skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The hostname of our servers is indeed hardcoded in the framework. So, yes, that's a 'singleton' in the same way that configuring your database hostname in Rails is a singleton.

I get the impression that arguing this further is a dead end. I'd suggest looking at NSManagedObjectContext for a basic approach that doesn't rely on global state / global variables, and while imperfect in many ways, is at least familiar to existing ObjC developers.

Lastly, I'd look into the research into the effects of global variables on program interdependence, as well as the numerous discussions on the negative impact on maintainability, composability.

Regardless of the above, it sounds like Parse will likely not be a good fit for our (large, complex, and top-chart) applications. If we're not the target audience, then no problem.
Invite HN: Unofficial Post Startup School BBQ at the PA Hacker House
It has to work
according to the graph, it gets downloaded an unknown number of times more than the unknown number of times it was downloaded before.

what a pointless article.
Sorry Tara, looks like the HN crew has other things on their minds.
"...implementing an entire MP3 decoder in JavaScript allowing Firefox to play MP3s without any Flash. Now I’m looking for an H.264 decoder in JS."

Out of curiosity, where does one learn about writing a video codec? Is there a canonical resource for codec implementation?
The source of the TechCrunch article is the current highest post on this website.
Ask HN: Anyone started/starting online/offline magazine startup?
I was always passionate about popular scientific information and "did you know" things. If there would be a book with million pages with "did you know" articles about science, I would read them without any pauses. You can say that there are already several magazines like - Popular Science, Wired, Livescience.com, HowStuffWorks.com, DiscoverMagazine, etc. But I think I found a niche theme to start a magazine style website, and if I can grow big enough, I am going to go also offline publishing. I think it must be something between "interesting facts"-"how stuff works" - "popular science". I would like to hear if anyone from HN started/starting a magazine startup, what are the experiences, advices, lessons learned, etc.
bloodbath? c'mon... that's a word reserved for death of a bunch of beings, in a short time span, by an 'unnatural' cause. he apparently died peacefully and naturally.
they can download from itunes, amazon and blockbuster via their tivo, etc. netflix never had a decent selection of titles available for download, somehow AMZN does much better.
Look at the bright side: it is still the richest third world country, at least until Wall Street casino wrecks it for good...
nice, got a quick recommendation right away. thanks pg ;)

looking for more, folks. thanks so much! will report back with interviews/videos when I have them.
Great Code Is Written Twice
I'm the guy that called Stanford. Look, it's not that hard -- someone here must have talked to a Bay Area reporter about their company or their job at some point -- can you please tell her/him to follow up with Stanford and talk to Dan Stober at Stanford News Service and/or Andy Meyer in the Engineering Department? http://chime.in/user/toybuilder/chime/65979187159736320
You are weird. Just kidding. It just kind of hurts me a little bit to see a great product come short in design.

Edit: Best HN username goes to you.
I applaud any company that once in a while allows a product to reach escape velocity and rid itself from the burdens of backwards compatibility. Not every step can be incremental.

And in this case it is not improbable that Amazon will make all books available in both new and old formats and that their readers will automatically download the right one so that the change does not encumber the end user the slightest but brings benefits on newer devices.
P/E ratio is one representation of how the market sees the company growing in the future. It's honestly an "emotional" number.

While Apple continues to defy the pundits, it _is_ difficult to see their profits become, say, 5x over the next ten years (since they already rake in $100B+ in revenue). Also, one could legitimately argue that Apple has real competitors in every business they are involved in (PC makers, Android, Samsung, HTC, etc), and that their markets are inherently saturated (of course, one can argue otherwise too).

Meanwhile, I suppose people see more growth potential in Amazon, because the ebook market itself is still growing, and their EC2 service is coinciding with the growth of hosted deployment of services. At the least, I can see how it's easier to trick yourself into thinking Amazon will have a stronger growth trajectory (it probably helps that Amazon's revenues are somewhat smaller at ~$30B). It also helps that Amazon has become a monopoly in their core business of online retail (with perhaps ebay being its main competitor), and application hosting seems (to me) a duopoly between EC2 and Rackspace.
What's funny for me was the first time I saw Trello, I looked over to my left and that is exactly what I saw (albeit minus the advanced features of discussions etc.).

