skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
If fc.exe depends on DLLs for its core functionality, then the whole scenario is even goofier.
Why shouldn't iTunes be used? Is there a problem with using iTunes instead of the others? Something has to be used as an example, surely, so why not a prominent and widely installed program that most "normal people" have used? Is there a reason you feel like you need to defend Apple and iTunes and ask the OP to pick on some other product? Apple is now bigger than Microsoft, they don't need a babysitter anymore.

As a sibling comment pointed out, 56 pages is much longer than the EULAs you've referenced here, so iTunes kind of stands out anyway.

EDIT: After actually looking at the article (heh), the reason they chose iTunes is because Seth Meyers' joke mentioned iTunes specifically ("You pass bills the way we agree to iTunes Terms and Conditions updates"). Is that a good enough reason to discuss something Apple has done in a non-gushing way?
"just sending messages"

With this message, I hereby transfer to jnhnum the sum of $12.54 out of my checking account.

(Translation, since that's probably a bit subtle to just throw out there: In the process of abstracting money transfers as "just sending messages" your abstraction has leaked critically important details. There's more to money transfers than "just messages", and it is precisely those differences that are why you will not be finding $12.54 from my bank account in your account as a result of this "message" that I have just sent. Your abstraction is not a good one for any purpose, practical or rhetorical.)
Apple pisses me off for real. Google should see this as an opportunity to once again show iOS is a too limited platform. It's not like Bitcoin will die at this stage, and Androids already passed iPhone - another reason to not get an iPhone.
"An alternative to the standard methods of building planar MOSFETs has been proposed to help alleviate some of the physical barriers to scaling down existing designs. These proposals involve the construction of three dimensional MOSFETs either in the form of a dual-gate transistor (FinFET) or as a tri-gate transistor as a replacement for the conventional planar MOSFET."
I cashed mine, but photocopied it first.
Illegal like bittorrent and file sharing? We have seen how effective that is.
The value of having tickets directly (which are fossil artifacts) be able to reference/link-to other artifacts (checkins, events, other tickets) is something that maybe needs to be tried to be fully appreciated. When repos are clones, all that info travels w/ the repository, so there's never a broken record of what's happened. The webserver is also really handy for interfacing the repo. It serves it's purpose well, and I personally wouldn't wish it away. Whether it's something as simple as an ad-hoc "fossil ui" to run the server and load a view into firefox for a quick glimpse at the timeline, or running it fulltime so a dev. team can get a better clue of their branching/merging, it's a nice feature.
It depends massively on the intended market. Is it a consumer service? SMB service? Mobile? Local? Social? Color?

For a consumer service, making a big launch splash on TechCrunch, SXSW, Disrupt, etc is awesome. Not a lot of start-ups are fortunate enough to be a part of any of those events. However, just because you launch at one of these does not mean that the service will prove to be persistently successful. Certainly, you will get a huge bump in traffic off the bat, but if you do not have a great product, then it will be extremely difficult to create sustained value for your users. In my opinion, it would be far better to create a killer product, get your first 1000 users, and pay attention to what they want. Ideally, you get the PR to come to you.
digitizor.com has a couple of off-putting features. Their ad placement is very obtrusive. And when i clicked on the "beta" link it took me to a Microsoft ad which purported to be "informative".
so... how about browsers warn when they're pulling a an address off a DNS they've never heard of, and that isn't listed and isn't verified? Wouldn't that be a much saner way of dealing with the problem?
It's probably a humour piece.

The trouble is that many foreigners tend to take it at face value because it panders to racist stereotypes they hold about the British.
I thought it would be obvious that I didn't want to reveal that. :)
It would result in increased population growth not just because of decreased mortality, but because of increased fertility due to the timer on the biological clock becoming less than an issue, Lots of women don't get around to having as many children as they like, especially in this era, when many people are still receiving their education and then trapped under a mortgage and student loan payments during their fertile years.
... or just go install your own gitorius, and continue benefiting from all the tooling support you already enjoy.
Typical plans for our ISPs:

http://www.orcon.net.nz/home/plans/
Ahead of Launch, New-Look Profile Avatars Hitting Chrome OS
Then it matches the article very well indeed.
I like what they're trying to do, but I just don't see them doing a good job of it. We changed our domain name in August of last year, but Blekko is still surfacing our old name.

When you search for "credit card processing" we aren't in the top 100 on Blekko (though we're 2nd page on goog) but there are several sites that have NOTHING to do with credit card processing that are near the top of the list...

I think their crawling just takes a LOT of time/resources and I don't see them getting there anytime soon. Another issue is that their engine requires tags to use effectively and the layman won't learn the tags.

