skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I had the Vic-20 manual - it included everything, schematics, assembly language, etc. But for some reason I just couldn't cross the conceptual barrier of op-codes to assembly instructions. I didn't understand. A small assembly program in some computer magazine showed the assembly code, then the list of POKES to load the assembly program (it was a keyboard organ): BOOM! that was all it took...
Maybe they did, who knows? Apple doesn't need the money, but they do need to set an example for counterfeiters. Maybe they went easy on the kid in exchange for his theatrical cooperation. Or maybe they cleaned him out, I dunno.
#40 is a major WTF. They are outright removing the ability to create a length 1 buffer, so that someone who wants to create a 4096 unit buffer can save 3 keystrokes?

(Also, what if the length argument is dynamically generated, say from the size of a file?)
I've no idea about the exact legal situation, and I would assume that what he did was technically illegal (and would have before I heard of this story).

That said, I'm not sure his products can be described as "counterfeit", because at no point did he claim they were official Apple products or mislead customers in any way. Absolutely everyone who bought a case off him will have known that it was a non-Apple product designed to enhance the aesthetics of an Apple product.

(Again, without knowing about the laws, perhaps legally this is classed as "counterfeit" anyway, but not, in opinion, outside of a legal situation.)
DSA is great. Better in some instances than CDNinaBox.com if you have the right traffic patterns. DSA leverages 50+ Points of presence however. And until your content is requested at each PoP it doesn't exist there. So if a visitor hits yourdomain.com/awesomeness and then the Google Ad bot hits the same page with DSA unless the user and the adbot came from the same-ish place you still get 2 hits on your server. With CDN In a Box there are multiple cache tiers so if you get 2 requests from the same place you get Super Mega Turbo (that's the technical name) response, if they are farther apart you only get Mega Turbo, and if they are really far apart you only get turbo. But you still only put the load of 1 request on your server, per cache interval. Akamai is better if you have an event you KNOW is going to be big, can plan for the capacity, and has a finite number of pages you need cached. CDNInABox.com could handle the traffic for the Indy500 or Kentucky derby, but Akamai would be a better choice. We aren't attempting to be all things to all people. But our lower barrier to entry, and our greater ease of installation makes us a great choice for a large segment of the internet that aren't in the right class for DSA.
For what it's worth, I read derision in your original post as well.
I think that a lot of 'number crunching' scientific programs that evolved in the 1990's were written in Matlab. Most of them in the 1980's and earlier where in FORTRAN77. Where the comparison to python really gets interesting is the addition of the REPL, the (now mature) NumPy/SciPy libraries, tkinter (python Tk libraries), and a bunch of other common things that are causing many established scientists and engineers to ditch their Matlab licenses and move towards python.

This is more geared at the analyst level, which you could compare astronomers to, rather than the scientific programmer level (who have been writing C or C++ in the 1990s/2000s instead of Matlab). Python makes things neat because the same libraries (mentioned in the article) that the scientific programmers are using can now be used directly by the analysts/astronomers.
So how do I contact the author with updates?

I clicked on a random item - the complaint that explode() doesn't take the empty string and return an array of each letter. But of course you can just use the str_split() function to do that (which is way more logical than passing an empty string).

So how do I contact the author and reduce his sadness level?

Or is this one of those websites that don't want to remove items, even if they are wrong?
This raises an interesting point: that by promoting the adoption of DNSSEC, we can preempt such legislation technologically.
Google, Facebook Lose Social Network Patent Ruling
Ask HN: What questions do you want to ask John Resig?
I'm interviewing John Resig Tuesday for Startups Open Sourced, what questions would you like me to ask him?
And how do you guys manage to balance the books you WANT to read and books which you SHOULD read?

I haven't really had an issue with this. The books people suggest that I ought to read, especially non-fiction, tend to fall close enough to my curiosity zone that I enjoy reading them. The only "should read" books that I've disliked were ones I read for school, and I haven't had any issues with that since high school (and only a few books I read for high school fit that description).

