skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
there's so many of these google acquisitions doing the 'disappear' thing that when they do resurface we've almost all forgotten and all is new again. haha. Maybe that's the point.
Holy shit, someone finally gets it.

AWS is a gigantic money pit. SoftLayer is the only way to go, IMHO.
Why must all software be free, and why must all devices accommodate free software?

The question isn't "all", it's "any". If Apple gets their way then jailbreaking "your" iOS device will be a federal crime, and the only significant open-ish alternative will be forcibly removed from the market.
You're welcome! And, I'll keep that in mind :-) I'm almost certainly going to leave the favorites and everything else there free, though. I'll come up with something.
Isn't the G+ auto-upload thing only available on Android?
“I can understand wanting to have a million dollars, it’s freedom, but once you get beyond that, I have to tell you, it’s the same hamburger."

The declining marginal utility of money, defined
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I think the subtle value lesson he was trying to get across to these kids is to avoid making money ( i.e. a certain amount of it ) as the goal. Humble, self-effacing and smart answers.

Oddly enough, I know very few people personally who set out with an exact locus on their future net-worth. Many, in my and the upcoming generation, aspire to have meaning over / along with money.
So the punch is based on scanning a QR code? Unless I'm misunderstanding, this is really broken. It sounds like someone could write a counterfeit app that scans the QR code, records the current location, and resubmits every minute, recording tons of punches that never actually happened.

They should do it the other way. Your phone should pop up a unque code for the cashier to scan. I guess that makes the barrier to entry higher, though. Maybe change the QR code daily at least (for businesses concerned about fraud, anyway).
Seeing a bad submission might encourage others to submit those kinds of links, thus defeating the purpose and ending up in a worse situation. Additionally, submissions that are upvoted are kept in a "Saved Stories" section of one's profile. I generally use this as a bookmark for things I want to read [again] later. What if the title is potentially interesting yet the contents are trash? I might save it thinking to read it later and it would be counted against me. Further, there is no mechanism to remove a saved story which would be a worthwhile thing to implement.

A better approach might be to hand-select N individuals you know are solid community members and make their votes count more. Three points per upvoted story rather than one, for example. To spread this further, take the top N users each of them upvotes the most (beyond a minimum threshold, decaying over time, etc.) and give them two points per upvoted story. With N=20, that gives you a pool of 420 people who can influence the front page to a greater degree than most while still keeping it manageable. You shouldn't need to update your original pool very often and the secondary pool can be recalculated once per day.

You could also have a bad pool consisting of those users who were flagged more than once by anyone in the original or secondary pools (again, decaying over time). Their votes could count for nothing.

This approach would anchor the community around known, trusted members and let their actions become the drivers for the behavior you wish to encourage. If you wish you had more members like those you hand-pick to upvote stories, what you're really saying is you wish those stories were upvoted more, so giving them more votes achieves that goal. The secondary pool is then reputation-based as is the bad pool.
NIST (the
National Institute of Standards and Technology) actually has a pretty good (if not exactly short!) definition by listing the characteristics "a cloud" has: http://www.nist.gov/itl/cloud/upload/cloud-def-v15.pdf

Leasing physical servers could be regarded as "cloud", but usually wouldn't because that method of hosting towards not meeting the Resource pooling, Rapid elasticity and Measured Service (esp "automatically control and optimize resource") characteristics (of course, one can argue that it can do those thing, but generally( it doesn't).

"Cloud" isn't* an engineering term, and thinking about it in absolutist, engineering terms makes as much sense as thinking about "web 2.0" in engineering terms 5 years ago.
Copyright troll Righthaven ordered to pay $120k in attorney fees
I'd clarify it as, programming as an engineering field, but not programming as a science. So yeah, essentially the same thing.
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I just tried building libalac.a on Linux using GCC 4.6.1 and it worked! There were quite a few warnings though.

To eliminate the warnings, edit /trunk/codec/makefile and add -Wno-multichar to CFLAGS.
I would love to see "someone" do that benchmark; using epoll, accept as many sockets as possible, for the sake of argument let's stuff one byte down them, and then properly shut them down.

I'm curious how close to the limit of the underlying poll technology we're getting, because it seems like everyone is converging in roughly the same area, in an order-of-magnitude sense.

I also find myself wondering about the implications of these artificial benchmarks and the stuff Zed discussed here: http://sheddingbikes.com/posts/1280829388.html
Definitely, in this we are in agreement.
Ever since reading that last year, whenever a movie I'm watching stops to buffer, I wonder if it could have been the Chaos Monkey.
You are being unfair. "Anything else" could include newer versions of Windows.
I agree. I really like the Google transparency report but I would like to know WHO/WHAT government officials/organizations requested to remove WHAT links and what their basis for removal is. However, I am still glad that the transparency report exists at all.
Mobile Banking
Hello HNer's,

I am developing a white paper regarding the future state of the mobile banking. The white paper is to help educate fellow undergraduates about the world of mobile banking. With the world becoming globally connected, the rise of mobile banking is inevitable.

