skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm all for porn. Larry Flint said it once: It's just sex.

So why make a big deal of it?
There is no way you can take the morale high-ground by disallowing porn. Tell me, are apples customers conservatives that walk around playing golf all day?
"mindfulness meditation" = vipassana

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=587032
REST, by a mile.

I've written programs and frameworks that handled both SOAP and REST before, and no, you can't have them, because SOAP needs to die.
Several of those startups don't disclose the chosen metrics either, though.
You could try learning something really obscure. As far as I know I'm the only hacker within 1000 miles who speaks any Mongolian as well as fluent English. Someday, two buyers are gonna show up in that market and keep bidding against each other till my rates go to the moon! Dreaming about that day is much more fun than trying to compete with tens of thousands of (French|Chinese|Spanish|Russian)-English bilingual programmers. In the mean time, I try to hang out at a webforum from time to time and answer random tech questions in Mongolian, which makes me feel all warm and fuzzy. (Or less charitably: I can't sell my skills, so I give them away for free).

To be perfectly serious, the recommendation for what language is "useful" to learn really depends on your own language learning skill --- which is a combination of inborn talent, knowing what learning methodologies suit you, and experience with compensating for a bad environment (e.g. I assume you live in the U.S. and attend an Anglophone workplace everyday).

Spanish is a pretty typical answer to this question not because it's the "most useful" but because it's not that hard for English speakers to learn, it's more widespread in the U.S. than other foreign languages, and it even has some applicability in tech (a lot of people I've seen suggesting moving to Latin America to cut your cost of living while you bootstrap your startup). Chinese/Japanese is somewhat harder to speak, a lot harder to read, a lot harder to get a visa to the country as a one-man startup, etc.
Ok, so you obviously do not know a few things:

- The reason why the flash plugin hogs your cpu is because apple doesn't expose the proper hardware acceleration API: http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/does_html5_really_beat_...
Adobe would want to optimize the plugin but can't.

- Why is it Adobes fault when your laptop becomes noisy under cpu load? Maybe you just don't need that fat cpu if you never use more than 30% of it? I don't know, but when i buy a device that is too noisy i don't blame software that makes use of it. In Apples world, this is of course not true. It's Adobes fault that your laptop is noisy.

- Afaik, the solution for creating flash applications on the ipad would be very different from the plugin, as it would generate objective-c code that'd be compiled by the apple SDK

About sites dropping Flash:

I believe that the internet doesn't need apple to get rid of flash. The internet will eventually not use Flash for navigation or for Ads in the mid-term anyway. As soon as major browsers support everything that flash does. That's how the internet has been evolving for the last decades. First it used frames, then tables, then CSS. Why would flash hold its position if it's the inferior technology?

And another question:

If Apple thinks that flash on the web is evil: They could've said "ok, no flash plugin in the browser". But leave the rest intact. Let developers use whatever tools they want to build applications! Be it Flash, Air, Unigine and whatever programming language they want! It is, i repeat, not about what is the best experience for the user it is just about the money, no more, no less.

Also, when flash is that bad. Why is it still supported under Mac OS X? I mean.. you should just get rid of flash on your laptop too. No? Of course not, Flash doesn't expose a threat to Apple on the Macbook, you are already buying your software elsewhere.
I've hated being a USER of APIs built on frameworks that output multiple APIs, like SOAP/REST/XMLRPC all at once.

You end up with unnatural APIs in the 'REST' api.

Don't get caught up in the details of 'rest', focus on developing the API for your users -- think about what Calls they need to make, make it simple, document it!, give examples, keep the output formats sane (xml and json are done easily now days), and you'll be miles ahead of most web services.
The promise of SOAP is really cool, but I've found that you end up making countless special cases and arbitrary error handling anyway.

The more complex and potentially fragile the in- and output of your service is, the more attractive XML becomes, since XML can be independently validated. If you have no such needs, REST will do just fine for almost anything.
Clearly, Steve Jobs is the only person in the world that believes privacy mode in browsers is for planning surprise birthday gifts for your spouse.
Read this response somewhere. Included in The Ultimate Guide I believe.

