skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
>People who make and advertise file sharing tools for the obvious purpose of conducting illegal activity

Except that's not what Tribler is. If you can't think of legitimate reasons for a decentralized, censorship-proof file sharing network that don't violate the law, I daresay your imagination is broken...
Steam is a DRM platform, but as a gamer, I would say it's a DRM platform done right.
> No surprises, no more need to abuse objects as dictionaries.

... pretty much every single file of JS ever written is "guilty" of this.
This post draws an arbitrary line in the sand. There's risk associated with everything you do.
The 5  SEO Posts You Probably Missed This Week
I think they are shaky from the point of view of protecting against legal measures.
Be careful. The JVM will never unmap the underlying regions it uses to support direct ByteBuffers, so if you end up creating a lot of them (such as for reading/writing files) or even just resizing them (which creates an entirely new one), you can run out of virtual memory.
I use the Colt (Java) matrix libraries for applied math and graphics applications, but it's still quite costly compared to optimized libraries like Intel's MKL. A singular value decomposition takes about eight times as long in Colt vs MKL.
Robust, from a legal standpoint. Robust as in "Government jackboots can't come in and shut it down". SOPA proved that any centralized service, whether that be DNS or HTTP, is vulnerable to governmental shenanigans. It's been on the back of everyone's minds since Napster, but this brought it to the forefront.
The capacity for accurate observation is often called, "cynicism" by those who haven't got it.
Not sure what it is, to be honest, but the entire value proposition usually doesn't turn out to be what you thought based on the impression you were given. Consistently underproviding value after a user has given up some personal info or whatever else, seems scammy to me.

I do know that there are some legit networks out there....just saying, as a general rule, I have seen too many affiliate networks that appear scammy. Almost seems to be the norm, than the exception.

I am sure I am not the only one with that impression either.
Literate Programming Matters
Hi Casey,

First off - Congratulations!

I have a burning question. Have you figured out how you're going to do shipping and handling? Are you using a 3rd party to do all of the distribution, or do you have the workforce yourself to do it? Kickstarter and Amazon don't do it for you, do they?
But let's talk about birth-control.
I worked with/at TakeNote, which is Cornell's commercial note taking service and dealt with this often. Notwithstanding "ethical" reasons, this is very odd to me. I think the California law cited that seems to ban the selling of class notes, and any public schools whose student policies similarly ban resale, raise colorable First Amendment issues. I know there is extant case law at least in some jurisdiction that says that your notes are your notes, presuming that they are not verbatim transcripts of the lecture. This is the case even if the lecture itself and material is protected by copyright.
Congratulations on the success!

Other than having a great product, are there any marketing things you feel added to your success? Particularly things that could be applied to other projects.
Is there any doubt we are in a bubble?
You definitely are right about the 'Win a Free iPad'. That's a good point - which kinda cuts to the heart of the current incarnation of the idea.

Will have to re-consider everything.

The short urls definitely make sense.
You cannot have such tools and have people only use them for legitimate purposes. Copyright and privacy of communication are mutually exclusive; if not now then soon. The copyright lobby knows this and they won't stop because of our promise to be nice.
Well, a web-socket dashboard could potentially lower their bandwidth costs, when people start refreshing the whole page every 10 seconds, just to watch one number change.
Thanks for your kind words. In regards to age and trust- we use PayPal to manage all transactions so we never touch the money you make (payments are made directly from buyer to seller), and amazon's S3 to host your files with expiring download links.

If you have any other questions regarding how we manage payments/downloads we'd be happy to answer them: hello [at] propelly.com
Quick idea: Perhaps some functionality which pays attention to which music you play during your run. At the end of the run, let the runner "grade" how they feel after their run. Help the user generate playlists for future runs based on this data. (Although, after typing this, it sounds gimmicky and probably doesn't work well for the hardcore runner audience which probably want a clean and simple app with a small set of strong features than a bunch of weak one. I guess it depends on what your app does.)
This will vary between 32-bit and 64-bit environments. My understanding is that the vastly larger address in 64-bit environments greatly mitigates the chance that data will be mistaken as pointers.

As far as crafting input to match allocated addresses, that is an interesting idea. One could, at the very least, create data that lies within the heap's address range. The issue is, you'd need a lot of data to blacklist a significant amount of memory, and if that's the case why not just DoS with a ton of data?

In practice, a fragmented heap is probably a much bigger issue than actual leaks. As the article points out, a conservative GC cannot perform compaction.
Absolutely right; hence my 2nd paragraph :)
It's great to see that I'm not the only one who likes to use this approach! :)
That is probably the best example of this tactic I've seen, very well written.

