skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Point taken. But reading HN, I feel a bit the way I did about a year ago as one of Philadelphia's city councilmen was goading the police into cracking down on miscreant cyclists: There are profound asymmetries in the way these guidelines (which people quote like the were whispered in PG's ear by God Himself) are applied.

In the case of Philly last year, you had cops obliviously riding their cop bicycles on sidewalks and the wrong way down streets. Meanwhile kids are getting cited for the same thing. You have people in 4,000 lb automobiles physically intimidating people balanced atop 25 lb of steel tubing. You have pedestrians self-righteously accusing cyclists of endangering people's lives while they obliviously cross against lights without looking.*

Your point that is someone's voting for it, it means that someone finds it valuable is the same argument that spammers used to use. This isn't anarchy: there are rules, as you pointed out. People will vote to have government spending increased and taxes zeroed out. Just because someone will vote for something, it doesn't mean it makes sense or is a good idea or is defensible.

* I'm still recovering from going over my handlebars a couple weeks ago when I wrecked my bike to avoid a space cadet pedestrian who crossed on a red without even glancing down Sansom St. Lucky for me, it was right in front of Jefferson Hospital's E.R.
I don't see why Lodsys would take Apple to court given that both parties acknowledge that Apple and Lodsys have a licensing agreement for the technology. And the given the fact that Lodsys's claim is that Appstore developers do not have such a license their pursuit of individual developers makes sense.

As it stands now, if there is to be a suit between Apple and Lodsys, it will require Apple to act as plaintiff on behalf of its developers and that could potentially open up a huge can of worms for Apple because it could establish a higher level obligations and responsibilities between Apple and its developers. The fact that Apple responded via public letter rather than lawsuit is indicative of approaching this as a PR issue rather than a serious licensing issue - i.e. if it was clear that Apple's agreement with Lodsys allowed them to sub-license the technology to third parties they would have sought an injunction rather than issuing what boils down to essentially a press release.
Yep. That's exactly the reason I got one.
Apple asks patent troll Lodsys to leave iOS developers alone
I'm a biologist, and I never realized that group selection wasn't broadly accepted until I read this article. I'd always assumed it was trivially implied by the theory of natural selection. Natural selection has been observed at every level, from entire organisms all the way down to the subcellular level (transposable elements, mitochondria, and others) I've never doubted that it also operates on populations of organisms.

I've often explained aspects of human society to my non-scientist friends in terms of group selection. (Short version: Humans who formed tribes out-competed the loners.)

On an unrelated note, I don't see how group selection and kin selection are mutually exclusive.
'Chief' is sort of redundant if there are no other 'executive officers'. 'Officer' too if it's just you.

I prefer 'Director'.

edit: as per https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Executive_Dir...
This issue is only about in-app purchases, not app purchases, and that's where my comment was targeted (i.e. Amazon's kindle app)
World Entertainment News Network sure looks like it's affiliated with Twitpic now.
Well, the first-order solution is to not buy popup ads. Popup ads plus "software that 'cleans' your machine" equals "warning sign".

But presumably these ads work, and maybe they work so well that it's worth the collateral damage to one's brand from people whose first reaction is like mine. Hey, it's your life.

The other defense is to build the brand. Get some reviews from someone I've heard of. Name-check those reviews in the ad, maybe even with a link. Buy other ads in other places, where I might see them as I surf. Change the call-to-action buttons to read a little more like "learn more" and a little less like "install this thing now". Heck, I don't know.

And, yes, it's true, the existence of well-known trojans masquerading as "security" software is unfair to legitimate system-utility vendors, just as the existence of spam is unfair to legitimate friendly emailers and the existence of the flu is unfair to people who like to shake hands. What am I supposed to do about that? Encourage people to sneeze on me in the spirit of brotherly love?
yes, but read the question above.

In Europe some of those things are paid through taxes and some are not. To make a reasonable comparison you need to know what's included each system and how the fees are arranged.
I hope more people support this project. Not only because lowering the barriers for Processing programming is an exciting thing to do but also because this could be repurposed for other languages (the code will be released under GPL). Full disclosure: I'm an advisor on the project.
Considering most vacation law is set at the national level, yes, weak union power at the national level results in the situation we have here.
I wonder where does Firefox for Android falls under, Firefox or mobile browsers? Although I don't know if it's significant, but when I last checked AppBrain, Firefox for Android had over 250,000 downloads.
URL Driven Design Estimation
Gah,I love my iPad but I am constantly annoyed by the lack of flash. There are more and more videos embedded in web pages and it is only getting worse. Something has to give and I think I will sooner move awaymfrom the iPad than the rest of the world will stop using flash for video.
10 Twitter Tools To Save More Time
Saving time on Twitter and handling it more efficiently is key for me. Especially as you can easily waste hours and hours without getting anything else done. So here is a set of 10 tools I use frequently which allow me to remain genuine, yet optimise my efforts on Twitter. Take a look, I hope they are interesting for you too:
Are adhoc gangs/groups that perform altruism common across genetic lines?

