skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I may be missing something, but this seems like a mostly unnecessary move by Apple. At least it doesn't need to be so strong. What exactly are they trying to prevent here, developers getting around the 30% cut to Apple, crappy user experience?

For apps where it genuinely makes sense to have an in-app subscription option, developers will most likely add it in anyway. The increased conversion rate will make it worth it in many cases.

Not good enough? Start using app store exposure as a stick & carrot.

Don't want people to load an app and immediately be told to go sign up online? Ban apps that rely on subscriptions.
It's simple. The US needs to stop subsidizing the bad calories (i.e. sweetners and hydrogenated oils) and enabling the treatments (i.e. dialysis, statins) that treat resulting diseases of civilization (i.e. diabetes, heart disease).
But he misjudged that something else (America) with his original destination (India).

Quoting from wiki (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christopher_Columbus):

"Amerigo Vespucci's travel journals, published 1502-4, convinced Martin Waldseemüller that the discovered place was not India, as Columbus always believed, but a new continent"
>that would be socialism.

That is a massively incorrect statement, which pops up every time government-mandated healthcare debates appear, which I wish to squash ASAP: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socialism

Universal healthcare != socialism. Not even remotely. It's a political mud-slinging attempt to equate healthcare changes with the historical fear of the USSR that seems to have infected far more people than it should even have reached. Yes, fear the Reds, they'll lob bombs at you now that the cold war is over. They've just been waiting.

At the absolute closest would be if the government were to run all the healthcare directly (it's not - there are and will be many private healthcare markets), and then it would be a socialist action, not socialism (a socialist government).

To make matters worse for this use, any form of taxation can be described as a socialist action. That doesn't make any government that taxes its citizens a socialist government.
I used to be a long-time believer of free market. But for health care and Education system things are quite different. All the participants taking care of their own interest doesn't mean the interest of the whole society will be maximized. Some poor countries might be better than the States. Believe or not, check the healthcare of Cuba!
I guess I'd better stop waiting for Amazon to provide me with an iPhone app that lets me launch Cluster GPU instances.
The timer doesn't even need to have a visible clock. It just needs to count the minutes.
Reference for the last part there: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16282212
And that seals the deal. No wakemate for me. Time to order a FitBit!
End of an era for NASA: Historic legacy for NASA's pioneering shuttle
New MacBook Pros to Carry Larger Trackpads, Dedicated SSD for Mac OS X?
Breakup Notifier (Launched on HN) on CNN Front Page
This is an utterly nonresponsive comment. If the economics of providing healthcare don't work out, they don't work out. It's not as if "go into debt" means "fat cats make less money". No, it means that the skilled labor and capital that drives the insolvent health care system will simply migrate somewhere they can deliver it profitably. Say goodbye to hospitals for rural and poor areas.
You know the "Try it" in the learn more section, I found it a little bit annoying that it takes you to the homepage instead of back to the learn more section.
Yep, I hear you. It was a late addition to the site and we didn't have time to fix the issue. We'll fix it soon :-)
This project was launched on HN just one day ago:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2243650

and is now certifiably going viral.

Congratulations to theli0nheart on taking a simple but powerful concept and executing brilliantly.
Poll: your browser's home page?
What do you use for your browser home page?

Wondering if the "home page" is actually used or if it is a kind of vestigial tail. Is your home page an active part of your workflow (or is it just, kind of, "there")?
Search Engine (Google, Bing, DDG, etc.)
Chrome's "New Tab" Page (showing "most visited" and "recently closed")
E-mail (Gmail, Yahoo Mail, etc.)
Portal (AOL.com, MSN.com, etc.)
News (NYTimes, WSJ, CNN, etc.)
Personalized Home Page (iGoogle, NetVibes, PageFlakes, etc.)
Social Media Site (Facebook, Twitter, etc.)
I understand the issue with Readability, Kindle, etc, but in this case, I'm having a hard time understanding why they simply can't charge for the app in the App Store. Their first reason is that using online accounts reduces piracy. However, while there is some iOS piracy, it's sufficiently difficult (jailbreaking, etc) that anyone that wants to pay for the app will do so. The second reason is that having an online account allows people to use the app on multiple devices, but the App Store explicitly allows multiple installations of a purchased app on multiple iOS devices, and I suspect that the number of people that want to use the app on multiple platforms (iOS, Android, etc) but wouldn't buy it more than once is quite small. Most people that can afford an iOS device and an Android device can afford to buy a $5 app for each device.
You're assuming Apple is stationary here. At the moment, app availability is still much better for iOS.