[Also, I couldn't let this comment thread go without this nick getting an outing ;)]
I didn't mean that as mutually exclusive but yes, Steam - obviously comes with DRM. Valve have so much goodwill that it isn't a problem with its users.
Patriotism is often an arbitrary veneration of real estate above principles.

~George Jean Nathan
StartX Fall 2011 Demo Day summaries & videos
Mimicking another object's behaviour on a known object loses the advantage that a skeuomorph gives you, namely muscle memory. Skeuomorphs are used for very good reasons: they are immediately familiar so a user doesn't have to think before using them. For every person who finds them too cute and annoying there are an order more who find them helpful (and in a world of scary technology) comforting.
Minor nitpick - FF has had let scoping for a long time. WeakMap has been around since FF 6[1].

[1]: https://developer.mozilla.org/en/JavaScript/Reference/Global...
One way the circumvent the need for 5000 teraflops mentioned in the article is to exploit the fact that our eye is only capable of seeing a relatively small area in great detail at any given instant. Per viewer, we only need to finely render a tiny bit of the scene. This of course precludes the same level of realism on a shared screen, but I suspect that viewer-specific devices (e.g. http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=virtual-rea... ) will become the norm as we move further towards virtual reality.
Yes I'm familiar. Do not use their services. They don't know your business, your customers or your market. Most importantly they have no clue about your business model. They will spend a lot of money for you and you'll get minimum value.
Boston Scheduled Delivery Service|Route Delivery Services,Ma
"liberal" and "conservative" are not party lines - they are methods of thought.

Fascists generally aren't liberal, and vice versa.
And CSS transforms are still in the "working draft" stage. It's been a half-decade and they aren't a full part of the standard yet.

That's why "the rush".
Kickstarter doesn't, but Amazon does have a fulfillment service. IIRC, you send your stock to their warehouses and they ship it from there.
So no more online banking, no more credit cards? Whatever businesses they have are fucked, when it comes to secure communication.
Only twice as unreasonable :)
I know many young founders doing all of this and not creating huge hype around themselves. I do agree with your points but you can't put all young founders in the same boat.

Playing devils advocate, if it gets you users, press, etc why not? I'm not using it in this circumstance but if you want to get TechCrunched, have a great product your age will help, why not use it?

The press always needs a story, every blogpost has a story, it may not be age it may be funding or the fact you worked for Google or though of it on a mountain, regardless every tech blogpost has a story not just 'this product has launched'. Blame journalism, not the people conforming to it.
German court dismisses Motorola's patent lawsuit against Apple
Data structure is "a particular way of storing and organizing data", so I think there's not so big distinction between two. More of that, when we think of data structures, we think of insertion/deletion/searching complexity, also we think about space needed (which is also a result of organizing algorithm). So I don't think that someone can run into troubles because of that difference.
> While this scene from Crysis 2 looks pretty good, in a few decades it's going to look like outdated crap.

Man, in few decades, you hit a button, which blocks your short-term memory and connects your brain to a game simulation that you will consider a reality, not knowing (and not even pondering) how you got there. Real shit™.
Finally! Somebody who understands me!

Now I certainly don't think retro design is "crippling" the basic OS experience. I personally find the whole desktop metaphor to be silly and outdated and not so useful for a generation that has grown up with computers and don't need a clock to look like a wall clock in order to understand that it's telling us the time. OSX widgets may be immature and tasteless, but they're not a hindrance.

If retro design is crippling anything, IMO, it digital audio workstations (DAW). Whenever I launch Cubase I have to deal with virtual mixer boards and virtual synthesizers that mimic the interfaces of 40 year old hardware to the point that you have to turn virtual knobs with my mouse. It's ridiculous and more often than not it's frustrating. Now I understand how this choice of design eases the learning curve, but I'd much rather jump over a few hurdles than run straightaway into a wall.

This is why programs like vim and emacs are still relevant decades after their invention. They don't insult the users intelligence, they don't pretend to be something they're not, and they take full advantage of the platform they're designed for.

If somebody could create a DAW that adhere's to this kind of philosophy, I don't care if it uses ncurses as an interface, I'd adopt it in a heartbeat.
Why? Because there are young founders or something else? There always has been and these (and many other) people have been building products before there was any mention of the second bubble.
I think you should re-design your site to promote your product because from what you've posted here it does sound like a nice management application that could be really useful. But your page looks very much like you are just re-selling GPL software WAMP.

I think what does it for me - all of the promotional text about "building your own website" which indicates that you want to trick naive people that they need your software to run a web server. Instead you should focus on "advanced configuration tools for WAMP servers" and promote all of the things that your software does, without touting the basic WAMP functionality as your own.
On Dying Well
I've only delved into really writing JS for the last couple of weeks, but a number of tutorials basically said that objects are dictionaries and vice versa, you just got some nice syntax and you can plug function in as values.

