skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This solution seems a good compromise between the security provided and the inconvenience. The inconvenience is simply entering a license key when you install or reinstall. This is key -- more restrictive DRM solutions with phoning home and so on are a serious inconvenience.

The security is good enough that someone looking for you software probably won't be able to find a working license key or keygen.
I agree, it's a bit of a meta-comment on the sad state of the Apple user-community. I read through probably a full 100 comments in this thread and found myself become more and more annoyed at the lack of basic critical thinking on display. In particular, Apple's done an interesting thing with the LED scheme on some of their hardware. It's a nice touch. It deserves to be noticed. It's interesting that it has never really been copied. Perhaps Apple's industrial design is really a generation or two ahead of the rest of the industry -- that's noteworthy and praiseworthy.

But an interesting LED scheme is immediately extrapolated in the article and by the vast majority of the posts here as indicative of the overall attention to detail Apple puts into its products. I'm simply trying to point out that this extrapolation is nonsensical and wrong by bringing up that Apple actually is good at detail in some areas, not so good in others. Therefore, attention to the detail in how the lights blink is not necessarily indicative of attention to detail in all areas. That seems pretty straightforward and logical to me. Supporting my supposition that critical thinking is clearly not part of the grotesque fawning going on here, here is the kinds of responses I get for putting forward an entirely logical, critical statement.

dieterrams - who is about as gushing a fanboy as the Apple ecosystem can produce.

"Your criticism is silly, and smacks of typical, petty anti-Apple resentment."

"You lost any pretense of trying to provide the voice of reason here."

This is the same person who's response to the OT was "The moment I realized the LED was mimicking breathing (I first experienced it with a white iMac) was the moment I realized just how far Apple goes to make computers for humans. Truly personal computers." Very poetic and followed by a few dozen responses about how, yes, Apple is truly breathtaking and Ive and Jobs are geniuses, etc. etc.

epochwolf & powrtoch - who both asked a variation of the same question.

"Would you mind providing a few examples instead of citing an amorphous large list?"

And at risk of incurring more downvotes from the dieterrams of the world, I responded that no, I won't. All anybody has to do is use their products and read a bit of tech news. Apple's products are full of problems and issues. From lower than average hardware reliability for the industry to wireless signal loss, industry trailing video card drivers or just outright poor design decisions like various gafaws with their input devices -- even things that simple extended reliability testing should expose occur far too frequently and don't appear nearly as often in competitor's products like poor material selection. I shouldn't have to go and research and provide a list of all the nit picky problems Apple has in their products line-up.

Anybody who is paying attention should be able to see them if they aren't spending their entire day trying not to.
I choked on that one too, but mainly because it echoes the kind of thing pseudo knowledgeable non-tech folk say in real life. At least in my real life.
Advice on building a customer focused and entrepreneurial culture
This depends a lot on the person, the school and the actual teacher.

Of course. But I'm making a point about what works for most people, most of the time. In this analogy, it's not necessarily a direct mapping from coach to teacher. If the coach is part of a large infrastructure, such as on a football team, then the mapping is more direct.

Teachers are only one benefit of taking an actual course. An established syllabus which has gone through years of iterations is another benefit - and this is often independent of the actual teacher. Another is the motivation. Taking a course is an investment of money and ego that self-study often lacks. People tend to be more committed to something they've invested in.
Are you referring to the auto switching of Ruby environments based on a directory change? If so, this latest version disables that by default
>The solution is not to put the government in the akward position of self-imposing constraints that regular people do not observe.

You have the right to peaceably assemble, but if you're on my yard, I can ask you to leave or have you arrested for trespassing; the government can't keep you off public property altogether.
The most important thing for the next 5-10 years to me is a) be happy b) provide for my family (I do have two kids and a stable marriage). All my jobs until now were very good, but I was hardly happy at them. I worked at big, big name companies in tech and also in one start-up, albeit not as partner.
Hmm... The Wikipedia article for the circle-drawing algorithm indicates that while it uses the same error-accumulation strategy as Bresenham's line-drawing algorithm, it was not actually invented by Bresenham.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Midpoint_circle_algorithm

I'm not sure how correct this is, as I don't have access to the full text of the papers involved. But it looks like if Bresenham did write the algorithm (and wasn't beaten to it by, say, Pitteway as Wikipedia implies), it wasn't until his 1977 paper, "A linear algorithm for incremental digital display of digital arcs".
Interesting. I didn't know that unmarried mothers in England at that time were "often condemned to asylums". Is such harsh treatment of single motherhood common? I can think of societies where it often carries the death penalty, but those societies also permit polygyny.
FastCompany already deemed it a major Dead End (inane article, but was speaking about "streaming search" which seems the same thing). :D
http://www.fastcompany.com/1684939/why-google-streaming-sear...
Yeah right. And /dev/null jokes are as old as Unix and always good for a laugh.
If you sell the software digitally the size of the "serial number" isn't a problem.

