skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Like the OP, I'm finding myself spending more and more time reading on my nook color. Though the LCD is slightly less comfortable than my eInk Sony ebook, having wikipedia a touch away is really too great to explain. I've read many, many books over the last weeks. One or two a week (last week, Jules Verne' "le testament d'un excentrique", the week before Jack London's" people of the abyss" and Verne's "la maison à vapeur").

And I still have a huge shelf of paper books to read :) Thinking of it, I probably spend most of my time reading something anyway (I read tons of magazines, blogs, HN, reddit, etc. too). I'm a real book worm :)

You say that you're reading about 25 pages per hour, that seems really slow; are you sure you aren't sub-vocalizing? Do you by any chance make the words sound in your head (or even your glottis)? This is often the main reason why some people have altogether slow reading and poor understanding.
I never knew it was called the H.E.A.R.T. act. Classic congress there.
Government could strip citizenship from Americans under Enemy Expatriation Act
Maybe it's a poorly written summary, but I see no link.

I see findings of insecticide, and I see bee deaths, but I see no finding of a link - I don't even see a correlation.

To show a correlation you have to compare rates of bee deaths in various locations, and rates of insecticide use. Then establish they move together.

Even that is not a link, but it's something. To actually establish a link you have to manipulate insecticide usage and watch bee deaths change.
I think just using a pastel color on the "Official Site" lozenge would work well. Maybe a goldenrod to suggest the idea you're trying to communicate.

The gold seal/blue ribbon idea is a good one but may disrupt the very-text-based rhythm of this page.
"We put cgi-bin in our dynamic urls to fool competitors about how our software worked."

Love it.
Kudos to Google for owning up to it rather than shifting blame to others. I wonder what kind of internal control Google has. Google is big enough that some of the internal/external auditing controls needed to be in place.
A lot of languages have constructs that allow changing an attribute into a method call transparently (@property in python and D)
Why would Google employees do this? Such risky venture and for what? An extra bonus? Moving up the career ladder? Unless they were doing a startup privately, it makes no sense... why go through such desperate measures?

It makes one wonder if people in the search term can manually mess around with the results to promote their own interests.
Friday the 13th
Google's response to Mocality (Kenya): We were mortified to learn...
I should have mentioned up front that I strongly agree with your core point about legal penalties and their effects on selection bias.

I was hoping the Wikipedia page on 'expert systems' would bail me out the examples front, but its 'disadvantages' section isn't all that clear or complete. It does touch on the issue I mentioned, though.

I think many high-frequency stock trading algorithms are examples. The trades may as well be magical, and as long as the program makes money the owner doesn't much care why.
The homepage is timeless and quite good even by today's standards. It gets across very clearly what you can do, what the product is, pricing and why you should use. It contains "awards" giving the visitor confidence in using the service.

"So you can build a store and start taking orders in minutes."
Ask HN: Where to find freelance web developers in Germany?
Everyday we read that Berlin is the next SV of Europe, there are many startups opportunities. It's already 3 hours I search a freelance web-developer in Baden-Württemberg region (to be able to contact him if needed) in Germany but could't find anyone!! Please share some freelance job portals in Germany if you know them.
Passion is what inspires people to do all kinds of things - healthy and unhealthy. But without passion we might as well just be worker drones leading a meaningless existence. The richness of our culture as a human race is all due to passion, for better or worse.

As far as the USA, feel like Europe, South America and many other places are known as more passionate cultures. Perhaps it is not as pragmatic as some other communist societies, but I don't think the USA is on the top of the "passion" scale.
This is the original trademark application which was approved:

http://tarr.uspto.gov/servlet/tarr?regser=serial&entry=7...
Thanks. I am interested in the general theory of how every database does it; it bothers me that this area of software engineering is terra incognita to me.
Ari Emanuel Told Mark Andreessen, Ron Conway That He’ll Help Them Fight SOPA
The eyes probably remind them that they can get caught. They weigh their risks and decide that it is not worth it.
> Such as PIPA and SOPA?