I have wide post-it-notes arranged in 3 columns indicating status; Done, In-Progress, Todo.

That and a pen and paper keep me ontop of my TODO.

I also attempted to keep track of my days work using a log post in Gollumn, I tried for a few weeks but that never seemed to stick.
Neuroscience vs philosophy: Taking aim at free will
> Death is necessary for human ecology

Ugh, not now. References or stop talking. I have my fingers crossed he was signed up for cryonics. This is tragic.
FYI, as of 1.8 MongoDB now has a WAL implementation optionally enabled by starting with --journal. We made it the default in 2.0 for 64-bit platforms.
at least this Yokohama is stable.
I use a http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Controlled_payment_number for things like this. I can set a specific credit limit, or just stop the number at any time.
http://github.com/baguette/lemma
If you're using bitcoin as a mechanism for transferring wealth, the volatility doesn't matter if your revenue stream is relatively constant, because only a small percentage of your revenue will exist as bitcoins at any instance in time.

Volatility only matters if you're interested in storing wealth, or if your transactions are both infrequent and large relative to the bitcoin market. These are the only conditions where a sizeable proportion of your capital would have to exist as bitcoins at one time, and therefore the only conditions where you'd care about volatility.

So sure, using bitcoins to pay for a house or an expensive car is probably not a good idea, but it seems, well, utterly bizarre to dismiss bitcoins just because it's currently unsuitable for a small segment of the market.

And personally, I'd view physical cash as being wholly unsuitable for purchases over $10,000, due to the risk of manually transporting that much money. If I had a choice solely between paying someone $10,000 in physical cash, or $10,000 in bitcoins, then I'd think seriously about using bitcoins. Does this mean that physical money is just a "toy currency"?
Progress and its Sustainability

http://www-formal.stanford.edu/jmc/progress/

Elephant 2000: A Programming Language Based on Speech Acts

http://www-formal.stanford.edu/jmc/elephant/elephant.html
John McCarthy's proposal for the language of the future
Is there not a YCombinator Distributed Open House on that day this year? (It doesn't look like it.)
2.0 has a new index format that should reduce your index sizes by ~20-30% to fit more in RAM. If you haven't looked at upgrading yet, it is probably worth testing with 2.0.1 to see how it performs in your use case. You will need to reindex() or restore from a dump to take advantage of the new index format.
I think it was the SmugMug guys who discovered that they had higher conversion rates at $12/year than $10/year, because people found it easy to think of as $1 / month. Response to pricing on virtual services can be tricky.
I used this example because I think in most people's opinion using sockpuppet accounts in a comment thread is even worse than using them to upvote stories. It's not uncommon for people to try creating sockpuppet accounts to upvote their posts, but rare for people to resort to this.

I was able to infer the two accounts were the same person because, as I said, the changelog guys emailed me and told me so. I notice you don't deny it, which seems both revealing and revealingly disingenuous.

(Incidentally, if anyone is reading this far, this sort of thing is why it sucks to run a forum.)
In general, I question the "network effect" and how strong it really is here in this industry.

People always say that in an ideal world you'd have only one provider for streaming movies, but I actually see this going the other way...as in multiple providers (e.g. HBO) that stream their own content. I don't think this affects the user experience as meaningfully as people claim. I think people in general are used to multiple providers and are much more willing to accept it. Just look at how many apps people have on their iPhone. Plus it's just a lot easier to play with the content providers in a more vertically integrated model.

One path that I would wish Netflix to keep going down is becoming a distribution channel for foreign movies.
Why Burying Sign Up Buttons Helps Get More Sign Ups
http://github.com/akkartik/wart

Arc-like names, python-like keyword args and indent-sensitivity.
Reed Hastings: “Qwikster Became The Symbol Of Netflix Not Listening”
The Evolution of John McCarthy (Evolutionary Algo with Lisp Code)
Wood Floor Refinishing NJ
Wood Floor Refinishing NJ: A lot of us have got wooded floors in our houses and especially those hardwood floors which a few of us really like to brag about.
I totally called it. "They always go in threes."