Just put it on a web page (and in an email, for later use) and have the user copy-paste it. Or even better, do what patio11 is doing: when the user clicks "Buy software" in the app, add a magic number to the URL you send the user to and have the software poll the server to see if the user has paid yet.

Also: poll the clipboard to see if the user has copied a valid serial key, to save the user the hassle of pasting it in the correct input box.
Management is a religion. But society was built on religion and we need it today the same way it was needed in Ancient Egypt and Sumeria. Authority is very hard to justify.

The high priests of the religions of political ideology and management rule over the peoples of the world. The good thing is we are not going to leave Stonehenge and the Pyramids as traces of our stage in development as species.

And no, I'm not an atheist. :-)
Extending the premise to the ultimate, if you have time to study just one book and one in which not a single word is wasted it's got to be :

The Elements of Computing Systems: Building a Modern Computer from First Principles by Nisan and Schocken
Here are a couple of scientific articles from two of the more well respected science organizations in the world. There are a plethora more, though it's hard to wade through the opinion pieces, which are far more numerous. The general consensus among the experts is human activity does have something to do with global warming. And there is a ton of direct evidence. In my mind (I'm not a climate scientist, but as a biologist I have been exposed to a lot of the research over the last 15 years or so), the question isn't so much are we contributing to global warming as it is how much we're contributing to global warming.

Like it or not politically, the way science works within a scientific community on issues like this is driven by the consensus of the expert community, which is informed by the data. Granted, it's easier to get published in a peer reviewed journal with an article that supports global warming than one that tries to debunk it, but in a scientific forum the data will eventually stand up on its own. If someone uncovers a preponderance of empirical data that contradicts human contribution to global warming, it will stand up to scientific scrutiny. The best example of a paradigm changing finding of this sort that I can think of in modern science is punctuated equilibrium. A lot of the evolutionary biology community screamed bloody murder at first, but the data were just too compelling to ignore.
Unfortunately, on global warming the data all point in the opposite direction right now, i.e. global warming is happening and we as humans are contributing to it.

http://royalsociety.org/uploadedFiles/Royal_Society_Content/...

http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/306/5702/1686
Also see "Jodie"
I actually prefer this most of the time. Bugs tend to crop up between stack layers so testing as much of the stack as possible at once is more effective, IMO.
Also religion is needed to enforce a particular way of thinking which eases communication. Sometimes you may want to put someones mind in a box.
10 Easy Ways to Improve Landing Page Conversions
in Brazil any number starting with 7,8,9 are cell phones. you know you will be paying cellphone call price. Just like it is with VoIP.

In California i waste most of my minutes receiving "usted ganhaste la loteria" calls.
Selling meat products to people who post on the internet is like shooting fish in a barrel, but this is still an impressive use of discounts to attract new customers.
> cheap projectors that seem to alternate between red, green, and blue

If you were curious, those would be single-chip DLP projectors: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Light_Processing
"I saved myself $1,500 by finding workarounds for my problems, rather than just purchasing a new laptop straight away."

But how much time each day was spent dealing with the fact that his computer didn't have a hard drive? If your time can be valued in terms of dollars (it can), I bet it would have been cheaper for him to just pony up the $1500 for a usable laptop.
For those who like rvm for its gemsets, check out rip: http://github.com/defunkt/rip . Supports pushing/popping multiple ripenvs (gemsets) and has sweet support for unix-like command plugins.
Obviously CERN is doing heisenbug research.
how exactly is it free then?

person X sitting on their computer, they click call person Y.

google will first call person X's mobile (he will pay to receive) and then call person Y's mobile (he will also pay to receive) and connects both.

so, where is the free part?

And since the monetary currency in mobile bills are minutes, you are paying the exact same thing as if person X just picked the phone and called person Y.

actually, if he did that, then it may be really free as operators gives more minutes for mobile to mobile calls! which is not the case when receiving a google voice callback by starting the call in the browser.
Where Should Your Groupon Clone Go?
that is rather hilarious !
In my opinion, if your algorithm is that solid and unique, that's your real selling point.

This whole "you can't control the player" is a bad idea, it doesn't drive the usual gamer and you're going to find that maybe it's exciting for people to watch their creature fight the first time but there's no repeat value in that (watching the same moves over and over and over again just isn't exciting).

The perfect blend of your idea and the wishes of the masses is to have your 'Cornelius' algorithm analyze the drawing then return a skill set. So it gives the player 6 movies + 10 combo moves based on their drawings attributes. You get a combination of the "my ninja vs. your ninja" as well as the ability to actually influence the outcome and promote replay value.
In any specific case, you should believe in the EMH. It's the safest assumption.

