skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
While I thought Our Choice was a pretty snazzy product, and I think it's a shame that they're discontinuing work on their publishing platform, they did have a somewhat conservative approach to ebooks. No selectable text, "interactivity" that was pretty much limited to embedded videos and charts, and so on. What made it special was the incredibly "fluid" interface, meaning there wasn't a single button or control, you navigated the book purely by touching what you wanted to move and it worked like magic.

But there's lots of other ways books can be done in a digital format. For one really excellent example look at Inkling [1]. Now that's revolutionizing a medium (in this case textbooks).

[1] http://www.inkling.com/
Bloomberg Taps TechStars for TV Show About Startups
> She was charged with trafficking in child pornography, which is somewhat understandable.

I'm not sure how. The intent (as I understand it) is to protect minors from predators and exploitation, not to give them a criminal record for their own actions - consider that the perpetrator and supposed victim are one and the same in this case. Had they charged others who viewed/shared the photos in the chatrooms, that would be understandable, even if they're minors themselves.
Why our portfolio companies will never suffer like Airbnb
Git's own bash/zsh completion support comes with utilities for the prompt. For details see:

http://git.kernel.org/?p=git/git.git;a=blob;f=contrib/comple...
Official announcement from the USCIS http://www.dhs.gov/ynews/releases/20110802-napolitano-startu...
The problem with this is that its just too damn ambiguous. What does "discover" mean in the context of software development? You have your own idea (which is a good one), but communicating that to a candidate so you're on the same page might take more time than its worth.
Also the great Ben Barry (http://blog.designforfun.com/) of the design cult forum theroot42.org and other places now works at Facebook.
I'm no python developer but this:

def main():

for i in xrange(10000000):

"%d %d" % (i, i)

main()

Does't seem to be copying the result anywhere. Where as the C example is copying the result to memory .. which would explain why it is slower.
I agree that rolling new frameworks/libraries out for the glory only is a terrible thing but they generally don't do much harm since the truly atrocious projects fade into oblivion. We can only hope at least one thing was learned from them.

I do not consider jQuery restrictive and in fact it's liberating because it provides a core set of tools that are much more useful than the core tools provided by native JS. jQuery was born out of a need. As long as something is more useful than what it wraps I tend to not mind it. But wrapping things arbitrarily like HTML is just useless.

I do see a stark difference between marrying independent frameworks that are proven and writing a brand new one that encompasses all the ideas of each.
The bill is a pure lie. They worry about anonymous dissidents, not pornagraphers. They use the word "child" to promote fear and confusion they can hide behide. Nothing new, WE HAVE SEEN THEIR KIND BEFORE. And on it goes.
It's on HN right now because it's an amazingly good and open discussion about how someone who was involved in a PR nightmare feels after it moves from being a story to being something in the past. If you read carefully, there are important lessons in PR and how to do good customer service embedded all around this story. There are lessons on crisis management, and yes, there are lessons on irrational human behavior and responses, especially in terms of how media attention, time and the reactions of others changes people's perspectives.

I've found HN's comment section to be equally full of lessons on irrationality. From the person who is angry that EJ can't be satisfied to the person whose heart was still captured by her original story and unsatisfied by the outcome.

These are how your customers respond when you do something wrong and are disappointed in you. For a site that focuses on startups, these lessons are worth seeing.
I've read this as: "Facebook acquires Photoshop" and felt like WTF?
Hi Andy. Thank you sooo much for the positive comments. Nothing better than reading these comments and chatting with the users. Very motivating!

Would you mind sending me an email at emil@helpjuice.com? I might have something interesting for you

Thanks!
This is a good quote generally, but not when discussing child porn and the sexual exploitation of children. In this context, everybody is not guilty.
This means a lot, coming from a person like you!
This being the internet, EJ has received an uncharacteristic amount of sympathy [1]. This is particularly true when considering that no pictures have been posted, so her eloquent writing was the only tool evoking emotional involvement and trust from the reader.

My main issue with this post mortem is that, as you indirectly pointed out, it comes across as a bit self-entitled. Yes, AirBnB was slow to react and set things straight, but they still did the right thing, when they truly weren't obliged to.

What happened to EJ is extremely unfortunate, but it was only marginally AirBnB's responsibility. Her public outcry and the consequent reaction of an anonymous crowd, was even less AirBnB's fault.

In short, it's a sad story all around, and one that can be studied to learn valuable PR lessons. The outcome is as good as it's going to get though, whether EJ thinks it's adeguate or not, so it may not be a bad idea to move on.

Of course she may not be in the right state of mind to come to that sensible conclusion. I truly feel sorry for her, but I won't look forward to "coming back here in search of answers to the many questions that loom large."