Bad legislation and lobbyism are no reasons for or against anything.

> Believing that a concept such as a digital pattern or an idea is property that belongs to someone is borderline religious -- because I'm sure you fervently believe it without any supporting evidence.

That is arbitrary from an objective point of view. Now name me a law or human concept that is not.

Thank you for your assumptions about SOPA and fervent religiousness in a thread that has to do with neither.
> It's obviously true that there is not a 1:1 relationship between piracy and lost sales. But it's also not a 0:1...some pirated copies are in fact lost sales

Another thing to consider is that pirated copies can be lost sales to someone OTHER than the owner of the pirated material.

Suppose I would like a game to relax with. I'm willing to spend up to $20. I see a game that I'd like but it is $50--so I pirate it. Let's assume that if I could not have pirated it, I would not have bought. $50 is simply off the table for me.

We can't reasonably count my pirated copy as a lost sale to the maker of that $50 game.

However, if I could not have pirated it I would still want to have a game. I would have probably found an older game that I could get for $20, or perhaps picked up an indie title or two.
Facebook Debit Card for White Hat Hackers
Apple Releases List of Its Suppliers for the First Time
I had a similar experience. I was taking a flight home from Arizona, and the TSA agent stopped me because my drivers license was expired. He let me board because my Sam's Club card (which I don't believe has an expiration date) had my photo on it (a TINY Black and white picture).

Not sure how I would have renewed my license from out of state, if they didn't let me on the plane. I'm pretty sure I couldn't rent a car and drive home!
I keep reading people saying this, but my netbook screen is 1024px wide, and eating up any of that space turns websites into things that must be scrolled horizontally as well as vertically.

Unity ruined Ubuntu on my netbook because of that. Sites that I read before no longer fit in the screen width, including Ubuntu's own homepage.

I dumped that noise and installed LXDE and made my netbook usable again.
I think this idea is that you can use "properties" rather than public class variables.

Then you can convert your public vars into properties at a later date.

This means that you will not have to (necessarily) rewrite your code as the language knows that

a = myobj.myvar

now should call getmyvar() in the containing class and:

myob.myvar = a

should call setmyvar(a) , I know that C# certainly allows this.
Can you provide any examples? Was it the tools he was using, notes he was making, or diagrams he was drawing? I haven't seen him program, so I'm curious as to what makes him so much more productive.
Lilupophilupop SQL Injection Tops 1 Million Infected Pages
>I've only just this minute taken a mere six steps to get from Jack Lemmon to Samuel Pepys

I wonder how often a path between two pages on Wikipedia is unique once its length is known. (You know, assuming no cycles were abused inbetween.)
The libvirt & virtualization tools software development platform
If my girls show any interest in CS, I'm moving the family to NYC. Done.
Reminds me of Infospace back in the 90's. Same goal: dominate directory services. Started by an ex-Microsoftie. He made millions.

But later the truth was revealed. His was not an honest business. Prosecutors moved in on it. No more Infospace. And some Wall Street analysts were banned from ever working on Wall Street again. See BusinessInsider.

Google is giving away free websites. It's an easy way to get someone's information for their database, for only yhe cost of electricity and bandwidth. But then they will turn around and sell database access or services to others.

Google is doing anything and everything to horde public information.

That's fine.

But then they want to charge others (businesses) for access.

Good luck with that.
Instantly made me think of "Carthago delenda est"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carthago_delenda_est
A brand new Basecamp developer is allowed to push a change like "disable HTML support" directly into production, without anyone pointing out that it might be a bad idea? Seriously?
No.

C# and Objective-C (And I assume similar languages too) can have public accessors which are not used like function. No need to add ()'s everywhere.
Police are perfectly behaved when the proper permits have been filed...Here's a photo I took of when the hundreds of pilots protested on Wall Street (also at the same time as OWS): http://www.flickr.com/photos/zokuga/6190171031/

And for protests without permits...the cops are generally going to not do anything but watch unless there's an imminent public safety issue. They don't like bad publicity as much as the next person, and I imagine they're going to be particularly wary of very tech-savvy groups, for obvious reasons.
Tell HN: Buenos Aires HN meetup
We were thinking about going out to meet some fellow HNers, care to :q that vim for a few hours and join us?

