skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm guessing that he means a reporter's sources are protected under the freedom of the press granted by the first amendment. For a reporter, having his address book exposed could be quite a bit more damaging than for the average user.
Nice. I'm glad to see this get some real world use. You need to get this in front of some advocacy groups.
TC pricing info: "Paid levels providing unlimited messaging are available for $10, $50, and $150 per month, with access to 1,000 contacts, 100,000 contacts, or 250,000 contacts, respectively."

This sounds like a gamble that the user will buy the service, but never reach the number of contacts: for $10 it's $0.01 per contact, for $50 it's $0.0005 per contact, at $150 it's $0.0006 per contact. For $50, they'd want the user to send/receive less than 5k messages to break-even on Twilio retail costs.

The main problem they will have if anyone tries to send to 100k contacts, is that Twilio limits the send rate to 1 sms per second. This batch will take 27.78 hours to send and 250k will take 69.45 hours to send. Not to mention that it will cost the company $1,000 and $2,500 respectively (although they will have a way better deal from Twilio than $0.01/sms at that point).
Please share your data showing that Coffeescript is faster than CPython
First article by CodeSquare.me founder on Tech.li
This is by far the meanest comment I've had the displeasure of reading on Hacker News.
It depends on what you use them for. I use ec2 as a testing platform to experiment and gauge performance. From that viewpoint, it's cheaper and easier than a normal host.
Seems similar to the one up on CCAN [1], which is also BSD-MIT licensed.

EDIT: forgot to mention that it includes a bunch of great helper functions, too.
Between coding OpenGL and jumping into web dev, I spent 2 years professionally working as a 3D artist. As a kid I worked a lot on video and audio editing, and as a front-end developer I've mastered Photoshop. I have the talent but need the money safety net before leaving everything behind and pursuing a "crazy" idea like this.
As an Internet citizen, there goes my 2012 bill estimates

- Desktop Software (around $1,000)

- Hosting + Domains (around $300)

- SaaS (around $50)

- Mobile Apps* (around $5)

That should give you an idea where my money goes. I still believe that desktop software has lots of potential. Especially, when your target market is educated about purchasing a license. You eliminate the server costs and their data maintenance.

*My (probably) only purchase will be for AirSync (doubleTwist) on Android.
Just keep this in mind the next time you see some article about how it's impossible to make money making apps. What this post is asking developers to do for their apps is the utter minimum of basic marketing. It's not even Marketing 101; it's stuff you could figure out way before that. And many app developers don't even do it.
Depending on how you plan to implement and display the user ratings, I see some potential in this. Say I was browsing store shelves and was interested enough in a product but needed a nudge in either direction, a quick scan and send is easier than mobile googling and can provide me with near instant, useful feedback.

The hardest part as always will be adoption. This will only be useful to me if there is a critical mass of users to supply me with feedback and make me want to leave my own. Figure that out (incentives? Coupons? Humor? Maybe add a lowest local price search function?) and maybe you'll be on to something.
I remember reading that federal agents are a special case.

You're screwed if you lie.
You're screwed if you tell the truth.
You're also screwed if you choose to remain silent, as that's used against you.

The only safe answer is "I cannot discuss that until I discuss it with counsel.
I'm generally right in the middle of said paperwork, and you've got it right. The main caveat is that overage cost is often (though not always) higher than the commit.

(The other caveat is I've never seen $1/mbps transit, if you find it, let me know. :))
Give it better tires and suspension for dirt roads and you've got a winner!
In order to mitm over https you have to install a special certificate, for example, http://www.charlesproxy.com/documentation/faqs/ssl-connectio...
Any reason you roll your own numeric() instead of using isdigit()? It's in C89.
I once made a variant of Backus's Turing-lecture language FP, where to compose functions you wrote 'f g' instead of the original 'g o f'. I'm curious if people into concatenative languages would call this one of them -- it satisfies the definition in the article, but there's no stack, so I'd guess not. It's more like point-free Haskell with some notational support for the style.