Check out this wildly entertaining speech by Adams published last month:
http://www.ted.com/talks/douglas_adams_parrots_the_universe_...
I'm not sure if Feynman intended it or not, and I wouldn't be surprised if he had, but this sounds like a sarcastic commentary on how even "great men" could be subject to appeals to authority (ie Compton).
All the chap did was accidentally leave his phone in a bar. Presumably he had it out for dog-fooding style testing. Gray Whoever (I've forgotten already) is hardly a name that will live in infamy.

Unless the next time we see him is in a grainy beheading video featuring Steve Jobs wielding a large machete.

All this 'OMG STOLEN' drama is totally over the top - I think some people are just looking for an angle at which to get outraged at a newsworthy product leak.
It looks promising, but I saw so much articles on new miraculous treatments that I became a little bit more dubious every time I read an article like this one.
The other thing I miss is Hacker Hacker News (http://hackerhackernews.com/) - I wish something like that were built into HN.
Say “NO” To Free Banner Design
Whether you decide to create a banner design yourself or with the help of a professional banner design expert you must make sure that the banner design you get should be unique yet affordable so while it helps your company in making an impact, it doesn’t cost you a big amount of money that you regret about later on.
I'm surprised about some of the comments here. There is no reason they needed to post this guy's name. It simply isn't relevant to the story at all.

It's like they thought it was a good idea to kick someone when they were already down. It's just petty.
It looks like items on /ask are now ranked the same way as items on /news -- so yes, posts with no votes won't get onto the list.

Personally I'd be happier if /ask was in pure chronological order.
A lot of students suffer under it. I know I did, spent the final 2 years trying to bring my GPA back to something respectable. A lot of departments now list your overall and in-major GPAs. The in-major holds more importance unless they are the laziest recruiters. In general, you'll take more foundational courses that don't count against your major GPA for the first year. By the time you're a senior most of your courses will be in your major and count accordingly.

I will say, that one of the major differences between the US and the UK is no one really gives a toss about where you went to school and what you studied in the US. On my CV I still list my school and major, but it's a footnote, right above my interest in photography and basketball. American recruiters rarely ask me about it, and UK recruiters think it's almost as important as my javascript knowledge.
Seems like Chrome is hurting IE more than Firefox, which is good news for everyone I think.

I think it's misleading to lump IE6 together with IE7 & 8 as they're used by different people for different reasons.
And Firefox 3.6 looks well on it's way to being the most used browser version (a previous Firefox held this title briefly at the turn of the year, before they released the newer version).
The other ridiculous thing about Jobs's position is that, for well over half the world, SI Swimsuit apps are porn.

He is using the term as if it had some kind of objective definition, and that makes no sense at all.
12 white hat hackers you should know
but would'nt that affect even the older tickets, because section title (e.g. Seat number, etc.) would also be in english.

Given the popularity of smartphones and dictionaries, I think I can punch in that text and get back a reasonable understanding of what the ticket means - rather than a non-verbose ticket with English section markings and roman numerals (no - the entire world doesnt use Roman numerals)
I don't mind them being subject to a similar ranking, but I'd like them to appear for at least a time before they drop down the rankings.
It is not O(n log n) — neither is quicksort for that matter :)

The comb sort is intuitively O(n²). The inner loop will run n - gap iterations, where gap starts at n / 1.25 and decrease toward 1. I think we can effectively count this as O(n).

The outer loop is more tricky, in the worst case it will run until n < 1.25^m (where m is number of iterations).

Edit: Just re-read the algorithm and I overlooked that the outer loop stops when gap is below one AND no swaps were performed, so the above is optimistic. I.e. it is very clearly O(n²) and if you want to be exact, it could actually be something like O(n × (n + log n)) (for a shrink factor of 2, to make it simple) — but more detailed study of the algorithm is required to arrive at the exact worst running time, as the “preprocessing” (where gap > 1 is going to affect how many swaps can be performed when gap = 1).
If Apple has a problem with junk in the AppStore already, that's just an even better reason to try to keep more of it out.

