skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
If it were acceptable to infringe a trademark for a few months and make $130k, and the only consequence was being forced to stop, a lot of people would think (correctly) that doing so is a profitable activity. Apple is demonstrating that it is not.
This just seems like a article written to be confusing and take quotes out of context, even matt cutts head of google web spam said this whole article is false.
They've added lexical scoping in trunk in a fully backwards-compatible way; it wouldn't be hard to do namespaces and a "nicer Lisp" (by which I'm assuming you mean Guile?) in a similar manner.

That said, the number of people who hate on Elisp is surprising to me. No, a hacked-up version of Maclisp is not the best Lisp in existence. But, seriously, you're competing against vimscript. Will even the most diehard Vim addict actually argue that vimscript is even comparable to Elisp?
This whole theory vs observation argument exists at the very pinnacle of human thought, expressed in the Copenhagen interpretation. If you want to contribute to the human understanding of this, you'll have to beat Bohr and the uncertainty principle.
How do you identify when the time is right to use this approach? Is it more of an intuitive thing or does everyone agree to a certain point in time when something is reviewed? I like the analogy about clay, gives the concept a lot more perspective.
By ASP you mean VBScript, right? Because ASP pages can be written in JScript as well, and I remember JScript was quite nice.
Most engineers use MATLAB. Most scientists don't. Chemistry adopts it a bit more, but if a scientist is using it, chances are they are actually solving an engineering problem or just making a plot, and not performing data analysis or simulation.
This is a short-sighted analysis. Microsoft doesn't only make money from the Windows Phone licenses it sells. It makes money from advertising in apps, people using Bing, etc. Unfortunately an outside-in analysis of that is more difficult.
What the Highest-Paid Programmers Earn
You could pull the password, but you couldn't pull the private key from the browser (or plugin). Encryption/decryption is done in the browser, and the host server acts purely as a data store, incapable of doing anything with that (encrypted) data. The trust question then gets moved from the host to the browser.

Have you read the link I posted about how you could approach encryption at the browser level?

Far from not solving the situation, I think they fall into the category of "half-way encryption is worse than no encryption at all", and they don't seem to understand the social concept of trust. As Jon Callas says, "Encryption is not magic pixie dust that makes everything okay."
In my experience 90% of scientific data analysis work is: getting the data, cleaning it and transforming it into a form suitable for analysis. MATLAB fails miserably at these tasks.
This is a trademark infringement suit, not a criminal trial. (This means he is not being "tried" or "sentenced" and it's not like he's risking jail time.)

Update: It actually is possible for willful trademark infringement to lead to changes of "criminal counterfeiting" although this particular case was a civil suit brought by Apple, not a criminal case brought by the state.

http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/US_Trademark_Law#Criminal_count...
Come on.. cut the kid a break. If you wanna punish him, take his profits, put it in some kind of trust fund or education fund for him and win some PR points while you're at it.
Never explain with stupidity what can be explained with economic self interest.
Chirply is hiring - solve hard problems and make stuff people use in real life.
Apple filed suit to put on record that it's illegal to sell (and profit from) white iPhones that customers might confuse with the official ones. But then they appear to have settled out of court with the family, making this a non-story. Quote:

"Apple did, however, also file a voluntary dismissal of the lawsuit at the same time, suggesting that a settlement has may have been reached, although Apple's request for dismissal without prejudice means that the company reserves the right to refile the claim at some point in the future."

Source: http://www.macrumors.com/2011/05/26/apple-files-lawsuit-agai...
I'm just guessing here but in this case it could be that the abuse doesn't mean extra traffic but people using it to generate text to fill pages with, in effect tricking the search engine.
Speaking as a grad student in astronomy, I tried using MATLAB for a little while but it occupied an awkward middle ground for me. It was a bit too high-level for the lower-level things that python is useful for (e.g. grabbing images off of a survey's servers or writing a script to align a spectroscopic mask), but it was a bit too low-level to compete with the things Mathematica is good at (e.g. symbolic integration, carrying units through equations).