If that changes, they can soften their policies.
This is a weird summary of how "free markets" and "supply and demand" work. Yes, you will pay everything you have for a cure. But the guy who will offer you a cure for "everything you have minus one dollar" is going to get your business.
Fun fact: Where I live, to sign up for Apple's iOS developer program, I had to fax my personal/creditcard details to Apple. That requirement was so bizarre it took me a while to wrap my head around it.

(To their credit, I got a confirmation email from them in about a single day)
Where have i ignored that? It's not even part of this discussion.

I'm simply saying the original poster didn't know what he claims to have known. It's hindsight nonsense.
What is the difference that making an iPhone owner unable to install applications? Or why is it allowed on a MacBook?
This is awesome. Now if we could just get people to accept these electronic signatures reliably, things would be golden.

Yes, I'm talking to you, Wells Fargo.
Little misleading... it says "throw away your fax machine" but has no support for receiving faxes.

I'd love to use a service like this, even at $1.99 per fax, but without receive support (so sad that companies sign first and want to fax to you) it's no good to me....
The first claim above is pretty broad; coming up with a single reference to support it would be hard, and coming up with a wide range of references time-consuming.

But as examples:

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/2268793 (2.5x more coronary artery bypasses per capita in the US than in Canada in 1988; admittedly somewhat dated).

http://www.pillsforall.com/blog/cardiac-stents-are-used-twic...

I realize that's pretty weak support; I don't have anything better off the top of my head, unfortunately.
> There's a perception in society that you can get away with certain
> extremely harmful things, like hacking or financial crime or
> environmental pollution, because it's hard to pin down intent
> and the results are hard to measure.

I think that you're mis-directing anger here. 'Hacking' in some cases (in the US at least) carries harsher penalties than other more heinous crimes (regardless of the amount of damage done). Hackers usually face stiff minimum penalties (in the US). Had he been tried in the US he probably would have spend a decade or more in federal prison, and been destitute and/or a 'product of the system' by the time that he got out. This would have increased the chance that he would re-offend (and just not be stupid enough to get caught this time).

> * Hacking Valve. Damage: $250,000,000. Punishment: 2 years probation.

Do you really believe that Valve lost $250M? That number is probably equivalent to the amount of money that Valve had invested into the Half-Life 2 source code at that point in time or the amount of money that they expected to earn through that source code. In hind-sight, Valve didn't lose much. They were still able to monetize their source code, and were very successful at it. Do you really think that there are people out there that did not buy Half-Life 2 because they downloaded the source code to a broken pre-release version of it? Do you really think that there are any serious commercial game companies out there that are using the leaked source code in their code base rather than licensing the engine from Valve?

The amount of 'damages' that Valve incurred due to this is/was speculative. Of course, once the initial estimate comes out, Valve isn't going to go back and state what the actual damages were, because then people would question why the initial estimate was so high. There are also perverse incentives to inflate those numbers:

- Larger damages get more attention from the FBI.

- Larger damages are more likely to see harsher action by the justice system (aka courts).

- Larger damages garner more sympathy from the public.

- Larger damages can make you look like a hero to investors when the reality turns out to not be so bleak. You can always spin yourself as the hero that saved the company from financial ruin.

- Larger damages make the incident a likely scapegoat should the financial quarter be tough on the company (much like piracy is the scapegoat for the MPAA). E.g. "Yea we did poorly, but it wasn't our fault! It was all that darn hacker!" When in reality the leak had nothing to do with the losses.