God damn it though. And fellow programmer students have no idea whom I'm talking about. Grar. (RIP '(JOHN MCCARTHY))
Real Life Ideas
Really? You think that the government spending lots of money on the war is not what got us out of the Depression? Of course the boom happened after the war was over. During the war... there was a war on. All that effort was getting dropped on Europe instead of raising the standard of living in the US. People may not have had a lot material luxuries during the war, but they sure weren't unemployed.
This is the first time I've come across the use of code as a meaningful narrative element in a work of fiction. It's not exactly Nabokov, but this is a pretty wonderful story. RIP, John.
P/E is only one metric and it's potentially very deceptive. You're using a PE that's uncorrected for expenses that are essentially investment in future business growth rather than a fundamental part of the business model. Amazon, for example, is hiring tons of new employees to build out its AWS business; that's a positive sign (it shows they believe that's a good investment) but in the short term it will drive down their earnings, because the cost of those employees is incurred now in exchange for business in future years.

So with Amazon, you have a denominator that's growing, and a numerator that's depressed by the investment in growth. That results in a very high PE.

MSFT and Apple, by comparison, are great companies but the market isn't expecting them to grow a lot (esp given how big they already are.) They're priced at a level where the market basically expects their earnings to stay steady going forward.

30X earnings is still not cheap for a tech company. It's in a spot where you'd have to look at the growth prospects, etc. to decide if it's a good deal.

PE makes the most sense if you're comparing very mature companies with similar size, growth and operating metrics. If that's not the case, it's not very useful.
You might want to qualify that statement before someone asks you about an empty, well-lit intersection with sweet sight lines at 2 am on a Tuesday night.
I suspect silverlight on os x is the culprit, too, because by clicking in the Netflix window I can usually get a spinning beach ball to appear when the video is frozen or stuttering. I recall Netflix working a lot better on my Macbook 6 months ago. (video playback in Flash in contrast has improved in that time.)
So basically just as large an opening as in US law. The specific notion of "deny the documents exist" isn't covered here, though I'd guess that would be the spirit of the law as you quote it.
I've been working on a MACLISP interpreter based on 80's manual I found on my fathers bookshelf. It's quite fun working backward, and seeing how the dialect influenced modern lisp.
You're assuming they were cable-cutters, which is common around here but still uncommon in the wider market. More likely, they had both cable and Netflix (maybe were testing the waters) and when the price change hit, they dropped the Netflix and stuck with cable.
How did you do this?

I have something (http://boxerbiography.blogspot.com/) I want to convert to either Mobi or just a single page. I was thinking of writing a ruby script to do it, but if there is an easier way, would love to know.

Thanks.
Keen On… Parag Khanna: How To Run The World (TCTV)
Regex's have a liberal bias
Oral history interview with John McCarthy
The stuff Wikileaks has released has had all the really sensitive stuff (like, names) removed, right? So, then, isn't the threat that Wikileaks represents mostly indirect (i.e. it might incite civil unrest if people knew what their governments were actually doing)?

If that's the case, then, why defend hate speech and not Wikileaks? It seems to me that hate speech also has the very real potential of inciting violence (holocaust, pogroms, etc).

I agree with you, though, that Wikileaks probably is more dangerous (in the people-could-get-killed sense) than Stormfront, right now. It certainly seems much more likely that Wikileaks could cause violent rioting (and worse) than that Stormfront will suddenly come to power, although my observations don't extend past the US. It could well be the case that neo-nazis are a bigger problem in other parts of the world.

