skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Copying the layout is one thing. Copying very specific details is another. Look at the tops of each pricing tab in both sites. The tabs with rounded corners. The subtle fades behind the pricing numbers. The 1-pixel-line-highlight above the price. The colors. (I know I'm basically describing the popular "letterpress" effect, but these examples are remarkably similar, even considering that they are both using a popular graphic style.) And clearly the corner badges are almost identical.
I'm not demanding recourse, and I'm not even saying that I am justified in pirating an app. However, I often pirate apps to try them, and the vast majority that I try are terrible, and I uninstall them almost immediately. Therefore, legality aside, I'm not ethically concerned that I'm "stealing" potential revenue from the app developer if I only use their app for 5 minutes.

My point is, this was definitely a bug in the app store, because before any charge there should be a clear modal confirmation dialog (and there normally is).
Revenue Up, Profits Down: Why Barriers to Entry Still Matter
I have been very frustrated in the past when the only documentation provided was javadoc. In many cases there was an xml that was not documented very well, and subtle things about the classpath that kept the system from working. Often the javadoc is just regurgitating the name of the method. In many cases the javadoc reminds me of the help systems in windows programs. I think I remember seeing a discussion on reddit where they were asking if anyone had ever found an answer in a windows help topic.
Google launches 'Hotel Finder', a new experimental search tool
Ah, I totally forgot about heroku console.
Here is what you would never know about the Minnesota study from reading Jensen and Rushton, or, for that matter, Saletan. It held neither race nor expected IQ constant; the black children were adopted at a later age than the other children, which the study’s own authors note is associated with depressed IQ; the black children’s mothers had lower educational levels than those of the white children; the “quality of placement” for the white children was higher than for the other children; and as the study’s own authors have noted, the black and mixed-race children experienced severe adjustment problems as they grew up.

-- http://www.slate.com/id/2179073
> Renting a car sucks.

Now that I don't quite understand. I find renting a car to be a lot of fun. The salespeople are always super friendly, they get you in and out quick, the price is relatively low (~$70/day after taxes), and you usually get to drive a brand new model.

Maybe doing it once per month would be a headache for some. Personally, I like it and if it saved me money to drive an electric car, I would happily take this deal.
Volumetric energy density isn't the only consideration for fuels though. Ethanol burns cooler, faster, and with more stability. When you raise the octane rating to reduce detonation you also reduce wear on the internals, allowing the manufacturer to use cheaper components. The same is true for the lower exhaust gas temperatures with exhaust values and turbo inlets. Current mileage standards have also caused manufacturers to jack up cruise-area ignition timing to extract a more complete burn before TDC from gasoline, which risks increased knock, and isn't as much an issue with ethanol. I also can't fail to mention the disgusting layer of grease and soot that covers the inside of engine, gas tank, and exhaust components (and the rear end of your car) from gasoline. Again, not much of an issue with ethanol.

These strengths are almost never written about or discussed. I agree with many of the points of the article in terms of the production efficiency issues, and corn being a weak production candidate, but I can't stand if/when this becomes an ethanol-substance bashing bonanza.

I also can't stand (in the overall discourse on the matter) when the article's points are used against the adoption of ethanol over petroleum. These aren't reasons against ethanol, they're reasons to work towards optimizing the means of production.
I've always thought APIs should try to avoid versioning. It's usually pretty easy to enhance APIs in a backwards-compatible manner. It also forces smarter design and restraint. Existing users rarely update integrations until they are forced and then it is a major pain just to stay in place.
Corn welfare must END (and I am very liberal/progressive if that matters).

But considering it's Iowa we are talking about, most politicians if they want to be president won't touch it with a 10-foot pole.

Ethanol is destroying small engines (generators, lawn mowers, etc) and most definitely reduces mpg by 10%

a gallon of ethanol costs approximately 17 percent less than that of a gallon of gasoline

That is why gas distributors love it - they not only get goverment welfare for using ethanol, it allows them to dilute the less profitable gasoline (to 'cut' it).

