skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> I still dont get what drives people to pay more for a digital download than an actual boxed version of the game.

Convenience. People pay for convenience all the time. That's why Starbucks can charge $2.50 for a medium coffee that you could make at home for $0.10. Or why the corner store milk is $2 more than the grocery store milk.

Driving to a store takes up to an hour out of your day. You buy the game, accumulating more garbage and shit that you don't need. Then you have to keep it safe and not scratch the disc. Care must be taken.

A digital download is incredibly more convenient. You don't have to leave your home, it's faster, safer, easier, and even better, you don't have to take care of more garbage or carefully handle optical discs.
The facts of the case are (almost) undisputed. What the guy did implicated him for several felonies. He had exceedingly good legal representation --- just read any of the court record to see that. His team managed to deadlock the jury on the most serious charge he faced. The one felony he got dinged with resulted from his destruction of evidence. And all this after (quick reminder) the guy broke into the still-active email account of John McCain's running mate during the 2008 election.

It is very, very hard for me to imagine mustering much sympathy for him. People are routinely imprisoned for computer-related crimes less blatant than this one. More importantly, people are routinely imprisoned for truly victimless crimes like "intent-to-distribute" escalations of simple drug possession. None of them have the resources this guy seems to have had.

I'm not sure the "burden" of a low-security prison far from his home is an injustice of a cosmic scale.
The author also fails to grasp the fact that if "Everyone-everyone!" (including "accomplished professionals") follows a given convention, then that convention must be correct, because that is what convention is.

Prescriptivists are universally incorrect, when they criticise universally practised convention.
Apple is on both the list of licensors and the list of licensees. In other words, they own some of the patents in the pool, and they pay to use those patents in the pool that they do not own. In order for Apple to make a profit on patent licenses, they would have to either own a majority of patents in the pool (if all of the patents are of equal weight) or those patents that they do own would have to have greater weight than all of the patents that are owned by others.

It's hard to say whether Apple actually gains anything. For all we know, they might be happy to break even.
If it had to, couldn’t the party trash the currency (from an international investor’s point of view) without trashing the economy?
Some people screamed and gnashed their teeth when one of my blog posts was discussed on HN not long ago, and they discovered I use Museo 500 as my body copy. (article: http://fayr.am/41ns commentary: http://fayr.am/41wI)

But now, I stand vindicated under the cold light of science. :)

(let the downmods and typography-forest-for-the-trees comments begin!)
"There is a good reason to use double spaces, and that is that when you're typing, you're only creating text, not typesetting. Software does the typesetting now, and will automatically space out sentences in a way that looks right. You don't need to change your habits, because computers work for _you_"

Counter-argument, in the form of a strategic rewording.
Yes. That is how it works. When you do things the legal way, even if they are evil things, you tend not to end up in prison. On the other hand...
What are some good examples of this?
Also interesting that searching {+cake central} or {cake +central} instead of {cake central}, the first result is the correct one.

I thought that the "+" just disabled the spelling/synonym/etc... alterations, while apparently in this query it does some kind of post-filtering for exact matches... (since both words do not appear in the page)
So many lucky users? :)

In an interview with the Washington Post in 2006 Marissa Mayer from Google said that almost no one ever uses the "I'm feeling lucky" button:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/10...

But maybe in 2011 Google users are luckier.
Ask HN: Failed/Strugling Entreprenuers please say hi.
What is the difference between a successful and a failed Entrepreneur. Are the successful bunch genetically smarter? Are they more hardworking? or are they simply lucky?

Why do some of us succeed and others fail miserably. Is it nature or nurture. I believe its all about the right circumstances. You throw a monkey on a stack of hey and if he is lucky he will find gold underneath it.

