skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
“Bloggers couldn’t find that themselves,” he said, “because they’re corrupted, or they couldn’t afford to spend the time.”

Actually, I'm pretty sure that bloggers have known about the Koch brothers for many years. The reason this guy had to wait until the New Yorker wrote about them might be that this guy doesn't read anything that isn't in the New Yorker.

EDIT: Changed the wording a bit. As Daffy Duck used to say: "pronoun trouble".
Somebody uses the following line in the thread:
"not because they are good programmers, but rather because they are good communicators".

Hell yeah. Overly-abstract code can be like using variable names x1 to x267 because it is more efficient to type. Time I spend grokking your code is time our website spends offline.
I wonder why he clarified the timespan to be in calendar time. Is there any metric I'm not aware of in which 'a few months' makes total sense?
"slightly faster" is a bit understated, you're usually talking about statically typed languages being an order of a magnitude faster for things that are computationally expensive. Granted most things aren't, so for a web page or whatnot, it probably doesn't matter; and certainly the expressive ability you gain from dynamic languages might be worth the trade off. But the trade off is undeniably there.

(Try comparing various languages here: http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/u32/benchmark.php?test=all... if you don't believe me)

Some dynamically typed languages can approach the speed of static languages, like Lisp, but they generally do that by introducing voluntary static typing hints, or having a JIT compiler introduce speculative code paths that guess the types coming in after some analysis.
I can agree with that. I'd add that if something seems clever you might want to make sure others on your team are aware of it too. At least that way you won't get blamed for being too clever, and more people will understand what's going on.
They got the trademark, even if it's ridiculous, Apple won't back down on that one. Rename or get removed. Even if I don't approve that "Retina" can be registered at all. But so did "Windows" ...
>>ADD/ADHD can be crippling, but for very smart people that manage it (or find way to become productive), it might be actually be beneficial to their creativity and give them and edge.

I am adult that has been recently diagnosed with ADD, and have to say that the comparative problem solving and creativity advantage has been apparent all of my life (not just to me :) ).

>>One comment that you hear from people that start taking Ritalin due to adult ADD, is that while they are a lot less distract-able and are able to perform and complete a lot more tasks, they feel less creative, and more a bit like robots.

I was afraid that this would happen to me, but thankfully that hasn't been my experience. I'm hardly a robot, and really just as prone to distraction. I am, however, better able to modulate my attention. On the drugs, I can choose what I pay attention to so that distractions are less of a problem.
Put WWW. on it and as a temp fix use someone like Nearly Free Speech to host the root domain with nothing but a redirect on.
I feel if Microsoft or Adobe had the same policies as Apple they would be riots in the street, but Apple mostly gets a free pass.

So my question to the fans of Apple, what is the limit? What would Apple have to do to turn you away from their platform?
Here I was expecting an article on using binary decision diagrams to efficiently solve some combinatorial problem with business applications!

Why this confusing initialism? Oh wait, silly me. For a second there I forgot that the intersection between people who chase such faddish mirages as behavior-driven development and people who know a bit of computer science is approximately zero.
You can't take product's name and use that product's name in your product when your product is about the original product without the owner's consent, even if the word is common. I find it funny that Bonobo would wonder that Retina is trademarked, considering the parent company is known as Apple.

Bonobo might feel they are in the right, but Unretina is using Retina specifically because of Apple's product, and it's directly related.

Just because a word is common doesn't mean you can't trademark it. I can't create a PC called the unApple and stand in shock when Apple comes calling.
I think some people mistake the ease of filling niches for the decline of art. It's not that art is on the way down, it's that more niches can be filled profitably with the audience made available by the Internet. Great art is a niche now. It's in the pie, but its slice is smaller. The people reading the "junk" either wouldn't care about the great art, or they would look at both.

I think this sort of pushback was inevitable when the digital publishing revolution people talked about for decades finally happened.
RSA: Richard Stiennon on Surviving Cyber War
Free icons search and generator
I feel as if every little thing Apple does get reported/blogged about and you have all this faux-outrage and people trying to make stories where there aren't any. I don't know of any other company that get scrutinized so hard. I hardly think Apple gets a free pass when it comes to the tech community.
i guess i was thinking about what they could do if they did not stifle their apps to fit some kind of unified design specification. 'killing' is supposed to reflect where i think they could be without following their own guidelines. Though apple sticks to design strategies and guidelines, there is much more flexibility, ie. when i use iphoto i dont feel like i am using itunes. whereas with google gmail feels like google.com, which feels like the rss reader, which feels like analytics.. and in my experience, i never really know where i am in google world. I know i am there, but i make mistakes because its all just generic space.
It's fine. Apple®.
Logic®.
New York®.
Tiger®.
Spaces®.
Tubes®.
Time Machine®.
the Arabic text say:
Jews are not terrorists, the American terrorists, the Arabs are the Terrorists.
You can also try this : "Israel will end" to Arabic it's translated to "اسرائيل لن تنتهي" which mean "Israel will never end"
Risk and Reward Are Not Obvious
I don't want a www. on it.
Solved: The disappearance of Rome’s Ninth Legion
A couple of key bits: “If somebody can actually get their kids through college writing for screens, for e-books, then the thing is working,” said Lanier. “If they can’t, it isn’t.”