(On second thought, this post's title echoes Backus's. Maybe they would include FP.)
Contribute to open source projects. I think they're making a huge difference in the world and deserve more than just a few dollars from my account each month.
> He connects to the Internet only through an encrypted, password-protected channel, and copies and pastes his password from a USB thumb drive. He never types in a password directly, because, he said, “the Chinese are very good at installing key-logging software on your laptop.”

Apparently he didn't realize that it's also trivial for snooping software to monitor the clipboard content.
Statically typed concatenative languages are precisely dataflow languages. Dynamically typed ones aren’t, because they can have dynamic stack effects. But the diagrams in my article look just like PureData programs for a reason.
Just to be sure it's inlined, really. Although I assume isdigit would be, being a compiler built-in.
And 85% seems really low to me. Out of the 20 people in my 10th grade honors science class I was the only student who had not smoked weed at least once. After that I have asked many people and the overwhelming majority have said they smoked pot at some point in time.

PS: 15% of the population is a lot of people, you would expect to find large clumps of people that don't smoke.
> Downside: a regrettable lack of cool faux-medieval robes to wear once a year.

http://www.by-the-sword.com/acatalog/Capes.html

That could be remedied ;-)

Seriously, though, I wanted to say thanks too.
This seems like much ado about nothing. Download in iTunes and it automatically shows up in iOS.

Don't use iTunes? Use your browser’s “mail page” command.
Has anyone read the Nikola Tesla's biography "My Inventions"? The guy makes some absolutely mind-blowing predictions. For example, in Tesla's book he predicts drone based warfare and the global electronic distribution of music almost 100 years ahead of time.

In the recent book about Google, "In The Plex", the author comments that reading the biography of Tesla was a major influence on Larry Page and made him mindful that he didn't get cheated out of realizing his vision by an Edison or a Morgan.
Why would that be a problem if we knew which hospital it was?
US govt safety net maintains the middle class not as much as for poor
I do not believe your comment will be downvoted for the reason you suggest, but rather because your comment is an ad hominem attack.
Ask HN: Would you pay for static analysis as a service?
Presumably for automated security review of dynamic languages with complex component interactions (Rails/Ruby and Django/Python of course come to mind). The tech kicker on this is twofold, firstly there isn't any widely used, commercially supported static analysis software for dynamic languages that employs SAT solvers to derive runtime code execution paths (which is really unfortunate!). Secondly you could use RBM generative models, while the approach characteristically suffers from overfitting, gathering knowledge of the partition function of the security of a particular piece of software code is trivial and isolating problematic components is a well explored field.

Thanks for your thoughts!
why are the flag values not enums (and why is 4 missing?)? is using a lookup table for decoding hex really faster than the (minimal) logic (what if it causes cache misses)? do you really think that a state machine with bit flags is the best way to express the logic here? is string_add meant to increment string_length on subsequent passes? what is "json_value * cur_value" supposed to do at the top of json_value_free (maybe i am missing some c trick here?)?

[not dissing you, just bored on a sunday afternoon...]
Did the 80% for $1 ever produce a cofounder?
Not an IP address--the user. A user account had to use my card info to purchase the goods. If Tagged can't tell me who did it, at least they can shut down that account for fraud.

I'm looking through Tagged's terms of service and privacy policy right now to see what their terms are on issues like this.
What would be the point of filing bugs against PyPy stating that it is slower or more resource-hungry on programs XYZ, when this is ultimately due to PyPy's core design decisions which are a point of pride and never going to be abandoned?
Expecting some positive outcome from that seems incredibly unrealistic to me. I believe it is a waste of time. It isn't my responsibility to provide reasons to PyPy why I'm not using it. Let PyPy - a project receiving no small amount of promotion - show that it is better for my purposes, before I invest big in switching over projects.