One major advantage python has over MATLAB that the author mentioned but didn't really emphasize is that python packages exist to interface with IRAF. Pretty much every astronomer who has to touch data uses IRAF to reduce the data and I can tell you from personal experience that IRAF is a horrible piece of software to work with directly. The python interface makes it much more tolerable, but I don't think there exists a comparable MATLAB version. Without a MATLAB interface to IRAF, python beats MATLAB for astronomical purposes hands down.
I frankly doubt there is a way to know which product will make a viable business or not. If you think about it Google has more data then anyone on what users actually want, and they still create products which fail.
Ask HN: Which translation API?
Given the recent announcements regarding API shut-off's (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2592399 is one of several posts on this), I expect many people are in need of a good translation API.

From a quick look around, myGengo is out because of the human element and therefore pricing. My particular site will have lots of property listings added daily (perhaps up to 5000/week). MS has http://www.microsofttranslator.com/dev/ but I haven't yet had a chance to look it over.

Are there any others of repute? Paid is not a problem but "good" automated translation is essential.
They are legally required to have some number of independent directors. This is to prevent executive backscratching, self-dealing, etc. The CEO of Avon is probably on the board precisely because it's kind of random. Their job is to read the financials and keep an eye on the board members that have experience in the industry.
> 90% of scientific data analysis work is: (...) and transforming it into a form suitable for analysis.

Is that infinite recursion or endless loop? Or is there an end to it, caused by quantum nature of work -- at some point the 90% becomes an undivisible unit? ;-)

((terribly sorry, couldn't help it))

At any rate, that sounds like you want to feed the input through a pipe of simple, programmable textual filters -- cue sed, awk etc. And then pipe into standard input of something -- I know Octave has standard input, MATLAB I wouldn't be so sure.
Google's App Engine is pretty much a for-profit API.

And now they've announced a change in their pricing scheme, which if true, would change App Engine from pay-what-you-use to same-as-amazon-aws-but-pricier scheme, which makes it hugely expensive for a large portion of devs that have built on top of App Engine. And migrating away from App Engine is a total pain in the ass.

I truly hope that the blog-post missed important details or that they'll keep providing the old option too (i.e. paying per cpu-hour instead of instance-hour).

I know App Engine was beta, but people have built on it expecting instability in the implementation, not in its pricing scheme. I mean, come on!
Terribly misinformed comment. First of all, he's is definitely not a 9 year old. He's 17. Also this is one of the least objective stories I've seen on HN in a while. It makes no mention of Apple withdrawing the suit upon successful settlement.
Woz has a habit of saying things that go against the official Apple line, be it praising competitors or sounding off on the "death grip" problem. He generally walks to the beat of his own drummer.
Cali to Scrutinize AT&T + T-Mobile
1. The lawsuit was filed and dismissed at the same day, all by the plaintiff, Apple.

2. The kid is 17.

3. The panels were Apple's components, just faulty ones that should never be released to the public.

4. Don't want be sued? Don't infringe other's lawful right. Want live like a true pirate? Prepare to get shot at. All is fair game.
Full disclosure: I currently work with the company detailed below (myGengo).

Depending on your needs, you could consider human based translation, which is generally more accurate than machine-based translation. Over at myGengo (http://mygengo.com/) we offer an API to help people get translations done by an actual translator, as opposed to a machine (think Mechanical Turk, but focused on translation). Feel free to check it out - various libraries abound:

http://mygengo.com/services/api/

An advantage to going with this approach is that the myGengo API can also return a machine translation while a job is being worked on; a takeaway here is that even if a service like Google shuts down, it should be fairly simple to use another service behind the scenes, keeping a nice level of transparency for you.

Of course, if you'd like to stick with general machine translations, you could check out the following - should be close enough:

http://www.microsofttranslator.com/dev/
The Optimism Bias
Perhaps you ask a user to enter the month of their CC expiration date, which is shown as 08/14 on their card.

