skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Do iOS apps have access to one's personal library in iBooks? (The same way music apps like LyricWiki can access your music on an iPhone, I mean.)

If so, we could keep the canonical version of our ebook libraries in iBooks and have additional apps that can access the content in myriad and interesting ways. It would allow the main iBooks app to remain simple and focused, while allowing useful innovations to sprout up around it.
HyperLocal App Idea: Historical Stories
Boy genius's book reveals life in college at age 8
Practical Malware Analysis book released, 40% discount from publisher
From the article:

"Typically, between all of these devices one can expect that in a classroom of 300 students there may be 1 or 2 that do own a connected device. Add to that the fact that a pre-paid cell phone can be purchased at a convenience store for around $25 and every student has access to a mobile device."

The age of mobile has truly begun. The modern day student can text faster than they can write cursive, can Google faster than stopping the class for a simple question, and can communicate more effectively over email with their professor than in person. Are these cognitive aids good for education, since they remove some overhead in learning? Or are do they hinder a student by making access to information too easy?
Ask HN: Is there a HN-like site for Foreign Policy and International Relations?
No one has a problem sharing their address book as long as they know that it's being done and they approve. The rest of your comment doesn't really seem to fit, if people don't like what a company/app is doing they complain and eventually stop using it. You, as a developer, can choose to try and keep them by meeting their needs or not. The problem is that apps have been doing things that the customer didn't know or approve of - the fault is clearly on the developer in that case. In general, be honest and let your customer know why you need what you need, e.g. to provide a better service, to serve better ads, to resell to 3rd parties etc.
Christian Kurzke from Google on Developing for Google TV
Are you waiting for usage to drop first?
About 10 years ago, a couple of guys (the best known of whom was a bit of a fuckup) set up a web site with a trivial bit of software and in effect declared, "by soliciting anonymous unpaid contributions from the Internet at large to this crappy web page, we are going to build a resource that rivals the two-and-a-half-centuries-old Encyclopedia Britannica".

10 years later their site was not a footnote or a parable about Internet hubris. No, it was a resource that is in some ways better than the Encyclopedia Britannica in scope, in depth, and in some cases even in quality.

It is a breathtaking achievement. Our daily reaction to it (and pretty much everything else on the Internet) is a crystal clear metric of how jaded we are. How extraordinarily lucky we are to be living in a time where someone like Jimbo Wales can (by the standards of history) more or less pull something like Wikipedia out of his butt at random on a whim.

I think people need to get over what else Wikipedia could be.

If you're right, there's an easy (and productive) way to prove your point: take the Wikipedia database, which is provided to you and to the public under extremely permissive licensing, and build the site you want Wikipedia to be. Based on your comments on this thread, I suggest the name of your site not include the string "pedia". Maybe you want to build "Wikijournal of XXX", or "The Wiki Transactions On XXX".

Seriously. If that dude can make a Wikipedia simply because he got bored publishing web photos of boobs, anybody can do something similar. Get to work, and stop arguing with the encyclopedians.
Sue Apple?
Happy Darwin Day (reviewing history of "punctuated equilibrium" theory)
Coders' Music Player
Your ideas remind me of "Up and Down The Ladder of Abstraction", a great piece on the future of interactive documents and how far existing standards can take us.

http://worrydream.com/LadderOfAbstraction/
It's unacceptable to transmit in plain-text a password that the user specified.

But if it's a randomly-generated new nonce, seems OK as a pragmatic middle-ground. Folks like us, who care, will log in and change it.
I always wonder if such commenters have ever lived in or even visited SV or SF. I liken it to occasional comments I've heard that the Bay Area has a thriving entertainment scene. These people have clearly never lived in LA. Until you've lived in a hub for Industry X, you really have no idea how thoroughly Industry X can saturate you and seep into your brain by osmosis. It seems like everyone in Silicon Valley is in on a deal or a startup. In LA, people talk about "the industry" without explanation—everyone knows which industry they're talking about.

