skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
So does the same line of reasoning in #2 apply to Apple iOS and Android devices? Why aren't people in an uproar about that? (I take that back, they are in an uproar in the Android world).

If you've hung out at a WWDC in the past couple years, it's apparent Apple is looking into the same such security scheme(s) for Mac OS X.

OEMs ship these computers as Windows computers. OEMs generally don't support alternative OSes on their hardware, because there hasn't been enough demand to make it worthwhile.

Linux on the desktop isn't even on Microsoft's radar. That war was lost by Linux (although ironically, they may win or at least fair very well in the "post-pc" era).

I'm still confused as to why Linux diehards don't just create their own (ARM-based?) desktop platform where nothing is locked down or closed source.
http://charityhack.org/ is happening this weekend if you want to go to one
Could you give a short overview what you did recently? I mean, the book is written, of course, but did you create or update your Android apps a lot, did you take new photographs etc.? Or is that pretty much fixed, (semi-)passive income and you're working on the next thing(s)?
>You don't need to do wacky things...

A function call in a for loop's conditional doesn't fit your definition of wacky?
Good stuff, thanks, don't be sorry, it's good feedback! :) (Gush founder here)
Micro Cloud Foundry beta released
Good points both, 1. I'll change for next week, 2. we'll put on the roadmap. Thanks!!
Tangent: are trackbacks in any way a success? Do you for example know anyone who uses them or pays attention to them? Are they useful to certain softwares?
Not bad at all! Good use of the API
Whitman at H.P.? The Idea Distresses the Tech World
The gold rush is over (thankfully). If you create something of value (a very subjective word) and are able to get visibility, you can be profitable.
> he could quite likely mean that [google was] the first to achieve search market domination, which is entirely true.

What definition of "search market domination" are we using such that that is true?

I'm pretty sure that Altavista had a huge market share at its peak and I suspect that it wasn't the first one to have a comparable share.
Taking a calculated risk is not the same as playing roulette.

Poor choices should not be glorified in the name of entrepreneurial risk.
Chinese man builds full-sized AR drone to fly around
"Be... sure.... to drink.... your Ovaltine?"
Don't fret about it, you're doing great. The thing that matters is the content, not the package. I'm sure that if you'd write a sales brochure you'd have someone check it but for your blog posts your level of English is more than adequate.

Dziekuje bardzo za wszystko ;)
Your point is valid, but you still miss the larger point you're replying to. Even without libraries, coding in C is going to require more lines of code than coding the same functionality in a higher-level language like Python. And lines of code correlate more or less evenly with time/effort/thought that goes into writing the code.

Crucially, this linkage does not depend on whether there are libraries for what you're trying to do or experience level in the language. If coding a particular feature takes 1000 lines of code in C vs. 100 in Python, you'd have to assert that a programmer can write (and maintain) code 10x faster in C than Python. Since roughly the same amount of conceptual energy goes into each line of code, this is tantamount to the assertion that a programmer writing C can think through concepts 10x faster than when the same programmer is writing Python.

There's a reason the field invented higher-level languages, and it doesn't entirely have to do with novice programmers.
Apple moving away from Samsung memory components
It seems like a pretty ridiculous definition considering the words chosen. Getting there first implies doing something first. Google didn't invent search nor did it invent the business model of PPC (GoTo/Overture did it - who were bought by YAHOO).
Ironically though, Gowalla's new data may likely appeal to advertisers more than ever before. Each interaction is now within a very defined context -- travel and tourism. There's no need to try to filter out locals vs. tourists with this. Companies will know exactly who is using Gowalla and why. These predefined areas will be a huge leg up in negotiations with companies.

Actually, you're also off on travel being less profitable. In fact, global travel and tourism is one of the largest markets on the planet, with $919 Bil in expenditures last year[0]. It's also astoundingly broad -- nearly every country on the planet, big or small, poor or rich, has a significant tourism economy. This is the big cash cow that Gowalla's chasing.