1. Deservedly so. Even though, I can't help but suspect that if the blogger was a guy, most people would have invited him to "grow a pair" from the very first post. Nevertheless, it's refreshing to see the outpour of support she has received.
glad you have a sense of humor about all this. sounds like your tea business is ultimately coming along. What business doesn't start with customers that are friends of friends...
This question is a great yardstick. If you are at a startup and want to swing for the fences, this question makes very clear your intentions.
A great follow up question, or daughter question, would be: "What tools do you think best contribute to the process of invention?"
This theme appears on VC blogs over and over: Don't hedge your bets; swing for the fences.

Small successes don't help VC funds, so VCs will present it as universally good advice. In reality, it's good advice for some entrepreneurs and bad advice for others. You have to examine your own situation and make your own choice.
Obama's Experiment: Twitter As a Political Force
"To be fair C++ is best described as using both"

I think that is the real reason people commonly complain about C++. It's stuck in some sort of weird twilight zone, halfway towards being a modern safe language, but retaining enough of C to make it dangerous. Arguably more dangerous than C since newcomers may not be aware of what they are getting themselves into.

Kind of like the difference between a pit of quicksand, and a pit of quicksand covered in palm leaves. ;)
Hacking Military Chip Encryption by Side-Channel Attacks
Why People Share: It’s Social Grooming Baby
I think a really important distinction is between things that are really interesting, and things that are "interesting" mostly because they confirm one's political beliefs. This article is just a random, interesting (or not, depending on your tastes) article that is not going to beget discussions involving taxes, the tea party, Obama, Ayn Rand, the Gold Standard, or any number of other discussions that have been done over and over and over and over again on the internet.
I don't wish to be mistaken, my shot was more about making the logical opposite argument then making a solid description of what Amazon has done. I did read the article as critical of Amazon but I agree that the author didn't get more or less then he explicitly agreed to and that Amazon does offer something in return.
Yes, it does seem a little strange that the result is unused, however changing that to be ``x = <stuff>`` would have no effect on the runtime, the compiler isn't quite good enough yet to realize the result is unused.
USCIS makes it easier for immigrants to build startups in the US
Re:

> GCC is unable to inline or unroll the sprintf call, because it sits inside of libc.

If I'm understanding http://gcc.gnu.org/onlinedocs/gcc-4.5.3/gcc/Other-Builtins.h... correctly, sprintf should be handled as a built-in function, rather than linking the libc version, unless you explicitly specify -fno-builtin. In theory that should allow gcc to perform various optimizations; I've seen that happen with printf at least, where e.g. printf-ing a constant string just gets compiled to puts.
First of all the solution of this problem is computationally impossible so this tool makes me feel realy uneasy I'd never use it -- it would actually make predictable easily reproducible bugs impossible to report when this tool is activated. It makes an assumption that infinite loops are just stuck with a false condition and nothing else is affected by that, which I believe is fundametally false.
The magic character is in a known location, there's no need to iteratively scan for it.

The use of "magic" characters is not the problem, as I see it.
Slideshow: If You Thought Airbnb’s PR Crisis Was Bad...
The article says that the mug-shot was removed after Cabibi paid $399 to RemoveSlander.com, however I found this: (not sure if the same Cabibi, but at least from Utah and aprox same age) http://www.bustedmugshots.com/utah/salt-lake-city/troy-phil-...
Facebook snaps up e-book startup Push Pop Press
Digital Media, Learning, and the Future
On a related note, job interviews (some times) have a special quality that you rarely meet in other situations. I think for those exact reasons.

Of course another explanation could be that I'm narcissistic and it's the perfect setting to talk about my self. But then I equally enjoy interviewing candidates, so perhaps not.
Here's you:

> Everyone tries to roll their own pet framework project because that's where the glory is.

Here's jtaby about twenty minutes earlier:

> Everyone today wants to get the personal glory out of their own little pet project instead of getting the glory out of contributing important patches to existing projects.

Talking point much?
How did they measure this? How would it compare to C#. I'm assuming they ignore the startup time of course.
I never claimed to be original.

I could have gone long-winded, gotten into Clausewitz, made a side trip into Westphalia with a detour around the Tower of London.

But life is short.

My liege, and madam, to expostulate
What majesty should be, what duty is,
What day is day, night night, and time is time,
Were nothing but to waste night, day, and time;
Therefore, since brevity is the soul of wit,
And tediousness the limbs and outward flourishes,
I will be brief. Your noble son is mad. . . .
Mashery Open Sources Their API I/O Docs
Designed to be sluggish?
UK to legalise private copying of CDs
Whether she realized it or not, she became the initial vector for distribution of child pornography the second she shared the photos online. So there is a semi-reasonable argument to be made that she caused some degree of social harm in distributing the photos. I'm not sure which side of the fence I fall on, but at least I could entertain the argument with a straight face.

