeepDyve). The linked website is flagrantly violating copyright and that should be cause for concern; not breaking the law is part of every engineering (and professional) ethical code.
Distinguish ethical from legal. Not all laws are ethical (depending on where you live, most laws could easily be unethical), and this website goes out of its way to say why the laws they violate are not.
>One may well ask: “How can you advocate breaking some laws and obeying others?” The answer is found in the fact that there are two types of laws: There are just laws and there are unjust laws. I would be the first to advocate obeying just laws. One has not only a legal but moral responsibility to obey just laws. Conversely, one has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws. I would agree with Saint Augustine that “An unjust law is no law at all.” Now what is the difference between the two? How does one determine when a law is just or unjust?
One guidance for the ethical side are the guidelines agreed upon by professional associations. I can't think of any that condone copyright infringement.
I disagree that that is a good source of guidance. Even if we take that as a given, OF COURSE few organizations promote breaking the law (sometimes a crime it self).
Another guidance for the ethical side is the concrete behaviour of working scientists: If they would send you the paper if you asked them by email, this is a clear statement that copyright violation is perfectly okay.
Way back in the day, we would buy reprints from the journal, and then mail them to requesters. And then Xerox machines appeared, and we made our own copies. Now we just email PDFs.
At least in my discipline, authors either retain copyright to their manuscript and can disseminate that freely, or they are able to personally disseminate the final published article (sometimes including on their own website). No copyright transgression occurs in this case.
I think you are making a mistake of equating ethics with legality.
Furthermore, I am not affiliated with YC and have never been even been to Silicon Valley. I merely use this news/link aggregator because the content and links interest me.
Linking to a site doesn't even mean you are condoning it. Would you really rather the mods censor content like this because they are worried about their reputation? I think that is the day I would stop reading HN.
Well, I'm not from Silicon Valley or YC, and I avoid torrenting music etc because it takes more directly from content creators, but the publishers' business practices put this on a whole different level to me. Also, half the time for the old-school stuff that one has to cite in the introduction for a paper, the corresponding author is dead but the paper is still under copyright.
Hm, let's investigate how things get to the front page of HN. Ah, here it is, on a page titled "Hacker News FAQ": https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html under the header "How are stories ranked?"
Maybe perceptions are completely off base sometimes.
If they want to seriously engage regulated industries like finance, medical, energy, etc., they need to. As it stands now, an association with them is suspect.
I too am disappointed to see this here, though the young hotheads are obviously out in force today and relishing sticking it to the man.
Surely we are better than this.
One of the earliest lessons I was taught, and I taught my kids, is that if somebody else has something we want and doesn't want to share it, it's not OK to just take it.
More importantly most of the scientists want their research to be read and studied as widely as possible but have their careers to worry about. The journal system is being widely criticised but academics are not in the best position to take action against it.
The dissemination of knowledge, with it's potential for reducing inequality and increasing social mobility, is much more important than the profitability of journal publishers and outweighs the risk of hurt feelings due to a sense of ownership of knowledge (which seems like a fallacy in itself) that anyone involved could possibly have.
So why not email the corresponding author? I have yet to not get (or give) a manuscript that way. From my own perspective, each time I respond I'm possibly getting another citation. It's also a great form of networking.
When I do research I go through a lot of papers, many of them are discarded after the first couple of sentences. It would slow me down a lot, when I had to contact all of the authors in the first place.
How useful would google really be, if you had to contact every author before reading the actual website?
What's the practical difference between getting any paper you need from the authors and getting any paper you need from such a website? Except much more work for anyone in the former case without any benefit.
> One of the earliest lessons I was taught, and I taught my kids, is that if somebody else has something we want and doesn't want to share it, it's not OK to just take it.
That is why I don't take it away, but copy it instead.
> One of the earliest lessons I was taught, and I taught my kids, is that if somebody else has something we want and doesn't want to share it, it's not OK to just take it.
Like the absolute power of a dictator?
Of course this is a hyperbolic example, but the real world is not only black and white and simple rules like that cannot cope with the complexity of it. The question is, where we should draw the line. And many people in here agree, that publicly funded research should be made available to the public at no further costs for the greater good.
If, the king, reserves all the political power to themselves you would not join (and expect your children) to not join in a revolution against them?
If corrupt gov officials & cronies. keep all the food/medical aide for themselves, you would let your family starve, sick child die before stealing what you needed?
My point is your "lesson" is overly simplistic and naive. Reality is much grayer and messier. Some believe what in other contexts would be considered unethical, is morally justified, even morally required when it is needed to combat injustice/other unethical situation. But, sometimes the means do not justify ends. (messy). Why you and your kids need critical thinking more than simplistic platitudes.
