skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Actionscript 3.0 is much more sophisticated than Javascript/HTML5. The capabilities of HTML5 are equivalent to Actionscript1.0/Flash Player 6, circa 2004 (these demos were entirely possible even in Flash Player 5 perhaps). Plus, Flash is reasonably cross-platform (except for iPhone/iPad of course).
On another note, making embeddable widgets (slideshows, videos with more than just viewing functionality, like Youtube) is very hard in Javascript, since any complex embedded Javascript would likely clash with other scripts on the page (we have experienced this, making a complex Javascript widget, that ended up clashing with Adsense ads of our customers, it was a nightmare to debug that).

Incidentally, I brought up my task manager while viewing these demos, the CPU utilization jumped from 5% to 97% (Core 2 Duo, 1.66 GHz).
I used to do stuff like that, until I found it was a lot easier just to work directly out of my Dropbox directory. It's tough to argue with real-time offsite backups.
It's about where I am, not about where they are. slug's comment looks like a great idea though.
Tell HN: And my dead itouch rose from the dead
My itouch died after I mistakenly had water spilt on it. I tried all I could, but it never came back on. So I tossed it away and forgot about it. After 4 months (today) I decided to switch it on, and viola it came on without any hitch and is working perfectly. I hope this info might come useful to people with dead itouch and iphones.
regarding your suggestion .....how is a blogger going to know whether his new blog is going to net $10/year or $1000/year without turning on ads and therefore paying the $300 fee ?

Here in Washington state, businesses are required to pay 1.5% Business tax. However, if the business earns less than $28,000, the govt does not collect any taxes. I think a sole proprietorship business license (for a real business, not a blog) costs $15.

imo charging $300 for a license to run a blog with ads is high. Not exempting low-revenue blogs from the $300 fee is also absurd.
startups that want to disrupt big guys can also use this strategy, find a niche that is overshot by the incumbents, offer them a good enough product, but improve the performance on other dimensions that big guys overlook, then pivot. I think this works for both disruptive product in existing market and new product in new market
With an unreasonable policy like this and with the city demonstrating an inflexible attitude, it seems likely that there would be other unfriendly policies in place... I am glad I do not live in Philadelphia.
When I was very, very young, I once made said to my parents that I was glad I lived with my family, because if I lived all alone in a big apartment in a city, I would feel very lonely. And I remember - this is one of my most vivid early memories - that my father stopped what he was doing, sat down, and explained to me that someday I might find myself living in that kind of situation. Even then I could tell this was very personal to him - like he'd been in that situation himself. And, he told me, even if I found myself living 'all alone,' and even if I thought I was in a place where no one cared about me, or thought about me, or even had contact with me at all - I wouldn't be. He told me that there would always be people all around me, so I'd discover, if I looked around, that people just next door, people just a few feet away from me, were always right there, communicating with me on a certain level. I only had to pay attention.

It's nice to have that sort of confirmed by this study. Because of that impression, it's always made sense to me that this is true; cities are interconnected systems, and every member is dependent in some way on every other, no matter how solitary that person may think she or he is. I think we've built up a lot of mechanisms today whereby it's easy to tell ourselves that we're very lonely; all that's needed to remove that sensation of being alone is a simple observation of the basic fact that we're constantly and continuously interacting with the people around us, even if it seems like we're not.
DDT hasn't been effective against bedbugs since the '40s - long before the ban. Use any pesticide long enough and the target will tend to develop a resistance. Now it just agitates bedbugs and makes them more active.
Did you read the post you were responding to? How the consumer changes behavior was clearly explained.
If you do a bit of digging around on the City of Philadelphia website, you will find the following text under the Description of the Business Privilege Tax section:

"Every individual, partnership, association and corporation engaged in a business, profession or other activity for profit within the City of Philadelphia must file a Business Privilege Tax Return, whether or not they earned a profit during the preceding year."(http://www.phila.gov/revenue/pdfs/Rev%20PDFs/BPT_internet.pd...)

Basically, this is a $300 one-time licensing fee to conduct a business from a property within the City of Philadelphia.

There are two types of examples that this article uses:

1) Home-based "I'm just dicking around and use Google ads to offset the cost of my basic Wordpress subscription and server" bloggers. This seems kind of shady to me and I would be really interested to see about what an actual accountant and/or lawyer would have to say about this. After all, this is someone going asking the City of Philadelphia's Revenue Department if they have to pay more taxes. That's like going to a divorce lawyer and asking if you need a divorce... of COURSE the answer is going to be "yes."

2) Home-based business that turns no profit - Regardless of the profitability of a business, in the United States (and most everywhere else in the world) you have to pay the relevant city/state/county/federal licensing/inspection/regulatory/screw-you fees. That's the way running a business is. Don't like it? Don't run a business (out of your house or otherwise) if you can't make peace with that.