The exploitation charge, on the other hand, was patently ludicrous.
I thought the message at the end about people expecting full correctness was a bit off; after all, if we expected fully-correct programs, we would be proving them instead of writing C.
Minecraft creator does the math and says: http://notch.tumblr.com/post/8386977075/its-a-scam
Jobs gives executives more control as he plans for Apple’s future
I see. How do I get more points? I see a post with 2 points are listed in the 'Ask' section.

Sorry for the newbie questions. I am new to HN.

Thank you.
Zynga Sued By Patent Troll
Oh and does anyone else think the malloc example in comparison to actual garbage collection is incredibly unfair?
Perhaps it is recognizing it, but it's not doing anything interesting with that knowledge, on my machine GCC emits a call to "__sprintf_chk"
Ok, well, thanks for answering.

The comparison to Albuquerque makes no sense to me. We could as well guess that Airbnb is less safe than riding a roller coaster at Disneyland -- so what? Those kinds of random comparisons prove nothing.

Because of its inherent structure, we can reasonably suspect that Airbnb is far, far riskier than current measurements yet show. I think of lots of nasty crimes that it facilitates and I'm sure you can as well. There is next to nothing in it that would prevent much higher rates of crime. It's structure is attractive to crime. The toll of the kinds of crime it is well suited for is incredibly high. Unless the basic model is significantly changed, none of those risks will go away or much diminish. Meanwhile the attractive potential for abuse of Airbnb is now well advertised to all potential criminals.

I suppose what most greatly offends and alarms me about Airbnb is how sharply it diverges from very well established cultural and legal norms. It is as if the designers of this product want glibly to overturn common sense about how far to trust strangers and it wants to ignore the many rules and regulations that are designed to prevent precisely this kind of business activity -- all on the basis that "most people are basically good" or something. That's socially irresponsible engineering.
Can't think of a use-case for this? .... maybe if you have some seriously "legacy" process running somewhere that loves to stall but patching is not an option for some obscure reason? ... space probes?
Hack Your Logitech Revue
Fine, it happened... but you also have your app on 101k more devices than you did the month before so do something with that, flip your perspective a bit and take advantage of it.

Hell, before pulling out of the Amazon app store, release a new ad-supported version, and wait until a decent number of people have upgraded. Then pull out of Amazon's store. That should help defray the costs of the new hardware. Users can still do as the author suggested: re-buy on Android Market, and for users who had already paid for the app (not on free-app day), ask for a refund. Any serious user of the app will want to switch over to the Android Market anyway, so they can get later updates.

That feels slightly underhanded, but... eh. Server costs are real.
In the UK, BT (The biggest ISP) introduced CleanFeed[0] and "strongly encouraged" (read forced) to be used by the government. It was claimed that it would only ever be used for blocking child sexual abuse imagery.

Recently a judge has ruled that BT must use the same system to block a website used to share links. [1]

The list of blacklist sites itself can only be edited by a small group (iirc 4 people) of unelected and unaccountable people at the IWF[2]

Cleanfeed is also pretty flawed, doesn't work with HTTPS, can be interrogated to get a list of blocked content (using TTLs) and misleadingly returns 404 for blocked content.

[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cleanfeed_%28content_blocking_s...
[1] http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2011/07/british-tele...
[2] http://www.iwf.org.uk/
[3] http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~rnc1/cleanfeed.pdf
My understanding was that the 20% figure applies only to cases where Amazon changes the pricing of your app without your specific approval (which they can do). There is apparently enough demand for the top spot that they can ask the developer to take the hit. Up to them whether they do or not.
The fact that you are even asking this question and that you are as far along in the process as you are (i.e. you have applied and been accepted) indicates that it is important to you - and that's as important as anything gets. School is often wasted on the young, it sounds like you are in a position to appreciate it. Good Luck.
Facebook’s Design Strategy: A Status Update
I doubt Facebook would build a hardware device. Instead, I think they'll do a 'social OS' that uses Android for all the low-level stuff, but with the Google apps all replaced with apps that have deep Facebook integration (messages, contacts, photos, etc.).

Microsoft Bing apps (e.g. Maps) could round out the features that FB doesn't build themselves, and they could use Amazon's Appstore in lieu of Android Market.

But to your point, it's possible these designers are at work making this social OS beautiful. Android in the back, iOS in the front.
This is the second time I've seen a story on mining hit HN, it always strikes me as a bit odd as the two worlds are miles apart. But I find them both fascinating (I work in both industries concurrently - by day I'm working for a production drill manufacturer and by night I'm a founder of a startup).

We manufacture underground production drills and have drills at every major underground mine in Canada and many of the other large underground mines around the world. We have equipment at Kidd Creek which is the deepest mine in Canada. When I first began to learn about the conditions underground the first thing that surprised me was the temperature in the mines. It's hot!

