skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
If you intend to keep things this way, then don't call it a Money Back Guarantee. Instead, be really clear that users have a trial, and billing is in arrears. Something like:

YOUR CREDIT CARD WILL NOT BE CHARGED!

We collect credit card numbers during signup to
prevent fraud. But we won't take a cent until your free
thirty day trial is complete.

The trial is obligation-free; just visit our easy-to-use
cancellation page during the first thirty days and you'll
never be charged.

Consumers know that guarantees and rebates are intentionally painful to collect. They feel more confident and empowered when you don't have their money yet.

One caveat: I've seen successful trials that are a week or two long. At thirty days (and with users who aren't very committed), you might have an issue with users forgetting about the forthcoming charge, and then getting angry when it shows up on their bill next month.
BSA displays software license battle trophies
"First of all - shipping binary code to browsers. Please. No. Flash is bad enough. Say good bye to all the grease monkey style hacks and remixes and lots of other interesting things about the web"

I don't see how browsers interpreting compiled bytecode would prevent greasemonkey-style hacks.
Couple of quick responses:

pquerna, gridspy, thanks for your responses! I didn't mean to sound quite so cynical. Mainly I am venting my frustration at the lack of a dedicated developer to maintain the project, especially after I've seen so many success stories.

wrt AGPL: In orbited's case -- b/c it is a socket proxy -- the AGPL would really have no impact whatsoever on users. No one would be linking any of their code in-process, and so there would really be no requirement for them to AGPL any of their custom back-end logic. Besides, I don't really believe in trying to force users down a particular path. My hope is always that freedom and choice helps build trust with your user base, which ultimately results in the healthiest community.

Yet, when I started Orbited 3-4 years ago, I never intended to be married to the project forever. My hope has always been that some people/projects/companies that are depending on the Orbited would be willing to commit substantial engineering resources to fix bugs and implement new features, and from those contributions some new core committers would emerge. Unfortunately, my work still accounts for about 95% of the 0.7.x branch which is the last stable release.

I feel like Orbited is far behind, considering I haven't been involved in a release in about 2 years, and no one else has really stepped up. I am always shocked, truthfully, when I hear success stories and see people building applications with it still. The code base has remained unchanged through about 10 browser releases.
If I do or do not know Javascript is actually tangential to my point. What I find strange is that the browser environment forces a language on developers and that is seen as OK. When apple was adding language/framework restrictions to the AppStore people were screaming bloody murder but somehow the browser status quo is fine.

That being said the title was probably too agressive. The original was not very descriptive and it was what I came up with on the spot.
The OP deliberately wrote a rant about something he doesn't understand with an attention-grabbing headline and I called him out on it. I don't think that's unkind. I would have assumed good faith were it not for him explicitly stating he actually doesn't want to learn JavaScript but still wants to bash it.
مسلسل وادي الذئاب 5 الحلقة 7
Great work ! Do you plan to expand it to a full MMORPG ?
There are some great opportunities in HTML5 browser-based games, considering the ease to port to mobile devices.
Yahoo has poison pill defense at disposal (2008)
Wop, big bluff. Sorry, you're right.
You seem to be focusing of if I know Javascript or not. I don't know enough and I am learning. So it's not that I don't care. It's that I don't understand why Javascript being the only option on the client side is OK somehow. I've changed the title to be less aggressive.
I think the problem he's highlighting is with the browser executing a specific language. If it used a bytecode system, like JVM, CLR, or similar, you could still use Javascript--just compiled down to the appropriate bytecode. But others could use Ruby, or Python, or Java, or C#, or any other language that can be compiled to the appropriate bytecode.
This is especially interesting to me since I originate from Exeter :-)

Interestingly the town has also had a visit from Michael Jackson, David Blaine and Uri Geller (not so chuffed about a woo-woo visiting...!) Strange but true - http://www.bbc.co.uk/devon/news_features/2002/michael_jackso...
Nitpick - the Western Empire fell, the Eastern half went on for almost another thousand years.
At the risk of making a faux pas, could anyone share the .js and .html files of a very simple example?
Countries are richer when its population inherits more technology from their ancestors, except when bad governments are in charge. That is kind of obvious, really. If I was asked the question "Why are some countries richer than others in 2010?" yesterday I'd have provided the same explanation - It's because they were richer before that.

What the article is saying can be reduced further: Descendants of civilizations that have moved ahead of others will stay ahead unless they stop moving.

And further still: When you move ahead of someone in a race, you'll stay ahead until you slow down.

That might be nice to point out, but his mission at World Bank was how to bring the less technologically advanced countries forward, not explaining why countries who used to be technologically advanced happens to be richer today.

Obvious point, well argued.