I don't understand the thought process that leads to the conclusion that since there are low quality apps in the AppStore, Apple should go out of their way to bring even more of it in.

Also, Apple would get a world of crap if they decided to add something as arbitrary as taste policing to their AppStore review process.
I find "That is a wonderful idea. You can either clone the repository and make it yourself or, in the alternative, pay my consulting rate and I'll do it for you." solves 99% of my problems with the OSS entitlement mentality.
When you say "school" there, do you mean university? As far I can see, people are equally interested in the US as the UK as to which university you went to - at least for the institutions that have strong brands.
If you take a look at that ticket again: the only data that is variable-sized, is on a separate line - viz the Full Name of the passenger.
I do not think the positions of any other information would ever change - which means it would be staff friendly.
You think people will avoid the iPad simply because it doesn't support Flash? I think that will only apply to a very insignificant number of consumers.

As for the OS, I strongly disagree; running a SPOD-free OS is not a compromise, it is a crucial feature for devides like the iPhone and iPad (see http://daringfireball.net/2010/04/mobile_multitasking).
Making integrated circuits from uranium oxides
There is a slight upside - Apple might not let him go because they don't want to wear any flack from the media.

Still, that would put him in a pretty difficult position. Having the perception that you were kept on just to avoid PR problems isn't an ideal situation. I'd rather be sacked quietly and look for a job elsewhere, or be quietly kept on; whatever the boss though best.

I'm sure that the reporters justify it to themselves on that basis. But they haven't looked ahead.
To me the joy of Adams' humour was his elevation of the mundane. I think this is a perfect example; the fun of this simple little paragraph is that the reality was so parochial but the thing became an independent legend surrounded by Byzantine theories.

Perhaps I'm reading too much into it though...
I don't know about, say, Japan but here in Europe (Denmark, Spain and the UK where I spend most of my time), it doesn't differ much from the US.
Then again, his brain is part of the computer that is supposed to calculate the question, so maybe his random thought was not really random.
Hyperpolyglot Lisp cheat sheet: Common Lisp, Scheme, Clojure, Emacs Lisp
The perfect Security-Question
No, it's not obvious. Who knew? Do you know the guy that sold them the phone for $10K? It's Gizmodo that we hate — they are suppose to be journalists of some sorts, not bunch of kids on 4chan to which the poor standards you described indeed apply.
I had a look through /newest and there seems to be roughly one new Ask HN post an hour although with the quantity of new submissions that HN get every hour they quickly move off the first page.

I suspect that the posts don't stay visible on /newest long enough for a discussion to start and for the normal voter to find it worth voting for. I submitted an Ask HN post yesterday and it was off the bottom of /newest in little over an hour and a half, that is not long enough for a discussion to have become interesting.

I don't know if there is something that could or should be changed to improve this, maybe an /ask/newest?
Constantin Film AG demands end to Hitler/Downfall parodies
Excellent UX Videos – It's all about interaction
It appears that he provides the source from the main page(http://bitbucket.org/sqs/hhn/src) so if you wanted you could get something close to it running if you want.
Solar Activity Linked to Cold Winters in UK
REST, please. You can generally bootstrap a REST client from any language with basic HTTP and XML/JSON/… libs (ie. basically every language.) On the other hand, doing SOAP without a dedicated library is a path to pain and suffering, and not every language has such a library. Additionally, the complexity makes it that much harder to find a reliable library. (Python, for instance, has a SOAP lib, but it's old and tends to not play at all nicely with .NET's automatic SOAP services. Last time I tried to do that it ended with wailing and gnashing of teeth.)
So you need a typeface, an alternative way on how to choose fonts
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8r1CZTLk-Gk
Multitouch and GPU acceleration? E.g. fast pinch-to-zoom into hi-res originals.
Good call. As per link in http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1277701 (elsewhere in this page):

the binary search program that Bentley proved correct and subsequently tested in Chapter 5 of Programming Pearls contains a bug [...] it fails if the sum of low and high is greater than the maximum positive int
I think this is pretty simple. Either they pay, or you have no obligation.
I think the recent problem has been an overwhelming amount of iPad/iPhone/Apple news,opinion,opinion on opinion etc which has pushed everything else out.

