skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I find it ridiculous because they are blaming an epidemic (somewhat caused by their own actions) on an individual's ignorance of computers (likely). She is not being sued for downloading music, she is being sued for sharing (to which she probably was ignorant to). The 54k in damages (or 2M? who knows) that they want to collect is not because some mother accidentally (or not) shared some files. Also, it can be said that they are not protecting their IP very well if she and one other person is being sued out of the likely 50 million or more people that are downloading music illegally (or have at some point).
I missed the <sarcasm> tag.
I think this article, while raising some valid points in some valid contexts, is very stereotypical. I'd very much prefer watching The big bang theory for a fun explanation of these stereotypes to be honest
> Haiti gets to do it right this time

What are the odds that it will?

> all under the eye of international observers who must be present

This isn't the first time that "international observers" have been present. What has happened in the past when they were around? If this time will be different, why?

> Haiti has certainly never been off of the aide map in Canada; money, material, medical, police and military contributions have been going there pretty much since Baby Doc bit the big one.

That is not encouraging. Canada is pretty good at this stuff and pre-quake Haiti suggests that it wasn't enough.
If you're more hacker minded like this audience is, it's extremely trivial to jailbreak - the distinction being that it is totally independent and not sanctioned by Apple whatsoever.

Not only "not sanctioned" by Apple, but actively opposed by them. They go out of their way to stop jailbreakers and consider them criminals, and per the DMCA they're probably right. It will be terrible for future innovation if the only way to gain control over your own hardware is to become a felon.

The App Store and it's uncompromising restriction is the final solution to keeping this cesspool of a software "ecosystem" off the platform.

Along with anything that remotely competes with Apple's business model. If Microsoft had that level of control 20 years ago, we wouldn't have the web.

Even if Apple provided an "Advanced" setting which gains you root access on your device the malware writers would simply instruct the clueless user to enable it, and I KNOW that 99.9% of people would do it without hesitation

That's a testable prediction, since Android offers exactly that setting. We'll see if it becomes a cesspool of malware; I don't expect it to.
I think the sad truth is just that there's a substantial shortage of competent elementary school teachers in the supply pool.

Yes, they struggle even with such simple arithmetic tasks (speaking from my experience at public schools).
Why RAID-anything in a laptop? A single Intel SSD is pretty darn fast, and the second bay is more useful as a large-capacity spinning hard drive (unless you need the optical drive, of course). I have my MBP set up this way and I've been very pleased with it.
I thought so too, until I got to the part where he claims it's running rhymebrain! Still can't figure out whether he's joking or not. Naw, on second reading, definitely sarcasm.
Software development as a sandwich shop?
He forgot to encode the character entities.
>Are tightly closed environments like this where we want personal computing to go next?

I think all signs to point to yes (assuming you use "we" to mean the population at large and not HN). Outside the mobile world, look at the example provided by consoles. They epitomize the idea of a locked down environment. Look at how popular they are compared to PC gaming. I think that consumers want the slick, easy to use, "it just works" environment much more than they want an open environment.

People don't like it when they have to sort through the web to find software of marginal quality. With a closed system a gatekeeper filters this out for them.

I think there will always be a market for those who want an open system, but it will take a back seat to closed systems. It'll be interesting to see how this can be implemented in practice. The idea of a "root mode" for advanced users and "simple mode" for regular users seems like one possible solution.
While I agree on the automative industry I don't think the CEO's of the banking industry are incompetent. Unfortunately, I wish their actions could be excused by incompetence.
if you're on an embedded device, this is actually not a satire
Ask HN: Which bank would you recommend for a merchant account?
We are setting up Authorize.net and are deciding on a bank to create our merchant account with.

We could go with our regular bank, Wells Fargo, but I'm curious to see what other people use.

