skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It's not just the difference in app numbers, in app quality, in app language (you can probably do more with 1gb of memory in objc than java), but it's the integration, the user experience. On the computer, it's all well and good doing everything on your browser, but unless you're in full screen mode you're seeing something other than the page you're on. Apple does that bit best. (and others, but it's further ahead in the look of the out-of-app bits)
Does Geography Matter When It Comes To Happiness?
This seems like a very similar service to the wildly popular Instapaper. I'm curious what the difference is or how Copyto plans to differentiate themselves.
I just wanted to make matters more precise. I don't want to beat your comment (I'm an academician too), but let me comment on another example you give:

For example, Nature: http://www.nature.com/ajg/open_access_faqs.html

Open Access is an option for most of the journal I know of, whereby the author pays the publisher up front to have content accessed by anyone free of charge. If an author does not want Open Access, he/she won't have to pay, but the article is no longer free. [Edit: put quotes in the right place]

Even worse, you must sign a copyright form that transfers ownership to the publisher.

True, and that is quite ridiculous, but many publishers are OK with you keeping a copy of the article (e.g. a final draft) on your webpage or on some pre-print or re-print websites.

In the debate over which makes the most impact -- journal vs. conference paper -- most academics will say the same thing: journal, journal, journal.

In Computer Science, this is not true. Publishing on conferences such as STOCS or FOCS is sometimes much more desirable than on any CS journal.

I understand that there is a staff behind the scenes that puts these publications together -- editors, admin. staff, etc. -- and they need to be paid. But some journals have acquired such prestige over the years that they can name their price, and the manuscript submissions will keep coming. So perhaps these prices are not so surprising.

I agree. I dream of a totally open, web-based publishing system where papers are submitted and reviewed by volunteers, and accepted (i.e. put officially on a publication list) only when above a certain threshold. Perhaps the reviewers could also receive comments by both the authors and the public. If both the referees and the authors have a chance of receiving feedback, it could benefit the paper.

Admins and staff would be replaced by the web-based system, while editors (when suggested that the paper has poor wording or language) could be outsourced to the author. [edit: typo]
The "=" in the declaration of Haskell functions isn't considered an assignment, but a binding of a name to a definition. Usually when you have assignments, you are permitting a name to be rebound to a different value than it had originally. In Haskell you cannot rebind a name. Essentially "=" in Haskell is more like the operator's use in defining mathematical functions.

Due to how scoping and how do-comprehensions actually work, you can do some things that look like assignment, but are really creating a new binding in a nested scope. But if you try to bind a name twice in the same scope, the program fails to compile.
Every time I looked at the site (although this was last year, maybe it tanked) the item bids were very high, making the cost of a £500 laptop £2500 profit for them.
My biggest issue with the site was every time I visited the site or saw an ad, it was all "too good to be true" and I was revolted by the idea of getting into something that so clearly seemed to be promising me a free lunch, or a nearly free lunch.
Ah, I missed that. Though I was under the impression that revenue was cash flow, and that profits were 'after costs.' Maybe I'm misunderstanding the different between free cash flow and revenue.
It was a great idea though. And they did state the rules clearly, so it was your fault if you still played the game. And as Spolsky said, as users lost money, they just dropped off.
> I don't see why they would or should care about "usability and user experience" for 3rd party devices.

Because it degrades the users experience with Android.

Sure, some manufacturers will create a bad experience using Android 2.2. But, if Google knows that Honeycomb WILL have issues with most handsets, it would be prudent to hold off until those issues are resolved.

Just a possibility I'm throwing out there. Haven't read up on the issue yet.
Haskell does contain no assignment in the traditional sense. = in Haskell defines a name to stand for a value, which can't ever change.
Fantastic presentation!
Great idea, no. Epic scam!? Yes.
Show HN: Quick joke project
Is it a snack?