So my question is what kind of books (preferably, non-fiction) do you guys read?

Right now, I'm getting towards the end of A History of Western Philosophy, about half way through Gödel, Escher, Bach, and early on in Real World Haskell and Types and Programming Languages. One could make a decent case for categorizing any of them as "should read"; I read them because I want to.
Nice! I'm shooting for the http://bit.ly/11I71v achievement over the weekend...
" a little too strict" -- I'm trying to be more concise, but my precision hasn't caught up yet.

First, my point was that people don't succeed simply on network entry. I hope this is understood but I don't see it much reflected in the comments.

Second, the point of networks is to reduce the guesswork. The network knows if Joe carried his college workgroups but sucked at tests, or if he aces tests but flakes out. It knows how his sense of commitments and responsibilities matches up against network norms. A lot of people "in the Harvard network" have been _rejected_ by that network b/c it knows them and doesn't like what it sees.
Online Reputation Management: 10 Fighting Tips
> There's a big difference between "grunts and basic noises" and language. Or at least, that's my opinion. In this same line, I don't believe dogs/monkeys/birds/bees have language, despite the ability to communicate.
This view is just to simplistic to hold its weight when you really look at the intricacies of language and its evolutionary history which, by the way, I would suggest comes from manual gesture and not grunting.

Mu![1]

But you're probably right about gestures.

Wild chimps have a vocabulary of about 66 signs. We can also observe tribes with languages more primitive than ours (no pronouns, for example). But there's a missing link of several millions of years of evolution between both.

What are the (known) intricacies of the evolution of our ability to communicate?

There's no definitive proof for the statistical argument, but a growing amount of (neuro)scientific evidence points to it. What's (are) your alternative hypothese(s)?

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mu_(negative)

[2] http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21533821
Facebook Friend Exporter https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/ficlccidpkaiepnnbo...

I've recently came across the problem of exporting friends to gmail and used this solution. There's a problem that phone numbers as well as other data will land in the description area when importing the csv, but at least I got my contacts outside of that walled garden, and it grabs the emails (if friend displays it publically).

The subject app seems like it's a similar approach (js) with one difference - it needs permissions, while the bookmarklet above works 100% client-side.
FTA: "... so you decided to "das kind mit dem bade ausschuetten" (translate it) ?"

Classic :-)
Zerply an Interesting Alternative to About.me, LinkedIn
EVO 2 console puts Android in a box
I think if you do a manual test you'll find that at least some of the ones posted as ending points also eventually lead to philosophy. I know for example I hit Knowledge several times on my way to Philosophy on the day I did the test manually.

Interestingly, Language does create a sort of loop that does never hit philosophy.
Fine-Grained Parallax Propeller based multi-chip SIMD Parallel Processor
All business is risk. This is yet one more risk. Hundreds if not thousands of successful businesses work on top of other businesses.
And you've already dismissed the possibility that they actually have reasons for their opinions, or you wouldn't refer to them with a pejorative. So it looks like nothing could persuade to change your mind.

The problem with these "homophobes" is their closed minds, right?
Of all these complaints, I’m most forgiving of the name of T_PAAMAYIM_NEKUDOTAYIM. You only need to look it up once; the cost is a few seconds of Googling and the payoff is you learn a fun random fact. It gives the language a bit of color.

Still, glad I’m not doing much PHP anymore.
I am not sure how you would do it. As I understand it, the bitcoin distributed hash approach relies on transactions being "verifiable" to avoid the process of actively and complete verifying everything. But any "restart" would have to actually do this active verification. Still, perhaps someone who knows could describe how this could work.

Further, even a restart would involve everyone in the world having a record of how much money everyone else in the world had.

Anyway, the mind boggles thinking about how this could possibly work.
Can someone explain how this isn't extortion?
We use ActiveMQ in production. I couldn't agree more that it is not ready for prime time. We've had a pretty bad experience overall. Man I wish we used Amazon SQS...