[0]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tourism
> For some personal background, I do come from a financially stable family. My parents could have covered the $16k to help me follow my dreams. But I didn't ask them (and neither did they offer). The financial pressure and responsibility of my startup was to be fully on my shoulders.

Even though he wasn't accepting money from his parents, he was implicitly using their financial security to shoulder this risk. If everything had really gone to hell, they would have helped him back on his feet. (Much like some banks could take huge risks knowing the government would probably bail them out, even if there wasn't an explicit agreement or exchange of money beforehand.) Other people, like maybe his friend, don't have such a financial safety net and so can't take on those kinds of risks.
Check out the Linux kernel's linked list implementation for an example of it being done right. The actual workings of it are hidden behind macros that you can look at (quite simple, easy to grasp) so it's very clean to used.
> Learn how to code so you don't need to hire programmers.

Yeah, you can just get one of those "Learn how to Program in 30 Days!" books, and it's just as good as hiring someone who does it professionally.

This whole post reads like a big "Don't Do What Donny Don't Does" book.
Byron Real Estate For Sale
Thank you for the "jealous programmer"... I had a feeling that on hacker news this kind of personal attack wasn't welcome, but hey.

By the way, I was talking about the google ads.
I'm sorry, but people from Boston don't go to Cheers and you're assuming that tourists are really looking to visit these traps because of the plethora of mentions these places receive in poorly conceived travel guides. In this case, Gowalla, just like every other travel app is going for the low-hanging fruit and pandering to the lowest common denominator. Yes, there is money in it, but like it's been mentioned before, this may be an app in search of a problem to solve but it just may very well be that there isn't much beyond Cheers that appeals to a certain demographic and their use case is very well served.
So you'd prefer for us to lock an innocent person in jail until they die?

The death penalty forces us to acknowledge the decisions we make regarding the criminal justice system. We screw up, we kill innocent people. Each time a person is executed we are forced to acknowledge the possibility that maybe we screwed up.

By locking people in jail until they die, we get to pretend there is no problem. We take people's lives away on the theory that we might possibly detect our errors at some point in the next 60 years. In reality, we won't do this except on rare occasions.

Locking people up until they die makes us feel better because there is no single instant we are forced to acknowledge the possibility of an error. But it doesn't actually reduce the error rate.
A strategic acceleration of our loss of objectivity
As long as you have the ability to start earning quickly and are smart about it, you can get through that without breaking your credit record.

The key to dealing with credit cards is understanding the terms -- it's all written down in a little document that nobody reads. In particular, you need to understand precisely how each lender defines "default". "Default" == no more 0%.

Also, this guy had the business networking chops required to jump into consulting gigs immediately upon declaring failure. The exit strategy is essential.

I did something similar to this with a house that I needed to get out of quickly. I borrowed $52,000 over several cards and ended up using $40k. The $12k was used as a pool to make the automatic payments from. End result? The value of the home increased by $80k.
HDD Regenerator
HP Store sells now Discounted TouchPad Accessories instead of Tablets
If you're interested in buying an island, there's a web site specializing in just that [1]. The internet is wonderful.

Disclaimer: I'm not associated with this site in any way. I just think it's fun to daydream about.

[1] http://www.privateislandsonline.com/
> Of course C has references because C has pointers. References in C++ are just constant pointers.

This is incorrect. You cannot have a reference to nullptr, for example. Pointers and references are different beasts, nowhere in the C standard does it refer to pointers as references. The underlying representation in compilers does not imply equivalence.
Google command line (2010)
I can only wish them luck, it will be interesting to see if this model will be a successful one, since so many similar companies have trouble trudging on. They paid €45 million of licences in 2010 [1], and 2 million subscribers is probably close to €10 million revenue. They also have aggressive advertising.

[1] http://www.ballade.no/nmi.nsf/doc/art2011011911391428493018
That's a bit too cheer-leady of C, and stretches the definition of DSL way too much. Ruby didn't suddenly become a Java DSL when it was ported to the JVM, neither did Perl become a Haskell DSL when Pugs was written.

