skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
How about a better question: Why is this allowed in the united states? This is an absofuckingloutely clear violation of the due process in our constitution. Yes save the fucking children, but do it properly. We see the abuses that arise from improper giving of power. I guess people are waiting until basically we live in communist russia where you got to bribe cops to not give you speeding ticket, impound your car, and throw you in jail, because they felt like breaking some balls. And then you get to sit in a nice abusive prison cell for a few months awaiting trial.

Sure it sounds like paranoia, but the government will never turn to a giant powergrab overnight. It will always be gradual, slowly taking power until its too late.
The original article pointed out that the mobile app doesn't represent all the value the customer gets from the service, then hypothesized that it represents about 30% of it; so 30% of the subscription revenue represents 100% of all the mobile service revenue.

It might be a decent argument, if he hadn't pulled that hypothesized number out of his left nostril.
I've played with this a little bit over the last couple days and am completely blown away by the ease of use. If you're remotely interested in styling your own maps (particularly for a mobile app), you should try this out. It exports to an sqlite-based tile store that you can use to display your map tiles while away from a network connection.
http://lesswrong.com/lw/im/hindsight_devalues_science/

That essay focuses on social science, but I think it's still relevant here. Experts in the area did not think they could do this, and even the people involved weren't sure. It's easy to dismiss this as "yeah, it's just a big search engine" once you already know it's been done. Besides not accurately characterizing the approach Watson takes, that sentiment misses the fact that this was an open question.

Paradoxically, people would probably be more impressed if Watson did worse and the game was more competitive. It's like watching an NBA team play a high school team. The NBA team is so good that it looks easy despite the fact that they're that good because of decades of practice.

(Disclaimer: I work at IBM Research, and have associated biases.)
How to move the position of a certain bit within a byte 
You want to move bits inside a byte? Unfortunately, there aren’t any standard functions that deal with these sort of issues so we will have to use some smart and easy hacks.
How we used HN's feedback to improve SecretPoke
Have you seen multiple kLOC tcl apps? I have, and it is not pretty :)

Thing about extension languages is that they tend to be nice languages to write code, so people write a lot of code in them, and suddenly your app is 95% written in the extension language. Scheme is the language I know that grows best from a simple extension language to a full-fledged mature programming language.
The point of "sync & test before commit" is that for longer-lived branches, there's a good chance B only got created after you branched off.

So unless you catch up to reality (i.e. sync), you won't even know you should make those changes to B. Hence my post ;)
If you had an absolutely iron-clad plan, it's not inconceivable that you might be able to raise the required money for an LBO. Doubling current stock price is probably out of question, but you might have some luck at least getting the board to look at your proposal. It would require much more than a blog post, though.
SlideShare launches HTML5 web conferencing tool
World's first embeddable HTML5 document viewer, from Crocodoc (YC W10)
Interesting analogies.

I always thought the most obvious sermonising was about industrialisation and the loss of an innocent rural way of life (as described here, for example: http://www.nationalgeographic.com/ngbeyond/rings/influences....)
UNLV president plans for ‘state of fiscal collapse’
Copyright is not about 'if it makes money for the rights holder, it should be allowed'. It's about the freedom of the holder to decide what they think is the 'best', be it in monetary form, or artistic integrity, or whatever.

I disagree. Copyrights (and patents for that matter) are a temporary monopoly we grant to a creator to give the incentive for people to create new things.

We believe that the cost of taking away the rights of other people to reproduce those ideas for a limited time is worth the benefit of the new works that are being created as a result.

Should I have the right to prohibit translations? I think so.

I think not. Especially 30 years after your death. When does it end? If Shakespeare had left a note asking that his work never be translated into other languages, and never performed outside of England, should we continue to honor that today?