Thanks!
Computer power doesn't make the hub and spoke system much less attractive. The most efficient way to create a big route network is having a bunch of planes fly into the same city, waiting an hour and a half, let everyone change planes, and then fly back to where they came from. If it's a big city, then everyone who lives in that big city can get direct flights to all of the cities in the network. This means that you want an airport with tons of runways in the middle of a big city for the most efficient route network. Thus, you get ORD, DFW, and ATL, all big cities with big airports with lots of parallel runways. There will always be an airline that wants to make a big city without a big airport with lots of parallel runways their hub. Then you end up with what happens in New York, and what happened in Chicago until the recent runway construction.
IIRC, Intel specify a lifetime of at least 5 years for "normal use", with a warranty of 3 years. In my experience, you're pretty lucky if your laptop hard disk lasts 5 years; of course, the SSDs haven't been out for that long, so who knows.
I love your comment, it's really informative and just what I need. Do you have any suggestions of references (online or offline) where a layman can learn more about social queues? :)
Hum to be honest i really think this is a gross mixup of intelligence and capacity to adapt socially. Somebody very intelligent can communicate at very different levels without having to adapt. I see lots of very clever people doing this without even realizing it. That's because engaging someone vary much more on other criterias than on the mere intelligence of your interlocutor, like social context, aim of the conversation, etc ..

So the pejorative connotation of condescension fits in this context, the context of people thinking they have to adapt because their interlocutor is dumber than they are, when in fact it is they that lacks the social intelligence that would make adaptation natural.
I'm not sure why you believe Blackrock can divert assets from one use to another.

For instance, if Blackrock manages two pension funds (e.g., Target Retirement 2050 and 2040), they can't raid TR2050 to pay for obligations owed by TR2040.
I'm asking the author directly: http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/aue06/going_bac...

I mean, I know Haskell isn't the answer to everything (what is?), but this is a very odd complaint.
In Pennsylvania, you can look up summary offense level driving/parking tickets for everyone via a convenient online form. I tried looking Jobs up, but California seems to wisely keep such information off of the internet.

Edit: There are 5 random cases with Steve Jobs in San Mateo that are the matter of public record, but California seems to keep all traffic information off of the internet. Compare to PA where a parking ticket doesn't go on the internet, but driving without a license plate does.
It seems like the immediate future, at least, is diverse. Thin, thick, everything in the cloud, your machine is also a server, closed, open, appliance

The PC has been extraordinarily open so far, when you think about it. Imagine users of a phone or music player being given easy tools and encouraged to tinker with the way it stores music or contacts. Sounds outrageous.

The reality is that many (maybe most) users are confused by the fact that they can to music via itunes or via the file system. They definitely don't want to think about whether or not itunes is making a copy of that mp3 file in a different format, just remembering its location or moving it.

Open comes with a learning overhead.
One thing the book industry has against it is a few hundred years of institutionalized free books in the form of libraries. I've often struggled with the difference between going to the library and getting a book and downloading the torrent and reading it. I rarely reread books and in neither case do I end up with something physical sitting on my shelf...

They seems the same to me, ethically speaking. I'd love to hear a well thought out counter opinion. And if is isn't the same, then what is the digital equivalent of my neighborhood library?
>There are other solutions in either language that might suit your project better.

What I use at work isn't up to me. I'm paid to work, not whine and whinge about the spade in my hand.
The Top Ten Groundbreaking Tablets
I think you have it exactly right. People with good incomes who are just a bit underwater on houses in San Francisco or New York should probably stay put. But people with low incomes who are hundreds of thousands of dollars underwater in the outskirts of Vegas... well, I actually think that for them, paying off the mortgage would be a financial disaster. It will take up every cent they own for decades, and they will retire broke. Seven years of bad credit pales in comparison to the severe damage they will do to their financial future by trying to pay off this house.

Personally, I think one of the reasons people hang on is that they're too optimistic about a recovery in prices. I'm sure prices on houses in the vegas desert will eventually start to rise again, but from $190k to 550K? Nope.
Yea, I don't doubt the picture is just a concept... but it's probably the closest one to the real thing.
I've bee tracking their progress recently - This is just the start. Good to see that Posterous are already using their solution.
This taught me what it would take to get me to click on another gigaom.com link - an implication of an interview with Alan Kay.