I find this is generally a poor place for hardware-related startups.
Places to check (and network with)—I'd try checking in with your university's tech transfer office: they might be able and willing to clue you into recently-formed startups licensing university IP. Another would be your university's professional practice office (may go by another name), i.e., the office that sets up student internships. Another is with your department's industry relations rep (if you have one). A fourth place would be in any hacker spaces or tech villages in town. A fifth would be with the local angel investor groups.
A really great possibility is to take your senior design project seriously. It's not unheard of for those to turn into something commercially viable.
If you consider it functional, Common Lisp is still used by some very large and established companies: the Lisp HUG mailing list (LispWorks) will frequently have email signatures from some of them. There is some truth to the notion that CL is a competitive advantage and so its use tends not to be discussed in the open.
The right way to do that would be with FTIR or Raman spectroscopy, and this sensor is capable of neither.
At best, this is an ersatz replacement for the tunable filter on a hyperspectral imaging system. There are some advantages (off hand, acquisition rate is a big one) to a more diverse mosaic filter, but other than in using QDs as the actual filter medium, this idea is not at all new.
Meh, it's a use case scenario. When the differences in the materials you are testing for are so large, the sensor can make a pretty good bet for you. Take the case of; Is this Tylenol or a Skittle. Acetaminophen and fructose are very different and you can test for that pretty simply. To get very accurate readings you need a much more powerful pulse laser as the source, ture, but mose people don't need that. You can get 80% of the use cases with 20% of the 'tech', I think that's a great reason to stick one in every phone you can.
I'm not a big FTIR person, but at least for Raman, laser power is far less important than the linewidth (and you definitely don't need a pulsed laser) and the rest of the optical engine. I'm actually pretty bearish across the board on these consumer spectroscopy products mostly due to the importance of sample prep. Your use case statement is correct, distinguishing paracetamol from candy should be easy, but is really that a common need or a novelty? It seems to be the latter to me.
Mostly because there are very very few people in the world who are able to develop such a complex thing for Lisp (or similar runtimes). Since the market is relatively small and many applications are not overly concurrent, there is very little money to support the development.
I am guessing[1] that GCs are easier to code correctly without the concurrency and that a GC language is already expected to be slower so it doesn't make sense to do a concurrent GC. Also possibly, the language doesn't support concurrency well. Like a Python or Ruby.
[1] just an educated guess. I have no real knowledge of GCs other than skimming how they work in articles and runtime/language docs.
It doesn't actually implement concurrent GC, although what it does implement is far simpler and has a similar effect (low latencies) as concurrent GC.
Each Erlang process has a separate heap that is collected independently; because the process heap is usually small a stop-the-process collection does not take much time.
The downside is that sending messages between processes requires copying all the data that is sent between process heaps.
> Rust’s strengths are Clojure’s weaknesses, and vice-versa. Rust isn’t as expressive or interoperable, and its concurrency story isn’t as complete. That said, it’s much better for performance or safety critical needs, and it can be embedded inside other programs or on very limited hardware.
I find this hard to believe. Is anyone actually using Rust for a safety-critical application?
Depends on what you mean by safety. "People may die" safety, no; but "data may be lost, existential risk to business" safety, yes. Dropbox is writing a block storage engine in it.
I go by what I thought was the accepted definition, which is a failure or error presenting a risk for temporary or permanent harm to people. Financial risk like data loss would fall under mission critical.
A lot of certified safe systems are written in C++. I mean the ones that control the machine that could kill you. Response time is often a critical factor in safe systems. Also languages aren't as important as we would like then to be. Proof isn't used much for example because proofs are too difficult to review. Other techniques are more important like review, redundancy and testing. Safe systems tend to be more about boring old software engineering than computer science.
I agree, the choice of programming language is one of the less important parts of the SDLC. In the case of Rust for SC work, as the linked article alludes to, what doesn't make sense to me is that there is no industrial-grade tooling or support software. It seems like an ill-informed statement.
As to proofs, I thought some level of formal proof was required at SIL4?
Are you interested in this? I am planning to get the NetBSD rump kernel running on sel4 at some point soonish, not quite the same but you would get much of userland. (Email in profile).
I upgraded from a Paperwhite 1 to a Voyage because I thought the screen and haptic buttons would be improvements. I can barely see a difference in the screen quality when I'm deliberately looking (and don't notice any while reading), and the haptic buttons are poorly placed so I rarely use them. The Voyage is nice but was questionably worth the extra money over the Paperwhite 1. Now with the Paperwhite 3? Fuggetaboutit.
You know what feature would be a great improvement? A backlight without blue light, for reading at night without screwing up sleep cycles.
