skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I came here to post the same thing. Zuckerberg is only saying this because his buisness depends on it. Anyone who can get people to listen to them can report on people's opinions as a way to influence other peoples opinions. Considering the way the way the media echo chamber hangs on his every word, hes trying to create a self fulfilling prophecy.

People anxieties aren't fleeting after every update, what is fleeting are peoples assumptions that they can be open on facebook. These days, almost every time I take out my camera someone will inevitably asks me not to put the photos on facebook (not that I would anyway). Some friends have quit drinking because they know that if a picture of them drinking in their free time, which they are allowed to do could still ruin their career.

Facebook isn't making people more candid, its making us self-censor. That self censoring is moving from facebook back to the real world. Its very troubling.
Instead of taking $5 from HTC per Android device, they should give them $10 to ditch Android for WP7. That way they'll end up making more money.
We do this in short bursts at key points of the design process. It's not 15 minutes every 15 minutes for months. It may be every 15 minutes for a day or two - constantly trying to hone the details and the experience so it's just right.

You have to be selective about this, but when you get it right it's incredibly effective. Enjoyable too. It's like working with clay - molding, cutting, and shaping right before your eyes.
Actually this is even more specific, which is building your product on a webservice provided by someone else is risky. Unlike a library you download, a webservice ends the day they cut access to it.

With a library you can continue to use it, and slowly rebuild your product to use a different library (or even use that library forever if it works for you), but with a web service it works 100% today and tomorrow it doesn't work at all.
I imagine any kind of number crunching would be done in a different language or use optimized libraries. I wonder how many numerical apps are moving from Fortran to modern C++, e.g. using templates for optimized number crunching.
As a counterpoint, many companies are built off of APIs that are out there. That's the nature of business and that's actually great for the API authors out there.

But if developers knew that APIs could easily go away, then people wouldn't build businesses on top of those APIs. The risk would be too high.

I don't know the history but it seems that Google could've implemented some simple solutions to prevent abuse of their APIs while catering to the business community such as simply charging for use. Any legit business would be willing to do this.
They serve to save people time.

Or to draw attention to a succinctly formulated essence of an article. They help me in focussing on the articles that may be of interest.
I just got done reading this. It's admittedly not a scholarly work -- it's a set of interviews which paint a narrative about how it feels to move from the working class to the upper-middle class in America. Your statement about being shamed for doing better than your parents represents one of the book's themes.

http://www.amazon.com/Limbo-Blue-Collar-Roots-White-Collar-D...

I am an oddity. Although I grew up in a blue collar town and my dad was a factory worker/janitor, all four of my grandparents had college degrees. So, I identified with the book's stories in odd ways -- sometimes understanding the working class guy and sometimes understanding the upper middle class one.

[BTW, someone here on HN recommended this book. To that person, thanks!]
Teen Who Sold White iPhone Kits Reveals How Apple Hunted Him Down
I studied Ada 3 semesters & taught Ada 1 semester at WVU. I think it had to do with the fact that West Virginia Univ was big on defense, NASA & FBI projects which mandated Ada. Some of those avenues have materialized bigtime:
http://www.fbi.gov/news/pressrel/press-releases/west-virgini...

Ultimately I felt it was not such a fair deal for the students. Over 50% of grad CS WVU students were non-US, so they would never get to work on these Defense related stuff due to sec-clearance. Ada was also touted as a successful example of design-by-committee, which I found quite nauseating.
2. I claimed "money is a veil", not "money doesn't matter". People focus too much on money when discussing macroeconomics and the effects of complex changes in the economy, and not on the true measure of prosperity. As a simple example, if the Fed started printing even more obscene amounts of money than it does not, our GDP next might be twice what it is in 2011. Wow, 100% growth! What an easy way to prosperity!