$v = validated_integer($user_input); // the user input 08
if($v == 0 || $v === 0) { // let's just be safe

// the Wrong Thing happens

}

This is a contrived example, sure. But you've never checked to see if a user input the number 0? Or a non-zero, positive integer?
Mixpanel (YC S09) Raises $1.25 Million From Sequoia, Rabois, Levchin, And Birch
That's the grammar for PHP integer literals[1]:

decimal : [1-9][0-9]*
| 0

hexadecimal : 0[xX][0-9a-fA-F]+

octal : 0[0-7]+

integer : [+-]?decimal
| [+-]?hexadecimal
| [+-]?octal

"08" and "09" do not match any of these.

php -r "var_dump(08);"

Yields "int(0)", while the case should rather be treated as a syntax error, if you ask me.

The bottom line probably is that your literals just shouldn't have leading zeroes…

[1] http://www.php.net/manual/en/language.types.integer.php
This is also one more important feature/pain author didn't capture. Python is designed with scientific calc in mind. Floats are represented as pure floats like C or C++ way.

python

>>> 2 * 3.1
6.2000000000000002

perl -e "print 2 * 3.1"
6.2

ruby -e "print 2 * 3.1"
6.2
A slight improvement would be if you can export to a file, which is importable via Gmail's own interface. I'd still be trusting you with my Facebook login, but I'd be keeping my Gmail login secret.
My mistake. I see where I got 9 from.

So... Yeah, not as cold and heartless as I thought then. By 17, he should be able to understand trademarks and whatnot.
Hm, this uncanny valley idea is actually really interesting. Thank you very much for bringing it up. I'll think about this for a while.
Apple did, however, also file a voluntary dismissal of the lawsuit at the same time, suggesting that a settlement has may have been reached, although Apple's request for dismissal without prejudice means that the company reserves the right to refile the claim at some point in the future. -- http://www.macrumors.com/2011/05/26/apple-files-lawsuit-agai...

Note: This is the article that Betabeat itself links to.
ah, I apologize, I didn't realize there was a difference when it came to people under 18. Still seems a bit odd they would cut kids slack for one, but not the other.
Yet another example would be Neal Stephenson:

"I use emacs, which might be thought of as a thermonuclear word processor."

- In the Beginning was the Command Line http://www.cryptonomicon.com/beginning.html
Actually most astronomers and physicists I know are already moving toward Python.

Coming from a mixed particle physics and astronomy experiment, almost all our tools are written in Python for researchers, but usually with ROOT (C++, http://root.cern.ch/ ) underneath. ROOT is python friendly.

SciPy/NumPy, PyROOT, PyFITS are all unbeatable tools for anything in Physics or Astronomy as far as I'm concerned. Throw some knowledge of C in with that, and you can scale anything up to supercomputing clusters or back down to your laptop, and that's a very important, powerful thing for a scientist.
I have been using Esper in the last 2 years to solve several problems requiring near real time latency with the same technologies uses in this article.From DSL router events to Business Activity Monitoring.The fact that you can go to production with the Open Source version is awesome and the community is really helpfull.
Nobody is arguing that they don't have the right, but there are social implications to doing so. People have the right to not like them because of it.

You also have the right to not write thank-you cards when people do nice things for you, but those people have the right to react to your selfishness.
I think you probably have a better chance at making 1.2 million from your own company than finding a job that will pay you that much.
They dun even need to do anything except put a link to their new service on their main domain and it already gives them an instant boost. Which they already do for 99% of all their related services.
How frustrating. I built something just last week using the translate, transliterate, and diacritize APIs. These are/were really useful APIs for creating language tools.
Sarah Palin’s new movie. Potential titles.
I'm not sure what you expect to happen there but the following code always produces "Correct!":

$user_input = '08';
$user_input = (integer)$user_input;
if ($user_input == 8) echo 'Correct!';
if ($user_input == 0) echo 'Incorrect!';

If you take out the cast, the result is the same. If you change the numbers to '010' and 10 respectively, the result is also "Correct!". There is no weirdness.
Maybe there are some problems with the mindset of the poor, but I think that part of the problem is that I am probably going to find this kid through my own middle-class network and continue to perpetuate a culture of mentorship that is often inaccessible to the poor.