Let's give credit where it's due, but really C could have been Ada in any of those examples and the results would have been about the same (especially in PHP's case).
Reactions to this topic regularly break down into two camps: The people who are proud to have online portfolios, and the people who are angry at the idea that their sterling work experience is undervalued because of the lack of easily available proof.

Here's the thing: No one's saying your under-NDA work with proprietary toolsets isn't excellent work or that you're not at the top of your field. All we're saying is that people who might want to hire you need as much information as possible about you and you're not giving them much to go on. The entire "github/Stack Overflow/your portfolio/the web/Work for Pie* is the new resume" movement is about the information asymmetry that plagues the job market. Employers want to hire awesome people! Job seekers want great jobs! Historically neither side really knows what they're getting until well after the offer is signed and the employee is in the building. There are just too many questions you can't ask without sinking the deal, like "is it OK if I punch out at 5 every day?" or "do most of your former coworkers hate you?"

A sweet github "resume" offers two things:

- Social proof. Are competent people following and working with you in this public setting?

- Hard evidence of your technical skills, work style, communications abilities, interests, and persistence. You can't get enough of these from an interview or from a resume.

Both of these things are gold to a hiring manager, and it's hard to get better answers than the ones you and your trusted associates can glean by reviewing someone's online portfolio. If you've got a portfolio that compares favorably with the job requirements and the hiring manager actually sees this portfolio, you're getting an interview.

This means two things for a job seeker: (1) Have an excellent portfolio. (2) Do everything you possibly can to get that portfolio in front of the people you want to work for. How are we going to make that happen? Focus! Buy targeted Facebook ads for people at the company. Maximize the SEO potential of your personal blog and profile. Become respected and known by the people that your prospective manager also respects and knows. Attend the conferences your dream employers attend. Make every professional move with an eye towards career growth and increasing your desirability on the market. The enemy's gate is down. Good luck.

* Disclaimer: I know, like, and work with the founders of Work for Pie. It's a solid idea with lots of room to grow.
Things I Can't Say [in my YC Application]
This is one of those silly things that you just can't stop playing with.

* "allah" isn't there but "jesus" is found twice!
* "hate occurs more than "love"

Just as I was really excited about the mystical possibilities here, I came across this party pooper: http://math.stackexchange.com/questions/20566/prove-there-ar...
We're very fortunate in this country for a liberal bankruptcy law, at least for when it comes to taking this kind of risk.

Now, this kind of risk won't work as well in this economy. Credit cards have severely curtailed their introductory rates. However, in 2002-2007 I knew people who augmented their income multiple times by this same arbitage and putting the money in low risk investment vehicles. Once the intro rates were finished, they would pay back 100% and close the card, moving on to the next one.

The credit card reform act will make this more difficult in the future.
> Microsoft is requiring (PowerPoint) that OEMs ship client systems with the secure boot enabled to get the Windows 8 logo.

Okay, so by default this is on. Am I missing something or is there a big reason why you couldn't just Hit [DEL] when booting and change this to [disabled]? After all, major mainboard manufacturers currently make it rather easy to overclock your system (even unlocking disabled cores), which I can't imagine making Intel or AMD very happy.

Yes, some Dell/HP computers might be truly locked, which would make this Winmodem 2.0 on a bigger scale. But as long as you can build your own, most Linuxers and Hackintosh builders should be okay. Well, at least for desktops. If e.g. all Dell laptops would be permanently locked…

But right now this is a lot of coulds and mights over a potential feature. I'm still saying FUD.
Ask HN: Starting under a "nom de guerre"
Not quite ready to associate my real identity with my evolving side project on the tubes (for several reasons at this point), I've decided to use a pseudonym. So, for example, my e-mail is <pseudonym>@example.com, and I will be signing all e-mails under that name. Has anyone ever done anything like this on any of their projects and have any lessons learned to share? Thanks!
Lots of compilers are bootstrapped; GCC builds itself with GCC, GHC (the Haskell compiler) is written in Haskell and builds itself.