While some animals do exibit adoption, I don't think its nearly as common as altruism towards biological children. And group membership that requires altruism overwhelmingly seems to have genetic tie-in.
IRemoTap puts your powerstrip in the cloud, turns lights off remotely (video)
for me jungledisk/dropbox/ubuntuone sounds really dumb.

any hacker worth their salt can just use rsync or something else. and you can somewhat trust your remote host with openSSH.

if you are already going to pay for storage/bandwidth? why settle for a dumb client and doubtful privacy?

dropbox i can understand on the price issue to be more appealing, but if you plan to backup private documents, this is not a good selling point. more so in recent fear mongering campaign against them.

I'm paying the lowest linode with backup and just have a cron job on all my devices (home/work PCs, android, openwrt router) sending rsync diffs there. and as an added bonus i also use that host to host my private git repositories and run mysql slave for an offsite backup for my personal projects data.

...not extremely cheap, but not extremely insecure.
We're also giving google implicit permission to push code to our machines anytime they want.

We should have conflicting feelings about this

You have a point. But I think the answer to that is in the market.

Through Chrome, the browser is evolving into a new kind of platform. It will be a platform that encompasses locally execution and memory and all of the flexibility and availability of the cloud, and it will all just work.

There are sure to be competitors. If one competitor fails, we can always take our business elsewhere. We only have to worry if the government legislates us out of a means for oversight.
OCR would be grungy whereas the magnetic stripe is the intended direct machine interface. When you attempt to connect a machine to a human interface all sorts of annoying things can happen. Even if it's simple in theory, the amount of errors generally jumps.
It also says

However, […], you hereby grant Twitpic a worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free, sublicenseable and transferable license to use, reproduce, distribute, prepare derivative works of, display, and perform the Content in connection with the Service and Twitpic's (and its successors' and affiliates') business, […]

I think the "sublicensable and transferable" part is relevant here. What I found most odd was the claim to go after unauthorized uses. I would've expected that this has to be done by the copyright owner in many countries.
Physics and the Immortality of the Soul
I'm a degreed EE, but before college I was a hardware hacker. I learned by reading everything I could find: electronics magazines, Forrest Mims Electronics Notebook, at the time Radio Shack had a few other good electronics books. Couldn't afford to buy parts, so I dumpster dived for radios and old electronics I could remove parts from.

The first important thing is to learn how to read simple schematics: that only takes a few hours. Then build something. It doesn't matter what you build, it all gives you experience. First thing I built at about age 12 was a "crystal" radio with a hand-wrapped coil and a diode and tuning capacitor removed from an old radio. Try your hand at simple kits like the ones on SparkFun or the Velleman kits.

The biggest mistake I see n00bs making is they bite off too much at first. helloWorld() != Facebook

Start small: build a headphone amplifier, get some high-power LEDs and make a little flashlight, then get a Teensy or an Arduino and start programming microcontrollers. The experience you gained from lighting LEDs and amplifying signals will pay off when you try to get a tiny micro to control things in the real world. Read the room temperature and have the micro display it by flashing Morse Code on an LED, easy stuff like that.

Above all, have fun!
Linux 2.8.0?
Well, elephant mothers in a group help protect each others' young from predators by creating an impenetrable elephant wall around them. A single elephant mother could not protect her own young by surrounding them in this way, but she can protect her young by joining the group, if she is also willing to help protect others' young as well.

On the other hand, members of a herd are usually genetically related, so it is possible that kin selection can also explain this phenomenon.
I imagine Apple's lawyers always begin letters with "Dear Mr. Small"
CLint meet CLang and the better for it. Although if I read correctly between the lines, there might be a little trouble getting the engineers to buy in :) Every met anyone who could actually make it all the way through CLint with all warnings on! Enough to drive you crazy!
IF you don't mind me asking, what autoblogger do you use for it?
(Note that Firefox, as well, does not support H.264 for many of the same reasons — and never did.)
There's also an article on Phoronix -> http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=OTQ3N...
> It's disappointing that the response is "we've already licensed that" rather than "you cannot possibly believe that you really own that."

How exactly would the latter proposed response actually help?
Agree with your premise.
Disagree with your conclusion.

What you've effectively called a bug is in fact a feature.