All in all I find this article to be long on rhetoric, anecdote and high-minded moralizing and short on details and investigative journalism. Were I a denizen of the City of Philadelphia and concerned about this, I would put in a couple of hours of research at the reference desk of the public library and wait for some better analysis on this subject from a slightly more reputable source before shelling out for this fee.
Not really "brand new" at all. It wouldn't be out of place in the first week of an Algebra course.

You don't really need much math background to understand the proof. At the top, where he writes pi = (top line of numbers, bottom line of numbers), he means the permutation that sends the first element to the second place, the second element to the third place, and so on.

If you think about it, every permutation can be split into cycles of this form (a -> b, b-> c, c->d, ..., e->a). One of these cycles, that's of length K, is called a "K-Cycle".

I think that's the only terminology you need to follow the proof.
I think you misinterpreted my comment. I am in no way endorsing or agreeing with such a law. I agree with you, it is unreasonable.

However, that is a separate question from the one this article addresses, which is that, assuming this law does indeed exist, does it apply to bloggers who attempt to make money from their blog? Now I haven't read the law itself, so who knows. But if it exists, then it sounds to me like it does in fact apply to them.

Likewise, if a person in Philidelphia sets up a consulting business, I'm sure they are required to pay this fee as well, even if they take a loss the first year, in which case they would have made even less than these bloggers.
Cities charge fees for business licenses because traditional businesses require and tax city resources. They create traffic, they create additional overhead on utilities, sewers, and other municipal things.

A blog, however, does none of these things. It requires nothing Philadelphia-specific. You would have the same municipal overhead whether someone runs a blog or not.

It's not reasonable to tax anything that can potentially bring in money as a business. Do I have to get such a license to sell something on eBay or run a garage sale? What if I sell something on craigslist? It would make more sense to charge for any of these because they have more impact on municipal services than just running a blog because I at least have to transport the goods. A blog just requires a visit to a web page.

This is obviously a move of desperation on a group that Philly still believes can be marginalized without disruptive public outcry. If you told the people they couldn't have a garage sale without buying a $300 license from the city, they would freak out. Since blogging is still unfamiliar to most, Philly assumes they can take money for that without stirring up a ruckus. Someone should prove them wrong.
That is by no means my solution. I agree that this law is unreasonable. However, if the law exists, then it sounds like it does apply to bloggers just as it applies to anyone else trying to start a business in Philidelphia (in this case, by start a business, I mean try to make money).

Note however, that the people in this article did not disagree with the law and set out to protest it. They merely had no idea that they had to pay Philidelphia's licensing fee for making money before they tried to make money. And unfortunately for them, ignorance of the law does not beget exemption.
All good questions.

I tell myself to do something while I'm deciding what to do.

And ask myself: "is there someway to get an instant 1st solution?"
For the proxy thing you may want to configure your applications to proxy DNS requests as well. Some do not do it by default and would leak the hostnames you're connecting to.

In firefox the about:config variable is "network.proxy.socks_remote_dns". Set it to true.
"What this law ends up doing is encouraging people to lie about any minor sources of income they receive"

Which, in turn, makes them that much more cynical about the law and legality.

If you go about making everyone a criminal then pretty soon the notion of criminals being the Bad Guys starts to fade.

Good way to undermine the rule of law.
Wait for an year or two. IMHO, HTML5 is going to evolve much faster than ActionScript. When I saw these kind of cool animations in Flash years ago, I wanted to play around with it but couldn't see the source. It was all hidden behind the swf/fla files making it harder to see how things were done. If I wanted to fiddle with it I needed Flash software. Not so with HTML5. All you need is a text editor and a browser. I am sure whoever this link would have tried to look at the source.

> making embeddable widgets is very hard in Javascript, since any complex embedded Javascript would likely clash with other scripts on the page

You can use local variables the way jQuery uses it. Something like (function($))(jQuery). If you declare all your variables and functions within this scope its easy to avoid clashes with other scripts.
Many states do not require you to report income of less than $X on your taxes, where $X is around $500 or so. This article made it sound like that is not the case for Pennsylvania, but maybe we're missing some information here.
2) Home-based business that turns no profit - Regardless of the profitability of a business, in the United States (and most everywhere else in the world) you have to pay the relevant city/state/county/federal licensing/inspection/regulatory/screw-you fees.

2) does not apply in India, at least. As a 'sole proprietor' you pay taxes on profits as per personal income tax.

No profits, or profits under the minimum taxable limit: no taxes.

Don't like it? Don't run a business out of your home.