So don't... make it a point to consciously seek out a way to connect with someone who wouldn't usually have a chance to work with someone like you. Find the poorest neighborhood near where you live, find out what high-school is there, call the principal and see if there's some way you can engage with them to do some kind of mentoring or whatever. Of course that's just an example, but hopefully you get the drift: if this point matters to you, do something specific to break that cycle and help someone poor.
Sony Says it May Know How Hacker Succeeded
> what's left of the design?

Exactly.
Mango: modular web-application framework for Golang
That's a good point, but it may be a superficial difference, actually. The final output is not necessarily direct representation of value of variable, but may be rounded up by default for easier use. Rounded up in a configurable way.

For example, in MATLAB, Octave and JavaScript, a value is displayed (formatted) as an `integer' if it's very close to an integer (closer than certain epsilon -- and that's configurable in case of M & O). At all the time, what the variable holds -- and what undergoes computations -- is a purely float value, never an integer.
The goods were allegedly Apple branded without authorization, hence counterfeit.
Cool, I haven't tried that library. I use the built-in vi-mode which does basic stuff.

Please check back with http://jlongster.com/ in a few months, I have plans to start doing this kind of stuff there.
They're definitely not more important. The actual stakeholders come first b/c they were the ones who took on the most risk. Second came the employees who took a job for a company that might not even have existed in a year. Third came the soccer moms and the rest of the ordinary ppl who could care less if you didn't earn any profits and had to go back to working a 9-5 until you die of a heart attack when you're 60
The announcement they make in a few weeks is going to be huge and disruptive. Some interesting bits from the interview in Startups Open Sourced:

Q: Tell me what your experience was like raising money. Was that positive or negative?

That experience sucked, and I'm still in that process. It's a lot better now but it still sucks. It's still very taxing.

When we went to raise before, we were six months after the recession which meant that it was very hard to raise from anybody because they were being super cautious. Sequoia did this "RIP" slide thing. It was challenging, and so it sucked because you just got a lot of "no's." We were two kids from ASU, never done a company, had never worked anywhere really interesting. We had nothing going for us other than that we were in YC. So raising sucked; we almost died actually. We were probably a week from just dying, thinking "Oh guess we're going to go back to school." I was like, "Tim, if you ever want to build anything, build it now. We might not be alive in the next month, so just build it now." And we actually ended up raising from Max Levchin and Michael Birch at the last second, and that saved us. We were like, "Oh, we finally did it, we raised." But raising was just taxing because you end up talking to VC's who have a million reasons why your idea sucks, won't work, and then you talk to angels who won't invest in you until some other angel invests in you. You have this chicken and egg problem.

Q: Sequoia's leaked RIP slides happened October 2008, and we were in the same YC class which was Summer 2009, so the summer right after. People may forget but it was actually kind of a challenging economical environment.

Yeah. I think the companies that raised--you had to be pretty decent if you raised. I think we were more lucky than decent.

Q: Any points where you thought Mixpanel would fail or where you really had stressful moments?

Yeah. It happened two weeks ago. It happens a lot. Basically when you're doing real-time data analysis, the problem is that you have to pre-compute everything. You have to do it all right when the data comes which means that if you don't scale the rate at which the data is coming in you start to get backlogged. You just have data that's piling up over time and so we definitely had scenarios where we were not real time, we had 24 hour, 48 hour, 72 hour delays for two weeks, and there are definitely points in times where the scaling problems were so bad that I would just lay on the ground and think "How am I going to scale this? How am I going to do this?" And the thing is, if you can't, you die.

Q: I remember the delays in Mixpanel's early days.