The whole point is to take the proper-superset aspect of Scala ( ie. every java OO pgm will qualify as a scala pgm ), and then gradually migrate the OO parts to a functional paradigm over time. This allows you to retain giant Java codebases that are in production currently, while gradually moving away from Java by taking these baby steps.
One very practical example - there's a boatload of concurrent code in Java out in production. Unfortunately, threads are not in the average programmer's toolbox. Multithreading, mutexes, locks, schedulers etc used to be stuff that OS guys who wrote IPCs studied. Now all of that has unfortunately become part of the Application Programmer's toolset, simply because Java exposes the threading API & makes it insanely easy to create, suspend, group & destroy threads. So the application programmers go wild & create all manner of multi-threaded Java apps & when stuff gives inconsistent results ( same method accessed by multiple threads, no lock etc. ), they wonder why. With Scala, you can rewrite just those bits using the Actors framework & not worry about relatively low-level constructs like mutexes.

Here's a simple example:( http://bit.ly/kOczaj )
Women in Tech & Design: the breakdown
Deeply researched breakdown of the issues women face when entering the design & tech sectors; explanations of the problems, how they persist and permeate our industry, and what the proven methods are at solving these problems.
Depends how good and how well targeted your Facebook campaign is. I mean, if you have an incredibly niche product, and you target everyone on Facebook in that niche your click/conversion for more info will be much higher than a blanket Facebook campaign targeting everyone.

That said, I'd probably be happy with a .2-.3% CTR on most of my FB ads.

As to how well your lander will convert depends on how well you make it (and again, who you target).

As to whether something is worth making - I can't really help you there.
Python dictionary tricks
Aha, okay I totally get that. Thank you.
Perhaps to access private repositories?
Bridge-of-service. I've seen someone leave a company (on good terms) come back two years later and the company gave the bridge-of-service with regards to 401(k), vacation, etc. He was really good though and the company really wanted him back.
and now you own a place with one bedroom, that can be sold for 2/3 (if you are lucky) of the price you paid in full for the mortage.

if you spent the same in rent, you would have lived in a 2-3 bedroom for 20 years, moving every time you changed jobs

20yrs is a LOT of time to be living in the same place you can afford downpayment when you are 20yr old. and a LOT of time to work/study on the same area
Number of times this comment thread has referenced shooting oneself: 5.

Awesome.
From Java to Scala, an Android application use case
Marissa Mayer Advice for Female Entrepreneurs & How to Deal with Failure
Setup is effectively free and incredibly easy. They're disrupting the gorillas of merchant services, by tapping into a market that your Visas, MasterCards, AMEX haven't been able to get to: local, small business owners.

It's disruptive because it changes the customer demographics for some of these businesses and the way they think about payments (customer analytics, payment options, loyalty programs).

Square is poised to gain market share very quickly AND there's a huge play to be made in emerging markets where the mainstream guys haven't found great traction and smartphone usage is growing rapidly.
When the story of twitpic's TOS broke, I immediately deleted all the pictures I'd uploaded and changed to Mobypicture. It's not as good, but their TOS says in no uncertain terms "All rights of uploaded content by our users remain the property of our users and those rights can in no means be sold or used in a commercial way by Mobypicture or affiliated third party partners without consent from the user."
I like that. No ambiguity at all.
There's no answer to that. there's no labor law in the US except from some payment and safety issues.

everything is negotiable.

i negotiated a little more in vacation then the other co-workers. Some other teams in the company can take time off based on the overtime they put in that month. My team doesn't have that. but if we work on some long issue, the manager usually gives an informal day off later.
This is... weird:

"As you probably know, I love Twitter.
I also love making stuff - that’s what I do. Here is my latest creation, a desktop app"

It's made by UberMedia... So he's just selling his name to the brand I guess?
I wonder if this is an indication that google is moving to clang for compiling (and not just diagnostic tools). If that's true, maybe this is another nail in the coffin for gcc? I see apple and google behind llvm/clang, who's behind gcc? Nobody?
For general tinkering with basic principles, you could also keep your eyes open for kits (for example, I have an old 100-in-1 exploring electronics kit that helped me out and to which I intend to return one of these days as it had some good things for getting some familiarity with the basics). Such kits are often designed with educational purposes in mind, and as such include explanations of why the circuits work in addition to instructions for how to put them together.
I thinks the given vs medium relates to whether a language is image based. Forth and Lisp are image based so you could say "you're sculpting the medium". Also Lisp and Forth are more friendly towards hacking the language it self.
Well written! The simple bugs that it seems to detect are fairly high frequency so it should therefore improve overall code quality. Looking forward to playing around with this in my spare time.
If you go to a University of California, it costs at least $10,000 in tuition a year alone,definitely more now, that's what it was two years ago. Plus books and rent for most people.
Ask HN: Recommended lean startup metrics
I am looking to put together a decent list of well-known lean startup metrics.

My favourite I've heard is the 40% test: Test whether to develop your MVP further by asking if existing customers would be disappointed if you switched it off. If 40% say yes, the MVP is good.

What others have you heard? Which do you recommend?
I think I've read this exact article dozens of times since almost since I began writing mobile applications in 2003. The message is always the same 'Web Apps are Coming! They're going to take over! Steve Jobs thought so!'

