skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
If we made laws that protected the uniqueness of first names to artificially boost the name creating industry, stealing names would become a crime as well. Name theft in the sense of the law would be theft but it wouldn't be like stealing a car, because stealing a car would have negative repercussions even if it were legal.

Enforcing everyone has unique names might have a high enforcement cost, which is why it may not be worth cost to society. Likewise enforcing copyright for consumer use has become harder and harder as well and at some point it won't be worth it either. Enforcing property laws however is cheap because it's hard for everyone to mass-steal cars and protect their own property.
This is a good use case for "git filter-branch" and a lecture along the lines of "stop doing that".
If it is "just 1s and 0s", does this mean making desktop software is also 'not real work'? And thus, copying desktop software is also not problem just as copying music is not a problem. And programmers should go find a new way to make money that is not developing and selling desktop software?
Skrillex: Happy Holidays Pirate My Music, I’ll Still Love You
If your configs become parameters to your app at initialiisation time, you're in the (pure) Reader monad. See xmonad for an example.
That's your call and I admire it (I think that restriction is a major cause of Lua's famous portability). I like the C99 struct initialisers and the ability to declare things right next to their use site too much to go back.
Chango: Make Music from Light and Motion
The diagram would be forgettable, the information would not. It's like saying if you don't use webdings no one will remember your blog post because it just uses a "legible" font. They, and you, are focusing on the wrong thing. Read you some Tufte.
Good luck in convincing anyone that doing something that's not rational is a good idea. The very definition of rationality is something that represents something good and necessary. I don't know why you'd try and argue for non-rationality/mysterious/spiritual reasons when using something is mathematical and scientific as computers. It's a bad combination.

Also, you don't have to use the whole standard. You know there are people who use C++ for hobby projects? That standard is dozens of times larger than the C standard.
russel - those articles are informative and entertaining. Thanks for the link.
It's not useless to other ZIP programs: you can unzip and zip back the directory with other programs and it will work just fine. The reason? They didn't make a derivative format.

Of course OS X aliases won't work on Windows -- there's no such thing as alias on this operating system. Just like Windows won't magically set Unix permissions on files extracted from ZIP archive created in Unix format. OS X specific things will be useless on other OSes.
Yep - http://staffsquared.com - A web app to help SME owners communicate and manage their staff,
That's a good point. My thinking was chip prices are pretty well known and commotitized while Apple's manufacture of the case is a big unknown to iSupply and everyone else because it's completely custom and no one makes anything similar.
I use very few consumer-facing internet services---but this would be one of them. Some of the things I read are lengthy(e.g. thelastpsychiatrist.com) and having someone read them to me would be awesome.
Yep, created (and sold!) http://cocoacontrols.com.
Apple and Samsung's symbiotic relationship
I use a little utility called GrabBox that does something similar:

http://grabbox.devsoft.no/

When you take a screenshot using any of the built-in tools, you'll see a Growl bubble asking whether you'd like to share the photo. Another one will ask if you'd like to give it a custom name. When you click, the screenshot is copied to your Dropbox/Public/Screenshots, and the public URL is copied to your clipboard. It's pretty slick.
Created http://classfrog.com/staging but still in stealth mode.
The Right Size for an Editor
I'm not sure right now. That was the last I heard before I left for vacation... Keeping to our CEO's advice and not checking any work email until I'm back from the holidays. I'm sure by then it will be apparent one way or another.
Try Tagxedo http://www.tagxedo.com (which I wrote).

I created a better one (based on pg's essay) a while back: http://www.tagxedo.com/shop/y-combinator
Why is the link back to Hacker News a Facebook doorway page? For tracking purposes?
Shuttered mine because I didn't have any time -- I was having to balance it with grad school and my co-founder was working full-time as biz dev for another startup.
I love that you can still click on the dropdowns and they work. You can also type in the text entry fields.
I am a software engineer who works mainly on a Mac. I am fully aware of the existence of .DS_Store files, but it has never bothered me nearly as much as it bothers this guy.