We do not have an inherent right to the ideas we express and the words we pen such that we can always control what other people will do with them. We've merely decided as a society to temporarily create such a right because the tradeoff is worth it.
Duh... in other news, water is wet.
Abstracted to middlemen in general, since most of it applies:

Convenience, product visibility, uniformity of services, buying power, plus they assume certain risks on my behalf (dealing with shady/inexperienced suppliers, maintaining distribution channels, chasing refunds, notifying me of recalls etc). It's the same reason I go to a grocery store instead of making trips to a dozen or more local farms.

In the digital arena, product suggestions are becoming important too. Amazon has a fairly accurate profile of what I like, and can show me stuff I might like but would never discover on my own. Independent niche suppliers can't build that profile and they usually don't want me checking out their competitors.

There's also the consumer willingness to trade product rights for cost savings. O'Reilly sells non-DRMed PDFs of their books on their own site, or I can buy a DRMed copy from Amazon for half price. For a book that'll might be antiquated in 3 years, that savings starts looking pretty good.

"Current technology" is no magic bullet either. The cost barrier of the infrastructure is lower, but it still requires talent a supplier may not specialize in to run it. Selling your own product poorly is probably worse for you than paying someone else to do it well.
It's a classic and certainly taught me a lot.

It's also one of the more slim programming books on my shelf. I've considered handing to to friends interested in programming. Simply because I hand them a Python book with thousands of pages and I can see them visibly cringe.

I also find the K&R style quite readable. :)
With all the interest currently focused on Q&A sites, Experts Exchange actually presents an interesting turnaround opportunity. Despite the last few years of squandering goodwill with their deceptive solution to the findability/paywall paradox, they are still one of the longtime residents of the space, and they still have a massive -- albeit creaky -- corpus of questions and answers. They should hire a strong UX/UI team and do a clean-sheet redesign: new logo, new zen-like appearance without all the noisy clutter, logos, UI "junk", fake blurred out answers with "sign up now!", etc. They should set up a strong information design and analysis team to mine that huge corpus for opportunities to segment their product into paid and free components -- and then update the business model to a legitimate "freemium" approach.

I realize this is all easier said than done, but it does seem like there must be real value under the barnacles. Every time someone scrolls down past screen after screen of ads and blurred answers and has their "I see what you did there" moment, goodwill is squandered and the community impression of deception and spamminess builds.
Dude, chill out. TED never said anything about Quora. It's mashable which is making a connection.
So, I'm not sure where your criticism is coming from.

Moreover, TED doesn't need to piggyback on Quora's hype, TED can stand on its own. In fact, if anything, this article will make more people who didn't know about Quora will make them look at it.
Nuances are lost on the internet? Because I've seen videos of him giving talks, and he acts pretty much the same way. What nuances are being lost?

Why do we excuse bad behavior from people?
I'm lost - what does "competently tuned GC" mean? There is some way to get the GC to NOT ever run? not take forever? What?

And even if you contrive your app to use memory very very carefully, with a shared runtime with 100 other apps (e.g. on a server) not everybody is as nice and GC still runs/stalls the system.
Nice tip. I've always wanted to get one of the R/C helicopters and was always planning on getting it from one of the aisle mall shops - but this advice is helpful.
"Ousterhout's reply is worth reading:

http://www.vanderburg.org/OldPages/Tcl/war/0009.html

An excerpt, which (imo) should be quoted more often

"Language designers love to argue about why this language or that language must be better or worse a priori, but none of these arguments really matter a lot. Ultimately all language issues get settled when users vote with their feet. If Tcl makes people more productive then they will use
it; when some other language comes along that is better (or if it is here already), then people will switch to that language. This is The Law, and it is good. The Law says to me that Scheme (or any other Lisp dialect) is probably not the "right" language: too many people have voted with their feet over the last 30 years. I encourage all Tcl
dis-believers to produce the "right" language(s), make them publically available, and let them be judged according to The Law."
Or the "Heroes Earnings Assistance and Relief Tax Act of 2007"

The more detailed title: "To amend the Internal Revenue Code of 1986 to provide earnings assistance and tax relief to members of the uniformed services, volunteer firefighters, and Peace Corps volunteers, and for other purposes."

http://www.opencongress.org/bill/110-h3997/show

It's only when you read the text you discover things like tax credits for low sulfur diesel fuel, tax subsidies for small business, and a $700 billion bailout for the financial services industry.
Caching is not a silver bullet
I'm going to say yes. (because I sell on GC, like GC, but note their lack of ability to reach a living person there)
which, incidentally, goes against every accessibility law in the book.
The problem is that nobody actually knows what constitutes a derivative work. Hence you have the LGPL for libraries so that you don't have to worry about linking them.