Timing might not be the best since there is probably a lot of people out of the city on vacations, but a post is definitely worth to gauge interest!
Eh, using protected/private members is one of those things that makes sense only insofar as you are paranoid that you can't just access internals directly.

That said, consider the following. I've got a renderer that accepts a sprite to draw.

Version 1: I pass the sprite object to the renderer, and the renderer gets the texture contained in the sprite and draws it, scaling it according to the sprite's size and position public members.

I then decide that all of my sprites draw slightly differently (different scales/glow effects/color tint/whatever).

Version 2: I pass the renderer my sprite, it gets the size and render settings members from the sprite, and then draws it.

Oops! I now decide I want a hierarchy of sprites, so that I can add hats.

Version 3: Same as version 2, but in the draw routine now the renderer asks the sprite for its parent to calculate its position and size, and now I've got more renderer code and more sprite code. I can't just use the exposed position member of the sprite--it has context and logic behind it that must be done.

Oh wait, I have a problem in which the sprite glow might change depending on how many times its been drawn.

Version 4: The renderer now has to keep track of how many times it's drawn a sprite. My renderer is getting a bit chunky now.

Did I mention scale should change according to time but also the sprite's velocity?

Version 5: Renderer grabs these variables directly, and does all that other stuff too.

...and that now I want to let that scale be overridden by a isConstantSize flag on the sprite?

Version 6: aaaaaargh

...and that now the sprite can decide it wants to defer to a parent sprite's settings sometimes?

Version 7: what did i do to deserve this?

~

Proper encapsulation and use of accessors is clearly a sign of paranoia. That said, as your code evolves, you might find that this paranoia is completely justified. Hiding queries behind interfaces lets you future-proof them and trivially add more advanced behavior and hooks.

Even when you are working by yourself on an internal project, you are never working alone. You are also working with your future self, and that person is guaranteed to want something different from you and to make assumptions that you are not.
I think I'd have replied with something like:
"Thank you for taking responsibility and beginning to compensate me for the extra time I worked for your company. The balance that is owed is $AMOUNT. If you would like to contest this amount, please provide a detailed accounting of your calculations. Otherwise, I will appreciate knowing your intended payment schedule.

Again, thank you for acknowledging the former shortcomings with regards to salary and pay.

--Former Employee"

I would honestly have steered the correspondence in this direction. Kinda saying "yes, the money you sent is MINE" without saying it directly.
if you consider the honor box a suggested donation box, is that a business

A fine question, and an ongoing local issue near me: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123422026431565295.html
A local Thai temple has a mandatory voluntary donation scheme that they use to skirt a lot of laws. I love their food, but am against their sham.

The sales tax is likely included in the dollar amount.

Could be, but I'd bet that he's technically non-compliant. The rules are mighty complex. Our next-door neighbor restaurant was recently fined heavily for considering their sandwich purchases "take out" while providing unofficial side-walk seating.

We (well, specifically, I) don't know if DC requires permits for re-selling food-stuff.

If we are to consider it a "sale", then I think he would require a Vending Machine License: http://dc.gov/DC/DCRA/For+Business/Apply+for+a+Business+Lice...

It probably depends on how much revenue is produced by each location.

I deal with many such laws in California, and have not found many such exclusions. Rather, like speeding, the behaviour is technically illegal but regulated with only selective enforcement. I don't like selective enforcement.

Just as sidewalk Lemonade stands don't require permits, in most locales.

I think this is again mostly selective enforcement. It's been a big issue lately: http://www.forbes.com/sites/erikkain/2011/08/03/the-inexplic...

Anyhow, all that is speculative, unless you have facts.