If you want your tech startup to have the best chances of success, there's no substitute for moving to the Bay Area. That's only one axis on which to optimize, of course, and there's more to life than maximizing the value of your company. But anyone who thinks that the Madison (etc.) startup scene is a reasonable substitute for the Bay Area needs to get on an airplane tout de suite and hang out in Palo Alto, Mountain View, or SOMA for a week. Believe me, it'll blow their mind.
I use aptana radrails every now and then. Does anyone have experience with both and knows how they stack against each other?
Universities are not going to 'make' entrepreneurs. That trigger usually happens a lot earlier in life. Take for example, the "Montessori Mafia" that includes people like Larry Page and Sergei Brin, Jeff Bezos, Will Wright, Jimmy Wales, Julia Child, and Sean “P.Diddy” Combs. The common thread among them is that they all were educated in a Montessori environment (http://blogs.wsj.com/ideas-market/2011/04/05/the-montessori-...). At a very early age, they were empowered with and nurtured to exercise their minds in ways that coincidentally make for successful entrepreneurs. I'm not saying Montessori is necessarily the only way to do this, but I think if you spoke to 10 entrepreneurs, a majority would point to experiences in their youth as having had an impact on their path.

Someone else that speaks to this is Sir Ken Robinson (Changing the Education Paradigms): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zDZFcDGpL4U
Alan Moore on Watchmen’s “Toxic Cloud”
1. This is far from frivolous.

2. The "very content majority" are just people who, reasonably enough, never even thought about the possibility that apps were doing underhanded things like this.
I would add "Numerical Recipes in C" to the list.
I have owned this book for many years and get allot of use out of it.

http://bit.ly/zHQyeC
I was surprised there was no mention of this in the article. Have people forgotten about this already? I immediately wrote MtGox off forever in my mind after that fiasco.
The startup scene is not elitist at all. There are lots of easy places to plug in and I think people are generally receptive. Feel free to ping me when you arrive here or email me. I'm easy to find online.
Ask HN: How does Amazon Local fit into Amazon's strategy?
It seems to me that everything else Amazon is doing is trying to push more and more customers online, where they know they can dominate. Why Amazon Local? Just because they could?
Android has this feature for years or call it a very granular and understandable permission system for apps.

(Don't want to start a flame war and I am not really an Android fan)
Citizendium was supposed to recruit experts to write articles, it's basically dead. http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2011/10/five-year-ol...

Google's Knol would have avoided a bunch of procedural mess, but it's been shuttered. http://techcrunch.com/2008/07/23/googles-knol-the-monetizabl...
Founders of ITA were MIT grads, and hired lots of MIT folks. (Former ITA Software employee here - though not an MIT grad). ITA has been around for over a decade FWIW.
As a consumer and Jim Gaffigan fan, all I'm thinking is this is great. $5 and I get his next album and he gets all the loot - except for the small amount he's donating.

I'm not sure what you are saying my hidden reason as a consumer is for wanting $5 drm free stuff. Is it something more?

I think a better approach would have been him coming out and saying he's going to subscribe to Louis C.K.'s new business model because it just makes sense to consumers, and it makes sense financially to him, and he's ALL IN.
The original reddit, the one where pg article still made it on the top of the one and only front page, replaced Slashdot for me.

Once reddit was taken over by trolls, HN replaced reddit.

And now, it's HN with a small selection of sub-reddits with tiny and/or strictly moderated communities.
Apple to require explicit user permission.
Binary Tetris, in 140 Bytes of Javascript
(If anyone did go to the voting page them subsequently not vote, I’d be very interested to know the reasons why- let me know.)

Well, I didn't vote because I don't have an iPhone, so I can't test your app.