(and yes, I use "subsidies" and "welfare" interchangeably because it's corporate welfare)

Researchers at U.S. Department of Energy’s Argonne National Laboratory

Let's get INDEPENDENT scientists not funded by the oil industry or government to write an article and I'll trust it.
His points may be valid (that some people cut corners to get the best numbers for their papers); however, as someone who spends a lot of time writing GPGPU code[1], I'll point out that MATLAB isn't the best way to benchmark GPU-based code. I'm not knocking MATLAB here, but simply pointing out that MATLAB is going to have overhead compared to, say, CUDA. Given that most GPGPU kernels run pretty quickly (less than a second, and probably under 100ms) even a little bit of overhead is going to severely affect your results.

[1] See my profile.
You could try Opera Mobile instead. That's a more traditional browser and may perform better.
I actually made tests a while ago to show precisely those two things, namely flooring and drawImage, are 10x as slow on Opera.

First let me note that on average using Math.floor(x) results in slower performance than using x | 0. I'd recommend using the latter way instead.

And even then Opera is an order of magnitude slower at flooring numbers compared to FF5, IE9 and Chrome 14:

http://jsperf.com/bit-thingies

Opera's drawImage is also an order of magnitude slower than Chrome 14, IE9 and FF5. Note that in this link the FF8Beta, Ipad, and the first two Chrome versions were ran by someone else's machine, so those results can't be compared with the other numbers.

http://jsperf.com/render-vs-prerender

If you don't believe them, of course, I urge you to run them for yourself.
I just turned on showdead but I still can't see anything at the link.
Large-Scale Cucumber Revisited (reflecting after 2.5 yrs)
I think Ada should be linked from Pascal, with (like Modula) an arrow labelled "too wimpy for systems programming", or perhaps "programming in the large".
If the government sets the curriculum and standards then why have private schools? They will just cost more because they need to make their 15% margin.
My brother is currently working with the Adams County school system which is switching to an entirely new system of public education. http://www.thedenverchannel.com/news/22189278/detail.html

They will no longer have traditional grades like Grade 7, Grade 8, etc, instead they will only have levels, and all students of a certain level will share the same classroom. When you level up in Math 10, you move to Math 11, even if you're still only in English 6. Your age no longer has any bearing on the level you belong in, only your ability.

The educational track will now be entirely in the hands of the students and they have until the age of 20 I believe to "graduate" from high school under the new system with a certain number of levels achieved.
hmmm. this is a little unfair. i've got around a factor of 30 speedup using a cheap GPU (some old nvidia card i had in my machine) compared to a fairly meaty xeon at work.

the important difference is that the kernel (written in opencl) was much more than just "taking the sine". once the data are on the gpu you don't want to move them back until you've done as much work as possible.

and there are different "kinds" of memory on the gpu. simply taking the sine of every value in an array is not using that memory efficiently (you're not using the equivalent of the gpu's L2 cache (and is cpu cache explaining the increased speed on the cpu?)).

so this would be io limited - all the test is doing is comparing memory transfer to the cpu with memory transfer to the gpu, and coming up with similar numbers.

i guess the fairest thing you can say is that if you're not going to put the effort into understanding how best to use gpus, leave them alone.

(incidentally, unless you need 64bit fp, or are really limited by pci slots, it makes much more sense to buy commodity graphics cards rather than the new top-end fermi made-for-compute cards - for us switching from an "old" graphics card to a c2050 gave an extra 20% speedup, iirc, which is peanuts compared to the factor of 30 from moving off the cpu; also, nvidia support for the expensive cards sucks, so opencl is worth the extra effort for the peace of mind that you can try something else)
If you're only doing one mathematical operation on each of the 100 million numbers and then you need to read them all back to the CPU, of course the GPU will be slower. However, if you need to do 1,000 or 10,000 mathematical operations each on 100 million numbers, and then get back a smaller answer of maybe a million numbers, then the GPU is going to blow the CPU away.