If that was an abuse, what are JavaScript objects supposed to be? What's the difference between them and a dictionary?
Thx. Probably will use Shipwire or a local fullfillment company.
Wouldn't this break externalized resources?
Page flipping animations are still valid: a user immediately knows how to turn the page, and, even if they need to be shown how to turn a page initially then they will intuitively know how to turn back a page.
Google obects to "Gchat"
Does Google let one account use more than one coupon? Certainly the terms of the coupon say one per account (I have read that because I did want to use more than one).
"Which is also probably why there is no popular site like HN for educators"

I disagree. First, there are all sorts of conferences, books, workshops, and other resources to help teachers improve. The amount of resources that exist to help make teachers better probably dwarfs the amount of resources that exist to help make hackers better. Second, if you read the HN comments it's pretty clear that the average person can't really say anything intelligent about education. Maybe this is less so among teachers, but I'm not entirely convinced that this is the case.
ZeroMQ (Scala) — Akka Documentation
Have you checked https://trello.com/ if it can handle what you need?
Of course you don't get a guarantee. People who are looking for one are stupid. You get a betting advantage - as long as you accept that it is possible to be a "good" investor, in the sense of making lots of money. If you continue to bet on people who made successful investments in the past, you might get burned by the people who merely got lucky, and you will make money when the person really was a smart investor. Past performance thing is not a convincing argument against this. A valid argument would be that the ratio of those groups is not favorable enough to overcome the management fee.
heehee, programmer's error. -4 is assumed to be the value, and not seen as -1 * 4, which i believe is the interpretation.

order of operations is a useless source of confusion -- we should just use parens always and avoid ambiguity. #toomuchcprogramminglately
The Ethics of Our Gadgets
[A]ll else being equal, the smarter and harder-working person will win, right?

But in actuality, all else is never equal. Then we use the outcome of that unequal scenario to judge after the fact who was the smarter and harder-working. In poker you have a very regular, controlled game. Imagine a tournament where some players were randomly given extra aces, then try and figure out who the best players really are. That's the corporate CEO market.
Practice makes you perfect.

Implement a bunch of problems from online judges (Google: UVA Online Judge, SPOJ, Codeforces and Topcoder). If you can't solve a problem, there is often explanation of the solutions (at least in Codeforces and Topcoder), so read them, understand how the solution works and then implement them, then try to find related problems. Doing this regularly, i estimate that you will be a good algorithmist in about 6 months.
It's not completely useful, nor is it completely useless. As long as it is possible to be a "good" investor, in the sense of making lots of money, it can still be somewhat useful. If you continue to bet on people who made successful investments in the past, you might get burned by the people who merely got lucky, and you will make money when the person really was a smart investor. Past performance thing is not a convincing argument against this. A valid argument would be that the ratio of those groups is not favorable enough to overcome the management fee. I'd be interested to see if the Buffet bet you mention is related to this, but my work filter blocks that site.
I'm a journalist for one of the publications listed in Cision. (I'm San Francisco/Silicon Valley editor at Xconomy.) Cision is a fine company, but if I were an entrepreneur at a cash-strapped company I would never pay $2500 for a list of media contacts.

A much better (and cheaper) strategy is to read the publications that follow your industry, figure out which reporters at those publications write about your niche most often, and contact them directly with a quick summary of your company and its latest news. Most publication's websites list reporters' email addresses, or at the very least provide an address for story tips. Of course, maybe digging up this information counts as "spending countless hours," but I don't think a media strategy has to be so time-consuming. Whatever your company is working on, there are probably only five to 10 journalists who will know enough about your field to do an accurate, thoughtful story. Figure out who they are and target them directly.

By the way, my address is wroush at xconomy dot com.
Marketing For Online Startups
What if someone just uploads a 50MB zipped dummy file?
I have found that it more likely holds on to some pointer longer than it could rather than leaking memory. For instance, I've never known it to start eating up memory.
Corporate Photography London
It is true that having understandings of all the above will possibly never be handy, but having a vague knowledge of them is very useful. There are a lot of times I have seen people make things much harder for themselves just because they didn't know something had already been invented.

Having a broad knowledge of the field can be the difference between knowing what to search for and not.