You said, "which of you are nice and voted for my app." But would I really be nice? In a competition like this, each vote counts in detriment of all the other apps/developers; voting you up can be essentially seen as voting everyone else down. And when my only criteria is that you happened to post on HN and they didn't, I don't think it's fair to vote your app up.
My comment was intended as realpolitik. I want to agree with you, but when I look at activist-entrepreneurs I mostly see people who have failed at both.
Yes; ran quite well with around 16GB of data in three nodegroups of two replicas each. Rolling restarts for making configuration changes (including the expansion of the cluster) were a total blessing. We peaked around 2,000 queries per second, and maintained (with a good indexing strategy) < 0.01s average query time using the SQL layer.
Exactly. Though /r/netsec is quite good, and /r/AskScience is pretty interesting at times. Also, /r/TrueReddit :)

Still, the percentage of articles I read is way higher on HN.
I think Craigslist's authentication scheme only works if your users don't need to be logged in very often. Otherwise it's a royal pain.
Wasn't that where Odeo was going before the founders abandoned it and went with Twitter?
s/just as//

In all seriousness, when people ask me what HN is, I reply "It's like /. when it was relevant". Thank you for being here, HN.
Yeah. Gotta watch him, if only for the skit about hot...pockets.
URDU SEX STORIES: Teacher Kay Saath Practical
Man, those were the days on Usenet spent plotting the Balkan disaster. It would be nice to know that something similar exists, as I'm getting bored of political blogs in search of eyeballs.
Thanks, yes, this makes sense, and does complicate things. In note due to the fact that afaik, the only one who can litigate based on a GPL violation is the original copyright holder
Too true. Everything on a computer can be represented as a number. So if you try to say that someone owns a number, let's say 5, how do you enforce that technologically? If they're not allowed to transmit 5, they can transmit 2+3 or 4+1. And it shouldn't take much imagination to see that to ban people from transmitting one number requires banning them from transmitting any numbers, because you can use any other number to make 5.

But mere impossibility isn't enough to make people give up. They'll keep trying and trying and just think that they didn't try hard enough, never wondering why people always seem to be able to find countermeasures. Maybe they can just ban the + program, any other use of it be damned? Oh, but we have - too. Well, there aren't that many functions on a pocket calculator, are there? Maybe you can ban them all? Maybe we could get that Godel guy to help us figure this out....
I have a set of honest questions to make:

I understand what it means to be a self-taught programmer, which I was from ages 13 to 17, before I got into college and, in some sense, still am today, as many of the things I learn and have learned for the past few years were "self-taught" (or, as I prefer to say, taught me by the authors of books, papers, and blog posts I read).

Some people like to call themselves self-taught hackers, software engineers, etc. And that is ok too.

But what does it mean to be a self-taught computer scientist? Is there some criteria, e.g. do you have to publish a peer reviewed paper or something like that?
I don't sit on archives of data but if I Google something on those lines the top result is http://www.wired.com/gadgets/mac/news/2006/08/71639. Indirect measure of the popularity of the iPod in India.
Hell yeah it is less secure. password, letmein, 123456, j@nuary1

All bad passwords. All will be chosen by your users at some point. The last satisfies any complexity requirements I have ever run against in the wild.

There is nothing insecure about sending a plain-text password that compares to a badly chosen password -- email isn't that easy to intercept and properly nobody is hacking your users physical (or wireless) network. At least not compared to the number of people who will be attempting to crack their online password.
I have to second Skiena's book. I had three books: the famous Cormen tome, "Algorithm Design" by Kleinberg and Tardos, and Skiena's "Algorithm Design Manual" available when learning advanced algorithms. I'm still amazed at how Skiena's book covers both the basics in a far better pedagogical way than the other two, as well as serving as a really nice lookup utility for tackling specific problems (the second half of the book is jammed packed with short problem description, as well as a overview of approaches and considerations). I kept looking up the same topic in all three, and ended up reading the Algorithm Design Manual.

That said, Cormen's book is famous for a reason, but more often than not, I felt it gave way for mathematical rigor than plain language.

Note: The second edition of Skiena's book is significantly improved over the first... well, besides the quality if the paper.

edit: Meant second edition of Skiena's book, not Cormen's. Sorry.
First, they default to the view of the majority of sources.