And yes, once you are convinced that markets are inefficient, you should not make any public arguments contradicting the EMH. You should STFU until after you have earned so much money that you don't care about earning any more [1].

[1] Obviously you can talk to potential investors/employees/etc, keeping in mind that any one of them might steal your strategy.
There are tons of other books that could be there, too. Any "top X books for field Y" list is going to be a bit arbitrary, probably telling you as much about the people who wrote the list as the field itself.

That said, I'd also suggest:

* Concepts, Techniques, and Models of Computer Programming by Peter Van-Roy and Seif Haridi ("CTM"), which covers several different programming approaches. Not about different languages, but their underlying models, and ways in which they can be combined.

* The Art of Prolog, by Sterling & Shapiro - An excellent book on logic programming, using Prolog for exercises. (CTM also touches on Prolog, but this book goes quite a bit deeper.)

* The Lambda papers - http://library.readscheme.org/page1.html

* _Lisp in Small Pieces_ by Christian Queinnec ("LiSP"). On implementing Lisp, strongly skewed towards Scheme.

* Paradigms of Artificial Intelligence Programming by Peter Norvig ("PAIP"). AI, problem solving techniques, Lisp practicalities and implementation, Prolog, tons more. Extremely lucid. (I wish it was a hardcover, though.)

* C Interfaces & Implementations by David Hanson - an excellent book on how to design C library APIs, including quite a few useful libraries.
How To Get Paid To Build Your List
Making great things can be very risky. Most companies are setup to avoid risky behavior at all costs because exposing yourself to risk can be very destructive. The few truly great things squeeze out of a typical company are all because of accident more than by design.

Apple has managed to figure out how to be risky in their behavior without being destructive. They've learned that you can actually jump out of plane if you have a parachute.
If you count native populations as the local government, then basically every single colony England setup.
Yes, and apparently CLRS's place on your bookshelf is shifted to the right of TAOCP. :)

Don't forget Okasaki's _Purely Functional Data Structures_, though. CLRS's coverage of persistent data structures is pretty weak.
I also concur. Computational modeling should be viewed as part of hypothesis formation. Similar to mathematical manipulation, it is a precursor to experimentation. Computational models are too often presented as evidence of a physical theory, instead of a prediction in need of experimental support. We see this in every field; social network theory, epidemiology, environmentalism, even papers in combinatorial optimization!

Interestingly, perhaps the field that most strongly holds to the view that models need testing is weapons research.
Wine springs to mind here.
-1 for PhD? Is it really like that?
When are you in a situation where you "have to go to North America", but where it still makes sense to choose Canada instead of the US?
Digium makes a lot of money? I haven't heard much about their financials...
Queen's University Plays Quantum Chess
You might like this thread on ask.metafilter: http://ask.metafilter.com/71101/What-single-book-is-the-best...
Nice job putting that song in my head, hero.

"...turning Japanese, I think I'm turning Japanese, I really think so..."
> But can I steal a car from a factory if I pay them the marginal cost of producing it?

If you can find a way to do so without entering the factory, or removing any of the factory's contents, then sure. The traditional law of theft is a purely negative right to not have your property removed from your possession, not any sort of positive right.
Regular newspapers, facebook, reddit, hacker news, xkcd and dilbert.

That's about it.
This is just how Chromium does versioning.

Chromium version #'s are four parts: major.minor.build.patch. Of these four parts, major.minor are "marketing" controlled. The other two parts, build.patch are engineering controlled and related to the Chromium branching strategy.

Chromium develops everything on trunk. Typically, once a day, they increment the build #. The build #'s are part of their branching process. Once a branch is cut, its build # is fixed. Instead, only the patch # is incremented on that branch, again about once a day.

So for example, the current stable release is milestone 5. This was built from the 375 branch. So the full version # is 5.0.375.127, which indicates that about 127 days have passed since the 375 branch was cut as you can see here:

http://src.chromium.org/viewvc/chrome?view=rev&revision=...

Chromium hasn't made much use of the minor part of the version #, the notable exception being 4.1.

Also, historically, Chromium has aimed to release a new major version every 6 months. But they announced recently that they plan to move to an even shorter release schedule:

http://blog.chromium.org/2010/07/release-early-release-often...

So if you think it's got high versions now, just wait. I notice that even though milestone 6 is only in the beta channel, the dev channel already has milestone 7 loaded in it:

http://omahaproxy.appspot.com/

tl;dr: Chrome versions move fast because they have a major milestone release every 6 months and soon the versions will move even faster.
Interesting, I ran through the numbers and 2L of Coke is about the same caffeine as two cups of 12 oz coffee.
Actually, this question was addressed by the best line in the story:
The Navy did not describe the scene inside the ground station as operators sought to re-establish control with the drone.
http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/2009/10/why_everything_in_su...