More:
http://feefighters.com/blog/blekko-banned-1-1-million-spammy...
"The lack of a 'rebase' function is considered a feature of Fossil, not a bug."

It's not as if rebase is commonly used. It's there for those rare instances when you, say, remove a file that it turns out you don't have the copyright for and need to purge it completely, or that huge binary file some newb (ok, it was me) committed a while back that's not needed and makes cloning take 10 minutes.

Fossil looks really exciting to me- I've used git a ton and like it but don't really delude myself into thinking it can't be disrupted. But, seriously, you're missing a critical feature; instead of trying to patronize your would-be future users by defensively stating that it's a "good thing and we're proud of this missing functionality"- you could simply state something along the lines of "In general we think not having the equivalent of rebase is a good thing, but should you seriously need something like it, this is opensource and we'd love for you to contribute..." etc.

[Edit: I'm referring to git-filter-branch etc. to remove those things, not the rebase command per se, but in context of the original page's "Immutable==good" argument I interchanged the two]
Success with self_publishing
Without example in- and output or at least more detailed descriptions of the actual experiments, it's hard to judge the value of the research. It's (unfortunately very) easy to write a system that spews out grammatically correct but otherwise incoherent sentences, a large part of NLP is about this precise problem. I'd like to know more about how the structure of the sentences by DISCERN match that of schizophrenic utterances.
Right. But in this case trusting WSJ to keep your anonymous submission secure as well as trusting their ability to run a leaks site would be a mistake:

http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/05/06/wall-street-journal...
If you have killer product PR will be hunting for you.
Cool. Thanks for the clarification.
Because as much as we'd like to pretend otherwise, there are significant ideological differences between the US and China. China just enacted a 3 month ban on all spy dramas on TV [1] and I'm about go home and watch Casino Royal with a bottle of scotch [2]. And as JFK says, our leadership in science and in industry, our hopes for peace and security, our obligations to ourselves as well as others, all require us to make this effort, to solve these mysteries, to solve them for the good of all men, and to become the world's leading space-faring nation. [3]. This may seem nationalistic to you, but I think JFK is right.

[1] http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/06/world/asia/06briefs-China....

[2] Citation not needed.

[3] http://er.jsc.nasa.gov/seh/ricetalk.htm
I'm fine with Ask HN/Show HN.
Has anyone ever heard of http://duckduckgo.com ?
If their theory is correct then the researchers have basically proved the inevitability of SKYNET. When the Internet becomes self aware (able parse and understand itself) its inability to forget will cause it to become schizophrenic and start issuing terrorist threats against humans.
You shouldn't take a bad salary from Google just so you can say you've worked at Google either, imo. There is plenty of distinction to be had out there for non-Googlers.
There's definitely a hierarchy of bestness: http://www.mcsweeneys.net/links/monologues/14topgun.html

Hopefully that will calm the well-founded rage.
Of course, they failed to mention that Seth Meyers' joke was likely prompted by the hilarious South Park episode about it 3 days prior.
Also, conspiracy is just two dudes talking.
I think the biggest reason that nobody reads these is because of the sheer size of EULA documents. They're dense paragraphs upon paragraphs of legal text. I don't think that it's the legalese that scares people away, but the fact that page numbers in the double digits is the norm.

I've found that reading and understanding is not particularly difficult, but when I install iTunes/Windows/whatnot, it's because I want to use that software. I'm sure a lot of people agree that they don't want to spend twenty, thirty minutes reading through a license that says approximately the same thing every other EULA has said before.

A shortened summary in plain English (or language of your choice, I suppose) would be best, but as the article points out, that would open them up to all of the legal holes that those 56 pages were busy closing. Creative Commons' "human-readable" licenses (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/, compared to http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/legalcode) are a good idea and one that I support, but as far as I know they haven't been tested in court, which makes it difficult for a company with large amounts of money at stake to embrace that.
I doubt Bitcoin will be made illegal. By itself, the Bitcoin network is just a mechanism for passing around signed messages and calculating hash values. It would be difficult to outlaw that without running into constitutional free speech issues.

Where Bitcoin might run into trouble is the trading of bitcoins for dollars or commodities. Depending on how bitcoins are classified legally, there may be additional regulations that sellers or buyers of bitcoins need to adhere to. However, because bitcoins are so different to any existing currency or commodity, I think we'll need to wait for a court to decide whether they fall under any existing regulation, if at all.
The thing I love most about Blekko is its /date slashtag. But on the other side, it's one of the only clear advantages it has over other search engines; its general slashtags include too few sites. There are some rare occasions where its scarce list of sites comes in handy - such as when you need a rough timeline with /date, and where a single story is parroted, such as Reuters, AP, US Weekly, and People Magazine.

