skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: Review my startup. Loqly - QnA for Local Businesses
We request your feedback and suggestions for our new product Loqly. After 8 months of sleeping 2 hours a day our iPhone app is finally out there and our website will be out in a few weeks. We are just looking for frank feedback from HN community.

Focused on QnA around local businesses, Loqly allows you to get answers to what "you want to know" instead of being forced to read what "others want you to know" (Foursquare tips + Yelp reviews, anyone?)

With Loqly you can ask questions about a local business, eg "How is the grilled chicken sandwich?" @ a burger restaurant near you. "Has anyone tried the new Cafe Machiato?" @Starbucks near you "Is it a good idea to bring my 3 year old with me here?" @a fancy restaurant where you have been dying to go. "Can someone suggest a good stylist here?" @a Salon near you.

We are going to introduce business referrals too (in a week) You can now ask questions like : "Can someone suggest me a good dentist in Las Colinas?" "Can someone tell me where I can get cheap tires for my Nissan Murano"? and locals will start referring businesses to you.

Please download our free iPhone app: http://bit.ly/e5u4jv and give it a whirl. We are launching our website in a few weeks. Leave your email address at http://loqly.me and we will notify you when we go live. Or send an email to support@loqly.me with subject "Signup request".

Finally, since Loqly is community based, please help us by tweeting about us. You could write "Check out Loqly, a cool new service, where you can ask questions and get answers about local businesses - http://loqly.me "

-Thanks and Regards
Nishant
True, but it's not just the fact that it's a common (and often garbage) claim--it's also about the relative worth if it's proven true.

I mean, if I could really get C performance out of SBCL (and for my purposes, I can't), I'd sure as hell want to know.

Think cold fusion. Sure, "wolf" has been cried a lot of times, but you're still going to want to know as soon as it happens "for real".
Try reading the article. The author lives in the US and refuses to buy from Amazon US. In short, he (and many other people in this thread) are complete hypocrites.
What I'm going to Business School for is not so much the curriculum, but the chance to interact with other like-minded people, get acquainted and also share knowledge and insight (I hope!).

It's also very valued outside the enterpreneurship world, if you ever want the job security (not to mention the network you should make, that should give you some job offers).

I'm starting in April (at ORT here in Uruguay), I hope it lives up to my expectations :) .
I entirely agree that changes in the record industry need to happen. And I entirely believe that more people will pirate until those changes happen. It would be great for the music industry to change, it needs it.

My only point: pirating is not a valid form of protest, because it is actually about you satisfying your wants.
What is so compelling about Angry Birds, you think? I completed the levels in the Lite version, and then switched to other games like Demolish or Cat Physics. I just don't get it why someone would play AB again and again... doesn't it get boring after some time?
Crush The Castle was a popular flash game before it hit the iPhone too.
I don't see how it would have helped anyone if he had just moved on with his life and not downloaded the album. Isn't the usual justification for intellectual property that it rewards the creator? If you compare the "download the album" and the "move on and don't listen to the album at all" alternatives, the creator gets no reward either way, so it seems ethically neutral--- contrary to the case where he could've paid the creator and instead chose not to, where the creator actually loses out on a sale.

Now perhaps you could say that it's unethical because if he hadn't downloaded this album, he would've paid for someone else's, so he's not stealing from the creator of this album, but indirectly from the creators of other albums that he didn't buy instead. But that seems like an argument that proves too much; in that scenario, is it also unethical to listen to CC-licensed music, because doing so steals business from non-CC-licensed music?
As an addendum, that's an issue of the parents failing, not the school. The primary responsibility for a child's welfare should fall to the parents, not the schools. Schools are secondary. If schools take the primary initiative, there's even more incentive for parents who are on the decision margin to offload that responsibility to the schools and instead focus on other (potentially, but not necessarily, more selfish) things.
Behind-the-scenes with IBM's 'Jeopardy' computer, Watson
Lisp-based OSes
New York released statistics that show that only 41% of NY students graduate prepared to get at least a "C" in college level math and writting classes.