Hopefully it'll settle down soon. It's great there is now the 'ask' page though which means at least that we can see such posts.
Fair play. Though you are financially supporting the anti-tinkering apple, you're telling apple (with your dollars) that closed is the way to go. Be careful how that turns out.
Twitter Chirp Conference Video Archive
The single most common SOAP interface that I have seen is something like:

string DoStuff(string request)

Where the request and the result are already XML documents!

SOAP has taught me to fear any technology that starts with "Simple" - it won't be.
I'm pretty sure it wont happen but I wonder if the Fed is salivating at the thought of collecting taxes on internet retail that crosses state lines?
Somehow "multitouch" and "pinch-to-zoom" sound really strange in this context... :-)
Lots of 'free software' and hacking stuff goes on in Germany. Of course, the level of English in Germany is superb, so you can still probably talk to them there.
Touch Gesture Reference Guide
I've found myself going through the HN archives when I'm looking for advice. Part of the issue with fewer ask HN questions may be that a lot of common questions have now been answered. I do think those posts are more fun to read and comment on though.
I love Jessica, I mean.. how can you not? I found myself smiling when she was laughing/smiling about something.

Another great interview by Andrew, as usual. Though, one thing I've noticed in a few of the Mixergy interviews is Andrew making small comments that, to me, seem really rude and off-putting. I don't think he notices that he's doing it and it doesn't seem to phase most interviewees, but I personally feel awkward when he does it.

Example: Jessica says she needs to blow her nose and he goes "If I do it all the time here, you might as well" - this is a mild example, and I don't think Jessica really noticed/cared about it. It came from a good place "hey I do it too, don't worry about it" but the way it's worded and tone can make it seem rude.

In other interviews it comes off as "you might as well, it's not like I have anything better to do". I'm weird and probably the only one that feels this way, but I just say it because if I was interviewed the comment/tone would not make me feel very good about myself and I'd be put off a bit.
Better yet: what if the contracts become self-aware?
Want to know the difference between a CTO and a VP Engineering?
Of course not today.
There is no smartphone alternative that runs flash (today!).
But let's skip forward to the end of the year and assume that by then Symbian, Meego, Blackberry, WebOS and Android will have flash support and it may work reasonably well (demovideos i have seen let me believe that).
By then, the iPad may have a major marketshare.
But, by then, a developer can write one application and target 5 major mobile OS and even all major Desktop OS with Adobe Air (keep in mind: Nokia and RIM sell a _lot_ of smartphones). For me, as a developer, i'd like to be able to use Adobes tools to create apps for most mobile phones.
Eventually, in 2011 this will make an impact on sales.
And in the end, there will be a lot of devices with a similar featureset to Apples products, with flash, without vendor lock in, probably even cheaper.

What's SPOD? daringfireball doesn't seem to work today, at least for me.

edit: Ok, google cache brought up the side. So, your single point why a Desktop OS doesn't belong on an iPad, is that it doesn't have a spinning icon indicating app startup?
I wonder how that would work on a device without a mousepoint anyway. So, you are trying to tell me that _every_ iPad application starts instantly? Even bigger games don't have a loading screen? Could it be that iPad apps are rather small? Most apps i run on my Desktop start up instantly, except for bigger tools like an office suite, photoshop, video editors, eclipse, that wouldn't even run on the iPad.
You're right (and thanks, hadn't seen that 'novelty' yet).

My reply was more in the vein "what you probably need, not exactly what you asked" - these not strictly 'built-in' either.