Not exactly cogent justification.
Indian Electronic Voting Researcher Arrested
"Much better for battery life than having Twitter and Facebook always running on the device."

Android has been proving that this claim is incorrect for at least a year now. Android supports true multitasking and you don't hear much about battery lifetime problems any more.

Hopefully, Apple will catch up next year with the next iPhone.
This is beautiful.

It reminded me a lot of an online puzzle game called Auditorium. If you liked these demos, and have even the slightest interest in puzzle games, I really recommend checking it out (free, pretty long demo): http://www.playauditorium.com/.
GAMEFUL: a secret HQ for worldchanging game developers
Real time face tracking/recognition on a Nokia N900
Machine Converts Plastic Back into Oil
Ask HN: Developing the developers
I've recently become the leader of a group of 3 junior developers. I'm looking for resources to develop their skills and motivate them to become better at what they do. Any ideas where to start? Practical is better.
> That's why people go to grad school, participate in a hobby, or join a sub-culture to make their world smaller again and limit their choices to make themselves happier.

I don't think people do those things to limit their choices to make themselves happier.

I think they do those things because the act of being at grad school, or enjoying a hobby or sub-culture makes them happy.

In other words, people don't do those things to socialize with fewer people; they do those things because they enjoy doing them. Socializing with people who enjoy the same things they do is a pleasant side-effect.
yeah... poor use of the word 'constantly'
What were these stories?
At the time I thought it was wrong, now I understand. It's not like google isn't cheating-- after all before the iPhone, android phones looked like blackberries, then apple released the iPhone and the android os is suddenly designed for touch screens?

I've been a fan of google generally for a long time, but between privacy and android, they have almost lost me.
I'm curious when people think something is a "business" vs. a hobby/personal project, in general, in terms of business licenses (not the IRS, which is separate).

For instance, if one were to publish, say, an email newsletter for free with no ads, would that require a business license? Or would it only require one when you went out and solicited ads/started making money?

Edit: I wish all cities had exemptions for tiny/new businesses. Some do. Some don't.
That makes sense. If the US government is selling it cheap, those who purchase from the US and other holders have the incentive to hold on to their helium til later when the price returns to normal. You're right.

Oil is a good example. That's why embargoes don't work. The target country just has to buy it through a third party to defeat the embargo. Embargoes can really only work when the country embargoed is shooting itself in the foot with price controls, as we did in the 70s.
I would be highly amused if some Americans visiting London stole the store's entire stock and dumped it into the harbor, for old time's sake. I would be less amused if activists decided to re-enact some of the other episodes from the history of this company.
as opposed to rape which involves people, places, and times?
That's not the commonly used definition. When the government puts out CPI, that's price inflation, not monetary inflation. Monetary inflation is only one component of price inflation. The other two are the velocity of money and change in productivity. There has been large monetary inflation in the past couple of years, but low price inflation because the velocity of money has gone down so much.
Likewise, how is a restauranteur going to know whether their new restaurant will make $50k its first year, or take a $100k loss, before building the restaurant and paying the $300 fee?

I'll go ahead and answer both questions. Just as an entrepreneur can create a business plan and analyze the market, a blogger can do the same. Except with a blogger, it's much easier; if your blog only gets a few hundred visits a day, you know you're in the $10/year range without having to turn on ads or pay the licensing fee.

Not exempting low-revenue blogs from the $300 fee is also absurd.

I agree.
You have been selected for the unique TV interview, Magazine report opportunity
I think you misunderstood

The point he or she was making was that a person that doesn't know that sqrt(x)=x^1/2 probably wouldn't be calculating the for example velocity of a projectile
Seems to be more like the Canvas experiments of Hakim.
Lesson learned: philadelphia is not a place encoraging early stage bootstrapping entrepreneurs.
I think I know a thing or two about Flash.

http://mahmud.arablug.org/

It's a powerful platform, and I will accept the author's desire to avoid using his demos in "HTML5 vs Flash" punditry; but it's apparent where HTML5 is headed, and I can't help but notice its competence, in domains where flash is usually considered the only option.
Hi. I'm the author of the post.

> The Perl 6 article is about all of the syntax that you need to understand before you can read the equivalent piece of code.

I think it's more that the Clojure article just shows the code with very little explanation. Whereas my post was intended to demonstrate some of the basic capabilities of Perl 6's multiple dispatch and type system for people who aren't very, if at all, familiar with Perl 6. People unfamiliar with Clojure can probably guess what the code in the Clojure post does. I think I was able to (although I've dabbled in Clojure and Common Lisp, so I can't speak from the viewpoint of a total newbie to those languages). Some of the Perl 6 syntax I devoted paragraphs to explain were probably as clear as (defrecord Person [name age]), but I chose to explain them exactly to be sure that any readers unfamiliar with Perl 6 were able to know the exact semantics(e.g., that readonly attributes are the default). Some of the syntax is not something someone who has never heard of Perl 6 will be able to look at and know the meaning of immediately. Is that really such a problem, if the meaning of such features(sans bugs in the implementations) can be explained and fully understood in a couple of paragraphs and make things much more convenient for the person who does know the language? You learn them in a day or two and benefit from them for the entire time you use the language.