Charter schools do much worse--only 10% of charter school students meet this "college ready" standard.
Same here, I download every tv show I watch.

But I would argue that I am not pirating tv shows. I paid for them by watching the same product placement as my american counterparts.

Remember, with tv shows you are the product, not the tv show. Therefore they are essentially unstealable because every time you "steal" a tv show, you're adding one more product to the content owner's roster.
Best Android Exclusive apps for the Thanksgiving Day | InfoMov.Com
Have you timed this? Instruction caches are finite, and overflowing them hurts performance so badly that some more loop unrolling may not help.
My experience is flight attendants that don't know the current policy, and assume that all phones have to be off. Maybe I'm just unlucky.
I recall at least one old FORTRAN guy wandering into comp.lang.c who had very few good things to say about C's handling of floating-point calculations...
So if something is too much work to acquire, we are allowed to obtain content illegally? I'm a little surprised Fred is openly admitting that he committed a crime. Isn't this enough for the authorities to pursue legal action?

The fact that the content is more expensive or harder to get is all the more reason to give up. This is not a moment of failure. It is a warning and a notice that hurdles have been set to prevent acquisition.
"This wasn't a small challenge: every minute, we serve over 100 million pieces of content that may receive comments."

"But it works because our commenting rate is significantly lower than our viewing rate."
Facebooks crude https workaround - still insecure
I've not timed anything, but asking gcc to optimise for size is the wrong thing to do when benchmarking for speed. I can think of lots of ways that this would cripple performance. Why not let gcc make its own decision?

The only justification for using -Os in a speed benchmark is "I tried it both with and without the flag, and it was faster this way". I don't see any such assertion.
I've experienced this with Disney's Fantasia some years ago, looking for a copy generally for me but specifically to show a friend a particular sequence. I searched high and low for a legal DVD copy and only found second hand dealers and other traders who wanted an extortionate amount, people the other side of the Atlantic which would have made postage+duty similarly expensive and a few VHS copies. So I downloaded the thing from a disreputable source (there being no real legitimate download sources for this sort of thing back then).

Maybe it is available now. Maybe I'll search later and consider buying a copy if it is officially available as a DVD or via download in a good quality format. Though my interest has dropped off considerably in the intervening years.

On other occasions I've hit the "we can't show you this in your country" thing. My reaction has always been "fair enough, there is an Internet awash with other things I can watch and I have plenty of other things to distract myself with at home too". A couple of times the restricted item has been a film trailer/preview - those productions may have lost the chance to garner my interest in paying to see them when they are released over here.

This isn't quite the same problem as the linked article discusses - this was an older item that was effectively out-of-print rather than a new item that wasn't available in all territories. The entertainment industry does shoot itself in the foot quite often with staged roll-outs though - either because people who might buy if they could easily obtain the content by other means or because people have a chance to happen upon negative reviews that put them off or have a chance to be distracted by other things and forget about this particular thing. While it can be excused to a certain extent with physical mediums (manufacturing and distribution logistics could make a coordinated global release difficult to manage, and a risky undertaking if initial demand for the product is not easy to judge) it simply makes no sense with content that is being distributed digitally.

Oh, and on a point of pettyness... Hello Mr In The US And Can't Get Content That Is Available to UKians Waaa Waaa Waaa. Welcome to what the rest of the world often experiences!
As always, I was hoping The Simpsons was the inspiration behind this. (for those who don't wish to watch, I'm referring to the make up gun Homer invents).
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HPpCvM1EVKE&feature=relat...

But, a human dot matrix printer works too.
>Which is hard, because the client you’re billing knows this person doesn’t really cost $100/hour.

This is also not exactly correct. The client probably knows the person they're getting doesn't get exactly $100/hr but they probably don't know what they do get. There are usually agreements in place where the firm will not tell the person what rate is being paid for them and the firm can't ask what rate the person is actually getting. The only person in this Ménage à trois who knows what everything costs in the consulting firm, and they make their money by keeping both parties in the dark as much as possible.
You are completely right, I'm sorry about my previous comment.