> Yeah, it worked out with Bernie Madoff, actually. Still it
> doesn't seem proportionate to his crimes.

What exactly should the punishment for Madoff be? 1000 years in prison? I somehow don't think that extra prison time would be much of a deterrent or a punishment. (Unless you're advocating torture, but in that case, you've really shown us your true colors.)
Well, that's certainly helpful. But what I'm saying is more that, without a QA team, while I would I would almost certainly attempt to quality control my own code more, it would be ignorant to deny that I or anybody else has blind spots.

I believe it's a lot more difficult to see your own errors than somebody else's. I believe QA is a fulltime job. I believe the relationship between developers and QA people is mutually beneficial to both people.
I do find myself using the Chrome "New Tab" page, clicking on the "Most Visited" sites. I'm wondering if there is an opportunity to create a new type of home page, based around utility/functions:

Mail: Gmail

Blog: Blog | Blogger Admin | Feedburner

Fax: HelloFax

Social: Facebook | Twitter | LinkedIn

Dev: FogBugz | BaseCamp

Basically, a place to neatly list all of the services you use so they're within easy reach.
Animated Real-Time Map of Auckland's Public Transit Network
Engineers Recruit Engineers With Hackruiter (YC S10)
The big difference is that Readability is adding value.
Computer Graphics and Image Processing with Python and OpenGL
It depends on whether anything is done about the racket going on between insurers, pharma, and healthcare providers. These are the people who blame each other for rising costs and likely a free market mentality is to blame. It's a circular argument in the US, which needs to be broken.
If you tried it, you would understand. Ruby programs make a _LOT_ of method calls.

Unfortunately the firehose doesn't work too well on OSX, because the unix message queue API I'm using (msgget(2)) is capped in the kernel to 2048 bytes and 40 messages per queue.
...and Slashdot before them. Actual strace uses -v.
No, that you're blind to because it's in the nature of software development. Spotting flaws in something you've spent the last $X hours convincing yourself is correct is hard to do. It's easy to make invalid assumptions and internalize them in your thinking to the point you don't notice them. This problem exists, and largely is solved by dragging in someone else to help with it. That someone else, unless you'd like to squabble over semantics, is doing QA.
Actually, most of the people least able to defend themselves walk out on it, just as the hospitals expect, because they have the least to lose. When you're already horribly impoverished, what does one more bill that you'll never be able to pay mean?

The ones who really catch it in the shorts are people who have never been unable to pay off an obligation before: their credit and hard-earned reputations are probably ruined (the first for however long a bankruptcy takes to go off the books, the second possibly forever), their day-to-day lives will become a gigantic burden since a bankruptcy will demolish any accumulated wealth/assets, and that's not even considering what it will do to their self-image for them to feel like they aren't living up to their personal standard.

Just so we're clear: I think this system is terrible, and desperately hope that something is done to fix it. I'm not sure what the right fix is, but I hope somebody out there finds it.
You have a typo on your sign-up page:

"Get 20 fax fages free"

Otherwise, cool idea.
Please explain some of Paul Graham's points on Lisp
That's not exactly encouraging.
You're welcome =)

As noted in the comments of that post, I'm doing a raster display with vector display techniques. Opamp sweeps are indeed a more sensible way of rastering, but the internal DACs on this microcontroller are fast enough to keep up anyway.

What's killing the refresh rate is the settling time for the (crappy) external dac doing the 4-shade colour. Your terminal application only deals with beam on/beam blanked so you can run it a lot faster.

By all means give it a go, it's a pretty satisfying project. I have no doubt you can improve on my version.
Above error has been fixed. Designer's error, not the author of the post :)
Not sure this takes into account everyone else who died at sea. Occasional serendipitous results are to be expected, but don't represent what is probably a large body of associated failures to this approach.
That's one of the problems we solve. That's a big differentiator between us and other electronic signature companies. With HelloFax, the other party doesn't have to accept electronic signatures - just faxes.