This is a good look at the various rebuttals to basically everything in this chapter of Superfreakonomics.
There's something to what you say about breaking the chain and it's particularly apropos as a re-balancing of STEM vs. other careers might be happening right now (mostly due to the better alternatives getting much worse) ... but there's a whole lot of first generation STEM types out there and I see no reason it won't continue.

For a very long time MIT was a place where the working class would send their children to get a step up the ladder as engineers (it was also a place they would work their way thorough college which obviously ended a few decades ago, although in 2008 they changed the financial aid policy so that students from families making under $75K would not be burdened by loans (all scholarships + plus some work)).

While not an engineer, as I recall Richard Feynman was one of those (from a working class background maybe and definitely a first generation STEM type; he ended up at MIT due to Columbia's Jewish quota...). For that matter, I too am a first generation STEM type. Heck, I didn't really grok what engineering was until I arrived on campus (in my defense I was strongly on a science track).

One addendum to your "profound long term cost" thesis: with the post-SarBox closing of the IPO exit we've also insured there will be very few future massive hacker oriented big companies. There will be some, like Facebook, but not many.
Help and recommendations are appreciated :)

My apps already contain some ads, and I have some paid apps as well.
I went from coffee -> black tea -> green tea for a bit and then just stopped altogether. If you're a heavy coffee drinker then cold turkey will indeed be painful. Hopefully you have tolerant & patient loved ones.
I guess I'm being downvoted for contributing to the discussion?
Blago Implies Obama is Corrupt; Wants Rahm to Testify at Next Trial
Google Docs already has the most important feature from Google Wave (allow multiple people to edit the same document simultaneously). Wave's mission statement was a bit grandiose -- it should never have been about replacing email completely, the killer app is real time collaborative editing.
House of Cold Steel
A wood hacker: realistic wood sculptures
from The Cellar: http://cellar.org/showthread.php?t=23436
Sure the guys language was imprecise, but the SQL implementation of the relational model was imprecise as well, so we call all get it wrong with gay abandon.

The funny thing about relational databases they model relationships fairly loosely, mostly understood and expressed by the user, not the system. Object systems have a stronger idea of a one way relationship with a reference anyway.

How many systems should care about relationships. All of them can.

Here in Australia they want to put everyones health records online, and connect all the hospitals, doctors, drug stores, testing labs, etc. to those records.

So far they have spent heaps, $500 million'ish, on a system that does this:

http://www.abc.net.au/rn/healthreport/stories/2010/2975642.h...

I think this is a good place for something like a non-relational database. You just create a sequential list of events for a person and you are done.

You can use something like CouchDB. If you loose your network, you can have a local replica at your local hospital and doctors office. Everything re-syncs later.

I think the whole thing is in analysis paralysis because they are trying to systematize the health universe so the meaning of all data is unambiguous. While that sounds grand it will take forever.

I blame the whole failure on a drive to systematize data, which SQL databases foster. If you just view health records as a bunch of bits of paper, and just say we want to store them in one place, in a way that is vaguely sequential, the problem is much simpler.

CouchDB is after all web scale, shard friendly, and there is no impotence mismatch. After seeing this video I am always going to want to say it that way.
You're (both) absolutely right. But I'd bet most people aren't away of that fact. This deal manages to highlight the fact that MPEG-LA is that greedy, which may lose them any good will they just bought with this announcement.
We built our own .deb containing all our bits, that depends on external dependencies. The .deb recipe is checked into source. Our deploy process is

1) compile the .deb.
2) spawn a new, empty EC2
3) apt-get the .deb
4) lein daemon start (http://github.com/arohner/lein-daemon)
Yes, the gist of both books is "There is no mysterious stuff out there, we don't need God or even physics to explain the mind, it's all just computation happening in your brain. Both consciousness and free will are ways of describing some of the stuff that your brain does."

He's essentially a Functionalist. But he makes his arguments convincing. The convincing-ness cannot be summed up more briefly than he does in his books.
Xen User Group LA Video
That's how I keep my source code. People tried more structured storage and text is winning.
My choices would have been different, with general topics: data structures, automata theory, programming languages survey, systems programming, algorithms, network programming, database/datastores, and AI ("Artificial Intelligence, a Modern Approach").

I have mixed feeling about compiler theory, and left it off of my list. Some may question including systems programming.
Hindenburg Omen Triggered
I learn what they want by observing them and considering their desires. I look at what they do and how they behave. Add in some intuition and luck, and that's pretty close to what I've done so far.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Shape_of_Things_to_Come
It is clear that Iceape 3.6.3 on Ubuntu 9.10 is the best way to browse.