It sucks not to be successful but can you really change that?
But you still need to put the seat belt on! If you don't, your safety is compromised. So it's really up to the driver...
Not to take anything away from these guys—they obviously have a great amount of drive, intelligence, vision, and focus—but I'm a little perturbed by the utter amazement of the host. 'Who actually makes their own iPhone app?' I wouldn't trust anybody who apparently travels in the tech/startup community who finds actual technical know-how so completely unnecessary (if not alien) to the effective tech entrepreneur.
Being able to work anywhere is cool, but id argue that its easier if you have a second small laptop that you can just grab and go somewhere then to unplug all the clutter from your laptop first, rearranging windows and whatnot.
This would require that the small Laptop is powered on and has active syncing (via dropbox for example) with the workstartion to continue where you left off though.

Since Cloud Apps and Data syncing is much easier today, it might better to use the right tool for the job and not a single machine for everything which then is a compromise in either field.
Comparing concurrent frameworks
As someone who studied computer science at Cambridge, I can assure you that Cambridge teaches at a very formal and mathematical level.
ZERO.

The world is not a video game.

The difficulty required to break into someone's email account has absolutely nothing to do with the legal implications of doing so. It is very possible that you could be convicted of a felony for reading mails on a passwordless email account.

Stay the hell out of other people's email accounts. Jiminy.
It's important to find some way to get money from this project - otherwise it will just end up as another abandoned half-finished open source project that you don't have time to continue work on and gets prioritized behind other work that puts food on the table.

Maybe you can think a little outside the box and try to get sponsorships directly from companies who are more friendly towards open source projects and communities? Find a way to pitch the idea to a bunch of individuals and companies who might donate and see where it goes.
Spideroak.com works too. It automatically backups your data to the cloud (securely encrypted!). It synchronizes your data across multiple machines (and multiple OS) and you can access all past versions of your files. It's free if you don't need more than one or two GB. It's the ideal backup tool for researchers that don't generate tons of data and want a simple backup solution.
The Instapaper Effect -- The dilemma of long-form writing on the Web
Very cool. It'd be great if they could also build a system to actually scatter rainclouds. Northern European weather would become a bit more bearable.
The benefits of Facebook marketing for the song and artists is a good question... lots of interesting answers here.

But how about Facebook's end? Doesn't seem to me they were going to get much out of it either way?

SO how much revenue did Facebook receive on this event?

Not so sure I'd be buying a Facebook IPO... of course, being broke I won't have to deal with the question.
HandlerSocket: The NoSQL MySQL & Ruby
I think I heard a distant scream of Zed... http://zedshaw.com/essays/programmer_stats.html He was so right for cases like this...
so do you carry that beefy gaming laptop to work everyday ? I would bet its not the lightest one ;)
Best option is dual-encode. Native in Firefox / Chrome / Opera / Safari / newest IE / Android / iOS, Flash in older IE. Costs-wise it goes up again in terms of disc space and encode time, but both are cheap unless you’re playing with the big boys.
I disagree on the hotspot complaint. People in the US have been asking for hotspot functionality and jailbreaking to get it for years, just like Europe. Similarly with tethering before it showed up.

It's far more likely that the delay was just Apple doing its usual feature triage and taking its time to get hotspot functionality up to their standards.

And with tethering in particular, it seems clear that if Apple only listened to AT&T it wouldn't have even shown up as soon as it did. Or have you forgotten the time-lag between announcement and international availability and when AT&T finally decided to turn it on, even with a steep fee?
Maybe there are a lot of links to pages on cakecentral.com that no longer exist and now result in 404?
That would be absurd.
Page-widening bug, ugh. :(
Or just typing 'cake central' in an address bar in firefox.
Give them enough that they can start anything but can't do nothing.

Human being is meant to work hard, play hard and love hard to be happy. I have same thoughts - if I make what I've set out to do, how do I prevent spoiling my children. One answer would be to raise them in an ascetic fashion - short on consumer goods and long on interesting people and experiences.
Chinese mom vs. American dad
No I don't need my laptop at work. I was talking about my personnal setup but I think the weight makes me want to use the computer less. What I mean is because my laptop is kind of heavy, if I want to bring it with me somewhere I need to make a commitment since it's harder to bring. Most of the time, I end up not bringing my laptop everywhere and I'm computer-free, which is nice. You can always read a book when you're in the bus instead of working and being looking at a screen since you already do this 8hrs a day.
Well put. I learned to type on an old fashioned IBM typewriter when I was in middle school. We were taught the two spaces after a period rule and that's so burned into my mind that it takes effort to use a single space after a period.