They do that because their job is to survey the sources.

More importantly, they default to the majority of the sources. They don't adhere to it. Part of the job of editing an encyclopedia is appropriately weighting sources.

The author of this magazine article is in the medium term going to get the Wikipedia article he wants, because the source he ended up creating is more authoritative.
This topic has two possible paths - oblivion and a bitter discussion full of hatred. I hope it takes the first.
A scientist researches. Was that intentional?
I work for a bank. We spend a LOT of time, money, and attention on satisfying various regulators. Now, I'm not complaining about that: it's part of the cost of doing business in that field, and for the most part the regulations have been put in place for good reasons.

But if "entrepreneurs" are not required to follow the same regulations, then that's just not fair. Am I allowed to call MY company an "entrepreneur" and thereby not be required to submit to strict scrutiny and regulation?

By the way, this comment is intended as a defense of general regulation of certain industries (like banking). I am NOT defending or endorsing California's MTA which I know very little about but what little I know is universally negative.
The "independent body" should be the courts, so that the clarity of law and the long-standing traditions of equality and appeals can be used by all parties to make sure that a fair and just decision is reached.

Anything less is just wrong.
Why God Loves Entrepreneurs
How Piictu is capitalizing on the changing role of the mobile photo (Part 2)
It's a matter of semantics, but I completely agree with you. I would have liked it if there was a book on Design Patterns in the list as well.
Nonsense. If someone is using your property (or widget) without your permission (or license), it is reasonable to consider them a thief (or pirate), and absurd to consider them a client (or customer).
Apologies for the meta comment but this is the thread with the highest points/comments ratio I've seen in HN. Almost six hundred readers upvoted it but less than 10% posted a comment, which is pretty unusual. I'm guessing it's the overwhelming "this is amazingly cool/touching/lovely but other than I don't really have anything to add to the discussion" feeling.
Redefinition of "property" is extremely important. Start with the fact that pirates don't steal - they infringe copyright.
My intention was to mention You and Cooper McHatton but Hacker News have the title limited to 80 characters. Also, such a cool site! I'm planning to write something as soon as I get some free time.
Programming Pearls is also an amazing gem you should read as early in your career as possible. If you end up heading into software, also check out The Mythical Man Month. Although dated, the lessons are timeless.
Apple responds to iOS contact data sharing: ‘It’s a violation’
Exactly.

Think of it this way:

A salesman is visiting a customer's home or office. The customer goes to the bathroom. When the customer comes back, he finds the salesman has picked up the customer's phone, called another salesman back at headquarters, and is going through the contact list and reading all the info out to the other salesman.

Will the customer be happy? No, he will not.

Will he be satisfied if the salesman then issues a non-apology apology ("we're sorry if you were offended"), claims that he was only doing it to "help the customer connect better", or tries to blame it on the customer and/or the phone manufacturer because the information wasn't locked? No, he will not.

In general, right and wrong don't change just because the action is carried out by software rather than direct human intervention.
Those are Amazon affiliate links in the article. Getting this on the front of HN will get you a few clicks.
That was very far from what I expected :)
Probably. But today's Apple isn't built on those hardcore Mac users. I wasn't one of them. If I go back in time, I would prefer XP over what Apple was shipping in 2002. I only have Apple stuff _after_ they became good again. (Too young to have had a chance to buy the originals - Apple II et al.) OS X is UNIX - love that - and it has nice proprietary apps which to me add lot of value to everyday life.
CLRS (the Cormen tome) is actually on its third edition now, with some updates/additional content.
On the fun side, I love /r/ExplainLikeImCalvin/ ;)
IDE's: When things feel only vaguely familiar, and you know just enough to be dangerous.
The cynical side of me thinks it was to foster the development of free and low cost apps in lieu of encouraging development of a mobile web accessible to devices from many manufacturers...the business side of me does as well.
Ditto (early 2010).

Since our complexity requirements were low we settled for a home-grown solution (basically memcached with write-through) and so far didn't regret.

