skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"Here's a compositional secret. It's so obvious and simple, you'll say to yourself, 'This man is bullshitting me.' I am not. This is one of the most fundamental things in all theatrical movie composition and yet magicians know nothing of it. Ready?

Surprise me.

That's it. Place 2 and 2 right in front of my nose, but make me think I'm seeing 5. Then reveal the truth, 4!, and surprise me."

Teller absolutely means this. Watching the Penn and Teller Magic and Mystery Tour, this was the one best scenes in that show or in anything else I watched on Netflix last year:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TgtgOs_OkTU

Yes, Teller is speaking, but that isn't what matters at all. The takeaway for me is that you must KNOW YOUR AUDIENCE! This is a magic trick that would not be a magic trick at all if it weren't performed for someone like Teller, a master of his craft. This scene from an otherwise interesting but forgettable show blew my mind.
Actually, with the sort of knowledge you have in your bag, you could not be considered a script kiddie anymore.

Learn what you want because it moves you in the direction you want to go and don't care too much about the others.

It is all about your ability to hack a problem and the having fun while doing it.

cheers.
Title is wrong, this isn't 'laundering' its just fraud.

So the TL;DR version - App has a way to purchase virtual goods, app vendor 'sells' such goods but money from Apple at the end of the day doesn't add up to the number of goods they sold. Reason is that some of the 'sales' are contested by users which then result in charge backs and Apple returns the cash and deducts that out of what they send to the developer.

This sort of stuff will eventually kill 'in-app' purchases. The fraud rate is too high, the money too lucrative (which keeps the fraud rate high), the laws protect the consumer (that is good btw).

So the developer is left 'holding the liability' which is to say their virtual goods are 'stolen' and they don't get paid what they expect. Apple doesn't lose, the Credit Card companies don't lose, only the developer does.

So if you are looking for a startup idea, figure out a way to provide a remote 'kill switch' on virtual goods. Which is to say, from the developer's perspective if the purchase doesn't completely go through and stay valid, the item vanishes. That will kill the black market for such goods and return the problem to direct fraud vs the indirect fraud which makes it hard to fix.
Would-be China Defector, Once Bo Xilai’s Right Hand, Oversaw Organ Harvesting
If you can stay true to the quality over quantity goal, BetaKit could very well become one of my most read sites. But I suspect it would be very hard to do so — everything I've experienced with online journalism suggests that quantity of posts is what pays the bills.

Best of luck to you though!
Twitter Looks Different??
Show HN: MVP for improving mental arithmetic
Wow, nice common sense analysis of the cost of his attendance.

My point is that it's unethical. I realize it's not going to make or break the charity.
17.1: Apps cannot transmit data about a user without obtaining the user’s prior permission and providing the user with access to information about how and where the data will be used

3.3.9 You and Your Applications may not collect user or device data without prior user consent, and then only to provide a service or function that is directly relevant to the use of the Application, or to serve advertising. You may not use analytics software in Your Application to collect and send device data to a third party.

So. These apps will be removed from the app store immediately, yes?

It is my understanding that a person's address book can be a trade secret, and is protected by law.
Why do people always take these so seriously?

It's far more likely that a bored teenager somewhere wrote this.

Also, if we were to assume that Anonymous does actually exist in some semblance, they would never ship a notice like this with gramatical errors. They're small, but obvious.

I'll eat my foot if they actually manage to make a noticeable affect on the DNS servers anyway.
You can get a 200+GB SSD for a reasonable price. And while it might not sound like it 200+GB is a LOT of data. Chances are it's going to hold everything except some media files (Music / Movies). But you can cheaply store them on a HDD or a remote file server. And once you have that file server you can cheaply play those movies at any computer or any PS3/XBOX/iPad/Boxee (etc) in your house which is really nice. So, while it might cost a little extra and take a little more work there is a lot to be said for going down the SSD path.

Of course you can also get a smaller SSD and or use it as your only disk drive, but they do really make that old file server idea really appealing especially if you have more than one computer.
Joe Hewitt's counterargument was that there would be less divergence in that case than the situation today.
Use both. But the OS and application files on the smallish SSD, and the data on the hard disk. Most "active" data can easily fit in 64G. The rest is stuff that is not accessed often enough to need the speed of an SSD.
And about 5000 years for the great user in the sky to notice something you produce/do.
Interesting - that article is one of my favourites, but I always thought the conclusion was a little more balanced. In addition to the idea that legislators and content creators don't understand bits, I think that the author also wanted to say that programmers and netizens don't understand "colour".
Article might be worthy, but this title gives me no insight into the content of the article and thus doesn't allow me to decide if I want to see it or not in a first place. How would I guess that it's about "network of blogs with the blatant self-interest machine"?
Sony Signs Ghost Rider Director Brian Taylor for Twisted Metal Film
Sony has said to have signed a large sum contract with Brian Taylor to create a movie based on the popular Twisted Metal game. The movie which is expected to follow the same story as the games, based around the underground vehicle war battles, will surely be popular with fans of the series of games. Read on for more.
Actually, this sandwich analogy is not as good as the library/book one.