IMHO, this falls into the category of "it's much easier to criticize someone else's design decisions than to make your own." How about you build an OS over the course of 15 years and then I can pick it apart and write hyperbolic rants about all the design details that annoy me?
My operator(Orange) doesn't present this option.
You pass the data around to the functions that need it, just like you would in any programming language.

The simplest case is:

do_work :: Config -> Result
do_work config = ...

read_config :: IO Config

main = do
config <- read_config
print . do_work $ config

But you can also put the configuration in a Reader, and avoid the step of manually passing the config to each function that needs it. Instead of:

my_program :: Config -> Result
step1 :: Config -> Arg -> OneResult
step2 :: Config -> Arg -> SecondResult
my_program config = step2 config . step1 config

You'll write:

my_program = runReader config $ do
x <- step1 42
return . step2 $ x

So let clauses and parameterized modules are not even in the running. Whenever you have a problem in Haskell, the best way to solve it is to ask yourself how you'd solve it in some other language. Then do that.

(Nobody writes software in any language where every function is responsible for reading a config file; that functionality is delegated to some common instance that is passed around as needed. So do that in Haskell, too.)
Former incarnations of the same thing here on HN:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1486158

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=58780
Indie Games not on TIGS or Indiegames: Seraphim Flame [Robert Hoani Bryson]
Want to donate your time to charities? I'm working on a way to make it easy.
Tech focussed startups fighting for the prize of consumer attention.
response: ok
works fine on (Gecko/FF10).
Comments on HN are a huge value-add. I can't stand other tech sites now, where the quality of the conversation is pages of fanboys calling each other names.
Yes, working on http://www.dialshield.com
I also think it is far from ideal and I permanently switched into Linux, want to stay and develop on Linux.

If I do a contract for 24 months, I will pay 99$ for Galaxy 2, and 49$ for Note, and 599$ for Nexus. Do you think it is worth of this much difference?
Ask HN: Review my startup
Hey folks, getting ready to launch a group social discovery/dating website and wanted your input, suggestions, comments, etc. You can access a test beta of the site at the following address:

http://www.planadrink.com/user

The basic premise of the site is to make meeting new people through the internet easier, more comfortable and fun. Currently, most socializing/dating websites focus on a one on one meeting which can be very uncomfortable. We think the best way to meet new people is in the company of your close friends. The vision we have incorporates your already established "social circle" in meeting new friends and potential dating partners online and in reality.

Our goal is to concentrate on making matches through real life group social activities. We we will be providing the medium of establishing new potential successful connections by offering a complete group social interaction and discovery experience.

Our website interface is simple and direct:

1.	Sign-up and create a brief profile.

2.	Add/Invite a maximum of 6 close friends to your circle that you normally socialize with.

3.	Start meeting new circles in your area!
One reason is the risk involved in app purchasing.
With all the other items you essentially already know what you are getting.

With apps you essentially buy them blind.
A crappy app already has your money when you realise it's crap.

Uncertainty leads to a tendency to put things off.

Apps might be much better off if there was an easy way to have a free trial period/limited feature set.

One reason free apps are desirable is because there is no downside risk in obtaining them initially.

If more apps had a free trial period, be it a day or hell even an hour I think we'd see a much greater propensity for people to pay and pay more after the quick trial is open.
shut down the product i started in 2007 because the product i started in 2010 started taking off.
Thanks for suggestion but I have a pretty good machine and don't think changing it in a very short time.
Happy Holidays to you too, OP! :D