He says interesting things about people carrying technology around. I wonder what you can do with immigration to make your country become more technologically advanced.
Check out the Safari Web Content Guide (http://cl.ly/2pug). It's written to specifically target the iPhone/iPod touch, but most of the information applies straight across to the Android platform as well. It has information on conditional CSS, viewport sizes, etc., that will help you optimize your site for mobile devices.
Don't Worry: Happiness Levels Not Set in Stone
Microsoft's anti open source propaganda video
They will make it smaller to fuck with the netbook people.
Photos from the making of Empire Strikes Back
>Actually, come to think of it, large swaths of the European Union are modeled on the Austro-Hungarian example, but those in Brussels are just too scared to admit it.

How exactly are "large swaths" of the EU modelled on the Austro-Hungarian empire?
Apart from the points appearing obvious, the article also points out that this was exactly not what his employer did back in the 80s and 90s. And his arguments appear to be more researched than some answer you and I could come up with by using plain intuition.
I'm the dumbfuck that originally posted the 160 hours number. The only thing I'll say in my defence is that it was written in October 2008, two years ago. It certainly didn't take into consideration the many hours of development that have been done since, and the hourly rate was based on actual searches I did on freelancer sites.

I wasn't actually high. Just stupid. If there were a way to 'unaccept' an answer I'd have done so long ago. The user 'schwa' corrected me long before chockenberry noticed.
Single page:

http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2010/10/11/reinventing...
I'm glad I'm not the only person who thinks this. Friendship is not an idempotent operation. Facebook connects up hundreds of millions of people and makes it extremely simple for them to share information. It's a social internet. To make any kind of attempt to preserve privacy is practically oxymoronic.
The Gervais Principle IV: Wonderful Human Beings
That most of the web (and obviously Flash is the exception to this) is text based is not an accident. Browsers and people are not the only thing reading the web - there are crawlers and other tools doing this, that and the other. Search engine crawlers for example go into the javascript and extract links.

Also I really don't think you have thought it through as a developer - its bad enough debugging stuff in browser without it being compiled and only having basically machine code to look at.

I don't think its the one true language for anyone to be honest - but expecting the browser to ship with several languages in it doesn't appeal to anyone either (and I know you just want a few byte code runtimes in but I cannot see how that would work while still maintaining all the richness and complexity of the web as it stands)

anyway - I think if there was any appetite to do anything about this problem it would have been done by now. There were people grumbling about it 10 years ago and I've seen a number of projects to add languages come and go.
Conquest as a purely military endeavour is not the best way to think about it - after all the people being conquered are going to be doing most of the dying.

Being part of the Roman Empire probably offered many advantages - certainly being a Citizen had numerous advantages, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_citizenship. Similarly being part of the British Empire presumably also had advantages. So the real work of establishing decentralized imperial republics is going to be in the social and adminstrative functions applied after the dust of conquest has settled.

This approach seems to the one followed in Iraq and Afghanistan but the Western powers do not seem to be quite so competent as the Romans.
> or producing high levels of science, commerce, invention, quality of life, safety, peace, rule of law, health, art, and other key things - decentralized imperial republicanism has absolutely outperformed just about every other form of government.

While we're painting a picture with broad strokes: imperialism is also responsible for the oppression of Catholics in Ireland, apartheid in South Africa, and the disenfranchisement of a large number of indigenous groups the world over.
No this is very, very wrong.

Consider:

unsigned long addr_t = &x;

This is not only completely legal ANSI C but is also idiomatic in kernel development.
My usual rule is to not inline anything that calls a full fledged function, and to only explicitly inline things that are truly on high performance paths. Basically, trust that the compiler will inline or not inline the rest as appropriate. But this is another interesting metric to consider.

That's pretty much correct. Keep in mind, though, that inline has different consequences in a header file. There are good and bad reasons for that kind of usage.
Unless we are talking about templates and cookie-cutter apps, this whole thing has little meaning.

Really good stuff is done by hackers and painters, therefore when you estimate your costs, you only tend to see the canvas and a little gouache, which are a commodity—just like computing. And perhaps some of your time, most surely, if you don't have a good time doing it.

Saying, that the painting of a picture costs X€ is about a code monkey who has no idea about what the real work is truly about.

But yes, management does have an interest in the devaluation of productive work to leave room for their own overhead. There are thousands of apps out there in the world, and from that perspective it is nothing but throw-away-junk, warranting a low price.

Is it possible that software is not like anything else, that it is meant to be discarded: that the whole point is to always see it as a soap bubble?—Alan J. Perlis

Those who compete with slaves will also become slaves.—Norbert Wiener
Not only that, but hospitals have to wait for confirmed laboratory test results before they report then to the CDC. That kind of reporting is certainly not done in real time.
"This is just mistaking the effect of accumulated capital for technology."

And how do you accumulate capital? By hammering on stones?
Well, no. inttypes.h is defined in the ANSI specification and is provided by glibc. If it were unistd.h you would be right.
Job postings are a great window into a company. They show you just how much clear thinking is demanded along with how well people communicate.