DDG is generally a nice alternative to Google, and its bang commands are invaluable, but it falls short when it comes to delivering relevant hits to my queries.

DDG is my default search engine in browsers, but most of my general queries begin with "!g".

None of the three are mutually exclusive, and I'm glad to have all of them. You shouldn't dismiss any of them nor use them exclusively.
SHUT DOWN EVERYTHING!
By that argument, EVE Online's PLEX should be illegal as well, as it is transferrable and exchangeable for something of monetary value (a subscription).
http://www.thoughtcrime.org/software/sslstrip/

DNS has nothing to do with it. They can arp-spoof your machine into thinking their machine is the gateway. Then all your traffic goes through their machine. If you don't verify certificates, then they could just present you a self-signed cert that they used to decrypt your requests, then re-encrypt them and forward to the real site. If your browser didn't warn you, you'd never know.

Seriously, watch the video. Even though your browser warns you, you're still very vulnerable. If you just type bankofamerica.com, anybody on your network could easily trick you in to divulging your password. You have to type the "https" in yourself and trust that your browser verifies certificates correctly.

edit: wrong link. =(
Lessons on Going Viral - Audio & Photos (Friend.ly)
WRT selling you on centralized VCS after you've switched to and enjoy DVCS:

That was my immediate reaction, but I realized that there is a third thing. In a way, a git-like DVCS in most workflows still retains some of its 'centralized' state - that is, some repositories are the only repositories with certain branches etc. and often there is a specific repository on a server that has all branches "that matter" (such as a github account). As mentioned, Kernel developers need this to reduce clutter/noise and establish arbitrary hierarchies (that are, in a sense, centralized).

This "third thing" is, in a way, even more decentralized than old-school CVS/SVN- in that all repositories truly become equal. I'm not saying it's better than git-style-DVCS- it's certainly not if you need an ad-hoc high branch-volume hierarchy- but I do think that it's an underdeveloped use-case that's neither centralized nor adhoc distributed that might (maybe not as Fossil per se) be very useful to many workflows.

Put another way- how often do git workflows have you push/pull from multiple remotes when you're ready to deploy (or at all)? In the vast majority of workflows that I've seen and used you generally have one authoritative remote. Something like Fossil would make it so that a push/pull to any remote is effectively the same thing.
Of course, Apple's EULA hasn't been tested in court, either, so it's hardly any better if that's the criteria.
Wikipedia defines money as:

"Money is any object or record, that is generally accepted as payment for goods and services and repayment of debts in a given country or socio-economic context."

This is in line with most actual usage of the word. Bottom line, you're just playing silly semantic games. It is useful to understand the differences between different types of money, but claiming that something is "not really money" based on your own private definition of money does not add to the discussion.
Something I'd like people to understand, at a very deep level: event-based async programming, and blocking thread-based programming, are fundamentally the same. The problem of maintaining your state in between event triggers is explicit in the first style; it's implicit, in the thread stack and CPU instruction pointer, in the second style. In the second style, it's the OS which is running the event loop, and it dispatches events by resuming a continuation - a continuation that starts by "returning" from the blocking call.

Much of the translation from blocking style to event-based style is moving the work of dispatching and looping from kernel to userland. Other ancillary benefits, like reduced address space usage by blocked threads, are in principle also achievable in a threading model - e.g. by storing stack frames on the heap and being more aggressive about collecting them (assuming GC).

Other benefits of async - such as overlapping work - are also fairly trivially possible with threading, though less deterministic.
Github to git, is like Tarpit to fossil :)

Too bad tarpit.com is taken :(
Then perhaps the author should take his own advice. Using words to mean what you want instead of what everyone else means isn't a good way to get your point across. It's even worse than bad code, since it's deliberately wrong.
Enjoyed the slides. There is a key difference between this design and the design posted by netflix (http://techblog.netflix.com/2011/04/lessons-netflix-learned-...) in that netflix treats their NoSQL db (Cassandra) as ephemeral, runs it on ephemeral storage, and uses s3 for durability.

If there anyone who could provide a pointer to someone describing a setup running relational dbs on ephemeral storage with s3 for durability I would be very interested.
You're just continuing to increase the number of things you have to trust implicitly though.
Most Scandinavian nations have mandatory conscription. I wonder if requiring all citizens to serve isn't preferable to establishing a military that ultimately consists of those who have fewer alternatives for making a living.