The ultimate answer to this post is a couple of steps down the AMD Fusion roadmap, where the GPU is a coprocessor like floating point units were back in the day. The GPU and CPU will be on the same die with unified memory and caches. When that architecture is fully realized, these problems will go away.
Agreed. There's nothing like university to show you what you don't want to do.
Cringely doesn't mention ISPs' claims that they will increase the caps every year. I'm willing to wait for them to renege before breaking out the torches and pitchforks.
That's a rather cavalier response when a major company like Apple, which I've trusted with my credit card information, has a bug in their software which can cause unsolicited charges to be made.

The app was only $5, and it's decent enough that I might have used it frequently (in which case I would have bought it anyway). That's not my point. The point is the bug (or at best, the "unexpected behavior") exists and involves actual money. I disagree with these commenters that are justifying this bug simply because it was revealed due to piracy.
I wonder about the honesty of machine sourced Tweets, not in the machines themselves but in the fact it would be super easy for a human to duplicate the tweets with faulty information. As a personal tool it could be amazingly useful (plants tweeting when they need water) but I don't see it working so well on a crowdsourced scale.
Fair enough. I took his statement to refer to obstacles in the university and job setting. Perhaps that's not what he meant, though.
> And one that I can't get confirmation on if it's in 7 or got pushed, index-access for List and Maps

I just tried it out, it didn't get added to 7.

> String-in-switch (NOTE: check on performance implications of this for tight loops)

I haven't checked the performance, but I tried decompiling a String switch statement:

String test = "asdf";
switch (test) {
case "sss":
System.out.println("sss");
break;
case "asdf":
System.out.println("asdf");
break;
}

That decompiles to:

switch(test.hashCode()) {
case 114195:
if(test.equals("sss"))
byte0 = 0;
break;
case 3003444:
if(test.equals("asdf"))
byte0 = 1;
break;
}
switch(byte0) {
case 0: // '\0'
System.out.println("sss");
break;
case 1: // '\001'
System.out.println("asdf");
break;
}

So it's one switch on the String's hashcode, with calls to equals to verify that the string is a match (and an if/else if/else block if you have multiple strings in the switch that have the same hashcode), assigning the result to a temp variable, and then a switch on a temp variable to execute your code.

It looks like it would be fairly quick.
regarding Kahn Academy: I don't know. My 5 year old is competitive so the game mechanics work well. She's been using pbskids.org for years playing educational games, so it comes very naturally at this point. Also, she likes to learn :p Mostly I think it's her competitive nature.
Lightweight Monadic Programming in ML
Mobile payments have been very successful in some countries like Kenya, where the M-pesa system offered by a leading telecom provider is a leading mobile money service, with over 8 million subscribers. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M-Pesa
Everytime something like this is posted on HN, people say in the comments "I hope this will push patent reform". I feel like this issue has been brought to light a lot recently, but is this just my bias as an HN reader? Have lawsuits and patent fights been going on for many years, or is it escalating right now?
The key with the public school system is to leverage your statistical power. When I was in school I told them I wasn't going to take all the optional blocks and instead would have spares. They said that it was a school policy blah blah blah.

I told them that the School Act defined no such requirement and being older than 16 I was no longer required to be in school at all so they could either let me have empty blocks or kick me out for violating the school policy on spare blocks. Being a rather articulate student I would be willing to write a letter to the editor explaining how a student who could sleep through math class and still get an A in the course was being forced out of school despite fulfilling the requirements of the School Act.

They could have another graduate on their rolls or another drop out, it was their choice.
I think it's a good idea to have a unified API and various compatibility layers, but...

+ The iPhone may only show a few recommendations, while a TV may have several
| rows of movie suggestions in multiple categories. Yet, if those two devices
| are calling the same API, it will take perhaps a dozen requests for the TV
+ just to load the Netflix home screen.