I got a quad-core Athlon II CPU, 8GB DDR3 RAM, a new motherboard and a DVD drive for Christmas, so I'm naturally feeling pretty happy about that. :)
Create a custom Siri API using SendGrid's Parse API
Www.workforcedropout.com
Anyone know if the other BSDs share this code?
Ask HN: What software do you want to see open source?
Just wondering. I am a big fan of the open source movement.
Ask PG: what book did you give to your nephew?
I love that comment threads on HN are discussions, not a "who can come up with the wittiest insult" competition. The "keyboard warrior" mentality is usually absent here.
In a world where free blog software and PayPal buttons exist I just don't see the need for drama and hand-wringing over the publishing industry. Write stuff. Put it out there. Charge for it. If its any good it will catch on, enough, eventually, and in proportion to how many people like it. The only bureaucracy or industry inertia or "bad treatment" you potentially expose youself to are the ones you knowingly and voluntarily involve. Get over it, move on and concentrate on writing and delivering.
There is a benefit to splitting concerns. Though I never plan it, over the years I make changes to both DNS and registration for my domains. It always goes smoother when you can update them independently.
The X-Ray phone app they released last month?
Yes, in active development: http://www.expulp.com
You can use this excellent bookmarklet that I snapped from here a good handful of months ago—

javascript:function hn_bc(r){if(r.hits>0){window.location=%22http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=%22+r.results[0].item.id;}else{if(confirm(%22This URL is not yet added to Hacker News. Would you like to submit it?%22)){window.location=%22http://news.ycombinator.com/submitlink?u=%22+encodeURIComponent(document.location)+%22&t=%22+encodeURIComponent(document.title);}}}hn_b=document.createElement(%22script%22);hn_b.setAttribute(%22src%22, %22http://api.thriftdb.com/api.hnsearch.com/items/_search?callback=hn_bc&filter[fields][url][]=%22+escape(document.location));document.getElementsByTagName(%22head%22)[0].appendChild(hn_b);

It submits the article to HN, but if it's already been submitted, it redirects you to the relevant discussion.
I guess we were also amazed at what can pass through security in one airport, but not in another

I've had stuff pass at one airport and confiscated at another. I flew to a meeting in California earlier this year, and my toiletries (packed in a clear ziplock bag) went unchallenged on the flight out, but my toothpaste was confiscated on the return flight.
I've always been leery of people who are obsessed with work to this extent. If work is your only metric, then yeah, its great. I sure would love my employees to have a 'work till you die' attitude. But life != work. Or rather, life > work.

It takes all kinds to make up a society. Some of us want a balanced life; we want to be reasonably good at everything. Some others want to be the best at a certain thing and are willing to sacrifice almost everything else to achieve that goal. To a very crude approximation, those from the former group keep society going while those from the latter push human society forward.

For me, Steve was an interesting curiosity. Not an example to emulate.

On the face of it, there's nothing wrong with being either type, but it does seem like each type cannot fathom why the other behaves the way it does.
Nuance, or some other usable voice recognition software. There are a billion potential applications of this technology, not the least of which is a huge amount of capabilities for enabling the blind. Ideally this technology should be available in a web browser to control web applications. The possibilities are endless.
I enjoy reading all your Forth comments very much, so please write lots more.

My pleasure. :)

Do we know any programs that have been written for them? What does Chuck write?

The largest available program listing for the GA144 that I'm aware of is an MD5 hasher: http://www.greenarraychips.com/home/documents/pub/AP001-MD5....

All I know of Chuck's current projects comes from his blog and the fireside chats he gives at the Silicon Valley Forth Interest Group's annual "Forth Day". They can be found here, along with many other fun presentations: http://www.forth.org/svfig/videos/index.html

It seems he's written some temperature-monitoring and signal processing code, a number of routines for generating VGA video signals and he has begun work on building a ColorForth compiler that can run on the GA144.

Do they provide a foundation for building application-oriented languages in the classic Forth style?

Based on my observations and my own experience tinkering with a softsim for a single F18, the resource constraints of the processing elements make it very difficult to write genuinely reusable code, beyond discovering idiomatic opcode combinations and design approaches. The only way to make your code fit is to code like Chuck- simplify brutally. It would be interesting to see how well an optimizing compiler could take more relaxed, modular Forth (or another language) and squeeze it onto an F18.