It's right back on my "do not click" mental list, with an extra strong negative weighting. An article about how Alan Kay's comment from several years ago re: the iPhone suggests he might like the alledged new tablet, plus a quip from an interview a year ago does not a worthwhile post make.

The only good thing I can say about not having a universal micropayment system is that I'm glad it cost them hosting and bandwidth fees to handle my page load. I hope it was disproportionately expensive.
Interesting. I also tried reading the Dragon Book, but I found it quite stale. I really enjoyed "Modern Compiler Design" (http://www.few.vu.nl/~dick/MCD.html). They also talk about implementing functional languages.

And if you already know how to write a lexer and a parser, "The Implementation of Functional Programming Languages" by Simon Peyton Jones is worth reading.
Customers pay. Users do not.
Forms are a fragile waste of time 80% of the time.

Only reusable modelforms + generic views really redeem them in my eyes.

The ORM is enjoyable but terrible for doing mass migrations. I've had to do some pretty ridiculous backflips just to get migrations to finish on our VPS.

The utter lack of real migrations. For. Fuck's. Sake. Makes it impossible to make any rapid changes to your models without thinking, "OH GOD WHAT AM I GOING TO BREAK!?!"

There are random and strange install-specific errors that will crop up and we'll either have to reinstall python/django, the OS, or ignore it and trudge on.

And there won't be any mentions of said problems on the mailing list to speak of either. (These kinds of things have occurred on OS X and Win32 both, so don't start pointing fingers.)

The incredible awkwardness of AJAX in Django. Utterly useless. It apparently suited Jacob and Adrian to pretend javascript didn't exist in their world.

It's opaque, doesn't support multiple databases, doesn't support non-relational databases, and it's nearly impossible to modify/rip out any given portion of the framework. It's the epitome of what people hate about full'ish stack frameworks.

I'm to the point where I no longer feel Django is saving me any time. The crippling of templates doesn't create a substantial separation of duties at work because I work with incompetents. Instead I'm left with crippled templates and whiny coworkers.

I'd rather work with Werkzeug/Web.py/Sinatra/Rails at this point. At least Rails was designed to be modular, allowing me to rip the parts I don't like out.
I was thinking it would be called MacXXXX or something starting with Mac. But MacTablet, sounds too much like a McDonald's product.
Thanks for the friendly response, haha. I went into more detail about what was bothering me in Django in another reply by the way.
Closing comment is the money quote. I guess he isn't burning any bridges.
For me at least: the single SSD got boring after a while and I wanted to get better speeds. As for storage I have a 2TB (RAID 0 as well) HTPC ( http://paulstamatiou.com/how-to-build-microsoft-windows-7-in... ) that keeps most of my media and usenet junk, then an external for other stuff.
Spammers penetrate 43% of Internet Forums
The new web app is really sweet.

However, as a Canadian who has a US-based Google Voice number (Montana, eh) functionality is actually reduced on the iPhone.

Now the app initiates a call to a different US number (operated by Google) to then present the Google Voice number as the "who's calling" number.

This results in a long distance call. Before this, calls were initiated by calling the iPhone. Inbound = no long distance charges.

I can still initiate the old way by using the desktop browser instance of Google Voice on a desktop PC, but not from the phone because it auto-detects. Rats!

Oh well. I love the service and can't wait for it to be launched worldwide formally.
Network recorders - It's not enough to know you were a cyber-attack victim
Well, it's the problem for maybe 1% of developers (to pull a "sufficiently tiny to make my point, but still made up" number out of thin air). There is still plenty of money to be made that doesn't conflict with the default functionality of the iPhone.