While researching online, I found excellent statistics which directed me to the top features that banking institutions are currently offering to its clients.

With NFC on the increasing rise, what do HNer's expect to see in the future of mobile banking in terms of features and security?

Maybe it is not feasible in the near future until NFC is more widely accepted but what are some nuances that you currently experience and wish to be solved?

Thanks!
> OS X has built-in malware protection.

That's not really true. OS X doesn't generally suffer from malware purely because there isn't much Mac malware out there. It's only difficult to get infected with malware because it's difficult to find the stuff. But it's actually pretty easy to write the stuff, if one were so inclined.
If you do not model your software for disaster recovery survivability and routinely test scenarios where you lose a data center, there will certainly be something bad that pops up when it happens in a real-world scenario. Once systems become too complex with too many interacting pieces you need to run real-world DR situations on a schedule to ensure something isn't missed.
I'm building one now too :)

Codecademy offers jump right in type of learning, (interactive), while the others seem to have a different style(a lot of video, along with interactivity).

Everyone learns differently so there is the avenue for many.

Congrats to Codecademy!
I fully expect this to happen. iMessage is a clear shot across the carrier's bows -- in fact, I wouldn't be surprised if they'd have preferred that Apple go after voice first before the obscenely marked up texting market. They're getting gutted from the inside out, and I can only imagine the frantic rent-seeking that's going on even as we speak to get this sort of thing "sorted out".
The issue is more so whether the codec can handle dropped packets. It wouldn't surprise me if FLAC could not recover in such a case; usually lossless codecs employ something like Huffmann coding which places a large dictionary at the start of the file.
It's an apple fanboy piece, presenting heavily skewed data, be it from either straight-out falsity or improper definitions:

1) Original iphone can't run iOS 4, but it gets green all the way through. Similar issues with 3G and iOS5. EDIT: I see now that the way you've done the timelines makes it confusing, and seems to be done intentionally to make your point rather than clarify what's going on.

2) 2.1 to 2.2 is a minor release. 2.1 to 3.0 is a major release. And Android 3.0 isn't a phone release at all - specifically stated as such. It's impossible for a phone to be "3 major releases behind" when there are only two major releases available.

Go back and remake the graph fairly. It will still show the story you want to tell, but you will be able to claim impartiality - and with it, better authority.
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Your point that ALAC != AAC is true and all but a better comparison would probably be

ALAC : AAC :: FLAC : Ogg Vorbis
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You are not necessarily doing it wrong, you may simply not have enough ressources ($$$) to buy enough hardware for complete redundancy.

When you get evicted from an EC2 instance you just switch to a new one, the cost is constant. When your piece of hardware at the datacenter goes down, unless you had the ressources for a spare one, you are hosed.
Telecommute From Chandler, AZ
I'm an iOS developer & a fan of the app store system (from the small indie developers point of view), but there is no way I can kid myself that iOS is an open platform.

Javascript & HTML are very nice inclusions, but really unless you can run arbitrary native code on the device I don't think it counts.
I find it increasingly bizarre, day by day, that people are so fixated on money and not value, or meaningfulness.

There's something about the way that money is discussed on HN that I find odd, but I haven't quite put my finger on it yet. Maybe it's that there can sometimes feel like a larger emphasis on politics or money than the things people have actually created... maybe. I'm not sure. I'm still working on figuring it out. Anyways, cheers to you!
With HD audio you can hear absolutely everything in the background. We need signal compression in the frequency range to hear just our voice signals in the range we want to hear. You can't speak over HD audio in busy traffic or where there is significant ambient noise.
Nowhere did he claim "two computers for every employee". Like any company with centrally managed IT, it'd be wise to have hot spares of any and all hardware. That doesn't imply "buy 2x of everything!", it means to prepare for failure and minimize downtime (of any hardware) by having spares that can be quickly swapped.
Punchd raised ~$50k at "500 Startups" demo day, then three months later was bought by Google (July of this year).

That is called how damn fast it is to get noticed and bought if you execute brilliantly in a big market.

And it only looks better now than it did.

It's a beautiful, elegant way of digitizing a marketing tactic that everybody already knows and understands.

The little paper signs "Buy _____ and get _____" are the perfect visualization of how well thought out this product is - nice job.
I fail to see how ad hominen attacks on Greenspan are adding to the discussion. If you feel that he's whining too much, downvote and move on.