3. In the economic analysis I made, I've pointed out that the effects that he is so worried about are identical, in much the same way that the effect of increasing trade patterns and specialization is very similar to the effect of increasing technological efficiency. Sure people stopped wanting them instead of them literally being free, but that doesn't change the analysis regarding the effects.
Google gives up Power Metering – Google PowerMeter API deprecated
The announcements seem impact the smaller, niche, API's. It's unlikely that this would ever happen to large API's such as Maps, Analytics, etc. However, the Translate API was definitely very cool.
Good call, I'll look into it.
Google shuts down several of countless, FREE APIs, on which the foundations of many startups rest.

"Google is just another company who doesn't care about developers."

What? A little gratitude, at least, before suggesting how things could be better.
Question: Can anyone recommend another Translation API? The problem is that the translation work that Google does is the best out there that I've seen, and I'm not even sure if there's a decent alternative to be found.
I'm not arguing that technology somehow isn't important for these companies. Of course it is. Pepsi Bottling Group has an immense IT infrastructure with annual spending that could swallow many startups. It couldn't operate in the modern market without this infrastructure. But it's a soda company, not a tech company, even if it delivered you soda from the internet. If PBG opened a large NY plant the WSJ headline wouldn't be "Tech Boom Hits New York."
Indeed, one of the downsides of Open Source... politics etc, it doesn't help, but tends to come with the territory.
I don't mean to be a stickler, but this is an egregious example of editorializing in the title. Can someone edit it please?

I was already well aware of the API deprecation story, but I clicked on this link thinking it was a new article from Google defending the move (or something of the sort).
Forty-Four Reasons Why the Chomskians Are Mistaken [2000]
Is Woz on Apple's board? Wouldn't it be inappropriate for him to help Fei if he is?
Troubleshooting Google's CDN with WhyHigh
Double Sided Stickers Used to Communicate Something Special
Idsketch.com gives you a comprehensive solution in case of getting brilliant double sided decals. We serve you all over the world. We know how to serve you better as we make your products matching to your requirements and latest trends.
I need more than a simple fan boy boast. Download it first and then tell me why.
Agreed, but if you're going to put the energy into picking out what doesn't work, you probably have spent time thinking about how it should be done, so following through is worthwhile for all concerned.
That's pretty cold and heartless. I understand defending your trademarks and all, but beating a 9 yr old into the ground AFTER he complies with everything you asked is too much. ALL his profits? Ugh. He never pretended to be Apple and it was very clear that they weren't official Apple products.
He sold a product with the trademarked Apple logo on it without authorization from Apple, and they're protecting their trademark. How is this a story?

Is there a trademark exception for being a kid? No.

Is there a trademark exception for "same shape as different colored component of product"? No.

Now, had he sold a white case without the logo, that would be a totally different story...
Array brackets after function calls are fixed in PHP 5.4:

~/php_source/php-src-5.3$ ./sapi/cli/php -r "function a() { return array(1,2); } print a()[0];"

Parse error: syntax error, unexpected '[' in Command line code on line 1

~/php_source/php-src-5.4$ ./sapi/cli/php -r "function a() { return array(1,2); } print a()[0];"

1
I completely agree that you are shooting yourself in the foot if you are relying on someone else's API for you entire functionality. But there are a few things here -

* Everything Google does is free. So it can be argued that the API is in fact for-profit.
* In this case, translation is not something a small company can do by themselves. The API's whole value proposition is that it enables startups without the infrastructure like Google can create interesting applications using the API. Google wants people to do that and its very much a big part of its success so far.

So the developer is not entirely at fault.

I would not rely on that one API itself for my business but he/she chose to do it.
Please do. Bonus points if you include something about Vimpulse (http://www.emacswiki.org/cgi-bin/wiki/vimpulse.el) to entice vim users to give it a try.
json api
http://correlate.googlelabs.com/search?e=json+api&t=week...

xml api
http://correlate.googlelabs.com/search?e=xml+api&t=weekl...
Good point about drain of intellectual capital -- legal issues could well be a turn-off for new talent, too. Do engineers still see Google as a cool place to work? Microsoft lost the cool factor ages ago.
Newsletter May 2011 – Immigration Reform in President Obama’s Own Words 
On Tuesday, May 10, 2011, President Obama delivered a speech on the need for Immigration Reform. Let’s hope that it isn’t just campaign rhetoric.
In some situations, the difference lies in the case of the direct object (partitive vs genitive/accusative).