What you COULD say is that it doesn't make sense that in practice, people are treated like idiots and flamed if they publicly mention that they don't find in practice that PyPy is always or even generally better than CPython.

Or you could say that they should both work for most purposes, and that the choice is nuanced (measure the difference yourself), and in just a few respects PyPy is not as mature (not surprising given the lengths of the projects' histories). And PyPy is a work in progress and you expect it to get better if it isn't better than CPython now, for some specific purpose.

I don't expect you to say either of those things, because it seems important to the PyPy project to promote it over CPython and if that means selectively mentioning only the cases which are in PyPy's favor, or softly suppressing dissent, then so be it. That is how it seems to me, and I don't understand why it has to be that way.
I agree and I'm glad as well - I think it'll be really beneficial to those who have difficulty interacting and communicating with regular input devices. More people should see this!
As with any security decision, you need a good threat model rather than FUD and giving in to cognitive biases. Whether you consider the threat model in the post to be complete and accurate, just saying "OMG Google could go evil!" is not really a useful way of looking at things.

You need to consider the loss implications if your email is compromised, given various scenarios (the whole account? one message? etc.) and the sorts of information you have in it (journalists working with protected sources vs. griping about your spousal unit malfunctioning). And consider who the likely threat actors would be.

In some cases, hosting on Google would be a spectacularly bad idea. If I were Jacob Applebaum, I wouldn't even think about it, because of concerns about "lawful intercept" and whatnot. But in my case, given the additional security features (two-factor auth, HTTPS everywhere, etc.), and my particular threat model, Gmail does the job just fine.
Syria unrest: Arab League 'seeks peacekeeping mission' ~ Daily World News
I usually use https://gethopper.com/you for things like this since Apple's "solution" isn't the most ideal. I prefer opening it on my iPhone via Hopper and downloading the app there instead of opening iTunes which I rarely have open.
I've used both. What you're missing out on is a better ecosystem of libraries and a community that communicates more and better than Python's imho.
On a related note, if you want to get something done on a sunday afternoon, writing a simple recursive descent JSON parser from scratch is both doable and fun.
Humans who work at Google do not read your emails, humans who work for the FBI on the other hand do, Google and Microsoft too along with other are required to implement back doors for the law agencies, you should be a lot more paranoid about that.

If you want absolute security, you are not gonna get it from nobody, and that includes Microsoft. Any information stored on a server you don't own is not secure, any information passed trough the internet unencrypted is also not secure. If you want absolute security you need to make sure that the information that you want to send is encrypted when transferring and only gets decoded and stored on servers you own and know to be safe from anyone, in other words, don't use email at all, because it's not secure by design, most of the time, it's vulnerable to man in the middle attacks.

Shame on Microsoft for not competing with features instead of FUD.
Totally agree. I know it's a different situation in Europe/Asia in regards to debit vs. credit card usage, but I transact almost exclusively on credit unless it's under $5 because:

1) Cash Back - I get about 3-5% back on all of my purchases which adds up to a few hundred dollars a year in cashback money.
2) Fraud and Price Protection - I've had my card stolen twice and in both cases, I just reported the lost card and I had zero liability. I also have AMEX that gives you price protection and a longer warranty for free on things you buy.
3) Credit Building - You need to build credit so having at least two credit cards in good standing with a long account history is important. This makes financing a car/house much more easily later in life.
Why I’m Moving Away From WordPress
Agreed, this sort of attention to tooling and the more menial parts of the development experience is sorely amiss among many other contenders, and definitely makes Go appear more interesting to me.
Indeed, I think great tooling can really help keep track of stack effects (I'd also say that combinators, rather than dup, swap, drop, ..., make you generally think less about the stack). You should check out the Brief editor as a prototype idea. Just having immediate feedback with step forward/back as you edit makes a huge difference. http://trybrief.com
Not to mention access everything on the external drive. Relying on one-factor authentication when the system may be (well, is) in the hands of the enemy is just asking for trouble.