The strange thing is that I couldn't find any reference to surrogate pairs in the Python documentation, so I was assuming that the elements of an unicode strings were complete codepoints. Instead this is not the case:

>>> list(u'\U00010000')
[u'\ud800', u'\udc00']

If I had Python compiled with the UTF32 option, this would return a single element, so Python is leaking an implementation detail that can change across builds. That's really really bad...
Crush The Castle and Angry Birds are distinctive from those games, and similar to each other, in that the structure to be destroyed is governed by physics, which affects gameplay through domino-like knock-on effects.

However, I think there are several apart from Crush the Castle, particularly as flash games, predating the iPhone. Physics-based games have become commonplace.

It would be interesting to know why Angry Birds won though. I would guess it's mostly the characters and presentation. i.e. design. Counts for a lot, perhaps especially considering that it's a consumer product, and for the iPhone. The gamplay mechanic slingshot vs. two-tap may have had an effect, by being simpler, and, as always marketing, timing (more iPhones had been sold) and luck. It would be interesting to know, but I can't see how you'd know.
As a particularly ludicrous example, I pay for subscription sports channels and then have to use low grade foreign streams to watch any Premier League football match kicking off at 3pm
(FA rules: they're worried that wider UK TV access to all top division games will reduce attendances at lower league games played simultaneously).
Is it really unethical to violate copyright laws when the copyright holders refuse to take my money?

From the point of view of the consumer, international price discrimination for digital goods also appears no more ethically justifiable than piracy.
Erlang on Embedded Devices
WebODF — a JavaScript library for OpenDocument Format
Having used Tibco and having written high-performance message routing services for investment banks, I'd like to say yes it is hard, and Tibco does it badly.
How Much Money I Made From Side Projects In 2010
256 char ASCII is called "8-bit", "high", or "extended" ASCII.
So, pure (7-bit) ASCII is the only thing you can hold in a "one-byte UTF-8 array". The 8th bit (or the first, depending on how you see it) is used to mark multibyte characters, i.e. any character that is not ASCII. So you only can represent 128 possible symbols into a UTF-8 character with length of one byte. In particular, UTF-8 maps these to ASCII (or, US-ASCII) characters, and the byte starts with a 0 bit (In other words, you cannot encode high ASCII into one UTF-8 byte.) For ALL other characters (no matter), the first bit in any (multi-)byte is set to 1. That's why it is easy to scan for length of ASCII chars in UTF-8, but not for any others.
I like reading Fred's stuff, but I must say I'm a bit surprised that he's just discovering this problem now. I thought he read this site.
You need to move ASAP. I'm serious.
Oh man, this stuff is frustrating. Two stories:

A girl and I wanted to watch a movie on a spare evening. We had been talking a few days before about how we'd never seen Scott Pilgrim[1], and so we decided to actually go down to Blockbuster, because it'd be quaint. I was surprised it was still around...

Anyway, so we get there, and we wander around, looking for it. We didn't see it, but we did see that they had 35 new copies of some other release, which seemed kind of ridiculous. So we ended up asking the people who worked there, and they said that it came out on DVD the next day. So we just went home, and about 15 minutes later, we were watching it in full high def. "Well, we tried to do it the right way, and all it did was waste an hour." Silly rules about waiting on physical products meant that they missed out on my $2.

Last week, I was with some friends. I mentioned how I'd just seen the premier of Archer[2], and how I was surprised it was as good as Season 1. My friends hadn't seen it, but were interested. So I told them to bring up Netflix, because all of Season 1 was on it. So we looked... and now that Season 2 was on TV, Season 1 was back to 'DVD only.' Ten minutes later, the first episode was torrented, and by the time we'd finished watching episode 1, the entire rest of the season was done. I was specifically trying to get my friends hooked on their product, yet they wanted to make it harder for me to do so. It's so dumb.