In this analogy, you are busy while you are making your sandwich (because you are putting it together from stuff you got from your fridge).

In the library-with-free-delivery-service analogy, you can do other work while you wait for data from the library/RAM to be delivered.

Modern superscalar processors can re-order non-dependent instructions while waiting on a memory lookup, and that is what the free-delivery-service aspect of the analogy illustrates.
Languages for For Live Coding
> I also think that most people bought this only because they wanted to prove to the world that it would work (DRM-less and cheap media).

I think the number of people concerned with making a gesture to push some political agenda about DRM is dwarfed by the number of people who like Louis C.K.'s stuff from HBO and FX and think $5 is a great deal for a 60 minute special.
Is anyone else as impressed as I am that Teller remembered the name of an up-and-coming magician they met after a show more than a year earlier? And that he referenced the 'inside joke' with no prompting?

Also, I think folks are missing what seems to me to be the key takeaway: "And if I'm good, it's because I should be a film editor. Bach should have written opera or plays. But instead, he worked in eighteenth-century counterpoint." He's taking something that's well understood in one area and bringing it to an area where that thing is not understood. Sometimes people call that a 'distinctive'. Sometimes it's a 'paradigm shift'. Teller could have been an average film editor, or he could take ideas from film and bring them to magic.
American currency is already destroyed - what's with the whack colors and big heads? It's getting to be like furrin money! Besides, pennies should have pictures of wheat on the back, and nickels should contain silver.

We can't even get rid of the penny, which is a worthless coin. Worse since its intrinsic metal value is worth more than a penny.

But the special interest groups of the cotton industry and the Crane Paper Company, and employees of the Bureau of Engraving and Printing, and their influence in Congress, keeps change at bay.
Excellent idea. I like the idea of different content (rather than only different design) for mobile devices - only show what is absolutely necessary. I also really like that this is done with CSS; much cleaner than a mobile-only site, though you aren't saving any bandwidth here (it's just text, though). Anyway, nice experiment.
I would interpret this for this scenario as "If you make (reasonably original) graphics for a theme, you do not need to release the graphics as GPLv2 if you release the graphics standalone. If you, however, release the graphics as a part of the theme, you need to put the graphics under GPLv2 aswell".

The mail quoted at http://wordpress.org/news/2009/07/themes-are-gpl-too/ classified the images and css as standalone works. They then concluded that the standalone works did not fall under GPL2. But the excerpt in the parent seems to state that these actually must be GPLv2:ed if bundled with the derivative work, no?

So my interpretation is that the disclaimer is in conflict with the licence, since the licence actually requires you to GPLv2 standalone work when bundling with derivative.
(IANAL)
Unlike a lot of folks here I mostly agree with the list - I'm a self-taught programmer as well. But don't stop with the The Little Schemer - grab The Seasoned Schemer as well, and if you can make it through The Reasoned Schemer you'll learn quite a few things that many programmers know nothing about.

I still think that Rich Hickey's list, http://www.amazon.com/Clojure-Bookshelf/lm/R3LG3ZBZS4GCTH is the best collection of self-taught programmer must reads I've encountered.
List it on http://hntrades.com/ or with a company like Sedo.
What are some examples of original research published in the Encyclopedia of Physics? What's an example of something documented in the Encyclopedia of Physics that isn't traceable to some earlier publication in something like Physical Review Letters?

I think you've missed my point with regards to experts writing in encyclopedias. I didn't say they can't; I said they probably shouldn't, as it's a waste of their time. Of course, if Britannica is paying you to, different story.
This reminds moe of Joe Davis' Telescopic Text: http://www.telescopictext.com/. Assuming you see this on a desktop computer, it's exactly the opposite of Frankie's responsive text: instead of gradually reducing the amount of information, it gradually increases it.
Sigh, the best practices book is not only about syntax. Troll much? (If you do crave bondage and discipline use Java.)

There are advantages and disadvantages with everything. Some of Perl's advantages today are CPAN, Moose and quite extensible syntax.

This is a good example of those three advantages:

http://search.cpan.org/~flora/MooseX-Declare-0.35/lib/MooseX...

(Note the optional typing of method parameters and attributes.)
I also especially liked the "be the $personality of $unrelated_domain". I think it could work really well because you can extract "meta-qualities" (if you'll excuse the made up term) that personality has and re-apply them to your domain.

Musically, punk rock popped into existence in a world of disco and polished/complex 'arena rock', bringing music back down to the essentials and playing it loud and fast. Be the punk rocker of startups by creating products that are lean, refuse to hide anything under a polish, and don't apologize for it.