... what's wrong with a simple n=count parameter in this case?
JUST FUCKING STOP IT. Don't use an ISO in the first place. Just make a USB drive with partitions and copy the damned data onto the USB drive. If you want a bootable partition, use syslinux, as detailed here:

http://thefowle.livejournal.com/470622.html
I assume it's because your original question, vi/vim vs. emacs is a decades old flamebait question, and it probably seems unlikely to some people that anyone could become a proficient emacs user and end up on Hacker News without ever encountering at least the jokes about vim vs emacs holy wars.
Heh, knowing several of the Googlers on this list, I find this pretty amusing. I'll have to show it to them...
My cable provider (Comcast) does not provide these channels, so the only way I can get BBC content is to listen to the radio versions online or tune in for an hour a day or so on BBC America (which really sucks).

I would love to just be able to stream BBC video all day.
I don't know. I do know that upping ethanol levels in gas will not make all the motorcycle riders out there happy.
That reads like an industry press release designed to confidently befuddle.

For example, addressing the concern that ethanol production crowds out food production, it simply states that a different kind of corn is used... ignoring that the same land and other inputs could be used for food crops.

Addressing the concern about greenhouse gases, it mainly talks a bunch about 'vehicular gaseous hazardous air pollutants' and carbon monoxide – not the same as 'greenhouse gases'. The only reference to "life cycle analysis" is a sentence-fragment quote from an unnamed study with unclear context.

And 'myths' #4 and #5, that ethanol takes more water to produce and results in lower gas mileage? Well, this 'debunking' actually concedes both those 'myths'.

Not an impressive ethanol defense.
I'm not for these patent trolls at all... but litigation costs money on both sides, not just defending.
I now get why I don't like Twitter. It's impossible to have a conversation or debate on it. This post was a direct result of that impossibility.

Slightly OT, but the New Yorker recently profiled Jarod Lanier[1] where he critiques social networking sites as dehumanizing and designed to encourage shallow-interactions. There are also a lot more interesting viewpoints including calling Wikipedia a triumph of "intellectual mob rule". I would highly recommend the article as a "Devil's advocate" sorta reading, which is unfortunately behind a paywall[2].

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jaron_Lanier

[2] http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2011/07/11/110711fa_fact_...
I don't think those reasons create the legal differences that you are presenting. Consider the Liberty Dollar [1], it was a currency that is backed by physical entity (precious metals) and it is directly backed by a company.

With the exception of a federal law that specifically mentions using metals as currency, Bitcoin and Liberty dollars are direct legal analogues.

I think the real difference is the usage intent. Microsoft points are simply gift cards that can only be used for the companies own products, Microsoft is not trying to have microsoft points replace dollars for exchanges between two arbitrary parties unlike bitcoins and liberty dollars.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberty_dollar
I wonder what it was about the culture they came from that encouraged that.

Unfortunately I think that the weakness in Western culture here is the same as its fundamental strength -- anti-authoritarianism. For white students (and to an even greater extent black students), it's not cool to study hard because that's what authority figures like teachers and parents want you to do.

I'm not sure what can be done about this. I doubt it would work just for teachers and parents to pretend they don't want the kids to work hard in the hope that they will.

Part of the solution, I think, is to provide pointless and arbitrarily rules for the kids to rebel against harmlessly. At my school, the teachers were very keen on making sure we had our shirts tucked in, and I never understood why, but now I understand that these sorts of pointless rules provide an opportunity for kids to rebel against something without actually engaging in any destructive or dangerous behaviour.
"Chief Scientist" always struck me as an odd title for a startup like this. What sort of science is being conducted in URL shortening? Is it one of those cute startup titles or is there some real meaning behind it?
The default 2Gb wireless internet cap from Verizon is pathetic.

It is even more pathetic with their 4G network advertisement. All it takes is 1(maybe 2) HD movies from Netflix to hit a monthly cap.
I've not tried with RHEL, but Fedora works great with unetbootin, I've used it a lot.