Well, it's working for Joe Konrath[1], Randall Munroe[2], Felix Salmon[3], and others. They've got very different models, but each has company for theirs. (Not that it's easy to break in, but it's also really hard to break in to traditional publishing.) It's very strange to say that people can't make a living writing on line, while ignoring the folks who are actually doing it.

Worse is this: "If the future is one in which writers are not paid, then it also is one in which writers lack clout. And if it’s a future in which writers lack clout, then what we have is a lack, basically, of an intellectual middle class. Instead we have a sort of volunteer intellectual class, which in terms of clout starts to resemble peasants."

What gives writers clout, at a social level, is that people are reading their stuff, and taking it seriously, for reasons that may have nothing to do with the size of their paycheck. In the tech corner of the world, The GNU Manifesto and The Cathedral and the Bazaar are both essays that had a huge influence, and not because of how much either author got (belatedly) paid. Or, to be a bit of a homer, for a minute, you can't really judge pg's influence by his royalties on Hackers and Painters. I'm not sure he could live well off the royalty checks --- but I'm pretty sure no one cares.

What is a future like in which most authors of book-length texts need a day job? More like the present than one might think. Most authors need one already.

[1] http://jakonrath.blogspot.com/ --- online novelist; paid content

[2] http://xkcd.com --- online cartoonist; free content, paid swag

[3] http://blogs.reuters.com/felix-salmon/ --- the blog is his job
> I feel if Microsoft or Adobe had the same policies as Apple they would be riots in the street, but Apple mostly gets a free pass.

I'm confused. Are you saying MS and Adobe should be able to protect their trademark, or that they shouldn't?
Isn't "poking at all the options the program provides, hoping one of them will be close enough" the way one actually learns to use a program? At least I personally learn everything this way.
"WHY ELSE IS THIS COOL?" seems a very casual heading for an academic article.
You are of course correct. However, there's a difference between enough security to launch (i.e. what comes with your framework like XSS, SQL injection protection and basic common sense etc.) and spending lots of time doing extra security stuff (like HTTPS everywhere, making sure cookies are properly scoped etc.) that could be spent getting your startup out of the door.

There has to be a balance, which is something quite a few fellow security nerds miss. The value security brings is in protecting data. If you have no data, then there's not much value in security. Likewise, if you have sensitive data then it's worth going the distance to secure it.
Everything you've said on this post leads to a big, flashing, neon sign saying "DON'T DO IT, MAN".

It's your own choice, but if you can't depend on him, doesn't have the skills in the areas he'd need to have, and seemingly wants to muscle in because he's watched a movie, then I think it's probably better if you find a way to decline without being too rude about it.

Maybe help brainstorm his own idea he can run with, if only to be supportive?
For my task management I used a perl script which appends comments to the bottom of the script as to do items.

i.e script and to do list are one and the same.
"You've fallen for it. Ives is the designer, not Jobs. Woz was the technological wizard, not Jobs."

I don't think I've fallen for anything (in fact, I made strong mention of Ives with respect to industrial design). Being able to conceive good design and being able to guide good design are both signs of design competence; being able to conceive good technology and being able to guide its development are signs of technical proficiency. Jobs in his role as guide (or leader) is an exemplar.

I never claimed (and I don't think anyone else did) that there are no "other talented people doing their jobs".

Your rejoinder, rather than actually arguing against personality cults, is more a reminder that "a witty remark proves nothing."
No, compilers can do a good job at translating Lisp into something that commodity hardware likes. It would be really hard to beat the performance of x86 running Lisp with custom hardware running Lisp cost effectively.
You've picked a bad article to make this point - if someone tried to re-brand OpenOffice as "MS Office" you can be sure that Microsoft would defend its trademarks, and you'd never see it on HN. But when Apple does the same, it is front page "news". Hardly a free pass.
What do you mean by 'what's next' ?
If it was organised would you be willing to come to London for it? I imagine I could probably help arrange accommodation for you, or at least help find somewhere nearby and in budget. I'm assuming this would happen on a weekend.
The Shadow Scholar
Cuckoo hashing is not only optimal in theory, it is also very fast in practice. The only downside, though, is that the insert time has linear-time worst case. Thus it may be not the best solution if latency is an issue.
Write to promote, or write on commission. <speculation> Most of the intellectually valuable literature didn't make money anyway. </speculation>
Couchfuse - FUSE filesystem exposes Couchdb databases as filesystem folder
thought exactly the same. define a "cool" way of doing things
i like the cut of your jib, sir.
I think we are saying the same thing, and I just did not say it well. My problem with the statement I quoted is that it is unconditioned on efficiency.
You can't test for a particular outcome given an unknown set of input data.