We have had incidents where it's Master/Slave replication continues on failure when configured to shutdown the master and slave brokers. It doesn't achieve the consistency it lists as a feature, and provides zero visibility of progress. I feel many of the features the project lists are incomplete, and are listed as a grasp at straws to have the bigger list.

Due to the poor quality of the replication, we had to invest a tonne of time to implement replication at the block device level with DRBD+GFS2, complicating the system and (benchmarks pending) likely decreasing performance, all to achieve a 'feature' ActiveMQ boasts.

I would also challenge a project to have worse, more incomplete documentation.

At the same time, I thank the ActiveMQ team for their contributions and ask the community to not turn it's back on this potentially decent solution. The ideas are solid. It isn't production ready, I feel, but that just means it needs some love.

Cheers,

Tim Vaillancourt
Prison computer error lets 450 violent felons walk free
Having the Apple trademark on them is what makes them counterfeit.

He probably would have gotten away with it if he had changed the labels, but I doubt that was technically feasible anyway.
Amazing sense of entitlement in this comment. Google built the apis, they host the apis, they incur costs from this yet provide them for free. Presumably this is because they intend to get some benefit. So its Google's decision if they want to continue to provide them or change the way they work.

I use some free apis in my commercial apps but I'm aware that I don't control them nor	am I	entitled to them. They may change in such a way that I'd have to discontinue a product but that's a responsibility I took on	when I decided to use them. Google and other free API providers don't bear reposibility for my decision.
Harry Lewis is awesome.

I wonder how this sort of analysis, especially at Harvard, will interface with the new Harvard Innovation Lab (i-lab.harvard.edu) being built as we speak. Academia may be able to adapt to help make startups easier in a traditional academic environment, or to help make academia more meaningful for students doing startups.
That's crazy! I thought that it was just my parents that did that. This past April, my dad told me that I didn't pay enough in taxes and that I should paying much more. Thanks, Dad!

I remember reading a quote from Bono where he talked about the crab mentality of his home town (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crab_mentality). One of the reasons I avoid Facebook is that it is just an easier way for that network and the poison thinking that you mentioned to flourish.
> a better concept of legitimacy would define it as flowing out of how you use the property

Why, then, do you argue that the Soviet people's loss of the property was not adequately compensated? If legitimacy is based on usage rather than how ownership occurred, why do you complain about how ownership came about? The statement that privatization is theft is a direct comment on the process of ownership transition!

One can certainly make an internally consistent philosophical system based on public or communal ownership. I just don't think you've presented one.
The way I've explained this (braindead) behaviour to people is that == is the 'equivalence' operator, and === is the 'equality' operator.

This sort of 'well, close enough' behaviour has bitten me in the past as well. While writing a JSON bridge between an older PHP backend system and a newer Rails frontend, we kept getting exceptions on the Rails end.

It turns out that the JSON library uses isnumeric() to determine if a value is a number or not - which makes sense, in some respects. The problem is that we had a parameter (the external vendor's product SKU) which was a string that, in some cases, consisted entirely of digits. On those few occasions, the JSON library would say 'Oh, this is a number' and encode it as such in the JSON.

When Rails tried to unpack it, we got an exception because our Rails model was validating the data on the remote end and choked on getting an integer instead of a string.

We ended up having to actually modify the JSON library we were using (everything else we tried either didn't work or had the same bug) to modify the check. Completely ridiculous.
I have personally had to get sites that use CloudFlare re-listed after being booted from Adsense, or Google because Cloud Flare served a different page to bots than to users and kicked off the Access Restricted Page.

You keep saying we serve off of one IP that is blatantly false.

I'll put my Crawl Rate Up Against anyone's because we had to have a conversation with Google's team because their Bot hit one of our sites for 1.2M crawled pages in 3 hours. Which is nice, but then they did it again the next day. and the next. So we are negotiating to not have to pay for Google bot traffic.

In webmaster's tools you can't even change the setting of a CDN In A Box Site, because Google Assigns you a Special Crawl rate.

