skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"I try to unravel the paradox [of blackmail] and provide a coherent basis for distinguishing legitimate from illegitimate threats. In brief, I argue that the key to the wrongfulness of the blackmail transaction is its triangular structure. The transaction implicitly involves not only the blackmailer and his victim but always a third party as well. This third party may be, for example, the victim's spouse or employer, the authorities or even the public at large. When a blackmailer tries to use his right to release damaging information, he is threatening to tell others. If the blackmail victim pays the blackmailer, it is to avoid the harm that those others would inflict. Thus blackmail is a way that one person requests something in return for suppressing the actual or potential interests of others. To get what he wants, the blackmailer uses leverage that is less his than someone else's. Selling the right to go to the police involves suppressing the state's interests. Selling the right to tell a tort victim who committed the tort involves suppressing the tort victim's interests. And selling the right to inform others of embarrassing (but legal) behavior involves suppressing the interests of those other people."

James Lindgren, Unraveling the Paradox of Blackmail, 84 Colum. L. Rev. 670, 672 (1984)
> but "good" would be to use an actual standard mimetype instead.

That only works if there is a standard mimetype correctly mapping to the needs of the platform. If you're writing a calendaring application you have one, but that's about it.

> The problem with using mimetypes tied to the service is that it undermines the concept of Uniform Interface, by forcing developers to write clients specifically for that service.

Uh... developers have to write clients specifically for that service unless there is a standard content type which the service can provide. Which happens almost never.

> Imagine if instead of standardizing on (X)HTML, CSS, JS and a couple of image formats, each website used their own format.

Does not follow. APIs and websites have a big difference: one is browsed by a human being, the other one is not.
One interesting benefit of using a local proxy tunnel (instead of VPN) is that you get rid of one round trip when making TCP connections. Since your browser will connect to localhost (~0ms) it will be able to send the HTTP request immediately rather than having to wait for a connection to be established to a remote host. Whether this actually ends up being faster or not depends on the distance between you and your proxy server and your proxy server and the remote host you're connecting to.
Is there any chance these power failures have something to do with the solar storms we are experiencing right now?
Although the bit about paying it forward and social sharing is a great idea on its own, I think I'm a tad more excited that he actually made an API for this. That's seriously awesome.
yes, but it's not as bad
Saray Kebab Logo III
For a more practical membership-share or coffee-club type of set up restrictions make sense...but in this case I think the anonymity of it all is the interesting part — seeing the behavior patterns emerge naturally and anonymously will be very telling.
>That is all there is to it.

At it's most basic yes, but passing arguments to both the decorator and the decorated function are the real value of the article.

And there are examples, more than I need but they provide different ways of looking at the same thing that different people might find useful.
Ideally, the #1 reason to sign up for the service is the curation and convenience of having it emailed to you (I guess that's 2 reasons). I have thought about publishing the newsletters a few weeks after they first appear - that may be a way to have my cake and eat it too, but it also may discourage subscriptions if people can just wait a while and view it online.
All the seemingly smart guys here, producing stupid arguments. Stop thinking how to cut children's lunch and start thinking how to get a 2nd job!
Never said it was an object literal eh. Object literals can only occur inside expressions, that's pretty well defined in the JavaScript AST too, which is described to the utmost detail in the ECMAScript specs.

The thing is:

- `return` alone is a valid statement in its own.

- The parser just need to use a simple lookahead to decide whether the next line is part of the previous statement.

- The parser DON'T change the meaning of your programs.

All that's beside that is a matter of taste. Whether use semicolons or not is up to what sits better with each person. I'm just arguing against the silly and incorrect "technical" arguments against it.
I switched from a 2009 15" Macbook Pro to the latest 13" Macbook Air. It's perfectly fine for development work (which for me is mostly Xcode/Komodo/Photoshop), and much faster than my previous machine.