Otherwise, it's a matter of context.
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.
If you pay for an API, and it doesn't work, you can show economic harm and that gives you a basis to sue.

I know from experience that a number of Google's APIs are just some engineer's idea of how to hook into the data stored in the back end which Google puts out there for some easy (and free) goodwill but without any commitment ever to actually do the necessary foundational work to support it as a product (which they are really really bad at, in case you haven't noticed).

So the point is they use the API internally, exposing it gives them additional testing and additional feedback on how to make it better. Once the cost incurred by offering it for free exceeeds the benefits of the testing they pull it back. Continuing to use the now 'well tested and well rounded' API internally.

GOOG-411 was a great example of this. It was a great way to get voice samples from a lot of people by bartering a service. Once their voice training parameters weren't getting better they turn off the service, (cuts costs) but they still get the durable benefit of a well trained voice recognition library.
> That is certainly an interesting niche, but why would I ever want to work on "enterprise-size" crapware?

Because it pays the bills, and pays them quite well.

> it's just that grep and dired and search-replace are universal tools that are good enough for all occasions. omething else it's easy enough to use macros or write elisp code to do it

Extract a superclass or an interface with them. Automatically and contextually build your getters/setters in Java/properties in C#, respecting visibility and implementing proper logic in the case of constant or final fields.

I'm not going to hold my breath waiting for you to do either. Emacs is nice enough, but it's absolutely silly to claim that context-insensitive tools are "good enough for all occasions."

And I would be pretty easily called a user of both emacs and vim. Both are tools for specific use cases. They are not, as the strange culture of text-editor-worshippers would like to claim, inherently superior as editors simply because you know them.
he's 17
No he is not.

http://www.apple.com/pr/bios/bod.html
Google is doing the right thing that would be typical for an internet company. For any product they would need to have maintainers/owners who are continuously updating and monitoring. It is completely waste of time to maintain unused stuff.
Ruby or Perl are certainly good options, although some of Perl's syntax can by off-putting to the beginner, IMO. Right now, there is much better library support for astronomers in the Python ecosystem, though.
A Roomba for cows: Lely Robotic Barn Cleaner
So after 2.5 years of doing jack shit, the forthcoming budget cut is the problem? I see.
Never rely on anyones API, building something with API is mashup/side-project not a startup/company.

I think a better statement is "Never rely on anyone's API unless you have a contractual agreement and SLA in place, and a backup plan for if/when the API goes away; building something on an API otherwise is a mashup/side-project not a startup/company."
as somebody who spent quite a large amount of time turning the algorithms physical engineers (photonics, specifically) into something software people can use (into c# and ironpython), I'd rather they all stuck to python. I'm tired of having to spend my day translating matlab into something useful.
Isn't a wrapper function the solution to this? Or even... a wrapper function that takes an associative array of options as an argument.
I have this quote from Charlie Munger taped above my desk: "You need to have a passionate interest in why things are happening. That cast of mind, kept over long periods, gradually improves your ability to focus on reality. If you don't have the cast of mind, you're destined for failure even if you have a high IQ." Here's a tip on reading non-fiction: It is very easy to get into a rut reading and re-reading what you already know. To achieve broader understanding leave your comfort zone and read what don't know. That is much harder to do well, but much more rewarding if you want to truly understand why things are happening. I scan book reviews looking for ecstatic reviews of books in areas I don't know. It's hit-and-miss, but I've learned so much more this way.
This submission is linking to a comment, not a news story, and that comment asks "why should any developer, any company which wants to build a valuable product for the long term use any of your APIs ever again?"