Bing's Bot loves us, because they will often crawl "all pages at once" so they will crawl 10k pages in 30 seconds. and go on to the next site.
I think it describes it perfectly, at least based on the usage of ghetto as slang where I grew up (Australia).

Of course, it's not a term to use where political correctness is required.
Totally agree. Of course, because PHP has the public/protected/private idea, it's correct in not redefining those for its own meaning, so the complaint is missing the point.

I think the worst villains of the public/protected/private family are getter/setter methods, it bugs me when I see them in Python code. We use enunciate ( http://enunciate.codehaus.org ) at work, and we bundle AMF endpoints with our stuff. Unfortunately the Java-to-actionscript step complained when our data objects don't have getters/setters (since I like just using public attributes), so now I have two Python scripts: one generating the Java code for a data object along with annotations, the other adding getter/setter methods.
While you are pointing out a valid strategic risk in building on another’s platform, I’m disappointed to see the top post here is simply engaging in blame-the-victim.
Increasing your PPC conversion rate
Ask HN: Are there good alternatives to Adsense for a recently launched site?
Forrester Calls Google's Chromebook 'Corporate Idiocy'
You mean like .NET? Or Cocoa Touch? Or DOM? Or Node? Or POSIX?

At some point, we're all relying on APIs provided by somebody else. I think that's why it's so easy for people to ignore the pitfalls of just a little bit more.
Maybe I'm recent enough. I enrolled and took intro courses in Fall of 2001, graduated in 2005. My intro courses, IIRC "intro to CS" and "algos & data structures" were Ada. 2nd year Software Engineering was Java. I think students starting Fall of 2002 had an entirely Java curriculum. At the time I was kind of annoyed to be learning Ada rather than Java, especially because the faculty member who wrote the assigned Ada textbook couldn't be bothered to actually teach the course. However, looking back on it I think Ada is a better language for learning than Java because everything is so explicit. I still have Ada on my resume, mostly for shits and giggles. I'd take it off if I was applying anywhere that might ask me to prove it.

EDIT: Reconsidering. Ada pushes you toward the waterfall development process which can be dangerous for newbs to internalize.
i saw someone once compare chomsky to freud, as a foundational figure whose discipline can't/couldn't progress during his lifetime.
Given they are deprecating the FeedBurner APIs, is there a good alternative to FeedBurner at this point?
You are making a false assumption. I personally use the FeedBurner API to keep track of feed subscribers, for example, and it was deprecated yesterday.
Machine learning cheat sheet
My typical responses is that replace-* modify+isearch macros are good enough that I don't miss having refactoring tools that parse my code on the fly.

My projects are usually not large enough that it matters. If they were, I suspect my typical response would be that I would simply install the appropriate mode for emacs and use that.
Slow news day at the LA Times.
Two and a half years later, our software is finally on the right device.
I wish they had a page titled "why we are better Google Analytics"
Agreed. We did a small amount of Android work for them and they were great to work with.
This isn't rape, it is a business. What is happening is not illegal or even unethical. Victim blaming is not wrong when the supposed victim is completely to blame.
Bullshit. You don't have to be a sysadmin to be a developer. Web devs often know the whole stack, but you're still a web dev if someone else in your company handles those parts..
Gratitude for what? Ripping out "the foundations of many startups"? In many cases, offering something and then rescinding at the last minute is worse than not offering in the first place.

(I'm not personally mad and wouldn't have built a business around this API. But creating false expectations is not a good thing.)
"No ads" is a good alternative, because the extra spreadability you get is worth far more than the pennies you'll be able to extract from advertising at an audience of tens or hundreds.