This really felt like a two page rant over something that very few people in the world even notice when reading, and even fewer would care. On the other-hand, unlearning the two-space rule for someone who touch types fast enough to transcribe most people's speaking speed in real-time is going to take an enormous amount of effort.

Even if I agreed with the statements presented in the article I didn't find anything compelling enough to justify the effort of retraining my fingers.
Getting Sand Dollars
Thanks for sharing. These might be useful to contribute to underscore.js (or similar project)
Mul-T-Lock Kilit
Kilit sistemlerinde dünyanın lider imalatçısı ve tedarikçisi Mul-T-Lock.
Tell that to Tim Berners-Lee. Last I checked he was not a gazillionaire
I always put two spaces after a period in grade school because I wanted my papers to appear longer.
I wonder if no one at Apple tests MacBooks with 2 USB devices plugged in at a time, one of which happens to be a fairly common USB Thumb drive.

This especially sucks when the 15" and below have only 2 USB ports on one side, right next to each other.
Personel Kontrol | Mul-T-Lock
Mul-T-Lock Personel Kontrol Sistemleri ile ofis alanlarınızda tam güvenlik sağlayın.
Most of us are exposed to SQL during our careers, but I expect that few think of it as a programming language. Can you recommend any good resources in this area?

BTW where would you say that Erlang belongs in this picture?
see http://www.bocusa.com/portal/Info?id=649&lang=1&;

Can I buy and sell RMB from/to your bank?

Yes, you can exchange USD for RMB or exchange RMB for USD at our bank.
This is in most cases probably not an Apple thing. All German keyboards lack dedicated [], |\, and {} keys. We have umlaut keys instead of those (this is obviously the right tradeoff for the vast majority of all German computer users except programmers).

I would like to see the circumflex key (directly below esc) replaced with something more useful but that’s also not an Apple thing.

The only thing odd about Apple keyboards is the very narrow enter key.
I'm not inclined to trust the communists more than the Fed, but I am inclined not to put all my eggs into one basket.
Where are the use cases? Some algorithms are expressed more easily origin-1, others in origin-0. If you must choose one and want to do it rationally, you need a set of use cases ranked by relative importance.

The origin choice may be easy to change in the language syntax, but once you have users, it's not so easy. User programs make assumptions about origin. So does the code generation phase of the compiler. In most cases, the assumptions are implicit and not explicit; after the fact changes are difficult.
The Nobel Peace Prize 2006
Muhammad Yunus, Grameen Bank

http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/peace/laureates/2006/yunu...

Cheers
yep makes sense when you got another PC at work. Thing is i have my own office so i am moving between home and the office everyday and am trying to find the right setup for both worlds. Ideally not ending up with half a dozen of machines.
Another writing convention I read long ago which grew out of typewriter limitation is placing a comma or period within quotation marks when not part of the quotation as in:

I'm a fully qualified "hacker."