When you edit a video (without musical soundtrack), you can get a good pacing for the scene by editing it to sync up with a song that evokes the emotions you want to express, and then removing the song when you render out. In this way you take in the qualities of pacing/emotions of the music, but don't need to actually reference the music.

And of course, we all write our code like poets. We rewrite lines that don't fit in well, and we refactor when functions get too long. Or we at least recognize when we're reading something that someone has put effort into crafting.

I'm not sure I'm supporting the argument well, so much as I'm just dumping out thoughts that the idea triggered.
We have no proof that this is even Anonymous. We have nothing that says that the author of this is even a hacker or knows hackers. Any person following the Anonymous attacks and statements could have easily written this file.

Why is this on hacker news? This is not news, this is a poorly (tech wise) written short story.
Brilliant!

Are you using the Summly API to condense the text?

Could be a good solution to @kyle's comment.
I've seen it work for him in person in Austin about 7 years ago. I think (some) local entrepreneurs value his gusto. His reasons seem different than party crashers from DC, he just does extraordinary things to be able to talk to successful people.

That said, most people will not be able to replicate.
I couldn't reply to repsilat for some reason.

I agree mostly with your statement except that we are speaking about legal terms. It's important to make the distinction between theft and copyright infringement laws. They were made for very different purposes.
Better yet, have the OS ask for the user's permission when the call is made like iOS does for GPS and push notifications.

Then you'll only bug the user if they use a feature that requires the call, instead of giving a list of permissions when the app is installed.
I agree, but I think this format could work well in certain situations where it can be done automatically, like for comments with karma. You could vary the threshold for hidden comments, so mobile users see less but overall higher quality comments (with a link to show hidden ones), and desktop users see all by default.
Okay, how is this worth -2? 0 I can see, but several others downvoted as well.

I seriously don't see how trade secret law applies to this case. Trade secret law rarely comes up in the context of software, so please treat this as a chance for education, not downvoting.
Have heroes outside of [startups / technology / business]. That's a solid statement right there.
We do something similar to this on Lanyrd - try shrinking the browser window on http://sxsw.lanyrd.com/ for example. The labels on the tabs change from "your sessions, your contacts' sessions, all sessions (1114), attendees (2594)" at the widest setting to "you, contacts, all, attendees" on narrower screens.

It's implemented by wrapping a span with a class of "not-narrow-friendly" around the words that should be hidden at narrow widths, then using media queries to hide them.
Cool! My first stab at this used an embedded dos @font-face (I think there's a branch in the repo) but I found the canvas text API too limited: it's a huge battle to control things like kerning and aliasing in a way that works across browsers, for example. I really wanted things to be pixel-perfect, so I ultimately decided to dump the actual bitmap font into a hex array and do the rendering myself.

I am hoping (perhaps naively) that rendering to a canvas element will inspire people to do creative things. It'd be awesome to combine this with something like three.js and create 3D ANSI art (by interpreting darkness as depth, for example).
Ok, time for someone to do a Javascript version of TheDRAW.
Dear Developer, excuse me while I slap you silly
I think the author is not looking deep enough. Universities form and fund consortiums all the time for one reason or another. The US Government funds even more and has more resources. If either the universities, or the US government, wanted academic research to be public by default, they could bypass the publishers entirely and do so with comparatively little effort. In this case the "publishers" are merely the fall guys. Something much more important is going on.
Obama campaign launches technology campaign office in SF
It is a nice read. The funny thing is, when it comes to host a web application people still think the hardware is just an utility and price has necessarily to be the lowest possible.

They do not think about the volumes the application will have to serve and which compromise on computing power and redundancy they will have to make to ensure their application will run.

Most of the time it all boils down just to the price. Weird.
1) Click on link
2) See a bunch of images in a Masonry grid
3) Don't see a logical structure of the content
4) Close

Sorry Chill, pivot again?
I guess you're right, it's a flawed argument. In fact, considering that I use exactly your argument to support/demand not eating meat, I guess it shows that I might just be going for a post hoc rationalization of actions that emotionally appeal to me in this case.

But just to play devil's advocate, might the charity decide that they want to take in a certain amount of money from an event and set ticket prices accordingly, thus passing the cost on to attendees? (The implication being that it's less ethically dubious to leech off of rich people than charities.)
Developers say Apple needs to overhaul iOS user information security
I'm surprised that Apple didn't do this four years ago, when an iPhone game was found doing the same thing (and transmitting the data in cleartext.)

http://isource.com/2008/07/23/aurora-feint-removed-from-app-...

The game was removed, but the (obvious) policy change wasn't made.
If this was such a minor little mistake, why does the congress suddenly deal with it?

http://www.macrumors.com/2012/02/15/congress-weighs-in-on-io...
How to crash a blog.