(That could be a bad idea, cf. second and last items of the Zen [python -c "import this"]).
Some people are just rich and can buy whatever they want.

But other people buy fancy houses, fancy cars, fancy computers, fancy holidays, fancy clothes etc. by virtue of choosing what is important to them and spending less on everything else. You can't spend more than average on everything unless you have more than average money. On average, people don't.
An introduction to Category Theory for Software Engineers [PDF]
UK Launches Formal Probe Against Goldman Sachs
Chrome: Not releasing unnecessary memory within tabs
Yep, been there, done that. Sending bespoke XML string representations over SOAP transport: priceless
The article neither claims, nor offers any evidence, that comb sort is "just as good as quick sort"; could someone fix the title here, please?

I'd guess that it probably performs about as well as Shell sort: hard to analyse, strongly dependent on the detail of how your increments are chosen, typically worse than O(n log n).
I can't emphasize this enough. It applies across all disciplines too. Great teachers don't have to be the best in their field, most are not. However, in my limited experience, those who think they are best in their field are more often than not awful teachers.

In those rare cases where they are both, it's something magical. I can only think of 3-4 teachers that I have ever had that fit that bill.
GPA in general is a rather baseless measure. Taking a class and getting an "A" means nothing; it's impossible for an outside evaluator to know whether that indicates a great effort in a tough class or an average effort in an easy class. I think we'd be better served with simply issuing z-scores and normalizing grades completely, so there's some real context.
I noticed that if I open, say 20 tabs and later close all but one, there are still 20 processes, so I have to use taskkill /f /fi "imagename eq chrome.exe".

I searched to see if this was a known issue and found this discussion.

Someone even suggests that Google uses Chrome to use our computers to calculate index of cache in the background then send the results back to Google...

Don't be evil? What do you think?
Did they change their article? I only saw it a couple of hours ago and it seemed pretty soft towards him.. going as far as to say it wasn't really an onerous fault and that he shouldn't be fired for making a simple mistake. It certainly didn't seem negative enough to create the shitstorm currently going on here and on Twitter..
Isn't that what Sony/Betamax said about VHS?
REST.

So much easier to explain and consume.

Plus, a modern framework like Rails essentially bakes the REST API in for you. Some of my apps are now really consumers and coordinators of Ajaxified JSON requests backed onto Rails.
This seemingly unending speculative rant by the blogosphere will continue until Apple either publishes a concrete set of step by step guidelines, or opens the floodgates. Neither of which will happen, and the process will most likely remain a black box. I am sure that Apple is doing their best to make the process as efficient as balanced as possible, and they do make good when they can - but yes they make mistakes too, it happens when you have a morally biased human process for decision. Yet they simultaneously manage to keep their options open and make a substantial profit, which is not an easy task.
It's an interesting question. Probably falls under the "teach a man to fish..." adage nicely. If you provide a functional tool that has reached the goals you set for it where's the obligation? Exotic features that are outside of your goals simply do not benefit your interests in the project. Someone has to make it worth your time and effort to continue otherwise you've provided a good platform that seems to be well documented and capable of being taken over by another interested party. If that never happens then you're probably right that the project is finished. Maybe find similar active projects to steer your users towards.
It would appear that you are submitting every other article from your blog.
Ask HN: What code have you read recently?
Reading code is good right? What pieces of code have people here read through recently? Was it inspirational/educational/helpful? Any code you would recommend to others?
Italian is spoken in the canton of Ticino in Switzerland, and is also an official language in the Croatian region of Istria, which was long a possession of the Republic of Venice. That said, yeah, it's not terribly useful in the world at large, but the food is good, the girls are beautiful, and the countryside is stunning in its variety.
5 tips for getting NDAs signed
Web Analytics 101: Definitions: Goals, Metrics, KPIs, Dimensions, Targets
What is Mesothelioma Or Asbestos Lung Cancer
This is an inaccurate (and edited) link title.
Incidentally, since this particular post of yours has now got some votes, why don't you re-post your earlier question here?