Personally, I find myself becoming more pro-Wikileaks as I see more interviews of Assange. The man is articulate and logically consistent (a rarity for any public figure) and I've found his arguments quite compelling. If you haven't seen him speak, I'd recommend it. He does a better job defending Wikileaks than anything that I could articulate in a post on HN.
Similar concept with photos:

http://www.yeondoojung.com/artworks_view_wonderland.php?no=8...
How is the CEO not out of a job yet?
http://www.cs.uni.edu/~wallingf/blog-images/code/jmc-lisp.sc...
Show HN: CodeJS : An Actionscript 3.0-like syntax for Javascript
https://github.com/Scriptor/pharen (Lisp -> PHP)

It's been a while since I worked on it, but I think I might start again pretty soon.
I thought the same after the first dip (was going to purchase at ~$150/share), but ended up convincing myself there was a stronger bear case to be made. Primarily, I considered:

1. Content producers control Netflix's ability to succeed; they could either support significant fragmentation across multiple service providers (allowing many entrants/competitors and driving up prices for their content) or distribute directly (eliminate middle men altogether)

2. Multiple competitors are or could potentially price much lower than Netflix streaming based on totally different business models; Amazon subsidizes streaming to drive sales in their core business and Google could do the same using an advertising-based model

3. Last point here is pretty subjective, but I didn't think Netflix was a likely takeover target by the majors (i.e. key competitors), especially given that Hulu is also on the block; Google already has platform, users and device-level distribution through YouTube and Amazon has much the same, in addition to already profiting from Netflix's growth (through AWS)

I had problems making a long-term case for NFLX and the blunders of leadership further eroded my confidence. I'm not sure the stock is truly worth about 1/3 of what it was a few months ago, but I'm still not buying it.
https://github.com/rictic/twerp-h

Tiny stackless lisp with continuations, written in Haskell.

~150 lines of interpreter, ~40 lines of parser.
You may not considering yourself a "designer" but you are. Your command over typography, colors, and shapes aren't typical among developers.
Frameworks drive programming language adoption
Lori Drew was acquitted on appeal where she was initially convicted of violating the CFAA, largely through exceeding MySpace's TOU.
(let ((john-mccarthy '()))
(with-backtracking john-mccarthy))
Bits of an emacs parser for creole in lisp - my tribute to McCarthy
When I heard John McCarthy had died I decided to write some Lisp. This is something I've wanted for a while. A pure EmacsLisp parser for Creole. This is not finished. But it's most of it.

https://gist.github.com/1310616
http://nakkaya.com/2010/08/24/a-micro-manual-for-lisp-implem...
A Marketer Learns How to Program
Why the 'Donation Blockade' Against Wikileaks is Working
wait so is this today or tomorrow?
Yes, when I came to the "R781 thought about the situation. Here are some of its thoughts, as printed later from its internal diary file," bit of the story at first I thought 'oh, clever.' By the end I was really moved.
Data Visualization as Art: I Want You To Want Me
even if it is terrible you can still eat it

I see you've never been to Friendly's.
I'm going to sound like a broken record but I have to: if this had been A/B tested, either a) it would have been averted or b) we would have good reason to know, with statistical confidence, that despite that X came before Y, X did not in fact cause Y.

Anecdotally, faces have worked really, really well for some people. (Specific example coming at my Business of Software talk tomorrow, so I can't spoil it, but it will be livestreamed and have slides posted.)
https://github.com/samsonjs/lake

Just a half-baked implementation of a simple Scheme in C.
You are lucky. My cycle to work (downtown Toronto, Canada) is in all fairness rather relaxed (bike lane 80% of the way, largely non-arterial street), but it is a rare day when I don't have to leave the bike lane at least once for a stopped delivery vehicle or truck. Best part? Any tickets they may get are waived if they go to the transportation department and prove they were on delivery. Apparently it's the city's way of being business-friendly.
Neither, it's Sunday.
Lisp prehistory - Summer 1956 through Summer 1958
https://github.com/bitsai/lisp-in-clojure
If only all the toy lisps were instead patches for sbcl, abcl, ccl, clisp, clojure, racket, chicken or gambit...
I think one of the most important things you can do, while you're alive, is to change the world...