For RHEL we do traditional PXE boot and Kickstart. (I guess you don't have a network so can't do that.)
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http://unetbootin.sourceforge.net/ automates the process.
What Small Businesses Are Having the Best 2011?
That's OK, most people decided that Vista sucked before it was even released.
I'm no network security expert at all but could something like this, if implemented by a company, render DDoS attacks useless? I know DDoS attacks have to deal with the server's ability to process the packets but could this technology be engineered to allow these attacks to occur without any affect on the site under attack?
It is bad for motorcycle engines.
'Still pretty awesome. Why did haskell come about? "Lazy evaluation is cool, yo."'

Hah. I added that edge way back when I was back in college. The "extended" graph was actually crowdsourced on the C2 Wiki, circa 2004, and it's pretty cool to see it here now.
Insight: Microsoft use of low-tax havens drives down tax bill
That's great, thanks! And that works for method calls too. So now I can replace set_color_from @cells[x][y] with fill *color_from(@cells[x][y]), reducing the number of side-effecting methods by one, and now I'm calling every Processing function in at most one place.
Girls interested in computers may be portrayed as losers and antisocial and outcasts, but guys interested in computers have been portrayed as and treated by society as antisocial outcast losers for as long as there has been such a thing as a computer geek.

Popularity and clique mentality tends to be much more of an issue in female circles than with males. I would say that, if one were to assume either sex will get untold amounts of hell for dabbling in tech early on, a female will probably get it worse.

You also have to note that culturally, there is the "nerd" phenomenon backing guys being interested in tech. If a young woman decides to get into tech, she doesn't get the same label as a guy does, she's often labeled by her peers (which can be fairly brutal) as a loser, outcast, or just "not one of the girls".

Now, given that last point, take a female developer who's young and just trying to get into things: you'll never quite be "one of the guys", and by choosing this vocation you're throwing up a flag that states you're fine to never be "one of the girls". That's not a fun combination to go through your youth with.
Going after people running Low Orbit Ion Cannon and expecting to get top brass is... incredible wishful thinking.
Demand Media Stock Crashes as Lockup Ends
Yes, something like that. But better use joda time because the standard API sucks.
joda:
new DateTime().monthOfYear().getMaximumValue()
The pre-GPS world
If politics is not suitable for HN then why do we have lots of articles about 'open source', patent reform, privacy issues regarding Facebook,Twitter, articles about wikileaks, lulzsec, the FBI, etc.

These are all primarily political and non-technical issues that affect our industry just as the Khan Academy affects our ability to learn in the politicized education industry.
Getting similar results. I don't really get it, the optimized version takes a few seconds before anything other than my background is displayed. By the time the rest of the 'optimized' site is being rendered, my original site's already loaded.

(This is from watching the video in my test results)
Ask HN/PG: Is YC (very|becoming) slow?
I have been noticing load time of more than 5 seconds, esp. the home page. (or is it just me?).
Agree. Grasshopper is just outside of Boston and out of last 75+ VC's and PE firms that have reached out to me, only 5 have been based in Boston with SF and NY leading the pack.
This patent was filed in 1995 [edit: and it actually claims priority back to 1994]. Was there really much relevant prior art in this space back then?

One other comment: I really appreciate that techdirt actually included a claim from the patent. Most articles posted here just quote the title or the abstract, which is useless as far as determining what's covered and what's not.
I completely agree that software patents should expire in 2-3 years. Even a 2 year advantage is an eternity in the software market.
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Most of the advantages you state there don't really require NFC, though. Certainly, very few of them are of immediate concern to me, so if a provider like Mint could check for transactions at regular intervals, I'd happily receive every one of those notifications by e-mail at a later point.

In fact, they pretty much already do that. I only get a weekly notification from Mint, but it might be possible to change that.
I absolutely like this post.

I am one of those who thinks amount of creativity shown is more important than amount of hours worked. Creativity should not be bound in hours.