What I really want to know is whether this architecture would be suitable for dataflow, i.e. whether you could build a spreadsheet on top of it. It seems not unlike the systolic array architectures that were a hot research topic 25 years ago, and those were thought to be suitable for dataflow.

I concur with your comparison to systolic arrays- the GA144 is more flexible than most of those old designs, but has a very similar character. I think calculating something like a spreadsheet on a grid of F18s could work well, but would need a much larger array of processing elements to be effective. Interconnect is also an issue. The parallelism that can be extracted by dataflow architectures is often a product of the rate at which calculations can fan out, and a grid-based architecture enforces a strict cap. As I'm sure you are well aware, spreadsheet formulae frequently gather input from a large number of other cells and are in turn used in many places, often with only a tenuous relationship to the orthogonal neighbors of a cell.

Your discussion of re-entrancy in spreadsheets raises some interesting ideas. F18 cores in a GA144 are designed to very easily push code to their neighbors to execute- it's the basis of deploying code through the grid. The same capabilities mean that you can write code that dynamically reprograms various parts of the array at runtime. Extensive use of self-modifying code is widely regarded as deep magic nowadays, but I've often imagined programming for a huge FPGA where an OS can assemble new purpose-designed cores on the fly instead of spinning up new processes- these chips could be used in a similar way. Like I said, there's a great deal of new CS theory lurking in this design space.
I voted "no" in the other poll. I am not voting in this poll. I did let at least two domain names go, in part because I actually could not afford to pay for them and in part because they were not going anywhere. We kept the content and that may wind up going into other projects elsewhere in the future. In fact, after "giving up" on one of them, I later thought this might be a good chance to come up with a better name and all that should I ever get around to pursuing it again.

I have been kind of recycling (with updates/additional commentary) some old content from a short-lived, now-defunct blog I used to have, so I think my intent to re-use the content for the two sites is not just wishful thinking or whatever. For now, I have cut down the number of things I am working on and have been focusing the majority of effort on one site. I'm encouraged as it's the most concentrated, productive, consistent effort I have ever managed for any of my websites. Maybe I will actually monetize it at some point and everything! :-P
There's been a great service to do this for a few years. Awesome group out of Oklahoma City.

Basically a news aggregator that incorporates text-to-speech - the love child of Siri and Flipboard.

BuzzVoice (http://buzzvoice.com), formerly PimpMyNews. Have web and iOS apps (probably Android too).

Same founder as PigeonMe.
Hell, look at Rob Enderle...
I'm wondering whether they were incapable of sending back the pictures via an analog signal or didn't do so because they were afraid of eavesdropping - any ideas?
Just saw it mentioned somewhere in all the coverage before Lion's release. Maybe Siracusa's giant review but probably saw it before that from some NDA-breaker on Twitter. :)
A lot of information was in the public media as much as a decade ago: the satellite designations, the film recovery method, the approximate resolution.
Visualizing US Foreign Aid with D3.js
Meh, this is going to be back and forth. I'm all for this rule, not just because of "undevided attention" but unfortunately there's always going to be some sort of device every now and then that'll throw off navigation equipment because someone messed up.

I've heard a story where the chief pilot for a large company with a fleet of corporate jets banned Blackberrys because everytime the plane was landing and the CEO was onboard, the plane lost it DME localizer (older type of aircraft navigation beacon). No biggie, but in a worst case scenario that could easily become an issue.
I don't subscribe to the dogma about tools. You should use what ever gets the job done. I personally use Firefox for debugging (I love FireBug). I use Safari for general browsing, mostly because of the integration of Bookmarks and Reading Lists over iCloud. And I dabble in Chrome when I'm using a non-apple machine. I think all tools are good and bad, and picking one side just limits your options for productivity. My 2 cents.
I am also a software engineer who works mainly on a Mac.

Whether or not I agree with his choice to disable .DS_Store (isn't that _his_ decision, and we can just leave it be?) -- I am totally amazed at his persistence, and eventual success, to implement what he wants. The level of sophistication to live-patch a framework using mach_star is far beyond your ordinary level of interaction with the O.S. Forget about the non-portability or possible breakage on an update, this is _hacking_!