[link doesn't work]
Ugh, that never really worked, did it?
No one was complaining about having to ask the user for permission to access an address book. People were complaining about silly, arbitrary rules, like banning dictionary apps for "not being family friendly" or walling off entire areas of computer science from third-party developers because of some obscure pissing match between Steve and Adobe.

It's disingenuous at best to compare user privacy protection with the massive list of rules enforced by Apple for reasons that never had anything to do with protecting users.
First: Brian is the man. (Had him on a show I used to be on called The 404, and he had me both laughing and vomiting by the end of the show.)

Second: Teller's advice is echoed by another great... Ira Glass. He talked about how to make it in broadcasting. http://shorty.randallcbennett.com/post/36484012/ira-glass-gi...

The thing with all of this is pretty simple. When you start, you have taste. If you have good taste, you'll know what you're making isn't quite what you want, but it's on the way to being good. If you keep perfecting your taste along the way, you're making positive progress. For startup entreprenuers, that often means starting lots of insignificant companies / working at insignificant companies on your way to perfecting the sense of who you are.

I feel like I'm _just_ starting to know who I am professionally. It's been about 7 years, and now I know that the only thing I want to do is make it so anyone can create TV quality video without a TV quality budget.

Failing in numerous ways has finally led me to figure out who I am. Now, it's time to take what I've learned and actually contribute something to the world.

For Brian, it's kickass magic which people can consume online. For me, who knows what my end "product" will be, but either way, if you don't enjoy the taste refining process, you'll probably both be dissatisfied with your life, but also miss out when you're about to break through.

I hope anyway.
Calm down bro. You work at Chill.
You also need access to finance who grock the industry your working in - if you can, watch the documentary Micro Men there's a great scene where Cris Curry and Hermann Hauser are trying to explain to some local clueless bank manger that they want to build a personnel computer (the Acorn Atom)
My syncing apps manifesto: Dropbox + YAML = awesome
ha ha, that video was awesome!

A social network for toddlers?
Didn't get any of that so had to redo in metric.

speed of light = 3 x 10^8 m/s

3 GHZ = 3 x 10^9 /s

So 3 x 10^8 / 3 x 10^9 = 0.1 metre = 10 centimetre = okay, 3.9 inches

But then metric always saves your ass. Back in physics class, they'd ask you how deep the well was if you dropped a stone & heard the water splash in 10 seconds. Before the American students could even begin their work, all the Indians would yell "500 metres!" And that's cause the gravitation constant is 10, so one half 10 times 10 times 10 is 500.
Extracting dominant light from Spherical Harmonics
Setting up Google Webmaster Tools with Python / Django
The Quiet Indie Music Revolution
It isn't true that the US government could easily bypass the publishers. They want the research to be distributed, and peer reviewed, and have historically relied on the publishers to do that. The NIH (the federal agency that dispenses the bulk of academic funding in the US) took the view that they could get better distribution terms on behalf of the US public, with their open access mandate in 2008. It's this policy that the journal publishers are trying to reverse. Distribution, and peer review, are evolving, but they haven't evolved to the point where the US government could easily bypass the publishers.
What are some alternatives to Bootstrap?
Quality UI tools and frameworks ? Ever tried to use those fancy thin-client frameworks like Cappuccino or ExtJS ? Spend days figuring out esoteric language/syntax/API and then fight with fragile implementations and no error checking + the ridiculous amount of boilerplate and bad structure. Compare that with XAML/C# with VisualStudio and tell me you don't see the productivity boost. Not to mention entirely different platform characteristics/capabilities.

As for libraries - just a week ago I was writing an app for image processing, among other things it needed to do indexing on images by extracting meta data in image headers and different formats (IPTC,EXIF,XMP) and there was no library to do that on Mono/C# that actually worked and after a day and a half of mucking around with half-assed wrappers I wrote the app to feed the DB in clojure with a Java library in few hours.

Sure in some abstract 10000 feet view tools don't make a difference, or if you're doing the simplistic CRUD stuff, but in day to day work it matters a lot that you get to use tools (eg. debuggers, intellisense, profiling), libraries, frameworks etc.
A giant 35ft long camera that takes 6ft negatives
Apologies for the super-late reply. Wasn't notifo'd of your comment for some weird reason.

For the better most definitely, and when Moore could still be considered as part of the comic industry. I don't think this has really been the case for a long time now.

I agree with toyg's comment that the industry is in its current state because they don't have enough Moores and Ellises and Gaimans. I'm also very fond of Garth Ennis' and Glenn Fabry's work. It's interesting to note that all these guys and more are considered part of the 'British Invasion'[1] and without them, the US comic industry would be in far worse shape than it is.

1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Invasion_(comics)