The other alternative -- and again, "no ads" is better, is to put up your add blocks, seed with one ad for a related affiliate offer or even an ad-looking block towards a page in the space, and then have the other blocks say "Click here to buy this space." You can then do the simplest possible thing to enable that -- e.g. email me and I'll take your payment by Paypal.
HumbleFinance: Dynamic Charts with HTML5, Canvas, and Flotr for Prototype
Is PHP that different from other platforms in this regard? Any Java programmer knows ins and out of Tomcat, any ASP programmer is MSSQL expert?
The modern IDEs I am thinking of are Visual Studio (appropriately tarted up with Visual Assist) and Xcode. Yes, unoriginal, I know, but what can I say? Anyway, people always tell me these two are rubbish, so I assume everything else must be at least somewhat better.

Perhaps I was guilty of hyperbole, and "magic" is excessive. But stuff that comes out of the box in the above IDEs, and in its out-of-the-box state is slicker, easier to use and requiring less effort on one's own part than in emacs:

- Symbol browsing with search by substring, so you can leap to a symbol knowing only its name or part thereof;

- Project file browsing with search by substring, so you can open a file by name or part thereof;

- Pretty reliable jump-to-symbol with context sensitivity (so p.xyz, say, will take you to the right xyz), so you can find something given a valid mention of it in the source code;

- Popup code completion without my having to do anything funny or wait for the next build;

- Refactoring - OK, actually my use of refactoring tools could probably be done in emacs without making me want to die, but I know people who like 'lift method' and all that other junk, which would be basically a manual process in emacs.

I tried a couple of things to try and bring this stuff to emacs. M-x imenu, M-x ctags, CEDET and ido-mode are the ones that stick in my mind. None of them were up to much, though I wrote some helper functions to combine ide-mode and imenu, and I was somewhat pleased with the result. Then I upgraded emacs, and they stopped working. I took this as a sign, and didn't bother rewriting them. I don't use emacs for C/C++ any more.
HDR Video on the iPhone - Soviet Montage
I'd be stunned stupid if every copy of windows in whatever little back-office hole in the wall they work out of isn't pirated. They don't give a rip about your software or IP in general beyond gaming the system. If they cheat on the spirit of the law this egregiously, they probably cheat every other damn place as well.
I think kind of by definition poor people don't have much money to spend on luxuries like having someone scoop their dogs' poop. Though, where I grew up there were lots of people with money who had odd jobs that they didn't like doing themselves. You could be a drug dealer, the muscle, a lookout etc. But it's not like people don't know this, they just don't want to be arrested or worse.
lobster, chicken, pigs, goat.... . The billions allow to go beyond the limits that exist for normal people. Interesting state of mind - 20 something, everything is possible and no limits (that he has no moral limits the history of Facebook creation is the evidence to)
I'm (hopefully) going to graduate GWU's CS program in May 2012; Ada is no longer part of the curriculum AFAIK.
> For every 1018 photons shot at the moon, only a single photon returns to the telescope.

Is that really 1018, or did 10^18 get mangled on its way onto the web?
Keynote:Clara Shih, CEO Hearsay Social #SocioLoco
Have you ever tried to use the matlab compiler for this sort of thing? Too limiting?
I bought a Wildfire which was locked to Vodafone. I took it to the nearest Vodafone shop and they unlocked it for me without charge. I was surprised and highly pleased until I realised that removing the sim-lock does not remove the lock on the bootloader.

Should have gone for the Desire, after all.
Just because Google has a license doesn't mean it's necessarily an implementation license (i.e., re-applicable to your customers/clients/etc).

The devil is in the details and we don't know them. Likely the licensing details for Google and Apple w/r/t the patents in question are different as well (so one implementation could be covered while another one is not)
He didn't declare those pages as ending points, only pages that were reached.

Philosophy is not an ending point either; it's part of a loop, which is why everything within the loop is at the same percentage.
Inquiry As A Replacement For Self Doubt
Ask HN: Good Posts That Got Lost?
I'd imagine there are many good posts that have been submitted, but were submitted at slow times, or just didn't get the initial traction that's now needed to get on the frontpage.

So list them here. (Please be selective and include a link to the original submission.)
I like when British people say "we should have a proper catch up" and they mean exactly nothing...