If you have a known snapshot of data, you can set expectations for how you want your system to behave under those circumstances.

If you create a world where IMDB would rank highest for your indexing algorithm for the term "avatar", then you can expect that when you run a search it will be returned as the first result.
Trademark search here... look for your favorite words! If you use the 2nd link you can search by company (search by "owner name"), you can see all the words that Apple/Facebook/Microsoft own

http://tess2.uspto.gov/bin/gate.exe?f=tess&state=4010:pa...
The last point says there are plenty of developers. The second-to-last says there isn't a vibrant developer/entrepreneur community and it's hard to make connections. Those are different things. You can have lots of individual developers who don't communicate with each other much.
An interesting algorithm, and an engaging presentation. If only more academic writing was this accessible!
That aren't "enforcing" their trademark in the courts where the attempt would probably be unsuccessful, they are just threating a guy with app store removable unless he does what they say.

The trademark summary says 'Electronic hand-held game units other than those adapted for use with an external display screen or monitor;'
Great story; thanks.
اليهود ليسوا إرهابيين. الأمريكيون الإرهابيين. العرب هم الارهابيي

in english, this exactly translates to :
Jews are not terrorists. The terrorist americans. The arabs are the terrorists.
Start With Innovation, Then Make it a Revolution
Can China brew up its own social media revolution?
Email notifications aren't launched yet but I'm preparing to test start testing it with a small of users. Want in on it?

I can't afford to give out many trials right now, but what I am going to do soon is give all the free plans access to a specific detailed analytics account (probably mine, @shazow) to give people an idea of what it's like. For now, I'm counting on that $10 isn't a huge loss risk.

I'd love to chat too, hit me up at andrey@socialgrapple.com
Thanks for the comment. I should probably add a lot more info about what we did to secure the app. I will try and add that info in the next day or so. Thanks for all the suggestions. Much appreciated!
Love Tips
I don't comment with the expectation of up votes. Infact, I commented that just to warn others that they'd be staring at a google-wall.

Anyone else remember when you didn't have to log into google groups to look at a newsgroup thread?
Donated as well. I don't own or care about the PS3, but Sony must not win this.
Facebook, YouTube, our collective time sinks (stats)
No it would be more like MS sues every software product with the word Office or Windows in it. Which they don't as evidenced by the existence of OpenOffice.

I am not trying to argue Microsoft is some white knight or anything else noble, just that Apple policies are worse but with better marketing.
Free publicity for the price of a name change - for a free app. Everyone wins.
I am a mathematician and ...
OK, don't then. I was just suggesting a temporary fix as its unlikely Amazon will fix this any time soon.

Also be aware that their are benefits to hosting your site on www. - its not just for historical reasons. e.g. the ability to restrict cookies to the subdomain - which you can't do with root domains as it affects all subdomains also.

Not to mention people will some people will still go to www. by default anyhow so you're always going to have to have a www.
Okay, as it used to be written in good ol' BASIC

10 start

20 allow email registrations

30 goto 20

;-)
That's a great example actually... it's Open OFFICE, competing with Microsoft OFFICE, and surprisingly AFAIK Microsoft did nothing to defend that.

That being said, Apple isn't the only company going a bit overboard, as Facebook is making legal threats to LameBook, TeachBook, and PlaceBook
Mind to share please?
I am not saying the is any news conspiracy. Rather these stories do very little to dent Apple fanaticism. Unless all of these people own large portions of Apple stock, why are they so loyal to a company?
Free Android App maker
There's no point in telling people to make it executable in your instructions, given that it needs all the extra arguments in the alias.

Also, putting these two lines before your import will make it run without complaint on Python 2.6.x:

import warnings
warnings.filterwarnings('ignore', 'the md5 module is deprecated')
I think you missed the point. It's a Mac app to downsize images. The trademark is for 'Electronic hand-held game units other than those adapted for use with an external display screen or monitor;'.

Also Apple were happy with the name for the first 6 weeks of the Mac App Store being open.
What's ridiculous about the trademark?
Counterpoint: some of the best reporting on the nuts and bolts of the subprime mortgage mess, while it was happening, was by a semi-retired mortgage broker pseudonymously blogging as "Tanta", who never got paid a dime for it. When she died, she was mourned by everyone from Tyler Cowen to Paul Krugman.