For some reason I'm cracking up over this. (:
I guess the difference might be the tools they provide to drag and select parts of pages and only save them to read later
WebGL is not really canvas, it used to be called canvas 3d at first but now I think people just refer to it as webgl because it's completely different, I may be wrong though.
It is Cornell. They run arXiv and host its primary mirror.
InfoQ: Hadoop Futures at Structure Big Data
Expect a surge in period tracker web apps.
Would be nice to see tryerlang.org integrated with the Quickstart section.
I'm really confused about what you mean. OSX's Finder hasn't changed much in years. This is actually a big complaint of the OSX user community. They want it to change more. Finder in 10.6, even 10.7, is really not much different than Finder from OSX 10.1 though quite a lot different than Finder from Classic.
"Why is it that such a successful company as Facebook feels like it needs to change and reinvent its interface constantly?"

I've been thinking exactly this.

Facebook seems to be mutating at a high rate. Perhaps they'll mutate into profitability but perhaps they'll mutate out of being something that their users are willing to keep using...
Hm. My man page doesn't have that passage:

NAME

strfry - randomize a string

[snip]

DESCRIPTION

The strfry() function randomizes the contents of string by using rand(3) to randomly swap characters in the string. The result is an anagram of string.

[snip]

COLOPHON

This page is part of release 3.32 of the Linux man-pages project. [snip]

What version of the man-pages package do you have installed?
Ethical? Maybe not. Smart? Definitely yes.
It could be a great business decision, hes an advisor for Spotify. There is more going on than meets the eye in this instance.
IBM was a master of this: Get a customer cornered and then bleed them. There are modern versions of this, too (Oracle springs to mind).

"Nice business you have here. It 'ud be a shame if something were to . . . /happen/ to it? Right?"

"Right, boss."

"Shaddap, I ain't talkin' to youse."

It's a successful, ancient business model.
Funny to see them go. I was headhunted for them a few years ago & decided to play along just because I found their business model 'interesting'. Even though technically interesting (lots of realtime action), it had 'scam' written all over it. Sometimes only time will tell the difference between pure evil and pure genius.
Any way to import bookmarks from delicious/diigo/pinboard ?

Seems like the others bookmarking services, i don't really see the 'different approach'... maybe the screenshot part ?
Got an email address? I don't see any email addresses or feedback forms on the public site.
http://timetric.com/topic/us-gdp-all-statistics/

US GDP today is seven times higher today than it was 60 years ago.

At the worst point in the recession US GDP dropped to the same level it was in 2005. Yes, the US GDP grew as much between 2005-2009 as it shrunk during the recession.
it's a problem on the filesystem.
They also wrote their own web server.
50% of Tweets Consumed Are Generated By Just 20K Elite Users
Maybe he is trying to buy a record label for Facebook, as that is pretty much the only thing FB are not able to get into fast - music. Buying Warner Music (via SP) would enable FB to rapidly sell music via FB like iTunes. Also putting the recent FB purchase of Israeli startup Snaptu in the same context, they might well be trying to create their own mobile OS - which will be FREE to mobile phone manufactures similar to Android. Massive advantage to FB if they do this is they have 550+m users that mobile operators would love to tap into with very litte marketing effort.
not sure about HN meetups. I think the closest thing might be geekup: http://www.geekup.org
without state protection of gambling, the number of venues would quickly proliferate into the thousands and push profits to zero.

Why is that a bad outcome?

What you're saying, if I understand it correctly, is that regulation helps keep scammy crap like gambling and Swoopo around. All I can say to that is that I'm against regulation precisely for this reason (among others).
Indeed. From the university behind arXiv, this is less of a surprise. Having said that, however, it is obviously a big step and should be applauded by the scientific community at large.
and a fellow ruby dev, awesome.
Do you ever go the geekup/nwrug meetings?
I was stunned to find that Apple Inc. hadn't registered the Color trademark, they've had a software product by that name since 2006 [0]. There weren't any software products with the Color trademark, so it was awarded to Color Labs on January 20th.

[0] http://www.apple.com/finalcutstudio/color/
"Passive aggressive" hits the nail on the head.

