skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
iOS5/iCloud works in this use case, actually. You download an app anywhere, including desktop iTunes, and your devices automatically download it too. It is a bit of a bandwidth waste and it asks for your password, but it's smooth enough.

You can download every iPhone app on the iPad too, unless it requires GPS/camera/compass (not sure). The only missing use case is downloading iPad apps when on the iPhone. They cannot even be found in the mobile App Store's search. :(
This article introduces concatenative langauges, but it doesn't explain why they matter.

In my work, I found that the lack of syntactic marking for arguments of function calls is a devastating drawback. Coming back to my own function definitions a week after writing them, I spent minutes unpuzzling the code. I could use every trick and write the function in the most elegant way, using combinators in the style of Factor, and that made it worse. But writing it out with local bindings also didn't help. As soon as you write a nested expression, you start to lose the sense of which values are being passed where.

gcd n1 n2 n2 0 = if n1 else n2 n1 n2 mod gcd

gcd zero if else "mod" plus swap gcd

factorial 1 interval product

I was designing a Forth-like functional language with generic functions, and for a long time I felt that the lack of markings didn't matter. I thought that one could understand the code "well enough" without knowing exactly where the arguments were going. There is something to this argument, and there's a lot we can do to make code say what it does. But sometimes the author just had to implement something, and technicalities arose, and when you go to read it, the code doesn't "read" and you have to bring your own intelligence to figure out what it does -- it won't tell you. In these cases, explicit argument marking is indispensable.

In Forth-like languages, simple things are wonderful and elegant. There is no other shorter way to write than point-free. And, writing with combinators is satisfying, and it can make the "essence of the function" more evident. But unless you severely constrain your style to ultra short definitions, avoid nested expressions, and use local variables profusely, you're constructing puzzles for yourself.

It's almost like the concatenative style is too optimal. You have to back up a step in beauty in order to get a practical tool.
Financial goals and rewards of an indie developer
Interesting. If you ever do switch, it would be interesting to see what your customer's reaction is and how much more profitable the SaaS model is compared to the current one.
Is it possible that things like Freckle or even the 37signals stuff are more "fan based" businesses rather than stuff that people really need? More like "heck, I like these guys, why not pay them 20$/month"?

The real work then would be blogging a lot, going to conferences, socializing, to maintain the fan base.
So really it woud be more like Kiva; loaning money to people based on charity. The problem with that is what makes Kiva so rewarding is the quick turnaround times, where you loan someone something and you get part of it back only a few months later to help other people with. That wouldn't work with student loans.
I love this traffic graph, looks very similar to past HN type analytic graphs ive seen.

I would say a big lesson people should learn from you and others is, use load balancers. At least if traffic spikes, you can add another server (provided you have an image sitting by waiting and your code doesnt mind being load balanced).
try http://www.webmasterworld.com for deep down, in-the-trenches type discussions and http://www.searchengineland.com for more editorially fashioned coverage
Don't call marketing your lead generation boutique
Wow these are significant changes! The entire development process has been cleaned up significantly, and not having to use Makefiles is a significant improvement, as well as default error type. Go team is dedicated to developers and developer process and it will pay off.
You should work on helping those without access to clean drinking water instead of wasting your time criticizing what someone else would like to do.
Don’t raise money thinking the money’s going to solve your problems
Wow, the Stanford Thought Leader podcasts look awesome. Can't wait to hear some of them. Thanks for the tip
What you are going to find is some poor kid who asked his mom to buy him Tagged gold for his birthday, and she went online to some random buy-tagged-gold-now.com website.

There is no bearded Ukrainian drinking his vodka and showing off how much gold he now has to underaged girls. He is long gone with his ill gotten gains.
The Cold Reading Technique (How to Read Minds Like a Stage Magician)
Well put... I like the way you frame the argument around the concept of ownership.

However, we can't conflate access to another's property and the deprivation of that property. If I walk on my neighbor's lawn without his permission, I am accessing his property but not depriving him of ownership. Similarly, If I misappropriate someone's copyright, I am accessing his property but not depriving him of ownership.

In each case, the owner's rights are being invaded, but the owner is not deprived of ownership.

Perhaps this explains the problem analogizing copyright infringement to theft. It doesn't quite fit. Theft necessarily deprives the owner of his property, copyright infringement does not.

Therefore, a more appropriate analogy in the law might be to trespass. If someone trespasses on my property, they violate my right to exclude other's access to such property without stealing it. The same can be said for misappropriation of intellectual property.
I don't have a good grasp on image libraries, but this might be a fun project to attempt:

Build a script that imports ZIP files full of JPEGs or a single JPEG. After import, display each photo in succession. Prompt the user to select the contiguous space that is unwanted (either the space around the single photo or the space between the multiple photos). This would work similarly to the Photoshop Magic Wand (with a slider to manage tolerance). The script could then pull out the positives (the areas to keep) and rotate them so the bottom is parallel to the x-axis.