The screen resolution is the same so basically there's no loss there (I haven't noticed a difference despite the smaller physical screen size), but the lighter weight and greater portability are fantastic. Battery life is about the same (~5 hours).

I would highly recommend it as a primary work machine, and cannot imagine going back to the heavier Macbook Pro.
I don't believe you can, since Starbucks lets you use your card for any purchase. That said, even if you could, why restrict it? He mentions that the point of this is to be "an experiment in social sharing of physical goods", so making it something purely built on trust makes the experiment exciting and worthy. If someone does abuse it, then that's just a data point in the experiment; but, if it continues to be replenished, that's a neat observation and a certain +1 for human nature.
> Wasn't there something in the news not too long ago about an investment firm that ran this way? :)

Only if there's also a continuous stream of people who are drinking without paying. If, out of a sense of community responsibility, people pay in close to what they drink (or a little bit more), then this system works.
awesome initiative! I always loved the pay it forward concept.

P.S. does anyone want to call this guy Lord Starkbucks?

Now I know where Jon Snow ends up.
It really doesn't seem that much of a "vulnerability" actually. The only way to get a picture is if you get ahold of the victim's phone, or they willingly give it up to you.

If you get ahold of the victim's phone, the victim has bigger problems (NFC, e-mail, saved passwords, etc.).
> Vendor mimetypes are bad. They defeat the purpose of REST.

No they don't. Most standard mimetypes are far too broad and completely useless as an actual content type. "application/json" for instance does not tell you anything about the content you're getting, apart from the meta-format in which that content is expressed.

Useless.
Also recommend the book: Hacker's Delight

http://www.amazon.com/Hackers-Delight-Henry-S-Warren/dp/0201...
Whether S&P says it or not, then, we should consider part of the 'default' risk being that USGov intentionally, strategically breaks those stated inflation assumptions.
Well, OK, but the answer also addresses other cases such as function/method decoration, passing arguments to the decorator itself, and passing arbitrary arguments. I agree that it's a little verbose, and the excessive comments and examples do detract from the clarity of the answer a little, but it's an excellent answer, nevertheless, if only because it leaves no use cases unexplored (excepting class decoration, but that's sufficiently orthogonal, I feel).

Your answer isn't wrong, but as an exercise in pedagogy (which is the point of SO, or at least one of its major aims) it leaves a lot to be desired, and wouldn't garner many upvotes. Not everyone understands what the term "syntax sugar" (and really, shouldn't that be 'syntactic sugar'?) means.
They have subsided. Note the K-index on this page: http://spaceweather.com
Well, you could buy a $100 starbucks card, which would break things. Someone already spent $30: http://twitter.com/#!/jonathanscard/status/10029778012327526...
I love the demoscene, I wish it were a much bigger phenomenon than it is (especially outside of Northern Europe).

That being said, one of the constraints on really getting why a demo is impressive is being able to appreciate what's going on. It's like understanding wines or beers or fine cheeses. You need to have a large base knowledge going in to get why the winning demo is unbelievably amazing.

Most people, even very technically or artistically inclined people don't get it. They think it's an interesting art project or something. But really understanding why it's impressive compared to say http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9oXRP5OM6tA requires a pretty deep understanding of the capabilities of modern computing.
Competition? What about just "Contest"

For a minute I thought you were posting about competing services, then I saw the page and was like "How is this a competition?" It should be something like contest > X entries for following, Y for each port you enter. Weight X and Y however.

I also agree, fonts need help.
Why Isn't the U.S. Innovating? Some Answers.
If they sent you an email every time there was downtime, then you would know every time there was downtime. Any time your servers are not available but you don't notice == win.
Ask HN: Finding work as an iOS developer
I've been getting more & more into iOS development and constantly reading here about how much demand there is for this. Problem is I have no idea how to connect with these people! I have a web dev background and when work dries up I have maybe 5 or 6 reliable places I can hit to find new work but with iOS stuff there's elance/vworker or seemingly nothing & I'd rather not compete for a £500 app contract. Similarly, my network is primarily folks who want web apps or for whom iPhone apps aren't a good fit.