If someone truly believes you should break software that made bad assumptions about memcpy, as a matter of engineering principle, then just stick this at the top of memcpy and be done with it:

if((src <= dest && src+len >= dest) || (dest <= src && dest+len >= src))
abort(); /* valid - spec says behaviour is undefined */
Obama didn't argue for this intervention in the first place. At least not in public discourse. Europeans argued for it, the US decided to support it later.

Also do note that I'm a firm supporter of humanist interventionism, you just need to have a pretty solid plan (or aspiring-democratic opposition) in place to fill the vacuum. A sizable portion of the population should support said invasion. Those are two criteria that make a world of difference in this situation.

But it's all moot since this thing is still ongoing. I'm curious to see how it works out.
And since we're on the subject of evidence - what do you think of this:

The private goods-producing sector value added fell 6.4 percent in 2009, after a 4.2 percent decline in 2008.
The private services-producing sector declined by 2.1 percent, after a 0.4 percent increase in 2008.
The finance and insurance industry grew 6.1 percent in 2009, partially offsetting the widespread economic decline. The increase was primarily driven by the strong recovery of the insurance carriers industry.

From a December 2010 report from the government's bureau of economic analysis.

http://www.bea.gov/newsreleases/industry/gdpindustry/gdpindn...
What definition does "assignment" have other than "a binding of a name to a definition"?

Keep in mind that there are at least three popular definitions of the = operator:

1. In C or C++, = handles assignment and mutation (no re-assignment):

int x = 1; /* assignment */
x = 2; /* mutation */

2. In Python, = handles assignment and re-assignment (no mutation):

x = [1] # assignment
x = [2] # re-assignment

3. In Haskell, = handles assignment (no re-assignment or mutation)

let x = 1 in

Just because Haskell's = operator does not behave like C's = operator is no reason to claim Haskell does not support assignment. In fact, that is the only thing Haskell's = operator supports.
I don't follow unless you are saying that other areas are less competitive.

There is a good reason that CA is hot for tech companies. It's the whole ecosystem.

Were it not for the ecosystem, these same folks are smart enough to found or move their companies elsewhere.
Swoopo was a brilliant concept and it's the kind of thing I wish I had thought of... that is, in the alternate universe where I have no sense of ethics and don't mind ripping people off.

The psychology behind why the site works is identical to why some people fall big for Nigerian 419 scams... "If I don't spend a little more money, I'll lose it all!". Suddenly it makes sense to pay $100 more than retail for a PS3 or TV because if you don't you'll be out $250 in bidding fees and not have the item.
"O.M.G" acronym traced to 1917
In retrospect it's easy to say that if they had spent 15 minutes in the library learning about lead gen and lifetime customer value they probably could have saved a few years of their lives. But it wasn't clear it wasn't going to work ahead of time. Seems like they made the mistake of starting out by asking themselves what it would take to build a great business, instead of asking themselves what it would take to test their assumptions.
There are quite a few sites based on this model. Hopefully they'll shut down too. I don't know if this is legal or not (probably legal, otherwise they wouldn't have lasted 2 years) but definitely not ethical.
Another perspective is that the way news sources and gathering is changing. Nate looks at the number of citations and draws some good conclusions - but I think he misses something important.

News aggregators, such as YC and Reddit sometimes link stories from New York Times, Bloomberg and Al Jazeera, but at any one time one of the big news outlets will be a small minority on the frontpage. Most of the content comes from blogs, smaller sites, comments somewhere and specific sites associated with a news event.

For instance, the recent nuclear disaster has been covered here on HN, but the links are often to sites that are somewhat specific to the event in questions. In this case sites like worldnuclearnews.org (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2348824) and theenergycollective (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2317356). Chances are that I will never visit these sites again, but for this one event they were indespensible.

If there was a biological terrorist attack in Copenhagen next week there's a good chance that The Copenhagen Post (http://www.cphpost.dk/) would make the frontpage of both Reddit and HN, but in there is not it won't. It's only an interesting source for very specific events.