We've actually used HelloFax ourselves to fax Wells Fargo.
Factor's heterogenous stack (complex objects rather than integers) definitely reminds me more of PostScript than Forth, and I agree it can make programming much more straightforward. I also liked how PS handles flow control- while Forth uses rather traditional looking left-to-right reading constructs:

3 5 > if ." greater" else ." less" then

PostScript goes with operators like "if" and "ifelse" that consume code literals from the stack (enclosed in curly braces):

3 5 gt { (greater) print } { (less) print } ifelse

It's a little heavier weight, but very flexible and it feels like a natural way to handle postfix conditionals.
Exactly. For me, every client-facing defect is an embarrassing personal failure. Having them caught in QA simply lessens the shame, and allows me to dedicate all the time I would spend freaking out about the newfound emergency to figuring out improvements that eliminate that entire class of errors.
Anglophones having highest incomes in Quebec is an old myth. In fact, a recent report from Statistics Canada (StatsCan) shows that English-speakers have a lower median income than francophones with the same qualifications.[1]

Furthermore, I highly doubt that the fact "you could be working in NYC if you wanted to" has any influence on your salary.

Finally, even if what you stated was true regarding francization, it wouldn't be ironic at all. Francization isn't there to help out the economy, it's there to protect a culture.

/rant :)

[1] http://www.mcgilldaily.com/2010/09/quebec_anglo_incomes_lagg...
It's a bit insane that both the US and individual citizens apart from each other pay more per capita for health care costs now than the government of a country with socialized health care.
The quicker we can get the entire world to wage parity, the sooner we can stop arguing about nationality and outsourcing and get back to improving humanity.
Nice catch! Thanks!

Fixed.
Wondering, “The heck is U-Verse?” The AT&T website doesn’t say†, so here’s Wikipedia: https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/AT%26T_U-vers...

> AT&T U-verse is a registered service mark under which AT&T offers VDSL and ADSL2+ services in various parts of the United States. It provides broadband internet access, TV, and phone through a fiber-to-the-node or Fiber to the Premise communications network.

† it merely, inscrutably says “everything is better” on U-Verse. And requires Adobe Flash to say so.
He took away something so scarce it's irreplaceable: their secrecy/confidentiality. And if it wasn't for self-gain, who on Earth's gain was it? He committed a pre-meditated (for months) crime to fulfil his own whims.
Froyo Custom ROM With HTC Sense 2.1 Gets Ported To HTC HD2 [NAND ROM]
>Wow, did you read the same sentence I did? They weren't implying Valve had a lust for profits, they were indicating that Gembe wasn't motivated by profit.

Fair enough. I think its a fairly straightforward example. Reading it again, I still think its fairly obvious that the piece was designed to minimize the clearly stupid, clearly wrong actions of an individual, and in order to do so, they needed to paint Valve as the villain. But I appreciate that this is my own interpretation and certainly one could read it differently. (The example I cited should have been changed regardless, as I don't think its necessary to the story and to me still reads as an attempt to vilify Gembe's victim).

> we can see that it didn't actually affect them negatively in any tangible way

Red herring. This probably helped Valve's sales, but that doesn't mean that it necessarily would have, and has nothing to do with the morality/legality of the matter, and as such, it has very little impact on my view of Gembe's actions.
Sony has a history of huge backfiring actions. This is just another point to add to the trend-line.
Getting Comfortable With Rubinius’ Pure-Ruby Internals
Groupon China will be a huge failure.

Groupon doesn't care a ton since they have boatloads of money, and they'll feel like they HAVE to take a shot since "China's a huge and growing market, blah blah blah" but it'll really be chalked up as a fat expense with not much benefit if any to the company.

Here's why China's different:

China, by and large, doesn't live for rampant consumerism. Walk the streets of Beijing or Shanghai (the 2 cities where this is most likely to matter in China) and you'll see that most shops are convenience stores and dingy eateries trying to eke out a living selling 2RMB ice cream pops and water, NOT "skydiving lessons! pottery classes! cosmetic dental procedures! maybe if i can drive some loss leader business in and call it an advertising cost, it'll be a good long run investment!"