I won't claim I'm the most experienced at this but I do have an app in the store and 3 more almost ready to go live. I also have a proven history of delivering on web apps for what that's worth. I do develop using Titanium rather than Obj-C as I'm way more productive that way. If that means I'm not a proper iOS developer then so be it :)

In short, does anyone know of a site that connects iWants with iHaves or of another way to get my foot in somewhere? A thousand thanks to anyone who can point me the right way!
Dude, you need to get off your high horse. What you are saying might be true, but you offered no better way of sorting through 1000 candidates. Besides, making applicants solve problems does not imply that writing code is the main skill, it only implies that it is a required skill. (Given all your math talk I wouldn't expect you to make that fallacy.) If the object is to sort out scores of unqualified applicants, then any simple criterion that weeds out a significant fraction is useful. Unless you can make a convincing argument that the tests will decrease the fraction of qualified applicants, your post just smacks of arrogance and entitlement.
Yes, but that is kind of what posting the image without a barrier to entry kind of guarantees, no? I guess that is the 'experiment'.. It would be more interesting if there were two cards, one public, one restricted to HN members or some other subset of 'public'.
The metaphor only stands if you're willing to admit that your startup is entirely frivolous, strictly a trend, and flashy without any attention to substance.

So yes, your startup probably does have a lot in common with parkour. Shouldn't we change that?
What about the Arduino community, and mobile phone programmers, and embedded systems in general?

I mean, yes, web & desktop coders don't really need to know about the details, but there are people who write operating systems, compilers, microcontrollers... Those are very low-level areas.
Amazons need to put some solar panels on their roof
As a side note, don't make the mistake of assuming that you have to choose between being really good at one thing or being acceptable at many things. It's possible to be really good at many things.
How appropriately timed for the Assembly demo compo weekend. But I don't think these things are special: what's special is that some people just adapt and immerse fully into the environment while others try to keep their thinking together and abstract away the machine.

We have bit-twiddling hacks because we have machines that do bit-twiddling. If we had had different kind of programming environment, these low-level hackers would've been creating different tricks of trade. Nobody probably ever taught them anywhere formally, except for programmer peers to each other.

It's not the low-level stuff per se, it's the people who go for the low level no matter what stuff there is because they have to do it to get the job done.
Why don't you update your comment with a detailed breakdown of why it's so fail?
Does this work properly for you? It just says "loading [...]" when I click on any of the documents there.
Except as far as an automated tool is concerned, knowing that something is "HTML" or "JSON" is useless: it will not be able to consume it. So it's not a useful information for an API. Instead, specifying the precise subset of the general-purpose format (essentially the language, where the general-purpose format is a meta-language) helps just about everybody.

And that's what github does: the `+json` postfix indicates that they're returning a JSON dialect, the `vnd.github-issue.text` explains what that dialect precisely is.
Looks like a bad apple or two has helped take the over $50 that was on it an hour or so ago down to $0. I don't see a normal pattern of withdrawing small amounts of money for coffee, that's for sure.
If there is really a need for perfect rendering of ODF documents, the best approach is probably to compile the relevant part of OpenOffice. Writing a 100% complete ODF implementation from scratch is very hard.
Step 1: Huh, that's a pretty cool feature

Step 2: I bet I could ...

Step 3: Quick check of CPAN

Step 4: Zounds. http://search.cpan.org/~erwan/Python-Decorator-0.03/lib/Pyth...
What??? For real? Fuck. I was going to set up an EC2 vpn endpoint this very day.
> Any time your servers are not available but you don't notice

Can't happen. My servers are monitored by external services that (to the best of my knowledge) don't use AWS.