The result is that nobody wants to risk tainting their work with GPL code if they're trying to make money. If it's GPL many people won't even look at it because who knows if someone who contributed a 2 line patch 10 years ago is going to come banging down your door with lawyers crying about violations. That's not what freedom is about.

If you want your code to have the widest use possible go for BSD/MIT licenses. If you want to promote RMS' agenda go for the GPL.
I guess both Java and OCaml will see that the object can be generated on the stack which makes it much faster.

By using malloc in the C implementation, you force it to be on the heap.
Alinea's Grant Achatz is Chicago's top chef
Countdown to Zero - Akensai.com
Windows "garbage collects" in its memory manager anyway; so no actually benefit using C++ etc there. It uses some pool with fragmentation algorithms that can take 100s of milliseconds to complete.
Crocodoc (YC W10) Launches HTML5-Based Document Viewer With Its Own API
>I was in charge of one application on the official Nokia 770 firmware.

Ooh, which one? I had a 770 (sold it and bought an N810, which I still use).

>Its browsers on different phones really do not work as I wished, they crash quite often.

The browser on the N810 is rock-solid. The one on my N86...well, I don't think I've ever seen it crash; but that might be because I almost always use Opera instead.
Random Hacker News
The other day I "ran out" of stuff to read on Hacker News. I had looked at everything that interested me, and had even checked out page 2 (I was getting desperate).

I realized that there were thousands of great HN threads that I hadn't seen because I hadn't been paying attention to the site when they were ranking.

So I pulled together a little db of the top 10,000 HN threads (loosely defined; a thread with >1 points, 1> comments, and some web link rank).

I put these into a random shuffle so that reload would give me 30 fresh threads that I (probably) hadn't seen before.

I'm pretty happy with this. Lets me scratch my HN itch when I've exhausted the main page, and it's often interesting to see the old material again.
Development Seed has consistently produced stunning work, both for clients and in terms of their open-source contributions, but TileMill really feels like their crowning achievement. (And all of it in PHP/Drupal, gasp!) Kudos, guys.
Buggy Behavior using Canvas
To date, I have seen no language except Qi that (1) supports sum types, and (2) isn't a statically typed functional language.

Anyway, it's not like a wannabe OO language would adopt Algebraic Data Types. "Those are for these ivory tower languages that no one use in the real world", one might say.

Qi: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qi_%28programming_language%29
Charging people money for user-generated content isn't sleazy. expertsexchange is sleazy. Imagine if SO had a premium subscription of $5/mo that had a few extra features. Would you consider that sleazy?

It's not the charge itself that's reprehensible, it's all the other shit EE pulled.
Years later I can still get a giggle or two out of WhoRepresents.com
Assuming the foreign workers are not being exploited or abused, I don't understand why it is any more or less moral to channel your commerce to them as opposed to people in your own country.
Ask HN: Review my micro product, Truck Report (NYC only!)
Even in the absence of an official title a bill will be given an equally glittering nickname by the opposition.
Government Employs Hackers in Brave New Scheme
I (the creator of the REPL) have been writing about this on my blog at http://www.deepbluelambda.org . There is still much I have not yet covered, but it should all show up in the coming weeks.
Precisely, and this explains a wide swath of seemingly nonsensical decisions being made in western countries in the last decade.
I also love K&R's style, it is one of my favourite books about programming
Baseless? Because Apple would never try to skim 30% of all the revenue that flows through their devices. That's crazy talk. /sarcasm

The post is absolutely not baseless. Apple hasn't made their intentions clear regarding SaaS subscriptions, and it is likely that they want that money as well.
100+ Free and Fresh Fonts for Creative Designs | Joanna Ciolek
Watson: The Confusion over an Airport Clue
"Yep, sometimes people up vote things which miss the point of questions (as originally intended) but generally they don't and even when they do (a) the information therein is interesting and useful and (b) the answer is probably of interest to anyone else with a similar problem who might want more than a single opinion on how to handle things."