Beijing and China are big cities, but most of the citizenry inhabit a tiny subset of the city. People go YEARS without venturing beyond a 1 mile radius of where they live. They rarely travel to other parts of the city to "try a new restaurant" or "hey, let's do pilates". For most people in China, everything they need is already there, so a groupon for something across town isn't appealing (most stuff on groupon isn't in close proximity to my house).

That said, even though most people are like this, even if some small %age of the population cares, (small %age) * (shit ton of people) == possibly profitable for Groupon.

China does have a lot of money and growing consumerism, but the gini coefficient is absurd. The median monthly income in Beijing is < 600 RMB (<USD$1000). People who have money can buy whatever they want and are relatively price insensitive.

Gift certificate and coupons aren't widely used in China. They exist, but they haven't been a fixture in the consumer landscape the way they have been in the US. Prices in China are a suggestion, and aren't even always written. The price for a widget is a function of how much the vendor likes you, the time of day, if the shop has to pay rent soon, and only sometimes, the actual cost to produce it.

I'm not going to speculate on counterfeit coupons as a problem, but I can't imagine that will help the cause.

This will fail because the intersection of businesses who want to use groupon + consumers who care about groupon is smaller than you'd guess for a huge population, buying and travel habits aren't conducive to the groupon model, there will be distrust of the brand and discount mechanism.
context: http://snasm.com/article/motorola-chief-defends-xoom-pricing...
I used hellofax recently for the first time, much better than pamfax, and no hidden charges like efax.
Sure! I've sent you an email. :)
Ask HN: What can westerners do to support the Middle East revolutions?
The Case for Play
YC has switched over to HelloFax and we love it. With 250 companies we have to deal with a lot of faxes, because every later funding round or acquisition means we have to sign stuff. So not having to deal with actual paper faxes makes a big difference for us.
How does Facebook Engineering's bootcamp work?
The model of a good HN post. Not only does it do something interesting to geeks, but, unlike "Star Wars On A Floppy Drive", actually takes the time to explain how it worked. Less cat - photos - in - geek-post - clothing. More like this.

Also, coolest thing I've seen done yet with a Salae probe. Those things are cheap, tiny, cool looking, and make great gifts; we've given them to job candidates before when things didn't work out.
Nathan Myhrvold on invention, striped omelets and penguin poo
signed up for the 20 free fax! would last me a lifetime :)
Did Scvngr Just Pass 1 Million Users?
That's coming very soon, I believe. I just nagged them to launch when they had a quantum of utility.
There is also corporate tax, and personal tax is assessed at graduated rates depending on income. If their income is low, say ~60k split between husband and wife, they would pay roughly ~0 for health care.
I thought of doing a similar startup. The biggest issue asked from us was what kind of filters do you have as to not allowing junk get through to these professionals that's time is very valuable ( lawyer, accountant, investor )?
Tolkien Estate Says No Historical Fiction For JRR
Plan ahead.

Support local representatives who do not think it right to go installing or supporting dictators and bullies.
SXSWi Food+Tech Event- IdeaCOMM: Instant Data Evolves A Community
[1949] Warren Weaver on machine translation
Game Input Device Controlled By Kissing [video]
French is an official language in ~40 countries.
I have some thoughts on this. Would enjoy connecting with you if you have the time vladik dot rikhter at gmail
Shhh. Lets keep it a secret weapon!
If you store by day UTC, you'd need two fetches to get a day in some other time zone. But if you store by hour, you need 24 fetches.
These guys really identified a pain point. This is hands down the most useful application I've used.
Everytime I have to fax something, it used to be such a huge hassle.

Here's the heuristic:

1. Find the nearest Kinko's/FedEx Store

2. Find my old or get another Kinko's card Kinko's/FedEx Store card

3. Put 1 dollar on it

4. Fax for $0.25

Two or three months later, repeat the same process.

HelloFax is a great example of a solution to serious pain point.

Good luck and congratulations!
I had a bad asthma attack while uninsured and got hit with a bill that took me 7 years to pay off.