Note that this is the upgraded Paperwhite, not the Voyage, and it's the same price as the previous Paperwhite.
Personally, if I set the light near the lowest setting I drop right off to sleep. It might not be campfire light, but it's not so far off from moonlight. Still, if they offered a warmer color option I wouldn't turn it away.
At night, I have to use level 7 on the backlight for comfortable reading without any other lights on. It's noticeably blue to my eyes at that setting. I get that Amazon's trying to make the display look whiter in normal light, but I (and I think others may) place more value on a warmer backlight for nighttime reading. Outside of vacations and doctor appointments, bedtime reading is my most frequent use case.
That doesn't sound good. I really want to use physical button with my kindle. Thats my biggest complaint.
One thing I couldn't find anywhere is how strong is the glass? A reader is much bigger than a phone and I wonder how safe such a big glass screen is.
Agree about the light though, its very glaring at night. I have to lower it to uncomfortably low to read to stop it from hurting the eyes. It actually feels a lot like backlight to me at night.
One of the main reasons I haven't bought a new Kindle Paperwhite or a Voyage is because I like the physical next/previous page buttons. I've tried last year's Paperwhite and I just didn't like flipping pages by pressing a part of a screen.
Thanks for mentioning the haptic buttons on the Voyage - my wife hates touchscreens, so she alternates between the last generation of e-ink Kindle with page turn buttons and the last generation with a keyboard. I'd given up on the Kindle line, but knowing there's an upgrade path for her requirements is helpful.
Now if only there were current phones being made with keyboards..... sigh
Which regular Kindle? The built-in backlight was the selling feature to me. My old Kindle had the light built into the cover which worked OK but was too bright for my wife. The paperwhite is great for reading in bed.
For me the swipe / touch has been worthwhile ! The page turn buttons on the regular used to drive me nuts. Others might be used to it. The Paperwhite is a bit smaller, but has no audio, so the old Kindle is still useful to listen to audio books - though the Audible app on iphone/android is what i use nowadays for audio books. Oh and the backlight - very useful. (as @lambdaelite) pointed out.
I, on the other hand, love the page turn buttons on my Kindle 5 and reluctant to upgrade for exactly the lack of this feature. I'm afraid I will keep stubbornly refusing to get used to swiping for turning pages. Why couldn't Amazon provide both options (swiping and clicking) for page turning, at least on some of their newer devices?
I've got a version 1 Kindle Paperwhite, and you can tap the screen to turn a page. That's what I do.
Random ramble time... (because this aspect of the Kindle Paperwhite annoys me every time I think about it)
The tapping bit is fine, so reading books is no problem, but to be honest, in general, the touch UI is no more than resoundingly adequate. The tapping is fine, and the swiping works, but it doesn't feel as nice as it does on iOS. For me, swiping works best when the UI updates pretty much instantly as your finger moves (e.g., iOS, Android). The Kindle, on the other hand, doesn't do anything until your swipe is finished and the action has been registered. Feels like somebody who's never used an iPad read was given a one-sentence summary of what swiping was, and then wrote some code to do what they imagined. (Maybe they were worried about the screen going all blurry? Well, that's fair enough. But technical reasons won't make the touch UI suddenly brilliant.)
This makes the experimental web browser rather hard to use - a shame, as this could have been such a great feature! - and the book list a bit annoying.
But, still, compared to the non-Paperwhite equivalent, it has a backlight, and it's a bit smaller. And there's never anything wrong with a few more pixels. So overall, I don't mind, and the Kindle Paperwhite gets a thumbs up. It would still have been improved by some more UX work and/or a couple of physical inputs. I think this is what annoys me about it so much - the device is good, but it could have been better, and it's really obvious.
The thing I loved about my Kindle 1 with buttons on both sides, I could lay on my back/side in bed and go back/forth with one hand. If I mess up and go too far or need to navigate menus, on my PW I have to get both hands involved.
Agreed on that. I have a nook and love the buttons. Forward and backward on both sides so I can turn pages one-handed with either hand while I'm holding it. Comes in handy if you have a cat that likes to plop down on your arm while you read.
One of the buttons is starting to stick, so I'm looking at upgrade paths. The Nook Glowlight dropped its page turning buttons, but if I buy anything other than a Nook, everything I've purchased on it evaporates. Thanks, DRM!
I totally get that journals are evil, and charging money for research generated with public funds is questionable. It's very frustrating as a small entity needing to view articles, and being asked to cough up $25-50. That said, there are legitimate alternatives (like emailing the corresponding author, or professional society memberships, or alumni library access, or DeepDyve). The linked website is flagrantly violating copyright and that should be cause for concern; not breaking the law is part of every engineering (and professional) ethical code.