---

I learn a lot on SO from reading responses that don't answer the question.

If I see "How do I do x?," I'm quite happy that someone answered, but I'll get a lot out of that page long discussion on performance implications and alternatives.
That, and the fact that it's 30% of the mobile service revenue. If you sign up out-of-app, you don't pay 30%. He hypothesized (out of his right nostril, presumably ;) that all mobile users sign up via the mobile app, even though it only gives them 30% of their usage value.

In other words, "I made up random number A. Then I made up random item B. Together, they prove <really outlandish claim that will drive visitors to my blog, but has no connection to reality whatsoever>." I hear AOL is looking for writers.
Though, I'm not convinced. Given that Google also tries to branch out to other domains, why shouldn't IBM do the same?

Sure, I agree in principle. And I suppose if IBM management thought that was the right avenue for them to grow, they would do it. I just haven't seen much to make me think IBM have any interest in the consumer space at the moment. That could certainly change, but I personally wouldn't bet on it happening anytime soon. But, weirder things have happened...
Interesting point.

No Section 508 compliance.

5th amendment violation - taking property without due process

Libel - falsely accusing a domain name owner of peddling kiddie porn

Any others I am missing?
I'm the Product Manager of PostageApp (www.postageapp.com) and we have quite a few international customers and our revenue comes in from a subscription model.

Can't help you too much with gems, but our user registration uses the Freshbooks (www.freshbooks.com) API to create a new client + recurring payment profile, and we've connected a payment gateway (Authorize.net) to the account to process credit cards immediately.

Let me know if you have any questions.
What Goes Into the Price of Your Gasoline?
New Facebook Fanpage for The Next Generation of Online Dating
While I suspect One Pass is probably quite a bit from actual use by any publisher, this press release/the video has probably been in the works ever since the rumblings about Apple's subscription plans made the rounds. While not the most honest move, it is a brilliant PR coup.
Israeli general claims Stuxnet attacks as one of his successes
"The IT capability or service you are considering moving is a mission critical aspect of your business." Really? That would seem like one of the main reasons to switch to cloud computing, as it's much easier to handle different amounts of load and guarantee data integrity.

Otherwise not a bad checklist, I guess. I especially like "Your IT organization has not sufficient maturity to govern the additional complexity of managing additional processes and outside contracts brought by Cloud Computing" :-)
Maybe they were thinking people wanted to use it as their background?
Indeed - will be interesting to see how this pans out, especially as Google already supplies the iOS mapping application backend.
I'm talking about technical solutions, perhaps in the DNS.
You don't need to root your Android phone unless you want to re-flash a different version of the OS. If you're just looking to download apps from outside the market (direct from SourceForge or GoogleCode for example) all it takes is to check one little checkbox in the setting screen.
RSA enhances Cloud Security by launching two cloud security services
using the hyperlink text "bored kids" to link to an article on a 45 year old obsessive conspiracy theorist doesn't exactly help the author's point.
Do these trucks typically stay parked in one spot all day? If not, one email a day might not be enough to keep people informed.
That's the case I was implying, but you're right that my post wasn't clear enough on this so I edited it.
You raise some interesting questions, and some misconceptions. It's an ugly format, but I'm going to respond point-by-point:

> Why isn't it re-entrant?

I'm not certain what you mean here; certainly you can call from C to Scheme to C to Scheme, and do so concurrently from multiple pthreads.