These are just two popular examples, but my experience is that most serious compilers for general purpose languages are bootstrapped.

(I'm working on a Perl 6 compiler that is mostly written in Perl 6. It's real fun!)
Google Switches Graphics Library in Chrome for Mac
I have to say that I'd really like to see the data on that. This looks like an unpersonalized kitchen sink attempt to cover everything. You can buy/rent/scrape all the locations, with geo data, from a variety of resources.
That argues for using base 27 better than the article does.
Services We Pay For and Use at PipelineDeals
The Elegant Chignon Updo Hairstyle
...Which means that only the people who want coredumps/stacktraces get them. Instead of everyone.

Sounds like a feature.
> Your chances:
> 3 or fewer letters: about 100%
> 7 or more letters: about 0%.

While this might be true for the set he's calculated, doesn't an infinite sequence of non-repeating digits suggest the likelihood of every sequence approaches one as the number of digits are calculated approaches infinity?
Vishing - What Is Vishing
The term vishing can be explained as using the phone line to commit a fraud by involving a user into some activity by which he has to tell about his private information and then that information is us
Note, open is not part of C. A better comparison would be fopen which, according to the C99 draft I have, just returns NULL on failure.
It's a shame that few people mention the book that seemed to inspire this genre: "Harold and the Purple Crayon" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harold_and_the_Purple_Crayon) -- originally published in 1955. It's still a classic in my mind. Max & the Magic Marker and Crayon Physics are also excellent.
@Author: This applies to which team at google again?
Flash Player 10.3.183.10 (Non-IE)
Honestly, your success throws me for a loop—it's the exact opposite of what I've encountered. Every teacher I speak with objects to the very idea of paying for software—without even seeing the app.

In another comment, I wrote this about Bingo Card Creator vs. Knack:
I think the difference is that he's providing something teachers already use, need, and look for, as opposed to a "new" kind of software solution. (Online gradebooks aren't that new, but they still are not in use by the majority of teachers.)

I really wonder if the difference is just in what we're selling. If I understand your product correctly, you offer instructional materials teachers have been using for a long time: customized cards to play bingo. This is something teachers are familiar with. As I mentioned in the post, teachers already buy classroom materials like pencils, letter charts, and decorations. They've been buying these for years and actually enjoy buying them. Bingo cards are a familiar need and expense. However teachers do not, generally speaking, regularly use software, much less pay for it every month. The concept of paying for an online gradebook is foreign, regardless of what the software looks like.

If you don't mind, I'll send you an email to follow up. I'd really like to continue discussing.
That's at least one good reason for Haskell to have built-in laziness. The implementation of laziness uses side-effects. The interface it exposes is pure/immutable. If you had to implement it yourself, out of effectful primitives, the result would have an effectful type, despite being pure. So it is simply exposed as a pure primitive, despite being implemented via effects under the hood. Pretty much all of the pure operations (e.g: add) boil down to impure/effectful operations deep down (e.g: an ADD instruction mutating a register).

That's why it is important to have an escape hatch -- capable of saying: "This is a composition of effects, but I know it is pure". In Haskell, this is called unsafePerformIO, and it has the (impossible) type:

unsafePerformIO :: IO a -> a

If you use this on a non-pure composition of effects, you get a bug.
Shen 1.7, successor to Qi II, released
This is the dumbest thing I've ever heard of. I definitely would not want to be blogging about this.