Don't get me wrong, I'd rather there was no filtering at all and there was instead a sort of "paid apps have the option of getting Apple Certification and being listed at the top of all lists" option instead, but I don't think the App Store problems outweigh the benefits for users.
What would be the benefit of holding on to the legacy stuff? It's not like they have users on old versions of software.
By following the buses around, or by copying the data from Dublin Bus?
I agree. But I think that implicit threat can also help to change the perceived public climate.
It's even better when you consider, for example, a senior dating a junior starting from when they were both 15 <-> 18. Today, happy couple. Tomorrow, criminal sex offender. All that changed was a few hours went by.
Tell HN what exactly?
I'm with you on this. None of these "leaks" actually have any information that hasn't been well-established by other sources who are outside of the NDA.

In fact, Apple as much confirmed all these details themselves when they allowed the device to run with an internet connection earlier in the week and that analytics company (I'm forgetting the name) started seeing a 10-inch iPhone OS 3.1 device. That was no accident. Neither is this.
In other words, he is the kind of pervert he is trying to stop.
Bat Boy Found in Cave, Has Apple Tablet.
Clear your cookies or check it out in another browser.
The article somewhat implies that running TRIM from Windows 7 on a dual-boot (with OS X) system is useful - wouldn't that not be the case though since Windows 7 is not going to know what blocks are in use on the HFS+ partitions?
APL would seem to offer a solution to the challenges of programming on a 240-pel-wide device. Unfortunately, WinMo doesn't offer any way of extending its HR. So Pocket APL users must enter APL characters by hunt and peck on a soft on-screen input panel.

I personally find this heartbreaking.
1 wchar_t *
2 utf2wide(const char *utf)
3 {
4 size_t len;
5 wchar_t *wide;
6 len = mbstowcs(NULL, utf, 0);
7 wide = malloc(sizeof(*wide) * (len + 1));
8 mbstowcs(wide, utf, len);
9 return wide;
10 }
I expected another article about web-based Google Voice.
Wow, talk about moving in the wrong direction.

As if all of the flashing ads on the right weren't enough.
I am gonna get neg to hell for saying this, but MP is garbage. You can't even delete a funnel. Seriously. Try it.
If you were based in the UK, i'd recommend Barclays - IMO, they're by far the most innovative when it comes to supporting online business.
Kids are used to adults meddling in their affairs. It's not like the criminal charges involved with narcotics trafficking stopped the drug trade among teens. You think laws about underage sex, something that is kept a secret from adults in the first place, is going to change anything?
The key difference is that a physical copy of a book can only be loaned out to one person at a time, so it is in no way violating copyright. No copy is made. A lot of people will break down and buy a book that they really want to read if there's a long waiting list at the library (I've done this plenty of times). Once you cross over into the digital realm, you're talking about copying and distributing.

Unfortunately, I don't know what the digital equivalent of the library would be.
I think he does a good job of humorously pointing out the difficulties involved with writing a C++ Webapp, but I don't doubt that he's serious about the performance characteristics being a good thing.
I would like if he clarified the license.
on that note does anyone know of an ansi Forth (or fairly portable at least) server that's reasonably robust.
Ask HN: SVG to PDF on a shared linux server
I have a website which uses SVG for an interactive client side thingamabob. I would like to provide the option to download a PDF of the finished output. I can pass the final SVG output back to the server, where I want to convert to PDF, then return it to the client for download.

This would need to work on a headless shared linux server, where installation or compilation is either an enormous pain, or impossible. The website is PHP, so the ideal solution would be PHP, or use software that's easily installed on a shared webserver. Python, perl and ruby are available, along with the usual things you might expect on a linux box. Solutions that involve cairo, scripting inkscape, or installation more complex than 'FTP it up' are probably out. Spending large amounts of money are also out, naturally.

The nearest that I've got so far is this (http://code.google.com/p/lindenb/source/browse/trunk/src/xsl/svg2ps.xsl) XSL transform which I can drive from PHP and then squirt the resulting postscript through ps2pdf (which is already installed). The only problem with this is that it doesn't support paths - if it did, it would be perfect.