The Internet is changing news, and I don't think Nate's analysis takes that into consideration, small sites won't show up in his analysis since they're typically only quoted in relation to one story. Because of News aggregators I don't get much of my news from the traditional outlets - I get it from experts on the particular piece of news I'm reading about. That expert may be wikipedia, it may be worldnuclearnews or it may be The copenhagen Post. The important thing is instead of getting a lot of my news from one source I get it from all over the place depending on what's happening in the world.

Besides I've often seen big news organizations pinch stories from Reddit without any attribution.
> Certainly some people - not just geeks - like this approach

I would argue that non-geeks are, in fact, far more likely to enjoy this approach than geeks.

> I find it patronizing ("Don't worry your pretty little head about where we store the files.")

Well except it's easy to know where they're stored.

> and authoritarian ("You may not delete the Pictures folder from your home folder or give it an alternative name.") all at the same time.

And this one is utterly bonkers: it's an open not-secret-at-all that iTunes and iPhoto let you move, create switch library by pressing Option as you start them.

> Long story short, I shouldn't have to open an application to grab one file. I should be able to use the file explorer.

You are. It's not like the file is stored in a secret binary database.

> Apple seems to go out of its way to make that harder for me.

Whatever.
I hope the NYT is successful with this model. It is extremely close to "pay if you think it is worth it", given the number of loop holes, which I would love to see a major precidence for.
Just a feedback- design is broken in IE7 & IE8. Otherwise it looks good service to me.
I think you should give it another chance. The first few minutes aren't very interesting, but once the actual talk starts it's great.
Samsung swiped my so-so Galaxy Tab review for its faked Galaxy Tab video.
I guess they forgot to add it on the public site. Their email is support (at) copyto.co
I intuitively knew this was the case, but wanted to do some research before posting an answer. The distinction between naming and assignment can be a little subtle. And you beat me to the punch.

But I thought this page was interesting:

http://www.haskell.org/haskellwiki/Pronunciation

'=' is pronounced as 'is'.

So you'd say something like 'main is the function that evaluates the expression...' Traditional assignment would be something more like 'the value stored in the container main now becomes the expression...'
Their traffic decreased DRAMATICALLY when competitor, http://bigdeal.com showed up on the scene. That and the sudden uptick in clones is what probably caused their failure.
I'm quite happy that Swoopo is failing. Did you get the impression that I wasn't? I'd love for gambling to be legalized.
Upps.. My poor user's view. Should've clicked view source
Only "an Ivy" or similar has the buying power and (more importantly) social capital for such a move. (E.g., consider how the elite social network lights up if a particular journal of note insists that therefore they won't sell to Cornell.)
Last.fm do something similar: subscribers get a special cookie which jumps the queue on the http load balancer (perlbal).

Thing is, if there are queues at the load balancer, something already went wrong.. so it only really benefits subscribers on certain, rare occasions.
Sorry, mine came from gnu.org and probably isn't really the man page (I misread a Google result).

In any case, I'm not wrong about strfry being a gag function, and it looks (if you read upthread) that my hunch was right that nobody uses it in real code.
Show HN: LocalGo - bit.ly for addresses
He didn't just say no though.

When presented with a model bug report (includes good description, test cases, and even a patch) he felt the need to change the function, but instead of using the supplied patch he rewrites it himself and commits it without testing it. It is still broken. When this is pointed out he gets angry and complains about people wasting his time, when it was he that decided to waste his own time rewriting it his own way and he was the one that still got it wrong.

Everyone would have been better off if he had taken the sensible path of "read bug report", "confirm bug", "test patch", "commit patch" instead of arguing and rewriting things out of spite.
How does "as users lost money, they just dropped off." followed by "filed for bankruptcy", mean "Smart? Definitely yes."?