Yeah, things like that still happen even today, but they're less severe. We have a better handle on it obviously, but there were definitely days where things just got really, really bad, and if you can't scale you just lose.
this one? http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2149242
Facebook's Zuckerberg slit a goat's throat? Wow.
Sounds like that was what the kid was doing with it -

"Since shutting down whiteiPhone4now.com, Lam has been working on a startup, similarinterests.org, a social web application for connecting users with shared likes. “I’m very thankful,” he said of the money he made on the iPhones. “For months I was struggling for an idea that would bootstrap my first startup and help pay for college.”"
I don't know much about mixpanel, how is it better and/or different than Google Analytics?

Congrats on the funding.
Why not? Roll something out, and say you'll commit to providing it for a certain amount of time. If, after that time, it doesn't seem worth it to keep it going (by any metric you decide), pull it. You've given fair warning.

Of course, I imagine that sort of thing would hurt adoption quite a bit.
Well stated. as always, just a question is there any potentially criminal actions here either on the part of Google or the Paypal/Google Exec?
Hurt Locker lawsuit targets a record-breaking 24,583 IP addresses
Actually the week after that meetup I realized the process could be simplified dramatically: http://technomancy.us/149 Now once you have Leiningen and clojure-mode installed it's a single M-x clojure-jack-in to get started.

Wish I had thought of that a week earlier! Could have saved us a lot of time at the meetup.

(The way you posted still works fine, so if you've already got it set up there's no need to switch.)
From a privacy standpoint, that doesn't mean anything since you're still granting the FB App permissions which, could then be used server side.
Sure, if you presume the existence of setjmp and longjmp. I'm more normally in the position of writing those routines, not using them.
This is being revisited as per the PHP 5.4 TODO. My guess is it'll happen this time around, and I voted against it previously (but changed said vote). https://wiki.php.net/todo/php54
Best Coffee Shops to Work from in Seattle
Sony’s problem isn’t earthquakes and hackers, it’s a lack of leadership
There's a lot of these lately! Also see http://github-high-scores.heroku.com </shameless_plug>
Ghetto testing? That's a terrible name for this...
I'm leery of building anything on top of someone else's API. I built on top of an API while also keeping in active contact with the company to let them know what I was doing, going as far as talking directly to their legal department, and they still shut me down when they couldn't handle the volume of usage. And this is in a situation where every marginal use of their API made them money. Collectively I was going to make them revenue of (projected admittedly) $1.2M. Didn't stop them from shutting me down.

Long story short: Building on someone else's API is a recipe for disaster. Are there times when you have to? Sure. But you need to know what you are getting into.
Social Media: The End or Start of a Golden Age?
Google API expect an entire file to be uploaded before it processes it, hence the need of a temp file.
Some more info here, including the developer name:
http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/patent_holding_firm_lod...

The developer is "Clapfoot Inc", and the game in question is "Tank Hero".
Perhaps if they based their new features on users testing like Zynga, instead of the 20% projects of their employees they might have features that have more market success (keep in mind Google's and Zynga's market are not directly comparable).

Implementation wise, I could see Google doing a "labs ghetto" where some set of white-listed MVPs would go out to small percentage of their user-base.

It's a powerful concept.
I met one of Mixpanel founders last year while I was in an interview process at YC. Totally chill and down to earth.

Congrats on the funding and really happy to see their momentum keep going.
There is a legal case involving a major tech company, that makes it news by definition. It doesn't have to be a case of Apple being morally wrong in order for it to be news.

On the other hand, you could argue it's not interesting enough to be worth writing - but the reason it's of interest is because this kid was of interest when he found a clever way to make money in the tech area, plus any story involving a company such as Apple and a legal case is sexy, partly because it offers an insight into how they might approach other legal issues in the future.
I usually write it as

$xml = reset(getXpathWhatever());

which returns the first element from array.
I just lost 14 pounds. However, the instincts around body homeostasis are very, very strong. I don't think it's reasonable to presume that it's all self sabotage.

http://lesswrong.com/lw/ab/akrasia_and_shangrila/
It beats Ballmer's chair hurling I guess.
How distinguish a  real cloud from a faked cloud
HTC does make WP7 phones (HD7 comes to mind), but I doubt even Microsoft has enough leverage to pry HTC from Android... HTC is a rising star there and it's a big market.