True. I can really only speak only to my experience running a food business in California, where my opinion is that it is impossible to run a business without breaking numerous laws. Heck, I just learned last month that all of my employees are working illegally: http://sanfrancisco.grubstreet.com/2011/06/so_has_anyone_in_...

If someone else goes against ethics, does it grant me a waiver to act unethically?

This is indeed the real question. It certainly doesn't grant an unconditional waiver, but I think there can be mitigating factors. Would it matter that the Bagel Guy has the permission of the business (he does)? What if he was representing it as a charity: http://bulkvending.blogspot.com/2008/04/making-money-from-ch...

I think the question is ethics. While the article was entertaining, it didn't delve deeply enough into the situation to be informative on ethics. I post to HN hoping that discussion might be able to happen here...
Ask HN: Indie Android Dev Marketing
I have recently written 3 android games, that are published on the marketplace. Do any of you know of sites that tailor to small apps and games, that I could get in contact with to review my games?

Or do you have any feedback for an indie android developer?

If you yourself are interested you can do a search for my username on the marketplace (dsgraham).

Each game was written completely in less than 48 hours.
Who was talking about Scala?
Oh, man... this alone makes me want to get a Kindle/iPad.

EDIT: Looks like it doesn't work with a regular ol' computer. Is there another site that has more multi-device support?
Do you donate money to the people who write the free software you use?
Mr. O'Reilly's words speak for themselves in the article:
"..the fact is that piracy is not a significant problem.. I talked with Nancy Pelosi .. and she said that the experience with piracy is different for people in the movie industry. Maybe, I’m not a movie producer."

"So here we have this legislation, with all of these possible harms, to solve a problem that only exists in the minds of people who are afraid of the future."

He assertion that the problem is an illusion almost immediately follows his statement that he has no idea about how much harm piracy does to the movie industry. So he does not know how big the problem is but he knows it is an illusion?
This is an interesting question and I look forward to its ultimate resolution.

Personally speaking, I don't believe she should have to reveal the password because I don't believe defendants should be required to assist the government in prosecuting them.
Hi zed, Thanks for your awesome book. I started learning python from your book in preparation for a new job I was going to take and I had no previous experience about scripting languages. Not only did your book help me learn python, but the way you talked about programming in your book got me to believe that all I needed to do was to work harder to become a better programmer. I was at a point in my life where I thought that I just wasn't built for programming. I am still an average programmer, but now I know I just need to keep working. Thanks a lot.
Payment rates would change but my guess is sales would be hurt. I think people will be turned off by the implied message that their company could not be trusted and would punish Bagel Guy by not giving their business.
To get the drop on an emerging market. Obviously the 200 rupee hosting costs are negligible, but becoming the de facto tech provider in an emerging market like Kenya is worth millions.
That's a false dichotomy--a school focusing on CS does not preclude covering other subjects well. I doubt anybody wants to do away with art or music or English--rather, they want to take the existing curriculum and add CS, more than they've been able at normal schools.

Both my father and my uncle went to a mathematically oriented school in Russia; however, this does not mean their education suffered. What it meant was that on top of doing normal school, they had more math taught at a faster pace.

Specializing in high school does not stop you from getting a well rounded education, but it can provide focus and ensures an exceptionally thorough grounding in whatever subject you're specializing in.
It's an interesting question. Certainly, I know of a few people that after high school got urban planning degrees and seem to be happy in their jobs, so I am not one to denigrate fields related to construction. However, on a daily basis I am bombarded with articles that say how the supply of software engineers is low, but I don't often see articles that says that the supply of mechanical and civil engineers is low. Of course, my sample is thoroughly biased because I hang out in software circles - however, I still suspect that the supply of mechanical and civil engineers is just fine.

It all comes back to the difference between "requirement" and "elective". A situation where you must take a class in a field where the supply seems to be ok, but not in a field where the supply is low seems to be wrong.
TeachText, Going to Change Classrooms Everywhere.
It wouldn't matter if piracy was a serious problem. Even if it was destroying half of the revenue of the entertainment industry per year, for example.