That line stuck out for me. Writing is window into the minds of the people you might hire as well as the company doing the hiring though.

I was thinking the other day about the tests companies give prospective employees to do pre-interview. One idea I came up with in addition to giving them the usual fizzbuzz programming problems was to test their writing ability by:

(1) Giving them a page of simple code with comments removed and asking them to add comment headers to each function, and

(2) Asking them to write a description in plain english of how a moderately complex function works (make it a function that implements an algorithm rather than something that processes data).

I'm not in a position to do any hiring and try this myself but I think it would add a lot of value for the employer in filtering applicants. If I were looking for a job seeing an employer doing this would give me a lot more confidence in them also.
> Let's not forget the long-term effects of British rule in places as far-flung as Ireland, Cyprus and - of course - Iraq and the rest of the Middle East. A policy of divide-and-rule led to pretty awful consequences.

If you're citing divide-and-rule don't quote Iraq. It has 5 races in it, 2 very dominant religions and several suppressed ones (it did once have a history of Christianity and Buddhism). The recent problem of Iraq is that it wasn't divided and the only thing keeping it from all-out civil war was one of the most fascist dictators in recent history who had a policy of if you get out of line you, your family and your friends die or disappear.

Cyprus is another bad example of 'dividing' it was a country that was held together by geographical location not by national identity. When the problems occurred, Turkey tried to intervene, but had to pull out because they were under threat of Soviet invasion (who had interest in Cyprus) and the US clearly stated they wouldn't help in a military invasion of the Turkish homeland.

Where decentralized British rule worked was where it was used. India and Hong Kong are the two countries you purposely failed to mention who have been doing fantastically after British rule. To mention that HSBC was the only bank operating in the UK that survived the global recession was in no way due to the rules the British established in Hong Kong where HSBC started.
"Horrid" purely because in its current state it offers no value, nor is it an impressive feat of technology. ( I dont believe )

Bottom line, you executed from idea to product, horrid or not. That IS great. The knowledge of knowing how to go from idea to paid service is very valuable.

I dont know if it is poorly made.
Tiny is not a bad thing nor is a lack of scope.
I don't think this is a problem with kickstarter, I actually think this shows the power of kickstarter! The problem is with diaspora itself, you touched on it there: "they were a handful of NYU students just learning to program who'd never shipped anything before" and it's they who chose kickstarter.
> That most of the web (and obviously Flash is the exception to this) is text based is not an accident. Browsers and people are not the only thing reading the web - there are crawlers and other tools doing this, that and the other. Search engine crawlers for example go into the javascript and extract links.

I can see how that is important for the strings in the code but I'm not aware of many use cases for crawling the actual javascript code.

>Also I really don't think you have thought it through as a developer - its bad enough debugging stuff in browser without it being compiled and only having basically machine code to look at.

If I want to debug javascript I need Firebug or Chrome's tools and those can very well have support for a standard debugger.

>but expecting the browser to ship with several languages in it doesn't appeal to anyone either (and I know you just want a few byte code runtimes

I just want one standard bytecode runtime. I can ship and have the user cache whatever runtime I need.

> but I cannot see how that would work while still maintaining all the richness and complexity of the web as it stands)

I still don't see what web richness is there to be had inside the <script> tag. Seems to me all the uses of it that aren't simply execution are marginal at best.

>anyway - I think if there was any appetite to do anything about this problem it would have been done by now. There were people grumbling about it 10 years ago and I've seen a number of projects to add languages come and go.

It seems to have been enough of a problem for google to have built GWT. I wonder why they haven't shipped a Dalvik VM in Chrome and have their GWT apps target the VM on Android and Chrome and Javascript for everyone else. Is V8 execution these days comparable to a good JVM/CLR?
Tiger meet: cool fighter plane pictures
Time for a personal access review?
I've always been an 'interruptible programmer'. While my bosses have really loved it, they pay for it by my being less productive.

You see, the human mind can only hold so many concepts in active thought at the same time. It's somewhere around 7. If paying attention to your surroundings is 1, there's only 6 left. If someone -happens- in the surroundings, there's at least 1 more gone. If something -interesting- happens, there 2 or 3 more as you go off on tangents thinking about them.

Yeah, half your mind is taken with your surroundings at times.

My solution is to pay attention to my surroundings when working on easy projects, and for projects that -really- need my attention, I put in earphones and block everything out. I have a few different music sets that I've heard so many times and/or they have a sound that doesn't ask my brain to process them.

With my earphones in, people have to yell (or call my phone or IM) to get my attention. I don't check even check my email.