Does anyone have an off the shelf solution to this, or should I just spend some downtime adding paths support to that XSL transform?

Thanks,
Dunc
So if you have an iPhone and a MacBook already - what's the point in getting a tablet/MacSlate/MacWhateverYouCallIt, particularly if it has the same OS as your iPhone? ?
That is an useless link baiting headline. Recommend changing it. An honest "TechCrunch begins showing interstitial adverts" would probably evoke a more interesting debate.
One primary difference is that libraries have real scarcity; they only have so many copies of any given book, only so many books in total, and a limited timeframe for borrowing. That's most important for new releases, where the number of people who want to read the book far outweighs the number of copies the library might have. It also holds to a lesser extent for people who want to read books the library is less likely to have (for example, if you have a favorite author, your local library might not have all their books), and for reference books, where you don't want to be constrained to a particular timeframe.

If libraries had unlimited copies of all books in print and you could borrow them instantly whenever you needed them, most of the main motivations for buying books would disappear, and the book publishing industry would operate very differently than it does today (whether or not that would be better, by providing more access to information, or worse, by removing the incentive to create, is open for debate).

So while in some sense downloading a book and getting it from the library might feel the same, in that you're reading the book without having to pay for it, the reality is different because all of those constraints have been removed.

As with things like music and movies, the primary problem here is that the physical medium imposed real constraints that are a big part of how and why the current business model for publishing has functioned. Just because it's possible to remove those constraints doesn't mean it's necessarily the ethical or pragmatic thing to do.

For the case of libraries, I think it's very much up in the air what the future will look like. You could imagine imposing the same constraints on digital copies via DRM, or imposing those contraints only for new releases, or charging for digital access but leaving physical access as free, or simply moving to some sort compulsory licensing model. But I don't think that digital equivalent exists yet, and I think it'll be a long, difficult road to ironing those questions out.
Scaling makes them different. A physical book can have but one reader at a time, and it can only be lent a limited number of times before wearing out, all of which limited the impact.
For those that are based in the UK, in what way to Barclays stand out?
Which is a very valid point, I have never understood why organizations that need massive scalability for simple, stateless, distributed apps would not pursue such a course.
The psychology of power: Absolutely
It's perfectly sane to write web services (computationally heavy processes accessed via REST) in C++. But for the algorithm-light, marketing-heavy frontend to such a service, use something easier—the optimizations C++ offers aren't worth it there.
"They've been introduced to the criminal justice system merely for appearing in them."

Thank god the legal system has finally figured that out! The true criminals that need punishment are none other than the victims. Fingers crossed this will set a precedent, and murder victims will finally get the punishment they deserve.

That'll teach 'em not to get exploited.
Don't forget the war on terror.
I'm not sure if it's a good or a bad thing that I didn't notice.
To be fair, after coming back to C++ after years in the world of Python and Haskell, it's not as bad as I remembered.

C++ is actually a moderately effective functional programming language. With reasonable knowledge of the standard data structures, and using BOOST, one can actually write fairly expressive and effective C++ code.

Most of the time, I feel like all I'm doing is writing a much more verbose version of Python. The rest of the time, I'm hunting nightmarish segfaults and segfault and template errors.
As the blog post author pointed out, let's not miss "a forest for the trees" - the post is not about THIS bookmarklet (as much as I'd like it to be, for self-serving reasons) or some other bookmarklet. MobileOrchard blog is for developers, not consumers of apps, and this post is about opening a new market and new possibilities for software applications that could benefit from tight integration with Safari and run in the context of any webpage - your imagination is the limit. The idea is that if one can monetize this, more professional-grade bookmarklets can become available. This is an opportunity for developers, and a boon for consumers.
How to leverage your unused domain names to boost website traffic
What I Hope Apple Unleashes Tomorrow
How to run a sexy airport