Take a simple example of hash-tables vs. tries. Being able to write a trie or a hash-table without looking it up is perhaps of dubious use. Knowing the relative strengths and weaknesses of each without looking it up is in your words "sometimes useful, but usually not." But when you run into problems with a hash, if you at least know that a trie exists, you can say "oh, let's look it up and see if it solves my problem"

Really there's nothing new here. Scientists have deep knowledge and engineers have broad knowledge. Move along.
The only sure way to lose is not to play
This is really important – I think every organization should do this. At my last job I learned so much from watching more experience people code and asking them questions. Now I volunteer my knowledge to others whenever I can because I know how much it helps.
Maybe I'm an insensitive jerk, but where's the problem? Tell the student to leave. Raising kids is hard, and finding babysitters is hard, but their problems don't take precedence over the other students' right to attend the class without kids present.
eMule has had that for years, using the Kad network: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kademlia

Filename searches are implemented using keywords. The filename is
divided into its constituent words. Each of these keywords is hashed and
stored in the network, together with the corresponding filename and file
hash. A search involves choosing one of the keywords, contacting the node
with an ID closest to that keyword hash, and retrieving the list of filenames
that contain the keyword. Since every filename in the list has its hash
attached, the chosen file can then be obtained in the normal way.
For Kickstarter, business model... Validated! Great job guys congrats! What a great story of someone not playing the startup lottery and winning.
It's only an abuse because JavaScript has no distinction between the notion of an object's "meta" properties, and its dictionary-like keys and values. So you'll get along just fine, until someone tries to write this:

var dict = {};

dict["hasOwnProperty"] = true;

dict["toString"] = "Bob";

dict["valueOf"] = 7;

... then you're in for a rough time.
Also they could represent proper names or locations. Perhaps a compass coordinate. Just because it isn't in the english lexicon doesn't mean its without meaning.
Work Together with Collaborate Links on Minus
Nope, it's definitely a function. That caught my eye as well.
What is Version Control? Diffs & Patches
A story of friends making things better together
I must have been very fortunate to have, on the whole, great teachers that cared deeply about their work. But then again, my parents made it a point to make sure we lived in less-than-stellar apartments in excellent school districts that paid their teachers well and treated them with respect.

There's a systemic problem with the way we (in the US) let remote policy makers dictate how teachers should teach (especially with the prevalence of standards-based testing), instead of giving them room to be autonomous and creative in their work. Micromanagement and lack of professional autonomy turns workers into disengaged drones regardless of the field (c.f. the dead look in the eyes of that friend of yours that's at a dead-end job at a coding farm). Most teachers don't start as "glorified babysitters" and get in it to try and make a difference but become disillusioned after fighting against the tide for a few years.
I've used both Colt and apache commons math in a machine learning setting. It was mostly the better handling of sparse matrix ops that made apache a couple of times faster than colt (due to hash-based vs. sorted list vectors) It was pretty much the same on dense linear algebra. Intel MKL, eigen, uBlas can be better, but I haven't done the benchmarks to prove this either way.
Extra points if you buy a fake version made in China and brought illegally into your country of choice.
If you're doing live conferencing, and don't want to force people to install a plugin, you'll need Flash. Which won't work on a phone. Is that ok?
Gesture screen lock security is no security at all - smudges mean the screen can almost always be unlocked at will. More likely is an encrypted phone with PIN or password entry on startup (that's what I use). But that still leaves the phone open to use when it's powered up, in standby.

There's a reason why password change dialogs in OSes ask for your previous password before letting you change it. Just relying on a single layer is foolhardy. For things as critical as money, you need multiple hurdles.
>In this context, the personal life of the person being introduced and their physical attractiveness has nothing to do with why they are here. At best it's completely off-topic.

It's a bloody startup presentation, not a congressional hearing. Making a nod at the person's personal life, on a subject that's typically cause for celebration (are you going to tell me "Congratulations on your new son/daughter" is sexist and eebil now) is somehow uncalled for?

>Consider if it was a male presented being introduced with: "...he was an alcoholic when I met him, but now he's been 3 years sober"

That's a really crappy example. The things we're talking about here are ostensibly positive.
It actually already exists ;)

http://mech-warfare.com/

Altough you can't play from home, but all the players have only the cameras of their bot to look around. So far they play with electric airsoft pistols and each bot (which has to be a walker, so no wheels or anything) has a few standardized sensor plates to register hits.

As most control the bots via WiFi, it would certainly be possible to host such a competition via internet.

[I never played this myself, but it looks like fun!]
Experimenting With a Free Book
Ask HN: Boston based startups
Hey everyone,

I'm working with a new Boston based incubator/seed funder and we're looking for a few local VERY EARLY stage startups to start things off with before we go public.

If you're even a little interested, reply with a comment and I'll contact you!

Thanks!

-Elliot
iPad 3′s Retina screen could prove problematic for developers
If I remember correctly then working with big integers (Python has "unlimited" integer) was really slow with pypy. My first example I ran in pypy used those and I was wondering what I did wrong when pypy is so slow compared to cpython.
Modifying Posterous' code blocks