There is no excuse to destroy due process and freedom of speech on the internet. None. Not piracy. Not child porn. Not terrorism. None.
Life is hard. The generation before mine still remembers a time when in some parts of the USA, it took year-round back-breaking labor just to eke out a living. There was no asking them what they wanted to do. There was no telling them to follow their agricultural passions. Everybody was expected to do their share to ensure that the family didn't freeze or starve.

This is what life was like for all but the very wealthy for thousands of years.

How fortunate are we to live in this time when this is no longer necessarily true in the developed world. When things get tough and your basketweaving Ph.D. no longer opens doors for you, that's not betrayal. It's not a reason to Occupy anyplace. It's the default state of things. So sod your passions, your aspirations, your pie-in-the-sky dreams. Do what needs to be done. Wash dishes. Scrub floors. Stack boxes. Whatever.
IMHO most software 'service life' it's not long enough to justify the annoyance of the accessors.

Most software are outdated after a couple of years.

But I still think that accessors are a must if you know that the software will be immortal (like Internet banking applications)
I just spoke with two offices for representatives in Michigan and the basic response you'll receive is: "we'll take note of your opposition and pass it along to the representative."

I asked for a meeting and was told that I could either show up at the representative's office or leave a note.

It takes 5 minutes to do this, so please take a moment and call.
Grooveshark launches HTML5 webapp
Oh, and for good measure--everytime you force yourself to use an accessor, you are providing the opportunity for somebody down the line to add debug and validation code. Or to add locking and critical sections. Or replace a dumb get and recalculation with caching. Or replace caching with a dumb get. Or a database access.

This flexibility is not something you might think you need.

You might also never need to debug your own code, or check your assumptions about variables, or track who is accessing what when.

(for what it's worth, I don't use protection for data members of Plain-Old-Data types [say, messages or vectors] very often--they're too dumb to deserve this sort of extensibility or cost)
Fascinating. I had no idea about the Brooklyn Tech major system. We didn't have one - you had your requirements, and then it's a free-for-all after that.
So what happens next?

Realistically I don't think there's any legal action they can take - can they?

Also, how does Google "make this right" with them?
Tether: Rejected By Apple But Still A Multimillion Dollar App
Ask HN: What books an Entrepreneur should read?
This topic is purposely too general. Because, I don't want to miss out books like "Guerrilla Marketing", which gave an overview of marketing in 3 days for me. There were books about Behavioral economics I finished, which were so helpful, eventhough it doesn't have immediate effect on my business.

So, the general question is, what books were useful to you in building your business.
> On the other hand, the ordering T_0,A,0 < T_0,A,1 < T_0,B,0 < T_0,B,1 is arbitrary.

Still don't see it. We are already making the assumption that the millisecond part is the same T_0. So then seq will depend strictly on the count of previous such IDs issued by that node only (would you agree with that?). So that is why I said that it doesn't make sense to compare seq number from A -- (0) and a seq number of B -- (1) before considering the identity of A & B. You would effectively order by relative load between all your machines at that particular time, at that time frame it would be things like disk access, cache states and so on.

EDIT:

In addition. Ordering T_0,A,0 < T_0,A,1 < T_0,B,0 < T_0,B,1 will be stable though, machine A,B mac addresses don't change. For any particular millisecond you will get all the results for a particular machine then those results will be sorted by sequence # so you would even get some kind of a relative load measurement.

Let's look at a longer example:

T_0,A,0

T_0,A,1

T_0,B,0

T_0,B,1

T_0,B,2

T_0,B,3

T_0,C,1

T_0,C,2

T_0,C,3

T_0,D,0

I think is a lot better order than

T_0,0,A

T_0,0,B

T_0,0,C

T_0,0,D

T_0,1,A

T_0,1,B

T_0,1,C

T_0,2,B,

T_0,2,C

T_0,3,B

T_0,3,C
Was it confusing to have to learn about HTTP, cookies, Javascript, HTML, stateless servers, etc?