As for obedience to political leaders, you have it completely backwards. A professional military staffed mostly by the underclass is much more convenient to political leaders. Military adventures are much easier when most people don't personally know any soldier. Think about Vietnam vs. later conflicts.
Rock Solid: AC/DC Stand Firm On No Downloads
Regarding the storage and access of Wikipedia's "world knowledge", DBpedia is a project that scrapes Wikipedia (InfoBoxes and categories) to create a structured, semantic database of knowledge.

https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/DBpedia
Technically the tethering apps weren't "removed", they're just hidden for phones on US wireless carriers. (They show up fine on my rooted Nook Color). While this shows the appalling degree of control we've ceded to the carriers, they shouldn't have any particular reason to block bitcoin apps.
You calling it a separate issue because you think about it that way doesn't change the fact that in terms of the current security model for the web... they're very intrisically tied together.

Do I think that RA/CA charging out the wazoo for the privilege of verified identity is right? No. That's what you need to be fighting against. You're trying to hack together some way to avoid buying a verified SSL by cutting corners. It's just not going to work.
When Paypal updates their EULA and various other policies I get an email about it and I can't remember if it's the link or in the email itself but it has a summary of what has changed since the last one.
What makes the US to work is too:

1)That USA is enormously resource rich, like natural gas,helium, oil, coal, enormous extensions with wood,cotton, cattle... while Japan has no resources at all.

2)That USA has an enormous population that is mobile(could move from west coast to east coast) speaking only one language while places like Europe or India has every country(or subcountry state) speaking its language and making not so easy the people to move(protectionism).

3) That USA got the world hegemony since WWII and everybody in the world needs dollars to buy oil, so USA can live from other countries work, just printing dollars.

While 1,and 2 will continue, 3 could end soon, because USA had abused so much it and is abusing it that things could change.
That's definitely true. Basic SSL hardly amounts to verification beyond the ability to find a valid credit card, yet browsers will accept the generated certs without a question.

To the OP's point, I'm perfectly happy to generate self signed certs, but I find that browsers make using them more inconvenient than necessary. That's the part that seems a bit conspiratorial to me. It wouldn't be hard at all to pop up a very clearly worded message "this is a self-signed certificate with fingerprint xxx, would you like to accept it [once] [every time]". Safari and Firefox aren't too far far from this, but I find chrome and IE to be obtuse at best.
This is why having just one app store sucks, and I'm not just referring to Apple here. It could've been Google or Microsoft, too (MS intends to have one in win8 too). But why should any of them be the moral police for everything?

I was thinking of Mondonet and mesh networks today. What if they could reject such mesh network apps from their stores because the Government asked them behind the scenes to do so? That wouln't be very good for us.
if you stash everything you're not committing, then the working copy becomes the staging area, and the stash becomes the working copy. how is that any different?

seems to me both systems have a method of choosing what to commit, in git you can choose to stash or stage, in the others you can only stash since they "don't have a staging area". git++ for having both options.
It's not as if rebase is commonly used.

This is widly incorrect. Powerusers of Git use rebase extensively, pretty much every patch that makes it into Git itself has been rebased at least half a dozen times.

I rewrite my history constantly, because when writing code I commit all the time, then I squash commits together later and give them proper commit messages.

I wouldn't use any SCM tool that wouldn't give me this functionality. The result of recording all history permanently is that users will just not commit their incomplete work, meaning that it'll be in their working tree instead of tracked in some form by the repository.
A blocked process is a process which is not in a running or ready state in the kernel. The userland process entering the kernel on its stack isn't sufficient to change this state; nor is starting or finishing a memory copy operation, particularly one which is done on the CPU (things might be different if DMA were involved). Blocked, running, ready etc. are process scheduling concepts and are about sharing a limited resource, specifically the CPU. A process busy copying memory, but using the CPU, is not blocked, because another process may not be running on that CPU instead.
Why not just build this as a web app instead of a native iPhone app?
The most common case: any situation in which only one character in a file is different. For one in every 128 pairs of these files, more or less, fc.exe will say "no differences found".

Are you asking why anyone would ever change only one character in a file? Typo corrections come to mind, or mild file corruption. I recovered a ton of files from a failing drive a few years ago, and quite a few of the text files had just a character or two corrupted.

I'm not sure what people generally use fc for -- I don't -- so it's hard to say how serious the impact might be when it fails.
Riding demographic changes
Quora Opens Doors to Self Promoters,Bias and Marketeers
Facebook sort of followed the model. It built for a niche first, then for other niches, then the niches collided with each other and they start building for mainstream and standardizing their product.

Chasm Companion book(and Crossing the Chasm, Inside the Tornado) explains this very well.

http://www.princeton.edu/~guanchun/Books/The%20Chasm%20Compa...