I usually don't have to resort to the earphones. One line of thinking is that if it takes all your ability to write the code, you couldn't possibly fix bugs in it. You should be writing well below your ability so that you can fix it when it breaks. This usually means the code is easier to read as well. But some things are just innately complex, and there's nothing you can do about it.
So instead of

printk("subtotals: a %d, b %d, c %d, total %d\n", a,b,c,a+b+c);

you have

printk("subtotals: a " COUNTER_T_FORMAT_SPECIFIER ", b " COUNTER_T_FORMAT_SPECIFIER ", c " COUNTER_T_FORMAT_SPECIFIER ", total " COUNTER_T_FORMAT_SPECIFIER "\n", a,b,c,a+b+c);

and soon you (1) can't read your code at all because 60% of it is shouty stuff in your calls to printk and (2) even the printk calls are awkward to read because your eyes have to skip over all the shouty stuff to work out what the output's actually going to look like.

(Perhaps that was your point, in which case I apologize for thinking it needed spelling out more explicitly.)
I understood that to refer to printf-style format specifiers that printk() uses. GCC can do type-checking for those: http://www.ohse.de/uwe/articles/gcc-attributes.html#func-for... -- but not if you invent your own % codes.
Please don't. I once dealt with code like this and it becomes unreadable very quickly, especially if many different types are involved.

However, if printk would be declared with __attribute__((format(printf, 1, 2)) (I don't know if it is), gcc would warn if the format string contains specifiers which do not match the given types, regardless of any typedefs.
I love the new idea, start with the bottom line, then work your way up to something people want... certainly better than starting with something free that people want then having them lay you out cold when you ask for some income from your work...
Isn't that the reason why you can set limits at each level of how many thank you "packages" are available at that level?
I hated JS for years, but started to love it in the last couple of months. In my experience, as long as you're not prejudiced and dont judge JS for its flaws, it will treat you very well.
I miss that "NO".

I expected to see "YES!", or maybe "MAYBE" in its place, but there's nothing there.
That thread is seriously wrong.

Here is an excerpt from an email discussion I had recently that touched on http://www.evanmiller.org/how-not-to-run-an-ab-test.html.

Evan Miller has a point, but not as good of one as he thinks.

It is true that multiple peeks mean that eventually any test will find
significance at any level you want. However in A/B tests the peeks
are not independent. This greatly weakens the effect he is talking
about.

Section 7 of my presentation, starting at
http://elem.com/~btilly/effective-ab-testing/#slide59, is about the
question of how long it takes for a test to complete. For that I ran
numerical experiments with constant peeking, literally every time you
add one to A and one to B you peek again. You can see graphs of how
many errors there were, and how long it takes to get an answer.

Here are key points:

- Be suspicious of tests that end quickly. Run them a bit longer on
general principal. (In general I'd call 500 people a very small
test.)

- Nobody can predict how long a test will take. Even if you know the
actual improvement, you still can't predict time to within an order of
magnitude.

- If a test has been running for a long time you know the true
difference is small, so there is no harm in accepting whatever answer
it gives.
"many of the miners are ready to head right back down and work elsewhere"

They might be ready but it's unlikely that they will. So far I've seen them be offered $10,000 each along with $400,000 for exclusive interviews. Hopefully the offers are real and they'll use it to take care of themselves for life. They deserve to not have to go down in a mine to earn a living after surviving this cave-in. [Source CNN Anderson Cooper 360 coverage]
Metaclass and superclass debugging in Ruby
It's just JavaScript, so they should work together fine:

Todo = Backbone.Model.extend

done: ->
@get("status") is "done"

toggle: ->
@set status: if @done() then "active" else "done"

Doing a quick Backbone.coffee version would be fun though, hmm...
Opera In Numbers (It’s Pretty Huge)
I can't really resist saying, because it's such a coincidence, that I _live_ in this picture and walk up Lavender Sweep. The trap street wasn't there in Google maps last time I looked, I assume they must move them around.
'generally'. It's the idea that you can easily mix up pointers and integers in C (and need to carefully remember types, etc) without getting told off by the compiler that's 'very, very wrong'. In your case, gcc will happily tell you:

warning: initialization makes integer from pointer without a cast

Without explicit casts, the compiler won't let you confuse pointers with integers without a warning or an error.
Ask HN: How do I promote my Open Source ERP Project?
Hi, we are startup company based in Mumbai and we have developed an web based ERP system in Python. What is the best way to promote this as Open Source to ERP consultants / companies?

The ERP world is dominated by the incumbents and all popular blogs are sponsored or run by existing companies. They have plenty of muscle and its hard for a small company to get in.

Any reviews, ideas would be helpful. The name of our project is ERPNext and you can find details on https://www.erpnext.com. The code is hosted at http://code.google.com/p/wnframework
TBH I was a little surprised that you didn't write this in coffee in the first place :-)

Isn't this the kind of thing that coffee would be aimed at?
Google does have a banking license in The Netherlands, I was looking into this yesterday, but there is not much information available, I guess they are not using it. I still wonder why they got it though.