In reality, we'll probably see something that's half-way between a web-app and a mobile app. In the meantime, can we stop predicting the doom of mobile software and get on with fixing what's broken about it?
Not sure what the "to your face" rule is?

His advice is almost _all_ conclusions phrased as if to be applied universally. Example, from the PDF: "If you have a lot of content (such as product information) to display, use a separate page rather than a modal view". That is not a friendly tip or even a very constrained piece of advice. It doesn't say "consider using" or "try", it says "use". If you think I'm being nitpicky you haven't been subjected to project owners sending you emails with quips like that, expecting you defend yourself against the laws set down by the experts. It may actually make sense in many cases, but there are certainly cases where it's not true.

As for methodology, he offers very little insight and no new ideas. You can spend an hour reading Steve Krug's book and understand the mechanics of usability testing. The rest is common sense and experience.

UX is not voodoo, it's an art. Usability is a holistic quality, not an aggregation like uptime or code coverage or conversion rates. It's pretty widely accepted that the Tivo is a hallmark of usability. Why? Can you answer that only in statistics? Can you then justify why you picked those particular statistics and why they determine "usability"? Are your results reproducible? I'm not saying you actually need to run through the full scientific method on usability, I'm just saying that running through only parts of it to sound fancy benefits nobody. You need to learn when things are just better, and you need to admit that it's ultimately an opinion, an idea, an artform.
Evernote Developer Competition and Conference
They probably just figured it was worth a shot to get some money, ethics be damned.
Apple Exec: People are pissed about the 30% in-app thing, what should we do?

Other Apple Exec: Add value to it.

Apple Exec: How do we do that?

Other Apple Exec: Show people that if they didn't use our methods and lose their 30%, they'll get sued for licensing fees for an in-app purchasing patent and probably lose it anyways.

Apple Exec: "Hey Lodsys, we're already paying you money, but could you do us a favor real quick..."

I'm not claiming this is what happened, because I sincerely don't think it is what went down. I'm just illustrating a theoretical and likely fictional path.
New "ShaperProbe" tool detects ISP traffic shaping
The community needs to exercise some collective editorial discretion. If an institution hopes to serve some curatorial purpose, it needs to make choices about what merits inclusion and what doesn't. Asking "the community" to collectively exercise anything is a fool's errand, therefore HN is doomed to suffer from Borges's Map Syndrome.
While this is true, I think it's more about the money they all are able to derive from each other wielding their respective patent portfolios than about the potential bad press from trolls.

Really in this scenario the trolls are almost the good guys, as long as they are attacking the big players like Microsoft. If we get enough cases like i4i v. MS, the big companies will decide that the current patent system is too dangerous even considering their large patent portfolios that they use to reciprocally gouge their contemporaries and competitors out of money.

Right now MS et al are not too worried about patents because any competitor who brings a suit on a patent claim can be counter-sued by one of MS's patents; if someone comes demanding that MS buy a license, MS can reciprocate and demand that that party license a patent it holds. These kinds of cross-licensing agreements and reciprocal lawsuits go on behind the scenes all the day long at the big tech players.

If we get more patent trolls who only hold patents and don't put out a real product for the big guys to counter-target with their own portfolio of tech patents, then we'll be in a situation where even an extensive portfolio can't protect the big players any more and they'll have to advocate for reform. We just have to make it cost more than their profit from cross-licensing, etc.

Just another handful of injunctions similar to the one from i4i case, which ordered MS to stop selling Office, and we'll be looking good.
And at the end of that 20 years you own a piece of property. Or you could take that down payment and invest it. Will that property appreciate more than the return you can get for your money? Don't forget about property taxes too.

Renting gives you greater mobility too, which can be used to maximize income.
Ah, great, I was not able to find that.

Well no wonder he expressed frustration. That would be unwieldy in any language. No disrespect to esr (obviously) because that was a million years ago in Internet time.
So, yeah.. you can write hard-to-maintain code in any language, but I think many (including myself) would argue that it's much easier to do in Perl than many other languages. It's built into Perl ('more-than-one-way'), and explicitly avoided in python wherever possible. Bottom line: all things being equal, I'd argue you're more likely to end up with a Python codebase that's a pleasure to maintain than a Perl one.
I doubt a majority of HNers saw the original submission.

Edit: To the pedantic downvoters, do you have to be completely hostile all the time? This is exactly the crap that is making HN a worse community-- a bunch of egotistical trolls chasing superiority highs. The problem is the trolls are more motivated to downvote than the normal people are willing to upvote, so eventually all interaction will be suppressed other than the few voiced the hive-mind accepts and agrees with.
Association between Income and the Hippocampus
I can second this. It is one of those documentaries that you need to see at least once before you die. Very informative.
SparkBuy acquired by Google