Here's a StackOverflow link for Python image libraries: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/94875/image-processing-in...

And i'm pretty sure a magic wand tool could be implemented in javascript to give you a responsive front-end. Import image into a canvas element. Capture the canvas element in a bitmap array object. Iterate through object (which are pixels) and flagging the ones within the tolerance of the clicked color.

Find a way to serialize your mask selection (output from the magic wand javascript function) and send the request back to the script for processing with the image lib. Make it spit out the resulting image or ZIP of images.

I looked for an existing implementation of the magic wand javascript function, but a cursory search wasn't yielding much. I don't want to trivialize the task, but I think it's doable over a full weekend for someone with basic programming chops.
All companies make money by adding value, the goal is to maximize value created while minimizing the cost and then benefit by charging people based on that gap. The niche is really the type of value your creating and you need to pick a niche is the correct size for your needs and capital. There is a world of difference between the ideal niche for a collage student trying to make some beer money, an unemployed coder trying to make rent, and 3 collage friends who just got 2 million in funding. The smaller the company the more nuanced it's approach and the smaller the niche, can be. What might look like a product feature to Microsoft may support 5 different tiny software companies all going after different angles.

The specifics relate to the market and the kinds of product sold. You are not going to make money shipping individual 50lb bags of dog food to people, but you might be able to make money shipping pallets of dog food to people. Things like building communities or creating content are really just another form of advertizing that is theoretically cheaper to create in the long run than Adwords.
#!/usr/bin/ruby is for Sysadmins
Taken in isolation this could sound scary, but as zalew says here[1] it's needed for them to operate. Seriously, think about what would happen if google suddenly started publishing your (private) content. They'd lose all trust from the wider population. For them to publish or publicly display your content in a way that would violate your privacy would be an absolutely stupid move. Google hasn't gotten to where they are now by being absolutely stupid. [1]http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3582421
I'm not sure where your math went wrong, but iirc I pay between 5 and 6 something a month. I'll check exactly what it is later.
You probably want to be Secretary of State.
iCloud definitely seems like the Right Way, going even further than the Android model. Doesn't this make the method the article talks about redundant - or is the author not using iCloud?

[edit] Oh wait, does that mean iCloud works from any device but not from a browser? That seems like an odd omission.
Funny how Sony references that patent for "Remote control of VCR with electronic mail".
> The Python version seems to be using an interpreter that frankly just doesn't work:

NameError: name 'reduce' is not defined
I learned a lot by messing with the Skeleton Framework. I decided I wanted to alter every CSS element and in doing so learned a lot about structure, relationship and even naming.
I was with him right up until this:

"Lawyers I spoke with said that my address book — which contains my reporting sources at companies and in government — is protected under the First Amendment."

What does this even mean? Does he mean the fourth amendment? If so, lawyers would have told him "not once it leaves your phone". What do you mean by "protected"? That you can't be compelled to divulge it at all? That police need a warrant to get at it? That you can sue if someone else exposes it?

So I flipped the bozo bit. If the author plunks a meaningless but frightening sounding paragraph in the middle of an article, I just don't really put a high value on anything he has to say.
Email is certainly not secure. IT guys can not only read text email, they can also read passwords. A long while ago in the earlier days of IDS, I was shown an example of how IDS scanner could read the Yahoo password a user types in the browser. But, that doesn't mean anyone would potentially read your email and they don't.

However, in the longer run, the question then is: like a snail mailbox which is fundamentally a right of each person/household - does our individual email in this increasingly connected world fall into the category of individual's right? Should the government or semi-government be responsible for securing the privacy of individuals? Should email be technically free in a real sense? I know this train of thought has several other inter-related points as well but ... we can't just ignore Gmail's reading of our emails - even algorithmically - without paying some attention.
It looks to me like they have a pretty healthily balanced of traffic sources. Quite a few within a few percentage points, nothing really dominating.
Show HN: Feeding the linux /dev/random pool using a smart card RNG
Share HN: First real-world use of my iPad app for speech disabled users
Google Might Launch Drive Soon
Almost 3 years ago I shared a small web-app on HN http://hackerne.ws/item?id=715265 and got a lot of positive feedback. While I couldn't do anything right away (especially due to my cousin's health), I knew what my long-term mission was. Mid-2010 I quit my job and started working on KType http://ktype.net. After 18 months of research, learning, and coding, tonight was the first real-world test of the app and I couldn't be happier at the result. My cousin was very happy to finally 'say' something on his own and so were his parents.

I have no idea if my app will be financially successful or not but I just wanted to share this happy bit of news with HN because you guys were the ones who encouraged me to go this route. Thanks!
They should not and likely will not tell you anything about who made the purchase. One alleged illegal act does not make another legal -- they can't violate their privacy policy, privacy protection laws of various countries, and the payment data protection regulations of their merchant account acquirer.