Onto the article itself, I find it concerning that some people can break the law and get away with it while others can't.
Just playing with it just now. Very cool site, the sign-up is super easy and quick. And you just dive straight into the programming. This more hands-on approach I find better for learning than just watching online videos.
Congrats to them for the round!
I don't like the analogy with "honeypot".

A "honeypot" exists to be a target for abusive behavior. Somebody who attacks a honeypot is making an attack -- they're guilty.

Somebody who votes for a bad story once in a while is just somebody who votes for a bad story once in a while. They're not a criminal, the way a person who attacks a honeypot. They shouldn't be treated like a criminal.

The big problems I see is: (1) different versions of the same story show up multiple times [extreme case: when the front page was about nothing but Steve Jobs] and (2) certain people who write consistently mediocre blog articles that seem to be voted up by voting rings every day.

Other than that, the quality of hacker news is really pretty good.
They also recently dropped the free version to 10 accounts instead of 50.
What is Cloud Computing?
Traditional business applications and platforms are too complicated and expensive. They need a data center, a complex software stack and a team of experts to run them.
Steve Jobs Responds To Hacker Critic
Rebuttal – “Hackers reportedly behind U.S. government satellite disruptions”
jaypreneur's head must have exploded. : )
Love it. We worked on Hipster's iOS App (Also did some work for Path too) and was wondering how yet another photo sharing app could survive. For me, the killer feature is being able to batch upload the pictures. Love the intuitive UI.
I'd say they're not too closely related, as the two were already bitter with each other before that point.
Google Voice was rejected from the iOS app store: July 2009
Multi-touch on android SDK commenced around: November 2009, sure they could have been developing it earlier, however in the following January google launched the nexus one with multitouch, which would have needed more than the short development time from July 09.

I.E. they're both as guilty as each other.
Being networked is a feature?
People insulting Aaron Greenspan just don't understand him.

If you want to understand him, just imagine a very sensitive precocious child raised on a rigid deontological morality by highly rigid and argumentative parents. This values system is characterized by a rigid logic that mainly focuses on things that are disallowed. For instance, lying is disallowed, betrayal is disallowed, and perfect obedience to official rules and legitimate authority is seen as the highest life virtue. The legitimacy of the authority though is dependent on the attempt of the authority to enact fair rules.

Aaron, as a precocious and sensitive boy who was mature for his age and learned logical reasoning early, absorbed his moral lessons very well and set them up as a set of rigid unbendae rules in his psyche.

When this kind of compex, highly integrated, high integrity, rigid value system encounters reality it finds outrage absolutely everywhere because the truth is that most authorities are quite incompetent and very far from fair. The hackers who are willing to break the rules have an unfair advantage over Aaron, who is literally incapable of breaking the rules due to his early programming. To rectify this intolerable unfairness he must demonstrate how the authorities are not properly punishing the rule breakers and t is hoped that this will ameliorate the unfairness.

I have a lot of sympathy for Aaron. He is really a victim of his short sighted parents who deeply indoctrinated him with this ideology that puts him at a major disadvantage in the modern day. It's not a simple thing to change or break this ideology even if he wanted to, because there are tremendous anxiety barriers stopping him from breaking any rules. He would feel extremely guilty and worried if he used patently selfish intentions and engaged in borderline unethical behaviour like spamming porn for money.

Aaron did everything right. He never lied, never stole, never even used deception or committed a lie of omission. He always shared with others and always engaged brotherly love. He had plenty of chances to betray people's trust for profit and did not take them. He worked hard and long with perfect integrity - moral perfection. And what did he get for it? Nothing. Zuck got 4 billion and his name in the history books for lying, cheating, breaking the rules. That could have been aaron, but Aaron was too morally perfect. It's just not fair!! And it's all the fault of Authority for failing to punish those who broke the rules.

Aaron - society is not to blame for rewarding cheaters. Your parents are to blame for giving you a crippling moral compass that is out of touch with reality.
Yeah, there is definitely a limit to how much you can gain which is useful to spend purely on your own confort and entertainment. When you think of worthy projects you could contribute funds to though I don't think there is any limit to the amount of money that would be useful.
I'd guess not much. Most people who wanted to use G+ already signed up with a Gmail account. Unless you're counting one person maintaining personal and professional profiles as 2 active accounts...
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Looking For A Ride To YC Open House Tomorrow
Anybody driving up to the YC open house tomorrow in Mountain View from San Francisco? Looking for a ride, will buy snacks for the trip. :)
This makes me want to work for Google!!
"Apple started selling AAC encoded music at a time when no† music player could play it"

Not that it mattered at the time as they were DRMed anyway.
Have you considered giving extra weight to submissions by first-year users, rather than just their votes?

If someone from that subset takes the time to find and submit an article to HN, I suspect that carries more signal than a simple upvote, whose effort-cost is near zero.