The period is not part of the quotation, but American writing style suggests it should still go within the quotation marks. America appears to be the only English speaking country to have this writing style; it's not that way in Britain, for example. I read this was due to something like ink splotching (or possibly it was jamming up of keys, which apparently gave us the non-optimum QWERTY layout) from where the typewriter would strike the page on mechanical typewriters when typing quickly if leaving the punctuation outside of the quotation marks as logic would dictate. I'm not sure how much truth there is to that, but I generally rebel and use the British style when writing, especially in informal situations like posting online comments.
Ask HN: When to put a language on your resume
I am new to programming and wanted to know, at what point is it exceptable to put a programming language on your resume? How much experience, projects, time would you suggest?
Chartbeat Cracks 2 Million Concurrent Users Tracked
Exactly. (I hope you understood I was using irony.)
Did they set up DynDNS by any chance? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U4oB28ksiIo
I was taught to use two spaces. &nbsp; Apparently there was a reformation of the the double space rule sometime thereafter. &nbsp;&nbsp; I would expect to be informed about such an important change in English grammar through a high exposure world-wide public announcement campaign. Considering that the use of double spaces separating sentences can provoke such ridicule, there really needs to be a global effort to educate all English speaking citizens of Earth. &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; Perhaps even training centers could be erected where people could be taught this new important change to the language. &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; These centers could perhaps even treat those who have been subject to the extreme psychological trauma of the public ridicule caused by the misuse of the space.
> price tag in the future of whatever the legal bills may come to

Oh great, FUD. If you are doing free video, you don’t have to pay anything. If you are selling premium content, then sure you might have to pay license fees (~10¢/user/year, and that will never go up by more than 5% every five or ten years), but why would you expect a lawsuit!?
Another story on the matter:

http://www.commercialappeal.com/news/2011/jan/13/convicted-p...

If he shows good conduct, they might release him as soon as November 23rd as confirmed by his entry in the The Federal Bureau of Prisons website:

(It was a very long search URL so I shortened it)
Inmate Locator - Locate Federal inmates from 1982 to present
http://tinyurl.com/6cv8r93

For those interested, here is the location he will be serving time at:

http://www.bop.gov/locations/institutions/ash/index.jsp
Neat! Four things:
1. The examples should probably be links. I spent about ten seconds trying to tap them on my iPad to no avail.
2. The description text doesn’t account for line-breaks.
3. iPad screenshots aren’t included in universal apps.
4. There doesn’t seem to be a way to bookmark the results. I was going to link you to my app for an example of these issues, but I can’t!

When I first clicked to see what AppBlogger was, I was actually expecting a “blog” with the app’s description and “posts” from the app’s updates (1.3.2 and its “what’s new,” 1.3.1 and it’s description, etc.). What are your plans for it?
Can't believe he managed to wrench 2000 words out of that subject.
> Easily guessable security questions like mother's maiden name as used by banks should not be considered legitimate protection any more than using a bag twisty to hold a gate closed should be considered the same as a chain and padlock.

Related: http://i.imgur.com/rGtgr.jpg
>"there simply are no places to walk in to."

From a practical standpoint, that's true for much of the US as well. If you live outside a large metropolitan area, your nearest service center can easily be 50-100 miles away. It's one reason many PC manufacturer's offer onsite service at the time of purchase.
It is probably just price differentiation. Probably app store customers are less frugal, and others will appreciate the illusion of a good deal and go and by the boxed copy.
Corona game from 14-year-old reaches no 1, passes Angry Birds
There's so such thing as being "dinged" with a felony. He will wear that albatross around his neck for the rest of his life.

It's not an "injustice of a cosmic scale" so it may not rise to your threshold of caring, but he's still a young man going to prison for what is essentially a prank. Have a little compassion.
Did I say anything about injustice? Sympathy is a commodity regularly dispensed to those in the wrong. The point of my comment is to explain that a low-security prison is one thing. One far away from anyone who cares about you is an added punishment. I'm not saying it's unjust, only a considerable part of the punishment worth consideration, on a human--not cosmic--scale.
Why? They are, after all, her employers-- and they've got quite a bit of time and money invested in her research. I have to assume that they have some kind of standards for the care of data, and I certainly hope that keeping exactly one copy of the dataset, without backups, on a laptop which frequently travels out of the lab, is in serious contravention of a number of their policies.
NYT Review on Tim Ferris New Book: The 4-Hour Body
It's important to note that some of the smartest people in the world are vulnerable to this. People we all respect. Fredrick Brooks accused himself of making this mistake. He came up with a job processing language for the 360 and in his book he claims it is the single worst programming language ever invented.