99% of my media consumption is legal, because most of the time, I don't mind what I'm watching or listening to. But when I'm trying to find something specific, it always seems really hard to actually get, and there's also this[3]. But torrents have everything, and it's fast, and no-bullshit.

1: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0446029/

2: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1486217/

3: http://farm5.static.flickr.com/4085/5008519733_757bc53e18_z....
How Meebo Got Started & Its Strategy to Make the Web More Social
You're right that it was formed by the 70's but my emphasis is in the early undefined formative stages. Its true that by the mid 70s the movement had already organized itself into an early form of what we know as hip hop. But prior, in the late 1960s nascent movements were occurring that would eventually coalesce into the hip hop community by the mid to late 1970s.
Thanks for steering me away. Fortunately your comment was leading the top thread when I got here so I didn't waste my time.
Yeah for AFL here we have probably 3 free to air games a week which are screened delayed in an attempt to improve attendances, I would happily pay to watch live for some of these games but the option just isn't there.

At least with cricket they have given up on showing only half the play if the match was in your city. Attendances are as good as ever...
Unfortunately the size of wchar_t is platform/compiler dependent.
The other day I was at Bourbon and Branch in San Francisco, a bar designed and run like a 20's era speakeasy when alcohol was illegal. Can you imagine living in a world where the government, no, puritans, dictated what you can or cannot brew for your own consumption?

If you think sharing digital music is "stealing", then I suggest you get familiar with the principle of abundance. The real crime is in drawing an analogy between peers who elect to share digital information, and pirates who kill and steal limited resources in transit from A to B.

The fact is, while the market includes a large number of P2P filesharers, many people will gladly pay for convenience and live concert tickets, and none of this is going to change. If you can't deal with this, you are in the wrong business. If you are a musician who feels robbed by the masses of torrent sharers, then I dare you to reveal your identity and speak up against filesharing and see how quickly you alienate your fans.

Understand that when you liken the free flow of information to "stealing", you are speaking a point of view that is quickly becoming extinct. The next generation born into the P2P era will think nothing of this, and find your prudish inclinations out of touch with reality.
Or, as the Simpson's put it... "Anything that's the 'something' of the 'something' isn't really the anything of anything"

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cc5vN2XReWs&subject=Simps...
Time Kille
i suspect he will loose hearing ability to some percentage after hearing hundreds of shots right next to him.
Combining the Unix style process separation with mechanisms in the language might be useful.

A problem with such environments might be the availability of widely used applications like Google Chrome or Firefox. A way around this might be to expose the language's Virtual Machine as bytecode or some other intermediate, and target C compilers to that. This way, an entire POSIX environment could be built on top of the Lisp based OS, which would be more comfortable for many users, yet still offer an omnipotent, seamless access to code everything "from the bare metal-up" in Lisp.
may i dare make a conclusion with my observations? :)

utf-8 is good for network interchange and is de facto becoming standard.

utf-16 is not bad for internal storage of strings in memory or in database. not nesserily bad. maybe even better for some reasons
Tim Ferriss observed this? Or in which peer-reviewed journal did the study appear?
Well, I am neither black-and-white with the topic. Both have valid reasons for use; UTF-8 in general is more efficient in space for any use where ASCII characters are predominant. UTF-16 is more efficient if non-Latin-1 characters are predominant. UTF-8 has backwards compatibility to ASCII if that is important. UTF-16 makes it easier and faster to count characters, take slices of characters, and scan for characters (and, so far, I insist no valid argument why this is the case has ever been produced - all UTF-8 solutions are hacky and/or harder to maintain). UTF-8 nicely works even with the native C char type, UTF-16 doesn't. In the end, all these considerations need to be weighed and your solution should accomodate what is best for your problem. In my case, all I want to say is that UTF-16 often turns out to be the better approach for text processing, while UTF-8 is useful for text storage and transmission.
The mongols were around 1200CE. The road from Rome to China was around 200BCE. The rise of iron was around 2000BCE.