You might include high-karma users as well, if the first-year members aren't submitting enough.
There are many bugs I've spotted with alt-tab and alt-backtick; I'll try to compile a list of unit tests for you as soon as I have more spare time. Here's one to start:

1) Open 3 windows of the same application (e.g. Terminal). Make sure each window has different content so you'll be able to tell them apart. Let's call these windows A, B, and C, from top to bottom.

2) While holding down Alt, hit ` twice.

Expected result: window C is now on the top of the stack. The order of the windows is now C, A, B.

Actual result: window A is still on the top of the stack. The order of the windows is still A, B, C.
Just a nit: OS X does have very basic built-in malware protection in the form of File Quarantine.
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Link to GCC anonymous function example:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anonymous_function#C_lambda_exp...
Splitting off HP's hardware business doesn't suddenly make it worth the same as Apple's

That's like claiming if it spun off it's discount coupon business it would be worth the same as groupon.
Mac Bauer. Power hour. Could'nt help the JB joke. Microsoft has bit of a Fort Knox within enterprises.
How does this work if I also have a personal account?
I work at a large tech company, and we've embraced macs for the last 2 years or so.

The macs are still more expensive than the standard company issue, but they are able to offset the cost by offering 0 IT mac support. If you're wanting to go off the beaten path, fix your own issues. There are internal wiki's where the mac enthusiasts pour time into other people's issues, and a general word-of-mouth troubleshooting culture.

From the context of the conversations I've heard, I think the major hurdles are around security, support, and hardware costs. Before I'm jumped for implying less security with macs, it's still centered around the ability for the enterprise to control virus scanners, DLP, workgroup rights, generic company control, etc. Whether the operating system is more/less secure is still a religious argument - my guess is more IT staffs consider it less secure however.

Which leads to an interesting question - since the user experience has lead to a large enterprise install base, when does Apple start prioritizing business needs? Admittedly I'm not an apple user, but I haven't seen any indication that's it's even on a list. I imagine I'm incorrect.
I would love to try it but it requires Facebook.
I think you're kind of missing the point of why the carrier crapware is bad. It isn't solely because you can't hide it or remove it, it's because in addition to that it is generally really poorly written software that has a terrible user experience and often only exists as an advertisement to some other product or service (ie. NASCAR app). Additionally in the case of some manufacturers and carriers, the standard UI is replaced with potentially less usable, but more importantly non-standard, creating an inconsistant user experience which fragments the platform.

TL;DR: if you buy an iOS device you get a consistant user experience. Thanks to the crapware, from Android you do not.
I would rather have a system where karma has some sort of multiplier for their submissions or comments, i.e. voting for a comment or submission from someone with high karma counts as f(karma) times as many votes. This preserves the "legacy" of HN by weighting submissions and comments from established, validated users higher than newer ones.
Apple itself runs antivirus for their corporate MBPs

Not AFAIK. Certainly not within engineering.
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IT was pretty clear from the story about AirBNB spam that they did not adhere to those requirements, in any way.
I found it interesting that Steve Jobs was worth "only" about $6B when he died, and more of that wealth came from Pixar than Apple. But, the driving force behind wealthy and successful people is very rarely money.
Really cool. Hope they add some stuff for other languages soon!
A successor to MP3.

We know there are better formats than MP3 today but getting mass adoption is difficult. Open source ALAC will give birth to new 3rd party supporting players, not to mention apple products already supports it & we have higher chances of mass adoption.
....says the billionaire.

Sorry but it's true.
Sweet.

And not so sweet: I get a nice failure to build the "convert-utility" on link.

It seems that there is some work to be done on this. I expect the best thing would be for the knowledge/info contained within the source to be merged into exsisting software.
AFAIK, based on the last talk by RMS I attended he condoned copyright on works of fiction only, not on works of fact. So no copyright on manuals, textbooks, scientific articles, etc.
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Well, if a poor person would say that, you'd think that he's trying to fool himself to accept his situation.

I think a billionaire knows better about that.
What $5B gives you isn't more cars, it's the ability to finance anything that you find meaningful to you (public health for Bill Gates, movies with a message for Jeff Skoll, other startups for Reid Hoffman).
Why aren't we taking the bayesian approach?
Agreed. That's why I would love to see it in the hands of Bezos and team.
I'm a person who almost constantly feels hot. I think unconsciously I realized that if I roll the sleeves up on my long sleeve oxfords (when I have to wear them) I feel much more comfortable, but could never figure out why it made such a difference. I suppose it just helped expose more area near my hands and cool me off.

I'd love to have one of these.
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27.
This is a controversial post? "Secure Boot" (without a way to disable or specify keys) is exactly like a locked bootloader on an Android phone.