I, too, remain curious if anyone is running this at scale and has bumped into the various corner cases (exceeding capacity, hardware dying, etc.).
Siri Leaks It Will Support Japanese Soon
I don't understand the criticism.

Wikipedia is a terrible venue to correct "popular misconceptions". If a misconception about the evidence against the Haymarket Anarchists is indeed embedded into the best known books about the event, the correction of that misconception merits more than a sentence or two in an encyclopedia!

And indeed the author here agrees, because he went on to write an authoritative text about the event, which will be cited by the encyclopedia.
So, developers will do their contact stealing with Mac or Windows apps instead. Better than nothing.
HyperDex: Hashing in Hyperspace for fast (really fast) key value store searching
Find Best Thing In Usa Store
Find Best Thing In Usa Store The latest styles for discount prices! just Order over $25 Free Shipping and customer reviews Find Best Thing In Usa Store
I would say a self-taught computer scientist is well-versed in theoretical, or 'purer' forms of computation. That is, I would expect knowledge of λ-calculus, what it means for a language to be regular or context-free, and so on. A software developer and a computer scientist are really very different things (but not mutually exclusive).
>Isaacson clearly believes that design is merely how a product looks and feels, and that “engineering” is how it actually works.

The author doesn't seem to understand that Isaacson isn't writing for a HN audience. To the vast majority of people "design" does mean only aesthetics, so the author is to some extent justified in following the same route.

Same thing with de-emphasis of software. It is pretty much impossible to explain why a certain piece of software is good using words to a non-programmer audience - who may not even have seen an Apple device. I'd have glossed over software too especially since everyone associates Apple with brushed aluminium hardware anyway.

Just because some aspect isn't discussed in the book doesn't mean the author is ignorant of it.

These types books are meant for mass market entertainment, not a technically literate HN crowd. Of course if you measure the book against the wrong bloody benchmark then it fails miserably. And yet somehow after pages of doing exactly that the author manages to highlight his own mistake in the final 2 sentences:

>Isaacson’s book may well be the defining resource for Jobs’s personal life — his childhood, his youth, his eccentricities, cruelty, temper, and emotional outbursts. But as regards Jobs’s work, Isaacson leaves the reader profoundly and tragically misinformed.
afaik, the only one who can litigate based on a GPL violation is the original copyright holder

Yes, because the only one who can litigate on a copyright violation is the original copyright holder. GPL is just a license like any other in that regard.
Cloudcracker : A password cracking service for penetration testers
TheGlobalSquare: Call for coders
TheGlobalSquare aims to be the first massive decentralized social network in the history of the Internet. We are aware of the difficulties we must overcome, but we believe the Internet Community has reached a point where such an initiative is possible. It is possible because we are more united; censorship and repression have created stronger bonds between those who care about freedom and the free flow of information. How can we achieve this goal?
That seems like fair compensation for assembling a list of books that, I may be interested in reading. Do you actually find this objectionable?
A Revolution is Coming: Networking for the Facebook Generation.
I've noticed that after the 3.3.4 market update I cannot view the permissions of installed applications. I used to be able to go to an installed app, Menu - Settings - Security, and view its permissions, that's all gone now.

Also, the permissions do not appear on the app's installation page, they appear on the confirmation page before installing (after clicking download/buy), that's not very good UI.

Before the 3.3.4 update, the permissions on my phone were just the titles with no description (Full internet access, Read phone state and identity, etc.), so Kudos to them for adding descriptions.

However, I was shocked after the update when I learned what "Read phone state and identity" really means, here's the description:
"Allows the application to access the phone features of the device. An application with this permission can determine the phone number and serial number of this phone, whether a call is active, the number that call is connected to and the like."

That seems pretty invasive for what I _assumed_ was a GUID or a token of some sort to authenticate purchases or keep track on installations. I wonder what "the like" means in that description.
"email isn't that easy to intercept and properly nobody is hacking your users physical (or wireless) network".

If you actually believe this, then we will never be in agreement.