I'd also suggest that RDF has been the second system for Tim Berners Lee.
The video doesn't say much about what the app does exactly, but it sounds like they targeted a really good niche. Who knew an app for finding shoe boutiques would have so much demand?
How can you tell an extrovert programmer from an introvert programmer?

The extrovert programmer looks at YOUR shoes while he's talking to you.
Maybe it is a cheaper way to buy dollars? I couldn't find the interest rates on the accounts anywhere on the site.
You should never buy Applecare directly from Apple and always from ebay. It costs a lot less (185€ vs. 350€ for a MBP). Make sure to check the sellers’ ratings.

I successfully bought Applecare from ebay twice. (And heavily relied on it in one case. Apple replaced pretty much every part of my MBP without any fuss.)
Should employees buy their own computer?
> What does too much global state mean? Is having singletons in your application inherently wrong, because they introduce global state? I don't think so.

I do. If you have an hour, the following talk by Rich Hickey (clojure) covers philosophy behind global state being the problem. This is not a code talk and he takes his time getting into it so it's not the easiest talk to get into but it does explain the mindset.

http://www.infoq.com/presentations/Are-We-There-Yet-Rich-Hic...

To answer your question more directly:

I believe Java's lack of functions/closures lead to excessive factory use, which tend to be singletonish and so you get the set of dependency injection/IoC frameworks that simply don't exist in other languages but exist in Java due to too much global state. There are other symptoms, but this is the first one that came to mind.
- Strong push towards threading. Before NIO, there wasn't a way to avoid threads if you wanted to talk to multiple sockets. NIO has solved that for networks, but the whole java framework/idioms push you towards threads where it shouldn't.

- No way to tell how things are implemented. I had written a heapsort in Java. It run x40 slower than the equivalent C. I was trying to figure out why -- e.g. was it inlining the things it should? if not, why? It's like Java is a subcontractor that won't answer about their methods - that's a bad habit.
The really interesting question is why the start page of cakecentral.com would be transmitted with a 404 error code.
Actually, the modern convention of a single space is not due to saving space.† A proportional computer font is kerned in such a way that the space after a period is wider then between words. For example, a standard space is 1em‡, but the space after the period is kerned to give a width of 1.5em‡‡. A typewriter on the other hand only has a single 1em space, so either use 1 space or 2. Also, I read once that they used 2 spaces on a typewriter to reinforce the ending of the sentence in case the period did not strike properly.

† Though newspapers are famous for tricks like this such as the missing oxford comma according the AP Stylebook, and I wouldn't put it past the newspapers to have done single spaces years ago for this reason. There are several differences between AP Stylebook and Chicago Manual of Style to account for saving space.

‡ An em is the width of the lowercase m in the font.

‡‡ 1.5em isn't a hard and fast rule. The rule is wider than an em and less than 2 em's. It could be 1 1/3 is common as well. In reality, a designer spends agonizing amounts of adjusting the kerning on a font til it looks how they want.
Very nice site. The product looks like a really nice version of a similar (windows) product that I used a while ago.
Your point is absolutely correct, but I think your example is a little unfair. There are a ton of template libraries that handle inheritance or code sharing in both Python and Java, some restricted to XML, others freeform. Saying that any one on either side has "solved" it ignores the others that have approached the problem from another direction.

For my money, a better example is the comparison between http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/java/index-jsp-135475.html and http://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0333/. Or http://rack.rubyforge.org/doc/SPEC.html, for that matter.
White House: Send In Your SSN - Via Unencrypted, Unprotected Email
I wouldn't be surprised if the owner _deliberately_ didn't create backups.

I used to work in academia. Some of the academics I knew were extremely paranoid about anybody (including SysAdmins) accessing their research. They would go to great lengths to to keep their work away from the "prying eyes of the university" (a phrase someone used once). This meant not allowing any access to their personal desktops, laptops, etc. Admins worked around the personal desktop issue by refusing to help them with the inevitable problems unless they got access. But laptops were a different story.
Slate Invaders: Why You Should Use Two Spaces Between Sentences