So, still slightly editorialised title here on HN, but pretty much on the money.
I'm not trying to be snarky here, but if you change the font and turn the toolbar off what's left of the design?
He stopped when they told him to. He complied with their requests, and now they're suing him and his parents. They aren't just protecting their trademark at this point, they're going for blood.
He never claimed to be an official Apple retailer or to be endorsed by the company, which is the protection afforded by a trademark.
Maybe it's a regional thing.

I have never heard the word used in the more than 6 years I've lived in Vienna.
Thanks for that link. I'm surprised at who's on that board. CEO of Avon? Seems pretty random.
The post itself presents an opinion, not a news item, and the title reflects the content of the post.
I totally missed that. Thank you for clarifying.
Well, maybe not just that type of abuse, overusage without benefit to Google. Of course there could still be abuse of some sort, like somehow using a service to spread spam or malware.
Too late, but I'm too self-conscious not to apologize for not proofreading. By the time I noticed the mistakes, I was caught in HN's anti-procrastination mode.
Pretty sure that's not what TweetDeck is thinking this week.
(Sorry: too late to be read, noprocrast and comment posting timeout conspired against me.)

I think the interesting part of this is the gait mechanism which is
unaddressed in the article.

A little experimentation with my fingers on the desktop confirms a
single actuator to move the legs between two geometries, and the
ability to turn suction on and off to the pads is sufficient to
climb walls. (Turning probably requires that you can individually
activate the pad suctions and have some flex available.)

time ====>	repeat

- O O
\ \ \
x x x
|\ |\ |\
- O O | O | O | -
/ / / | | |
x x x | - | O | O
/| /| /| |/ |/ |/
O O | O | - | x x x
\ | | | / / /
x - | O | O | O O -
|\ \| \| \|
| - x x x
| \ \ \
| O O O -
|/
x
/
-

odd toggle all even toggle all odd
only position suck only position suck only
suck actuator suck actuator suck
Isn't that kind of the point of the spreadsheet? To be contacted about potential work?
That's called array dereferencing. It doesn't work in php either, you need to assign to a temporary variable. I've been following a patch in the works (at https://wiki.php.net/rfc/functionarraydereferencing ) but there doesn't seem to be much progress on it.
Heh, no. And assuming you're talking about SIG and not some other Susquehanna, it's a completely different industry. But there are some cultural similarities between us and (what I've read about) SIG.
Offering an API, paid or unpaid, is not making an unending commitment to support it forever. If it was, businesses would simply not offer APIs.

When someone offers a product or service, they have to right to decide later on to not offer that service any more. That is simply the nature of any business arrangement where you are depending on an entity not under your control.

Would the OP prefer that Google and other companies simply not offer APIs?
http://www.microsofttranslator.com/dev/
Yup. ACL Anthology is a big compendium of many journals and conference proceedings in Computational Linguistics and NLP. Getting CL as an open access is great too, though most libraries had their subscriptions.
MATLAB does get one thing right: Function arguments are always passed by value. This "referential transparency" really makes it easier to reason about functions and test them.

It's the one thing I hate about SciPy.

Passing by reference for performance reasons should be automatically handled by the compiler. I.e., A=sort(A) should be handled in-place without requiring a new function sort!(A).
If the abuse is translating spam, then that's even more surprising - because that's exactly the kind of abuse that Gmail already prevents all the time. It even seems like a great opportunity for Google to gather spam data in all sorts of languages.
Charlie Cheever Explains The Difference Between Quora And Wikipedia
2 bash tricks
I've been programming in PHP for a long time and I've never ever accidentally used an octal anywhere. Does such a non-problem really need this much attention?
Concurrency bugs and memory access interference
Why a century-old battle over vaccination continues to rage
Learn You a Haskell is excellent. It probably taught me in an hour or two what my professor couldn't do the entire term. (He's a great professor, just not when it comes to teaching Haskell)

It's all available online currently here:
http://learnyouahaskell.com/chapters
But Perl has both "eq" and "==". PHP doesn't.
== really isn't that dangerous unless you use it dangerously. Comparing non-numeric strings to numbers is already odd.
I think it will be interesting to see if he is tried as an adult or not. Seems a bit odd, someone his age has the potential for a lesser sentence had he committed a violent crime, but perhaps not for copyright infringement. Either way, I think the MPAA/RIAA proved legally roughing up kids isn't the best habit to have.
The core team has it's own priorities, and has a history of ignoring the requests of the dev community. A couple of examples: in version 5.3, they added `goto`. WTF. Who, after five major releases, decides that what a language really needs is `goto`.