I guess they did make money for a while, so it's wasn't terrible, but having a business model that makes your customers leave? I'll pass on calling that 'Smart'.
It's not mentioned but [cost] online courses offer:

1) Slides with custom content for example a joke of what happens if everyone decided to lower their own wages. Considering that the pdf contents are dry, slides win in this aspect.

2) Community. Like-minded people discussing the course and how to solve it.

3) Peer/authority review. The teacher or a partner reviews the work done by the person.

Optional) Programmable quizs. Those generate pseudo random questions (Most easy for math-like courses).

Optional) As part of doing a course, have the student generate questions and answers (Best for non-math-like courses as per above). This is the student's contribution back to the foundation to continue to provide more information.
Things That Happen Only in Movies | SadAndUseless.com
I guess I don't understand the "scam" label. I haven't completely analyzed Swoopo's marketing, but I think the majority of people that play realize they are trying to get something big for something little. And it's a game. If they don't win, sometimes they come back. Sometimes they don't. It's not everyones cup of tea to put money on a game they think they can win. Just like its not everyones cup of tea to put their money and time on a startup thinking they can make a decent income.

I also don't get why people collect Precious Moments. Or play Cityville/Farmville. Or play most of the games on Xbox/Playstation. They pay good money and time for these distractions. And they come out with "nothing". But they have fun.

There's a lot of people who spend a crap load of time on StackExchange sites. And there's game mechanics roping them into collecting badges and points. But they enjoy it. Do the people answering get much out of it? Virtual points? :) Some virtual pats on the back for an answer well done?

But people enjoy it. Just because I wouldn't spend my money on Cityville or all my time commenting all day on some site, doesn't make them scams.
"The existence of code written by people who should never have been allowed to touch a keyboard cannot be allowed to prevent a correct implementation."

Sounds like Drepper needs to read the standard C library spec (or else there's a human-language barrier at work here). It is not incorrect to map memcpy() to memmove(). ("Be conservative in what you send, and liberal in what you accept." -- Postel)

Can anyone imagine this debate happening inside Microsoft? This is why they win.
Sorry that I misunderstood you. I agree, now that I have more context.

[It was "Competition in a free market is not a pretty sight" that made me disagree. It is a very pretty sight indeed when scammers fail, and that's something that free markets are conducive to. (I define free market to mean a situation where the government intervenes only to protect individual rights (i.e., they only stop force and fraud). Unfortunately, we don't yet have any free markets in America today, or anywhere else in the world, for that matter.)]
Vote with your cash: buy a 3rd party Twitter client and skip the ads altogether. Maybe Twitter will come back to their senses and provide an ad-free, paid Tweetie^W Twitter app again.
Yes, it's mostly true, but reeks of pure bitterness. Not everyone is broke, and some people like spending money. I suppose it depends on what you are collecting.
I still find it hard to parse that as a problem. I mean, power generation only provides a benefit to society when someone uses the electricity to do something.

So what? Infrastructure isn't inherently parasitic. Lots and lots of infrastructure isn't even necessarily bad.

I view finance as infrastructure. The machinery that hooks investors up with investees is fundamentally useful. The machinery that lets people and businesses manage risk, that lets them define very specifically what gains and losses apply to them in what events . . . that's really darn useful stuff. If it's complex sometimes--even incomprehensible--in order to achieve something, so what? So is software. So is engineering in general.

Some people practice finance badly, I don't doubt; some engineers are snake oil salesmen, too, hiding behind the inherent complexity of problem and solution. The government bailed out finance and that's bad, but it bailed out auto, too. That doesn't make car manufacture generally parasitic.

Those are historical specifics, justified complaints against individuals and events. But I don't see anything here justifies the demonization of the industry in general.
The vast majority... 90-95% as a rough guess.
I have a personal philosophy of not doing business with any organization or person unless I understand how they will make money. I take this exercise particularly seriously when at first glance it seems I'll be coming out way ahead.

This works remarkably well for filtering out hucksters, scammers, and shady businesses.
What's the Internet coming to anyway?