Fraud like this is rarely that transparent anyway -- it's often part of a multi-step process to launder money (buy something with stolen money, sell it for legitimate currency) -- and you'll end up with the IP address of a proxy in Romania that's of no use to you or anyone else. It's also unlikely the person that used your card is the one that stole your card -- the numbers are stolen then sold in bulk on forums for $1-2 a card.
AmazingWill, in my opinion, if you want to ensure privacy, online service with IMAP is not the solution, because:

1) You don't know who has (or will get) access to the emails stored at the servers.

2) You don't know if your account will not be hacked.

In my opinion, you either need to:

a) host your own email server, or

b) periodically download your emails through pop3s to your own encrypted drive, not leaving them on the server
Researchers at MIT Develop The Fastest Possible Data Transmission Method
Here's another way to look at it. The stack is the global state of the program; and this global state is passed as an argument to every function. By an unkind interpretation, a stack language is the opposite of functional; every function isn't just mutable, it mutates the world.

In a shell pipeline of 'a | b | c | d', I can see the dataflow clearly. 'c' never sees the output of 'a' directly; it must be mediated by 'b'. But for a stack, 'a b c d', I have no idea if c uses the value a or not, unless I know the definition of b and how many items c consumes.

When reading stack code, I find myself mentally inserting parentheses to see how far back each operation reaches; for higher-level operators, I find myself wanting to insert comments describing the shape of the code being implicitly constructed. I need to see the "tree" (though frequently a dag) shape.

This isn't different in complex infix expressions. There too, parentheses are often needed for clarity - and good programmers use them even when not necessary - and for very complicated expressions, I'll spread them out across multiple lines, with indentation to make the tree explicit, where performance or similar concerns prevents writing out the expression in a more long-hand fashion.
An IP address is not a person. Tagged doesn't know who did this, so they can't tell you. Even if they wanted to, they'd be violating data protection laws, their own privacy, and possibly their merchant agreement by giving out that information.
I never said concatenative style is better than functional style (outside of very specific examples), so the person you think is wrong doesn’t actually exist. Anyway, I agree all around. Although you can’t say for certain what makes a language popular or not, I think that picture of Clojure is pretty accurate.

And I would love to see a functional language as powerful and carefully designed as Haskell, without all of that language’s minor annoyances and barriers to entry. Even though the Haskell culture is great, it’s unfortunate (to paraphrase SPJ) that they picked the scary term “monad” instead of “warm fuzzy friendly thing”.
It's more of a United Nations thing, rather than the US.
> any device

Any Apple manufactured device, which constitutes about 30% of all devices I own and use. It's probably why I rarely download new apps on my iPad, if I can't trigger a download from any web browser I'm not going to even bother looking unless I need/want something specific.
what worries me, and is related to the issues described in that article, is that the various examples i've seen don't seem to be secure. the path loading was via https/tls but seemed to be (from the description given at the time) vulnerable to a simple mitm attack. that means that the server certificate was not being validated correctly. another example (can't remember the company) was using http.

in both cases, a clued-up governmental agency could read the data. as the article says, this can be a big fucking deal.

tldr: if you're going to abuse people's privacy, at least do it right.

[it's possible that the tls case involved loading a new trusted certificate onto the phone before the attack; i did check for that when i read the description and couldn't find any mention, but if that's the case then the loading would be secure - although even then, it might have been possible for path to hard code details of which ca they trust.]
Like the lure of the Sirens, the viral factor of social sharing is too hard to resist.

Oh VCs, some of our users put adblockers in their ears, but where's our rope?
Thanks but my point was that in his video he said it would be available for PC and Mac. PC != Windows so it bugs me when people say something is coming out for PC but really mean PCs running Windows. This PC runs Ubuntu Linux as do millions of other PCs around the world.
The advancement of artificial intelligence, not sure where to start, but I guess that's the point of this. If I had no concerns about money I would devote most of my free time to it.
> I just don't really put a high value on anything he has to say

Isaac Newton wasted the last decade of his life trying to turn stuff into gold, but his physical model of the universe was still quite correct, at least as a first approximation at the meso-scale (the best you could do at the time). You may find that one statement to be crazy, but I think the author still makes some important points about the flippant attitude toward privacy in the tech industry, which is supported by a thousand data points across dozens, perhaps hundreds of companies.
That's one reason I've found the pipeline metaphor not great as a way of introducing concatenative languages. To me, the shell pipeline, which has a data-in/data-out streaming kind of flavor, generalizes (with multiple input/outputs) into dataflow languages, not into concatenative languages. There are definite connections between the paradigms, but imo the stack-manipulation is a different thing not present in stream/pipe based languages. The graphical music language Pd literally draws the pipelines as wires connecting input and output ports on functions (inspired by physical patch cables), which seems much closer to what I'd expect a generalized version of shell pipelines to look like.
Needing an email address to sign up for your email hosting is slightly ironic ;)
That person makes $60K/year from 5hours/month but you can't imitate him. It's not really time = money. He is using some kind of personal/company brand that took years to build. There is value, but it's not in the time he is putting.