Steve Jobs, Dennis Ritchie and John McCarthy managed to do it. May them rest in peace, now, and be remembered for ever.
#triathlon mostly as its just my blog for talking about triathlon related things.
Hm, not really sure if I really understood Lisp, but at least I tried once implementing one which kinda worked (basically I was using it for ini-files and it's coded in c++).
http://www.michaelzeilfelder.de/bin/GrowTime/src/Lisp.h
http://www.michaelzeilfelder.de/bin/GrowTime/src/Lisp.cc
http://www.michaelzeilfelder.de/bin/GrowTime/src/LispFuncs.h
http://www.michaelzeilfelder.de/bin/GrowTime/src/LispFuncs.c...
http://www.michaelzeilfelder.de/bin/GrowTime/src/TestLispMai...
The article tells us, "First, fun is okay." I see this user as just exercising this point.
Can be found here:
http://www-formal.stanford.edu/jmc/robotandbaby/robotandbaby...
I do this monthly and it really helps. I think the idea of clearing out the clutter makes me feel productive and makes me want to continue that productive streak.
Stanford tweeted that they're still in the process of gathering information https://twitter.com/#!/stanfordeng/status/128580022675054592
I find the behavior of most bikers in traffic to be dangerous, obnoxious and rude.

Yes. Bikers have this in common with the drivers of trucks, buses, cars, SUVs, joggers, pedestrians, etc. They all break any rules that make their lives harder if they believe they're likely to get away with said breaking. All of them, all the time.

They're all just people, and they're all really the same.
Did you mean to reply to someone else? You two are mostly in agreement.
Ask HN: Need freelance front-end work to pay college loans while I job-hunt
Hi HN,

I'm a recent CS graduate and several year HN member currently looking for a job at a startup, but it's slow going. My college loans are eating up my savings, and I would love to be able to do some freelance work to help cover those and improve my skills and experience.

I have no problem with very small or one-off projects. If something is worth $10 or $20 for you not to mess with, shoot me an email.

Pricing: For HN members, cheap, and payable on satisfactory delivery. Seriously, you send me a project and a price, and it will probably work for me.

Contact: brianfarr@gmail.com

Here are some services I can offer:

* Convert a design to markup: Got a great Photoshop design or other image and need it converted to clean, valid, and semantic markup? Let me do that while you work on your product.

* Customized a purchased theme: You found that great design on ThemeForest but you need to make some changes and incorporate your logo and branding? No problem. Armed with a text editor and Firebug, I can get this done quickly.

* Basic CMS or Wordpress Theme: Want a basic theme from your design or markup so you can use a content management system and update quickly? No problem. We're not talking about creating an Engadget style superblog or infinitely customizable theme here, just your design and the ability to use an edit box to update your site.

* Fix small problems on web pages: Got some tweaks, bug fixes, and cross browser problems you've been meaning to take care of? Let me wear out the refresh button and fix them for you. I have plenty of HTML, CSS, and scripting experience to figure out what's going wrong and how to correct it.

* Website proofing and reviewing: Get a fresh set of eyes on your marketing and copy, get help distilling your message.

* Web application testing: You're probably getting tired of using it and you're totally acclimated to it anyways. Have someone else try it out, see if anything breaks, give usability feedback, etc.

* Something crazy you just thought of: I have lots of other skills too, so let me know!

Thanks for reading, and don't hesitate to email me ( brianfarr@gmail.com ) with any questions!
That's a criminal matter, there's no applicability to a civil action.
How would this accelerate copyright/IP reform?
Now that you've set the expectation that your buttons are fun, I was pretty disappointed when nothing happened with the Twitter button :)

I agree, fun really is OK. I liked that point. Pointless fun is still fun.
10 Powerful Business Tools
When the countryside is flat and good infrastructure exists at the same time, the winter is not that big issue. It's not ideal, but it's not stopping most of the people either. For example people in Sweden have no problem with it: http://www.copenhagenize.com/2010/12/winter-cycling-in-umea-...
The issues of winter cycling are quite small compared to issues accociated with changing the cycling culture and building the infrastructure. So I suppose if Americans made their "flat enough cities" bike friendly, they would cycle even during winter, as other nations with good cycling conditions do.
WP article is now updated. The techcrunch piece cited HN but the author also contacted Stanford faculty. Gamasutra also ran a short piece. The article is no longer protected if you guys want to update it or clean it up.
This is very sad. John was a brilliant man who always made himself available to not only his students but random people(myself) emailing him for research advice.