In some mines it's so hot that a human can't comfortably work for long, or at all. AngloGold Ashanti's TauTona mine in South Africa is sitting somewhere around 3.9km (Nearly 13,000 feet). The rock face in TauTona at its current depth reaches 60C. This is where it starts to get even more interesting for me. At these depths is hazardous for a human to work but there remains precious metals at greater depths. The technology to reach it and automate the extraction of these minerals is non-trivial and the current tech isn't advanced enough to reach it reliably. There are interesting problems that integrate software and heavy-duty hardware (30,000lb drills).
Instantiation for side effects happens in Python. Unless PyPy can prove that the string isn't used anywhere (and it can't, really), it has to execute the statement and push the object onto the stack before discarding it.
I agree with this. The way I see it is that the more you aim for consolidation at the expense of competition, the less freedom you have to renew your approach if you can't quite get the results you want.

This leads to people reinventing the wheel in such a way they're happy with the results and also learn new techniques that can be applicable outside of the framework dev environment.

This is great for innovation, and when you can code independently of a framework and create your own solutions, you're just one step closer to pushing the boundaries and coming up with something special. A custom microframework is great for that as you can get to grips with the concept of ORM, MVC, OOP (with PHP in particular) and all manner of other techniques.

On a personal level, I had the choice of learning a framework to make a REST API, or figuring it out for myself by making my own solution. I re-invented the wheel - probably made something wonky - but it's invaluable knowledge. Had I taken heed of the OP I may still be wrestling with Symfony2 or CakePHP right now.

Looking at it another way, this article could have been written a few years ago and instead of Javascript, it could have talked about fresh web developers creating a blog as their first project. The analogous question posed would be, "why don't people just install Wordpress?"

The answer to that would be: "because they won't learn anything."
天王男表
Boston airport expands behavior detection program
I love PyPy, those guys are amazing. However, every time I see "faster than C" almost always a bit of trickery/wordplay is involved.

The examples aren't comparable. The equivalent would be to have Python code invoke an external function which sits in a pre-compiled .so

Bulk of the work is happening inside of sprintf(), why handicap C by not letting it to compile the code?

The fair comparison would be to place the source of sprinf() nearby and see if C compiler inlines that call or/and unrolls the loop, otherwise it's just about packaging/linking, not really about code generation.

Edit: I see this became #1 on HN front page today. I want to take advantage of this and say that http://mailgun.net, the programmable email platform, is looking for an engineer who'd find this discussion interesting. See my profile. And we're users of PyPy too! :)
Kinect Hacked For 3-D Scanning Of Archaeology Site
Actually I don't think I was asking that at all, if you read it that way then I didn't communicate it clearly.

The topic of conversation here is interviewing, and the importance of trying to develop as qualified an understanding of a potential candidate as possible in an interview. Reginald posited the 'mother of all interview questions' around the question of invention and perhaps more subtly the question of building it yourself versus leveraging the work of others.

Its a great question because it starts a lot of interesting discussions around how someone evaluates tasks they are given and allows them to talk about what tools they can bring to bear on those problems.

I related that anecdote from Google because I gave more importance in my mind to 'invention' rather than 'discovery' before I went to work at Google. Google is, in my opinion, the technical equivalent of Mecca for invention. One of the things I learned from my time there was that you could go overboard on invention. Not simply 'not invented here' syndrome, but literally lowering the barrier to creating new systems so far, that the net result is a negative rather than a positive. (Google doesn't see it that way, which I understand too, this is simply an opinion after all).

I practical terms you are absolutely correct that getting something running will have a weight. maintainability will have a weight, and maybe continuity will have a weight too. And if someone ponders those weights, gets some feedback to test their understanding of the relative importance of them, and executes based on that feedback, that is a very good thing indeed.

The person I was listening too at Google either didn't do that, or didn't understand the implications of their choices with respect to the impact on the company, or perhaps the simpler answer was they just didn't think about it. Had they thought it through, I'm sure they would have mentioned it in their talk as the talk was supposed to be about best practices and that would have been a great point to get across.
'Perfect' is misspelled, and so is 'Hi there'. Comes across as unprofessional. Please spend some time reviewing your copy.
Some of the Most Mind-Blowing Facts: The immortal jellyfish and more
Are these special effects that much better then what is state of the art today?

Is their application somehow unique or significantly different or more technological?

It seems to me like pretty standard special effects, in fact a bit less special than what you see in big block buster movies.

This is why I perceive this as not much more then neat video.
Since when are CSS3 transformations well known and well documentation. Correct me if I'm wrong but aren't new CSS3 trasformations being added to WebKit every couple of months?

Until recently I don't think too many people thought of using them for more than just a nifty effect. Certainly not build an app around them. The debate was whether to build on canvas or svg. Now that's changed with a few recently apps created in purely CSS3 transformations. I don't think anyone is surprised that iCloud is smooth; CSS3 transformations are hardware accelerated.