The pseudonym was because, if her cancer ever went into remission, she wanted to be able to get a job, and she thought it might be a handicap to have (quite rightly) savaged just about every major company in the industry. The announcement of her death was the first most of her readers had ever seen her name --- Doris Dungey.

EDIT: Counterpoint to Lanier, that is. Sorry 'bout that.
Interesting that Ruby and Python have been flat for a while.

http://www.google.com/trends?q=perl,+python,+ruby&ctab=0...

I wouldn't have guessed they'd each surpassed Perl around 2007.

Edit: Also, despite a steady decline, watch Java dwarf them all:

http://www.google.com/trends?q=perl,+python,+ruby,+java&...
I was very happy today to see an article on Cuckoo hashing and one on space filling curves on HN. Three actually interesting technical articles that are not just fashion du jour would be a lot to ask for.
Censorship.

While not THE answer, it's why this longtime faithful Borders customer quit cold turkey.

When the "mohammed cartoons" flap broke, Borders responded by refusing to carry issues of magazines which printed the images. In a market where "banned books" are celebrated as an exercise of rights, this act of censorship alienated more than just this customer. The competition did not so violate this basic principle, and with B&N and others just as easy to visit, we took our business to where we could trust that discussion of controversial content would not be suppressed.

Trust is hard to build and easy to lose.
One of the problems I face as coach is that people ask me simple, yes/no questions and I always answer "it depends". It's not that I'm trying to be evasive, it's just that life is full of little complexities. So I took a bit of artistic license and made a generalization. As you point out, we could speculate all day on various scenarios where TDD/BDD might be useful. That line of reasoning was too much for a short comment on HN, though.

One of the things I really don't think you get -- something I had an extremely difficult time getting -- is just how worthless your code is. Startups are not rewarded for writing good, maintainable code. Hell, they're not even rewarded for writing code at all. There's a lot of folks that say to advertise, create a vapor-ware product, and only once you know for sure people are willing to pay money for it should you start programming. Whether you like that idea or not, it shows just how far down the line programming is in the scheme of things for a startup. "Maintainable" or "Great" code is even further down.

Startups are about making things that people want that can scale out to huge numbers. Coding gives you that ability to scale out -- in certain instances and under certain situations. But you could just as easily write 10 lines of javascript and make a million dollars as you could write 100K lines of C. In fact, there's another huge school of thought that says the more you code the farther you've probably drifted in your mind from where the actual market might be. Each little test you create is further reinforcing in your mind -- that little code->yay cycle -- that what you are doing is cool. And it's probably not. "Yay" is people paying you money. Not having a test run.

And that gets to agile principles, which I think are very applicable. Do a little, test the market. Do a little more, test the market. I have been doing that for a few months, and I've found that most people who want stuff could care less whether it involves programming or not, or how well it's programmed. They just want stuff. If a guy is drowning, he's perfectly happy with you throwing him a life saver that falls apart and is crappy -- as long as it saves him from drowning. You might not even need a lifesaver -- you could do something else. In fact, the more you speculate on what the drowning guy might need, the more off-course you are. That means that any structure you put in your code early on is smoke and based on pipe dreams. The iterate-test cycle for me is what has verified beyond a doubt how low on the totem pole programming is. Find something people want. Period. More customers, less anything else.

Coming from many years of loving to learn how to be a better craftsman with my code, kinda sucks, huh? All those guys telling you what a great programmer is and how to be one, and then Average Joe Sixpack doesn't recognize how cool your TDD and programming language are. Dang customers. :)
I don't see why they would be unsuccessful in court. "Retina" is not a term normally associated with displays, so I see no problem with it as a trademark.
I'm guessing that "Office" was already in use. "Word" certainly was (i.e. Word Perfect). So "OpenWord" would be probably be fine. On the other hand, don't try making an "OpenExcel" or an "OpenPowerpoint".
Any creative holder of employee stock options can change their gains into tax free income and not worry about city, state or Fed tax..

John Olagues
olagues@gmail.com
Best Buy’s bizarro world Xoom ad « The Orange View
That is partly my point, it is ridiculous no matter who is making the legal threats. The company making the threats should have no bearing on anything.
"Linear-time worst case" is different from "amortized constant time", which is what cuckoo hashing provides.

Almost all the containers we use on a regular basis provide only amortized constant time inserts.
Komodo Island is the new 7 Wonders of The World
Komodo Island is the new 7 wonders of the world, That's expected by most of Indonesian people, As we know that Borobudur Temple having previously not included in the category of the 7 Wonders of the World, And now the Ministry of Culture and Tourism, Republic of Indonesia struggling for Komodo Island National Park may come in the 7 Wonders of the World
I am from India. Just tried this website, Its cool except constantly asking for my credit card which is kind of irritating.