All a long time ago, but an even longer time in between them.
> I heard on the radio that Vegas did ~$85 million in bets on the Super Bowl alone.

And the thing they didn't tell you is that most of the serious sportsbetting is now done via offshore sportsbooks. Places like pinnaclesports.com offer better spreads to gamblers, and other sites offer much wider arrays of options.
For comparison, nationwide only 9% of 16- to 18-year-olds are able to read at a 'proficient' level, meaning they can read well enough to figure out a bus schedule or compare and contrast two different editorials. (And what they call proficient is really only an 8th-grade reading level.)

http://nces.ed.gov/NAAL/PDF/2006470.PDF
This is true for real software, not microbenchmarks. All of the shootout benchmarks will fit in their entirety in L1i cache -- which makes reducing the executable size pointless.

Incidentally, this is probably the largest reason why so many people still use -O3 -- it wins in exactly the kind of programs that are used as simple and common benchmarks. It solidly loses on almost everything else.
To clarify, not all consulting companies are "body shops." In my thinking, that's a term for companies that focus on image, sales, and marketing, but then turn around and try to sell the maximum number of low quality "units" to customers.

There are other companies that focus on quality and delivering actual and not just perceived value. Those are not mere "body shops."
Well, it is true that he has a legal avenue to acquire the files (as long as he waits for the delay imposed by Amazon US).

But I wouldn't call them complete hypocrites. Globalization has made us desire stuff we then can't acquire - very often artificially, in the case of entertainment, by way of publicity, positive reviews like in this case, etc.

Hypocrite:
"a person who puts on a false appearance of virtue or religion. 2. : a person who acts in contradiction to his or her stated beliefs or feelings"

The author is rationalizing (as I often do as well), but I wouldn't say he's an hypocrite, unless he refuses to pay at the time when he has a legal avenue to do so. (BTW, I did read the article - I might have taken the wrong conclusions, but still)
Every once in a while for fun, I try to find as many good .com domains as I can. There are a lot of good ones out there.

I've considered having a best available .com competition here, but think it might be considered wasteful, doing the work of squatters for them.
Your guide to the seven types of malicious hackers
Subscription models, vanity lists and social networks should be provided in an app store as a service that gives the digital content more meaning.

Steam is doing it. I pirate everything I see but since Steam I'd rather buy some games simply because they are then in my "Steam games list".

I would easily give up piracy on music if Spotify became legal here in Belgium, but it hasn't so I combine my LastFM subscription with rapidshare account.

Same for TV shows and Movies, I don't see the point in owning it, but I would pay for a Netflix account in a heartbeat.
1 -- It's perfect for casual play. I have a long commute that involves a subway, a high speed train, and a taxi. I can play it for 1 minute, 5 minutes, 10 minutes. As a counterexample, another favorite game of mine is 'Tilt To Live', but I can't just play it any time, anywhere, because I need a 10 minute block of time before I start the level (technically I could pause it mid game and come back later, but realistically I unpause and die). But with Angry Birds, I can.

2 -- The 3-star system. You can beat the level trivially, but depending on the level it is somewhere between moderately challenging to kick me in the pants hard to get 3 stars on a level.

3 -- It's funny. the birds, the pigs, the sounds they make, the way stuff crashes. I still snicker after countless hours played.

tl;dr - it's a near perfect combination of casual-play, challenge, and hilarity
Are you really saying that one can't enjoy the act of protesting?

"Pirating" music is as much an act of protest as it does satisfy. In fact, it doubles the enjoyment whilst filesharing is considered illegal, and triples it when you tell the world about it. It's practically free joy for the price of naught, and contributes to world peace.
Doesn't work at all if the source material is in LaTeX, or anything more complicated than RTF really.
Stirrups first appeared in India around 500BCE. They were widespread by 500CE. The mongols were 1200CE. You may be thinking of the Huns.

Incidentally, it is remarkable that it took 1000 years for the stirrup to spread across eurasia. I have no good explanation for this.