In the same release, they decided to finally add namespaces. But, despite the tired claim that PHP takes cues from C/C++/Java, they did not reuse :: (aka paamayim nekudotayim) as the scope resolution operator. Instead, they devised a new operator: '\'.

There is an IRC log somewhere where you can read the painful arguments back and forth over what this operator should have been. One of the rationalizations for the backslash was that it makes sense to Windows developers, as they are already familiar with the idea of '\' being used to separate elements of a hierarchy.

The end result:

Java:

Attribute/Method access: foo.bar

Static method access: Foo.bar

Package access: foo.bar.baz

C#:

Attribute/Method access: foo.bar

Static method access: Foo.bar

Namespace access: foo.bar.baz

Python:

Attribute/Method access: foo.bar

Static method access: Foo.bar

Module access: foo.bar.baz

PHP:

Attribute/Method access: $foo->bar

Static method access: Foo::bar

Namespace access: foo\bar\baz
Dint Fred Wilson say this at Disrupt NY last week: http://techcrunch.com/2011/05/23/fred-wilson-be-your-own-bit...

They should charge for it at the very least. Whats stopping anyone from using a proxy service and hitting their web page? I m sure people would rather pay a little than go through these unnecessarily complicated and unethical practices.
The State of Engineering in India
In the process of weeding down our possessions in general, I've been ditching a lot of books.

Kindle on the iPad definitely works, however the batteried nature of the device makes Kindle on Mac and Kindle on well, a Kindle, more useful for certain things.

I usually actually read on Kindle on iPhone.

Real estate costs so much, I'd pay more for ebooks than the dead tree version. That is an expensive bookshelf to keep.
Sick to see apple following sony in suing a hacker - in this case hacker in cutting their supply chain.

Irony is Jobs and Woz were known to have hacked the telephone system. Jobs accepted it as his start, his interest into getting into electronics and roots of apple.
If only you could configure Eclipse until nothing was left of its design!
Glad I stuck to scraping Google Translate, and not using the API. Cheaper and a better long-term solution.
This is one of the best collections of non-fiction books I've ever come across:

http://personalmba.com/best-business-books/
No kidding, I hate having to write some reflection BS in C# just to call a 'private method' as if addresses in memory cared about such things. The worst is some of the MS extensions for WIN32 that have private constructors designed to prevent obvious functionality. (Basically the constructors are private for political reasons). IIRC, it was something to do with reading COM streams from .msg files. It really ticked me off.
The way I look at it, Apple and Microsoft have ecosystems that allow others to profit from software development. Google has an ecosystem that allows others to profit from advertising. Of course, you can development software products around Google's platforms, but I'm only seeing a handful of success stories in comparison to the other two.
Django-RDF exposes models from any app as RDF
But it's probably what all the other Twitter clients are thinking. :-)
Google is not your daddy: long term reliance on APIs is as bad as outsourcing
The Rise of Social Settings
Resize images with PHP script
This has probably been discussed on HN previously, but to me the most interesting idea here is the meta-issue of Zuck's personal challenges.

I think it's a wonderful practice and while I'm sure most of us take on these kinds of challenges from time to time, but he seems to take an admirable zeal to it.

For example, I've taken on various learning-a-language (natural and otherwise) challenges, but I've never gone so far as to commit to practicing an hour a day, every day, for an entire year. Now, Mark only says he 'blocked out' the time, but if he actually follows through then it's very impressive.