It's best to play the open card in any case.
A Ponzi scheme uses investors' money to disguise a complete lack of legitimate revenue. Groupon really is doing business, though it's trying to make its subscriber value vs. cost structure look less fatal than it may be.
Hmm, I think posting the value of the card affects the data points. I understand why it needs to be done, but my thinking is that if nobody knows how much is on there it leaves it less prone to outright abuse.

If the card suddenly gets a $100 recharge I'm sure it will be abused a lot more. Maybe that's part of the experiment, but I'd like to see what people do in general without that knowledge.

EDIT: or maybe even just a "this card has more than <insert cost of minimum item>" so that people know it can be used, but not how many times.
Black entrepreneurs pitch their dreams to Silicon Valley
I'm kind of playing devil's advocate here and kind of not: How can you justify spending $n to buy coffee for someone with a smartphone instead of donating $n to someone with fewer resources and greater needs?
Thanks for the great and funny answer.
You miss L1 so much that you cry yourself to sleep every night
I think languages that allow the use of non-alphanumeric characters as method definitions make the language appear more magical simply because it looks like built-in language syntax. I remember when I first looked at sbt, they were creating directory paths with the '/' as an operator to concatenate strings. (ie "home" / "user") I'm guessing that might also be the reason Ruby is cited as magical all the time.
OK, so maybe I'm exaggerating a bit, but my original point remains - the investors have to share some of the blame here.
What is your logging policy?
I think what's changing from a business perspective is what kills software projects. What keeps a project manager up at night?

1980: Being too slow to run or not being able to an amount of memory we'd consider tiny is what kills projects. Large programs are relatively uncommon because the default languages (C and assembler) are so low-level that writing them is pretty much impossible. Programs exist to solve defined problems, not to be million-line ecosystems. In this world, being a decent programmer means you have to know about things like the performance trade-offs of pre-increment vs. post-increment.

2011: It's rare that a program, unless it's using O(n^2) sorting algorithms on large sets, is actually too slow to be useful. What kills software projects is illegible code. Paying a performance penalty for readability is generally a good idea, and highly-optimized but illegible code has fallen out of favor. This also means that fewer people are learning how to write such code, because people encounter less of it to read.
I'm not saying that there should be "one format to rule them all" or that in many cases, having a custom format isn't inevitable, but there are a lot of standard formats that can be reused. And you can use a mix of standard and custom formats for different resources.

In this case, I think the best solution would be to develop a standard "issue format" that would be used by all bug trackers, instead of each having its own. In another example, the "Users" part of the API could very well reuse one of the existing formats.

This also circles back to a (controversial) opinion I have, which is that JSON isn't the best solution for most of these services. With all of its flaws, XML has features like namespaces which enable a better reuse of standard formats - in the "Issues" example, where there is a "user" key, an XML document could integrate a foaf:Person element which is standardized.
It's possible to be really good at many things.

What are some of the many things that you have seen one person be really good at at the same time?

After edit: thanks for the kind reply, but I kind of thought from your original comment (parent to this comment) that you had a more recent example than Da Vinci in mind. What living persons are there who are conspicuously really good at many things?

http://stuff.mit.edu/afs/athena.mit.edu/course/6/6.055/readi...
How I would create a couple of million jobs--for $53B
Simply false.
If interest payments can be made sustainably, there is no default.
Functions? Luxury! When I was a wee lad, we had naught but JMP. And we were happy to have it.

Actually, most demos are written in C these days, I believe.
65,000 Old CDs Create a Shimmering Sea
Just think about your typical polymath like da Vinci. Sometimes people can be really good at many things, and if they assume that they can only be really good at one thing, they may not even try to be really good at many things.