So I disagree with your rejoinder: how about you find a reasonably permanent solution to turning off .DS_Store?
Yes, the lesson learned is that I am better at the tech side than I am the business side and it's bloody difficult to do both at the same time.

Or at least it's too difficult to do both while being a full-time student as well.

At least for me at that point in my life.
I can see the logic in wanting to keep the cabin area uncluttered during landing and takeoff, that debris could really do some damage if it all went flying, but the same logic is true regarding all hand-held electronics and most books too (imagine getting hit in the face with a hardcover copy of The C++ Programming Language)
My guess is that the CCDs of the time weren't up to the resolution that film could provide.
> The F.A.A. does allow some electronics during takeoff and landing. Portable voice recorders, hearing aids, heart pacemakers and electric shavers are permitted during all times of a flight

For pacemakers, do they have a choice? Could the user reasonably turn off his pacemaker during takeoff and landing if he wanted to?
Leaving Godaddy and need free reliable DNS? 
I am hearing a lot of people rant about having to pay for DNS now that they are leaving Godaddy. Well, about a month ago I was in an odd predicament with one of my .re (Reunion Island) domains. Apparently, AFNIC is way behind in how they want DNS handled. They require that all hosting providers respond in a "authoritative" way by listening to Port 53. Unfortunately, most hosting providers lock down Port 53 because it is a security threat. Anyways, after trying to resolve this problem for more than a week I came across free DNS by afraid.org http://bit.ly/freednsafraid It's a free service run by this guy Josh. He started the service years ago as an experiment and handles all inquiries if you have questions. I highly recommend Afraid.org. They even allow you to use custom dns (ns1.yourdomain.com) on their servers.
> I'm talking about forcing an industry that's crucial and operating badly to step their game up.

No you're not. They're not banging on your door to work with you. They don't care about your business and they certainly won't want to hear your advice. Self-publishing your book is not some big, noble game-changing stand that is going to topple the publishing industry. A disinterested observer might call all of this a tantrum...

It's simply not that easy to get people to "step their game up". It generally requires higher status: a powerful negotiating position, sense of shared purpose or dictatorial leadership over them. You have neither. What you do have is your own time and your own life. Use this wisely: don't waste any of your effort reacting to people in this way. If you truly wish to get them to "step their game up" then create a startup and directly compete with them. Self-publishing will take a while to scale but a startup could act as a catalyst...

Distilled, here's my advice:

When you're angry at people but lack an actionable plan on how to deal with them ignore them. Instead: find what you can control and use it to create value.
Setting aside Knuth for a second, this Web of Stories project is pretty great. I hope this grows.
Time to reflect on the year
I assume this is related to this really interesting NPR story from awhile back:

http://www.npr.org/2011/10/29/141824562/spy-satellite-engine...

My favorite part was the technology used to return the photos to earth:

Once a reel of film was finished, it was loaded into a re-entry pod and sent back to earth. "And then at around 50,000 feet, a parachute would slow it down, and a C-130 airplane caught it in midair over the Pacific," Pressel says.
I still have my reservation on Pan Am from the 1964 worlds fair.
Programmers already did - complete, mandatory binding to online services because your user account / subscription can't be distributed like the software.
Not to my knowledge. Chrome Apps and the Chromebook will be yet another quietly abandoned Google pet project that will burn any developers naive enough to hitch their cart to that horse.
I just posted a comment with a link to a story about how they sent the film itself back to earth. Fascinating stuff, and unbelievably complex.
This is the tech equivalent of being trapped in a Portlandia skit. You guys are taking his parody seriously...
Seq303 - an analogue sequencer emulator. There's one feature I'd add to it which I can't do without source.

(I want to add the ability to change the length of notes in the sequence; not all notes at the same time but individual notes.)
Until the updated version gets written, just a reminder that's been said several times and that PG reiterated at this year's Startup School: focus more on solving problems instead of ideas.