> What about multiple interpreters?

Like arenas? Guile doesn't do this, no. I've never understood the desire for this, either; if you want to isolate users, put them in different modules.

> Why a C-level GC like Boehm, rather than just track your own garbage?

Precisely for embeddability. Tracking your own garbage is hard in C. It's doable of course, but very error-prone. Guile's C API is pretty easy to use (IMO of course).

> Why scheme for an embeddable language, don't continuations make C interop hard?

We have continuation barriers, but it's true that our historical continuation implementation has been a stack-copying one. In 2.2 we are likely to move to a model where we just capture the Scheme stack.

That said, delimited continuations are really the bee's knees. See "Prompts" in the manual for more.

> Even back when they announced Guile, it seemed odd that they based it on SCM rather than on SIOD or TinyScheme.

I think the thing was that folks wanted an implementation that could grow into something more substantial. Which leads to your next point:

> Lua seems to be far superior for embedding. Guile seems big and invasive by comparison.

The problem is that once you have a nice small language, you start to want to program more and more in it, and you end up with a nice medium-sized language. You can see that even now with Alex Shinn's Chibi. It seems to be a hump you have to grow over and then become a nice large language ;-)

Lua is wonderful, and they are among the few groups I have heard of that manage to keep things small and lean. By all means, use it! But I think that in the end, most things tend towards something the size of Python, and for mostly good reasons.
The Startup Genome Project: Decoding Silicon Valley's DNA
How to Write a Good Email
1 year, 7 continents, 2 million rebootless kernel updates
Where in my message did I say it prevented redistribution ? Can you quote the sentence that made you understand that ? (this is a serious question)

It's not what I meant, and I don't thing it's what I've written either. If anything, it actually forces redistribution in case some might not want to (when you release a binary but want the sources to remain yours).
I just can't find a good reason to devote that much time to school.

Cast a wide net. Coding up some pet projects can be fun, but don't forget to check out that volunteering group or rock climbing class you've been interested in. Take a week to read some non-technical books. Visit your parents (if you don't live with them!) and enjoy some home cooking.

This isn't just advice for your time off, by the way. Cast a wide net once you return to UW. Take some art theory or music appreciation classes. Join intramural sports or a comedy troupe. You have a golden ticket here, a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to explore while building human capital. Don't waste your time killing yourself over an A- in an unimportant course.

Oh, and don't listen to those people who say college isn't worth it. Try to socialize, party, and have as much fun as possible. It'll pay off.
"... they will need to give Apple 30% of their subscription revenue for all customers that want to access SalesForce via mobile."

Wow, a huge post based on this flawed understanding. It isn't 30% of every customer that accesses the mobile app, it's 30% of each client that signs up via the mobile app.

The rules are pretty simple. If you offer subscription service purchasing elsewhere, like your website, you also must offer it in your app via in-app purchase. If a person finds your service by installing the mobile app and then decides to sign up, using the now required in-app purchase ability, Apple gets 30%.
This is node.js and express actually.

From the article:

--

Under the hood of TileMill is a combination of open source projects - Mapnik for map rendering, express as a server-side framework, Backbone.js for the client-side, CodeMirror in the editor, carto for the styling language, node.js, and many others.
GPL and BSD are both mechanisms to promote freedom. One is the freedom of a bill of rights, the other is the freedom of anarchy.
A first pass at a standalone client is now at:

https://github.com/sivy/py-statsd
Federal Officials Call For Better Privacy, Security Protections Online
I'm repeating it because it's fun and useful shorthand for saying that Apple has become incomprehensibly huge lately, not out of some innate desire to mislead you personally. :) And come on; it's clearly not a linchpin of my "argument", which does not fall flat just because PetroChina and whoever else might also be really big. Nor am I delivering some cruel insult to Linux. I loves me some Linux. I was just pointing out the facts.

As an aside, it would appear that Linux now has an exciting new path to earning money: winning Jeopardy!