So my main point is: don't assume from the beginning that you can't do many things well, or it will be a self-fulfilling prophecy.
It wasn't visible for me on that one comment. I don't know why, I thought it was too deply nested or something, but now I see it. Weird.
The stretch scale is fixed in the next version of Honeycomb.
> However, for the amount of marketing and push that these tablets are getting, there should absolutely be not only a wide range of options, but a clearly delineated path with which to reach them. Android Market has neither. You can search for "tablet", and you hit quite a few things, and you can search for "Honeycomb", and reach some others, but you have things like themes and wallpapers for phones in the Honeycomb style that make their way into your search. Apple has two sides of the App Store - iPhone and iPad - and it's completely obvious where the tablet apps are. I'm an experienced user, so I'm figuring things out, but I can't imagine someone who isn't comfortable with this stuff having much fun doing the same

Yet another example of how Google's Market app is slowly catching up to iTunes. The new market app is a big improvement.

It seems like writing tablet apps for Honeycomb are more an exercise for developers and their teams (I see distinct rivalries between iOS and Android dev teams at the same company) at companies that have Android apps to pad their resume and "feel cool" (look at me, we have a tablet app) than a practical economic market. I know four people who own Honeycombs, all of them were purchased by their employers so their company could get the "Tablet" achievement. As for iPads, I was shocked the other day to see not just one but two iPads being used (the glow is mega massive from the screen) from my nosebleed level cheap seat before an orchestral concert started.
If paying the nominal debt guaranteed an AAA rate regardless of inflation, then every country in the world would have an AAA rate

No, because creating peso inflation does not reduce Argentinas dollar debt. But dollar inflation does reduce the USA's dollar debt. Therefore it makes sense to rate the ability of Argentina to pay its nominal dollar denominated debt but it makes no sense at all to rate the ability of the US to pay its dollar denominated debt.
Yes, exactly. That's what the bond market does anyway and according to the bond market there is currently no danger of any inflation whatsoever.
Really? I don't remember the part in Max Payne where I got to drive a car made out of squiggly light that turned into a rhinoceros.
Momoko 0.3.0
>That only works if there is a standard mimetype correctly mapping to the needs of the platform. If you're writing a calendaring application you have one, but that's about it.

Standards don't fall from the sky, someone has to write and publish them. An "Issue" format is pretty much usable by any bug tracking software out there - Bugzilla, Redmine, etc. Github could perfectly have talked to them and define some common ground.

Is it their obligation? Of course not. But that would've been a "good" solution. This is just OK.

>Uh... developers have to write clients specifically for that service unless there is a standard content type which the service can provide. Which happens almost never.

See above. Usually it doesn't happen because providers don't make the effort.
Reminds me of this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vn29DvMITu4

"Don't mess with my cadence."
I also seem to remember that one of the last things Clarkson said was how much he liked the the Leaf.

More generally, a 100 mile range would be fine for me 80% of the time, but the other 20% I need longer range without a 12 hour stopover. Electric cars are just not quite there yet for my needs, and I suspect a lot of other people too.
I use decorators all of the time. However, I still learned something while reading this comprehensive explanation. Totally worth adding to my bookmarks.
I have yet to try out any book-reading software, but this looks like the killer social app that will convince me to choose Kindle rather than Nook. If the new Google book reader links tightly with Google+, as one would expect to happen soon, then I will commit to the Google product.

(I still read books the old-fashioned way, and my house is decorated in the Industrial Bookshelf style. One of the things I like best to do online is to discuss books and the ideas found in them.)

P.S. Thanks for the reply about Goodreads. I was an early adopter of Goodreads, starting an account at the suggestion of a friend in another state, but I stopped using it right away, because of its somewhat tedious interface, and no longer trust Goodreads at all since I saw Google results from searches on my name that included spurious Goodreads pages that appeared to promote books that I've never read. (I ego surf on the major search engines from time to time precisely to see what spoofing is being done in my name. I reported the Goodreads fake page problem to Google last year.) I do have friends who still like Goodreads a lot, but I'm thinking a tighter integration with an ebook reader has to be a beneficial feature for an online social network, and vice versa.
China hit hardest by US Downgrade
How-to Set Up Ubuntu w/ MongoDB Replica Sets on Amazon EC2