In addition: the two pieces of code are not equivalent. The Perl 6 functions validate the types of their arguments. The age-group function can tell you the age-group of both a Person and an age. As well, if you want to write another multi dispatching on the age group of a Person, it's easier with the Perl 6, because you just have to do "multi can-have-kids-meal (Child $kid) { True }" and "multi can-have-kids-meal ($person) { False }".

> But, I wonder, what does "generally" mean?
It means that you should read the rest of the paragraph to see some examples of its uses. Don't worry, though, the actual spec (http://perlcabal.org/syn/S02.html, grep for "The * character") is much more detailed. My explanation was a bit lackluster, I suppose, but I was trying to not devote much time to it, since the post is about multiple dispatch and the type system, not about the philosophy of DWIM as expressed in the simplicity and usefulness of Whatever.

> Oh. It means that sometimes -- even in the context of a trivial nine-line example -- the damned asterisk will mysteriously fail and will force me to bang my head against the keyboard for half an hour until I finally figure out that I just can't use it.
Well, more like five minutes (from time that I noticed the problem until the time that I had figured out the cause of the bug in Rakudo). But, yes, there are still bugs in Rakudo. I doubt this particular one will be around much longer(although it'll probably still be in this month's Rakudo *, since the compiler release was Thursday).
What the hell do you mean gold doesn't do anything?

Gold is used by several industries. Gold is found in every cellular phone!

The reason gold is used as a metric against currencies is because its scarcity is NOT illusory. USD's scarcity is dictated by the FED. Gold's scarcity is dictated by the earth's limited supply of gold, and the socioeconomics of gold mining.
It's to steer the submarine that the "home computer" is in.
I respect his opinions, but this is not about him, rather HTML5.

His demos provoked uses cases in my head, stuff I would usually consider flash for. I am by no means anti-flash; I know the SWF and FLV specs like the back of my hand. I have annotated wireshark logs of RTP that are almost faithful to the "spec". And most importantly, I am an Adobe fan, and sided with them against Apple.

But this is one of those "top idea in your head" things. Now, after seeing those demos, my mental model of "what flash can do" has been diminished. I will still use flash for microphone capture, sockets, and persistent cookies. But I know now that I don't need flash for audio, video, and interactive eye candy.

Flash has always been a last resort, and seeing HTML5, in this light, is like discovering Qafiya in English:

http://www.ghazalpage.net/prose/notes/arabic_rhymes.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qaafiyaa
Cholesterol and Red Meat
I guess the 300$ is to be considered part of the investment. It won't make a big difference to the 100K$ investment.

It looks like the law didn't consider very low revenues and hobby activity like blogging.
Five Kinds of Foods Shrink the Pores For Women
Newly discovered jazz recordings show why copyright laws need to be revisited
I know that this is a pretty tame example of subset types. But do you really think that modifying the return values of person-age for everything in the system is more easily extensible than a subset type which is external to the objects? Suppose that somewhere else in the system, you want to dispatch based on whether a Person is old enough to legally drink alcohol. With subset types, you don't have to be aware of the Child/Adult/Senior partition at all. With the :after approach, you're dependent on the ordering of the after methods and you have to know about the existence of the :child/:senior/:adult test.

Here's the code for buy-beer in Perl 6:

subset CanDrink of Person where *.age >= 21;
subset CannotDrink of Person where *.age < 21;

multi buy-beer (CanDrink $person) { give $person, Beer.new }
multi buy-beer (CannotDrink $kid) { call-cops-on $kid }

No other code in the system need be aware of it. No other code in the system is affected by it.
While I agree this will challenge a lot of popular assumptions about classical art, this information isn't exactly new. See for instance Alma-Tadema's representation of the Parthenon:

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:1868_Lawrence_Alma-Ta...
egad
What is your background? Technical or non-technical?
What's wrong with the already existing Drafts feature?
yeah, i don't know why you were downvoted
A HUGE sign of incompetence is if a company tries to "hide" the way their algorithms work. If they don't know enough about crypto and security to know that this is pointless, they CERTAINLY don't know enough to write secure software.
While browsing some of the more esoteric entries in that list (OK I meant LOLCODE) I saw a reference to this gem:

The movie Inception "explained" in C - http://github.com/karthick18/inception