Use a token or smartcard in addition to your password.
Funniest Fiverr Gigs Ever
This is a nice collection of gigs available on Fiverr. Is incredible what people can do for just 5 bucks.
> Downvote this if you're stupid enough to take advice from a tactless wannabe with the business sense of a doorknob.

I happened to have read a bunch of his articles(shirtless video, joker, pro-win). I disliked all of them. I read this one - this is just an anecdote about bureaucratic dance, with a cheesy title.

I can make my mind about something based on its objective measure, and your vile comment is totally unnecessary.
Most people wouldn't know how to email a page from their browser if their life depended on it.
I like using Jansson: http://www.digip.org/jansson/
We have thousands of users who run their servers on Amazon using one of our AMIs (http://bitnami.org) Whether EC2 is more or less expensive than the alternatives is a complex topic highly dependent on your particular requirements. Having said that, our perspective is that you need to consider the overall value you get for your money. There are features like the ability to take incremental snapshots of your entire machine for backup or cloning purposes that have no match by other hosting providers. That feature alone saves us innumerable hours of development and system administration. Our staging servers are not setup like or production servers, they can be exact copies of your production servers, on demand. How many bugs/issues do you think we avoid with that? For us, enough of them that any price difference with a "traditional" setup is not worth it
Open a terminal and type

sleep 30min ; mplayer xxx.mp3

Don't need any ticking timer, it will just distract you.
But if you really need it's only a few more lines.

I used to do sleep 60 min ; find / to wait for the hard disk
noise but that doesn't work anymore since i have a SSD.
I agree. The whole time I was reading the post all I could think was "Why is the author ignoring the countless benefits of SaaS?" - Scale indefinitely, access from any device, no need to install updates, no need for IT department, etc.

Then you get to the punchline, "You have too many monthly costs. Now add me to that list so I can help you remove the others!".

Ironically, the least expensive plan on his monitoring service is almost double the most expensive plan on the list of his own SaaS subscriptions.
There's more to OAuth than that, though, let's not throw out the baby with the bath water. Its original purpose - letting services access user accounts on other services without forcing the users to give out their password and complete control - still makes perfect sense and is often extremely useful.

Using OAuth as a authentication solution is the dangerous part; personally, I won't sign up for anything that doesn't provide either email/password or OpenID as an alternative, but I don't see what else can one do to "battle" that.
Lots of people accomplished great things despite heavy, regular use of alcohol: Boris Yeltsin, Winston Churchill, Ulysses S. Grant, Christopher Hitchens, Edgar Allen Poe, Alexander the Great, Ernest Hemingway.
This was written in 2010. How do these locations fare today?
Looks like Go is cleaning up. Love the language, but I won't commit to writing heavy-duty code in it until it either has sensible union support or sensible generic support. The type system is just too weak right now.
If this article is a homage to the famous "Why Functional Programming Matters" paper, I think it failed in a major way. The Why FP Programming Matters paper began each section with practical programming problems that FP solved elegantly. It built up the solutions piece by piece and showed at each step, how easy they were to comprehend, extend, and abstract.

The FP paper is very effective in making people who are hard core imperative programmers want to try FP. But the CP article here doesn't really IMHO elicit the same desire.

You should try writing another one with some practical examples.
I'd add another bullet to your list.

Employees are also potential customers. They're usually expected to track their own time and enter it into the company system on a regular basis.
Just go to any company and see what they do poorly. Ask them what problems they face.

Working in TV in the past, you would not believe the hassle phone numbers and email addresses were.

I would've killed for a spreadsheet-like layout for contact info that userbased contact lists, department based, then company based. Bonus points if you let people pick up the phone, then click to dial out.

Or, working in a relay center now, I have to wonder why no one has created a simple TTY automated menu system for the deaf. Sell it to companies, let them associate an 800 number to that line, and deaf people could call in and navigate themselves, largely rendering my job obsolete. (Well, when someone also does a good voice-to-TTY mobile app.)
Fastest way to count set bits.
> why are the flag values not enums (and why is 4 missing?)?