What happened to good old fashioned shame and just getting on with your own business? Everyone wants to be a fucking celebrity.
'#' denotes a fragment in a URL. Browsers will only send 'user:name=Bob,age' to the server.
My co-founder and I ordered business cards just a few days ago from vista print. I think we paid about $50 for 250 cards. We opted to make our own card so that we could have our branding on the cards as well as our info. I think springing for cards makes sense if you're in the early stages and everyone you meet has the possibility of being useful to you in some way. If you're already established and doing well, you probably don't have to worry much about it.
Yeah it's hardcoded, more, the OS X Lion takes it to the system level, by showing a location services activity in the menu bar when you do this.
This is crazy - crazy interesting and crazy nuts. The idea of arbitraging has always be fascinating to me. I've had an idea for currency arbitrage in the travel industry, but never done anything other than back of the envelope calculations. Feel free to take the idea:

Tour operators publish their prices for the upcoming year's trips. They publish them usually in one currency, sometimes in two, rarely in three. They're beholden to these prices because they publish brochures and distribute them to places like Flight Centre.

So what you do is become a wholesaler of a bunch of tour operators' trips (this is easy to aggregate, many have XML feeds that publish their inventory, including pricing & availability). Then you use real-time exchange rates to figure out which currency it's best to sell in to a customer and then buy the product from the operator using another currency.
For example, say the US & CAD dollars are at par when prices are published. If the US drops a lot compared to the CAD, you sell the trip to your customer in CAD but purchase the trip from the operator in US.

The beauty is that operators will pay you a commission (usually 20-25%) on top of whatever you gain from the currency arbitrage. There's some complexity in becoming a legal wholesaler and being able to accept multiple currencies etc.

At the very least it makes for some interesting math.
How to Build a Web Startup: Lean LaunchPad Edition
You can pull the most check-in places from their API if you want to see it yourself. Just looking at the Pittsburgh guide, it seems like the basic tourist tour we give visitors, and it doesn't surprise me these are also the most checked in places. They also have a few local bars that are not quite so touristy but definitely popular with the smart phone crowd.

In another comment of yours you mentioned appealing to the lowest common denominator... I see what you are saying but that also means "the average" person. You are less likely to be wrong suggesting the Cheers bar then a local favorite.
Then lets use $, we still have a few chars available
I only know the US side. But there are two schools of thought that I believe hold true -- specifically for the U.S.

You can go to school for the education or the reputation. The best of both worlds: Stanford... but it's a long shot to get in for just about anyone.

Universities really aren't moving fast enough to keep up with web technologies, so what you teach yourself will be faster than what a school can keep up with.

For reputation:
Stanford, Harvard, MIT, CMU

For theory, plenty of schools are good schools.
Maryland (full disclosure, my alma mater), Michigan, Cornell, Berkeley, Austin

Best of both worlds (in my personal opinion):
Stanford, Berkeley, CMU

Again, theory will depend on the classes you pick and the professors you get (You'll likely get 90% of it from one specific class that ends up matching up with your interest and learning style the most). Relevance will depend on what you can learn on your own.
Antique French Country Furniture
This isn't a team at Google. I used Google Docs for creating and sharing it, so it shows up as google.com in the Hacker News link. This is actually for a startup that I've been working with - they have done a tremendous job and have gained traction with their product without really looking at the technology. I'm trying to help out and to let them see what alternatives are out there
Privacy stink erupts over Borders bankruptcy deal
Have to agree.. Tokyo is not showing me the most inspiring list of destinations. I'd like an app has these kinds of lists, weighted by how long someone has lived in a city.. I can't help but feel there's a low hanging fruit there for "off the beaten path" travel guides. Simply ranking by number of check-ins is not so novel..
Google caught with altered rankings for its Product Search website
Which is not necessarily true...
Facebook f8 live
It's sometimes necessary to use violence in order to create disincentives for it, and discourage others from engaging in it.

Ghandi is a good guy and all, but he isn't always right:

I would like you to lay down the arms you have as being useless for saving you or humanity. You will invite Herr Hitler and Signor Mussolini to take what they want of the countries you call your possessions...If these gentlemen choose to occupy your homes, you will vacate them. If they do not give you free passage out, you will allow yourselves, man, woman, and child, to be slaughtered, but you will refuse to owe allegiance to them. - Ghandi, 1940