Okay. An example: Spend 10 years building knowledge and reputation on some field and become really good at it. Then give a one monthly paid talk at some conferences. That goes $5K/talk. Pretty much achievable. You can even make more, depending on the experience and value you bring.
>But, that doesn't mean anyone would potentially read your email and they don't.

Oh yes it does — they can, and they do.

http://gawker.com/5637234/

http://www.net-security.org/secworld.php?id=12048
> The ambiguity produced by stack effects is also paralleled in most infix procedural languages. C++ recognizes 18 levels of operator precedence

Yes, but all of those operators are binary operators, instead of let-me-look-at-the-documentation-ary, lots of those precedence rules are drilled into people at a young age, and lots of developers compulsively wrap them in parentheses anyway, just to make their intent absolutely clear.

All of that is very different from the experience of a concatenative language.
lols... would be pretty funny if he got 72fps from a test on a 60hz lcd ( ==60fps max visible hard cutoff )

btw quickhack test:

- set crt to X hz refresh rate

- bright white screen

- wave a pencil quickly in front of it

the X refresh rate at which you stop seeing a trail of 'multiple pencils' is just beyond your fps sensitivy threshold.. yes?
Like Secret Finds Romance Within Your Social Circle
I really love your app. Is all I ever wanted from Spotify when I'm on the go, so you guys have filled a great hole. Great job!
++

Syntax is extremely important for scripting languages, especially those you expect to use with a REPL. Programmers tend to choose languages that (a) are good enough for the job, and (b) are pleasant to use.
A machine parsing text is not the equivalent of a human "reading" it, all webmail services parse emails either to check for spelling errors or combat spam, Gmail uses adsense as well which is a much less annoying ad system than most.

The "reading" analogy is FUD employed by competitors to scare the uninformed, HN community should know better.
thanks (i was confused by the word "school" - the uk and us terms for school, college, university, etc, differ, and so i thought this was what a university rather than a high school).

hope you got/get your money back.
The two best-known features of Chuck Moore's style -- extreme simplicity and extreme factoring -- must be how he avoids the dangers you describe. I wonder if these qualities go beyond stylistic choice and are actually necessary if one is to build real systems in Forth. That might explain why programmers who come from other languages tend not to stick with it. Your story is reminiscent of others I've read in the past (most prominently http://www.yosefk.com/blog/my-history-with-forth-stack-machi...) that talk about being in love with the Forth model and then abandoning it because it got too complicated to make it do what they want.

Makes me wonder if trying to do what you want in that model is a recipe for disaster; instead, maybe you have to let the model tell you what you can do: if it's simple you get to do it and if it's not you don't. Chuck would see that as an advantage, but most programmers wouldn't.

Edit: the article I linked to talks about that at length. His conclusion is that if you're going to build systems in Forth, you need the freedom to shrink or morph the problem into something that can be solved simply in Forth. If you don't have that freedom (e.g. because people are feeding you inflexible requirements), it probably won't work...
Funnnnny!
Clickable links:

Frontpage: http://thequeue.org/api/frontpage.xml

Latest Submissions: http://thequeue.org/api/new.xml

Best: http://thequeue.org/api/best.xml
Here's another minimalist alternative: https://bitbucket.org/zserge/jsmn/wiki/Home

I've used it and think it's pretty neat. One of these days I'll get around to releasing the helper functions we've written to make it easier to use too.
Texting.ly (TechCrunch Disrupt/ Dave McClure funded)
Recessmobile.com
TextMarks.com
CallFire.com
Tatango.com
CellIt.com
TxtWire.com
Mobivity.com
Sumotext.com
Message-media.com
Trumpia.com

Trust that there are many more for more granular use cases.
it's downright trivial to switch mail providers

Yes, but on the other hand, that only prevents them from getting any new emails; they still have all your emails up to the moment you decide to change.
> How do you know? A friend of mine works on visual effects

Any chance there's a link to it online? I'd love to see an example :)

Anyhow, the problem for me is less with still renderings, and more with natural motion, like a human walking or talking. Also, I'd love to see a realistic splash as something falls into the water.
As nanotech increases in dominance, perhaps someday we can just make our own wireless ad hoc hardware as you describe. As the overall push is toward decentralized services and utilities, hardware is already starting to mirror reality, slow as it may be.
That way, when they later run a background check, they find out that you are not just a criminal, but a lying criminal.

That will catch up to you.