What would the advantage of using an enum be? (and I guess I used 4 and then removed it later.)

> is using a lookup table for decoding hex really faster than the (minimal) logic (what if it causes cache misses)?

No idea, that's just the way I did it. Feel free to try something else and profile if you're really that concerned.

> do you really think that a state machine with bit flags is the best way to express the logic here? is string_add meant to increment string_length on subsequent passes?

There's only two passes, and it increments the length on both (the first is to measure the string, the second is to know where to write in it).

> what is "[..] cur_value" supposed to do at the top of json_value_free (maybe i am missing some c trick here?)?

You're not supposed to mix code and value declarations in ANSI C, so I put it at the top of the function. It's just used to temporarily store the value while reading the parent.
Just FYI, what andrew said sounded like a plan to me, but AWS only gives 750 hours with the free tier. Might suffice for now, but not forever. So looks like I'll have to do this on an linux vm instead (at home).
It would have taken programmers weeks to write the code
necessary to copy and organize someone’s address book.

"Weeks" seems a little far-fetched, no? (Especially given the apparent lack of sophistication in the import process.)
Mobile App Search is So Bad AltaVista Could Have Done It
I've been working on this problem, in various forms, for the last ten years. It's pushed me to write https://github.com/aphyr/reimann, a network event stream processor for centralized graphing, metrics, dashboards, alerting, and analytics. It makes it easy to forward events to other monitoring systems, too. I'm using it in production at http://showyou.com now; after I'm comfortable with its stability under load, I'll make an official release--probably within a month.

[edit] I can also attest to the awesomeness of Boundary's platform. These guys have a killer UI, excellent reliability, and collect important, typically invisible data. I started work on Reimann because I needed to handle more than just network traffic--from the rate of feed item fanouts to a breakdown of memory consumption across all hosts. I also have different dashboard requirements. Regardless, I'm excited to see Boundary's take on the problem.
It wasn’t really supposed to be, but sure, I gladly will.
go build reminds me of ghc --make, it's great.

That and Go reaching a 1.0 release may help me get it considered for some projects at work.
http://gawker.com/5637234/gcreep-google-engineer-stalked-tee...
Post-Mortems For Ten Products I've Built
This idea is sort of wild, but auto-generated scripted media. Auto-machinima? I think in the perhaps distant future, even if your favorite tv show is no longer being produced, you will be able to input a script and some source material and have the result be a decently rendered creation that looks and feels like the TV show you're used to.

Imagine downloading a script with very detailed stage and setting direction. A piece of software would exist that would take as input the script and as much source material as you have (seasons of a tv show or a movie) and create the setting, model the characters, synthesize the voices and output the finished product.

I think a lot of the tech to get started with this exists in the fields of game development, video editing, machinima, voice synthesis, etc. If money were no issue, I would work on putting it together. It would probably just be a toy for years before it could generate something watchable, but would be lots of fun.
Remember, if you aren't paying, you're not a customer, you're the product.

I use Hacker News without (as far as I know) being their product.

I pay for Cable TV and yet I'm still their product.

It's not as clean-cut as that; you need to read the small letters and always use caution, paid service or not.
Finding a niche might not be an issue these days. I am interested to know how do you opt for certain niche while it's not your main field either.
And why is that, Michael? Which bits did you find objectionable? What would you prefer to hear? People negotiate. We can pretend they don't, but they do. For business people it's important to understand that.

But I'm all ears if you think I missed something.
ha. on the last one i was confused by your spaces - thought it was a multiplication... (sorry)

[edit] on the bitfield / enum question, i've been looking around for a consistent, standard way of doing things and there doesn't seem to be any one best practice (although various people note that bit fields are normally unsigned ints, while enums are signed).