skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The apple shareholders would get a benefit in that they would end up owning a bigger share of apple.

If you own say 1% of a company and the company buys back 50% of its stock, then you will end up owning 2% of the company with the same shares.

Currently for each apple share you get ownership of a part of apple's business and a part of apple's huge stockpile of money. The business would hopefully grow and create profit for a long time to come (at least you believe that if you own the shares), but the cash would sit around and do nothing. If you think that the business is undervalued, than it is very much in your benefit for apple to swap your share of the cash for an additional share of the business.
2/29 is a good date. 3/14 would have been much more in tune with the Raspberry Pi name.
How Do We Find Tomorrow's Energy Solutions?
Get It In Writing
Most people learn C++ as a feature-by-feature increment over C. This means they generally write function-oriented programming with objects instead of object-oriented programming, mix exceptions with returning errors, stick with pointers and char*'s instead of references and string's, and end up rewriting data structures before finding out about STL.

That being said I use some features of C++ I like (inheritance and STL) and while the result is somewhat bastard C/C++ it does what I need well, which at the end of the day is all we should really ask for from a language.
> you got this info from an intern who got this information from a talk from some guy other than the CEO/CFO?

The way he "sourced" this information might be questionable, but most of it is indeed true. Apple do have large cash reserves overseas[1], and they have inferred (if not directly said) in earnings calls that their large cash hoard gives them the ability to be agile when it comes to manufacturing.

[1] In fact, they are petitioning the US—along with many other large corporations—to allow them tax breaks so they can bring their earnings back into the country without paying significant amounts in tax.
That money belongs to the shareholders. You can invest it in the company to attempt to earn more money in the future (capital improvements, research and development). You can pay it to the shareholders in dividends. You can acquire other companies to diversify or to enter new markets.

If you buy back existing shares of stock, you increase the value of each share of stock by improving the earnings and free cash flow per share. (Think of it as paying down long term debt.)

Stockpiling the money--especially that much money--doesn't generate much return for shareholders. Sure, it earns a little bit of interest, but Buffett's reasoning is probably that there are better places for that money. Use it to make the company worth more.
If you want to innovate, you have to ignore the data.
How so? If they don't pay dividends, what benefit will you gain from the stock?
Upvote for "There's unions and then there's unions." I live in Michigan and have known people who personally attest to all of the negative stereotypes about the Teamsters and the UAW. On the other hand, Germany manages to have a world-class economy based on manufacturing highly-sought factory-made goods, and they do it all with high-wage union labor.

I'm a red-blooded American, so I prefer as few regulations as necessary. But maybe -- just maybe -- we can copy a few of the things that those wacky krauts are doing.
Luckily, the acquiree knows that "It doesn't look so hard, we can build it ourselves" is almost certainly a mistaken belief on the part of the acquirer. I've found that any system, no matter how complicated, when explained by a competent engineer who knows the system well and is a good communicator, sounds "not so hard, I could build it myself". I have to remind myself that it is probably hard, and I could probably not build it myself for less than the cost of the acquisition.
Read past the first couple of words of my comment and you'll see that I agree that worker protections are important, I'm just saying that unions have historically created a whole host of hard to solve problems and are not a good way to deal with this. No job availability is still generally the worst possible outcome in a country without strong social safety nets like the US, so don't underestimate the importance of competitiveness.
"C++ is a horrible language. It's made more horrible by the fact that a lot
of substandard programmers use it, to the point where it's much much
easier to generate total and utter crap with it."

So what's his excuse? RE: Linux
Zappos was one of the first companies to use Kiva Electronics to automate their processess. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fdd6sQ8Cbe0
It's a shame that there aren't unions in China and the United States.
Also check out this excellent TEDx talk:

The Hidden World of Box Packaging

http://www.ted.com/talks/mick_mountz_the_hidden_world_of_box...
Where did you see the extra $500 ?
Lies my airline told me
With all due respect to a fellow member, how does Java do Regex better than perl? When I attempt to use the Java Regex, I miss several features I am used to even in Python. Perl invented Regex, which helps explain why the syntax does what it should.
I'm not the person who you directed your question to, but Piracetam and Choline help with increased cognition, focus, memory recall, and mental stamina. I haven't taken Phenibut, but it appears to reduce stress/anxiety.
Someone Save Us From REST
well... it costs them something more than it cost to have it the way it is now, and since they don't have to pay for the effect on the workers working in the non-ergonomic warehouse, what's the point? If they had to pay for the health/welfare of their workers directly, they'd have an incentive to ergonimicize the place.
Because it's characterized by exploitation.

The same could be (and was) argued for actual slavery in the US. "At least they have food and clothes instead of being naked in the jungle." "At least now they're Christians." "They're not smart enough to take care of themselves - they do best with white guidance. It's a kindness."

Of course, it's not quite as bad as actual slavery. But it's close enough that using word "slave" isn't completely spurious.
That was my first thought. Does the iPhone support something like near field communication?
bravo! this is something a friend and I have been discussing on and off for more than 3 years, good that someone actually is doing it (rather than just talking ;-D).

Break a leg
Linus's objections seem centered on the fact that it makes it easier to generate bloated code. While this may be true, there's nothing a little self-discipline can't control.

STL and Boost may not make sense for the kernel, but there's nothing wrong with using C++ classes at their most basic. The kernel would be far more readable if it used classes and simple inheritance rather than re-inventing the wheel with structs full of function pointers.

C++ gives you more flexibility with regard to encapsulation as well - it's hard to argue that that doesn't lead to cleaner, safer code.
You can sell it for higher than what you bought it for if the stock goes up.
I know this comes from US Government data, but do you have any plans to add neighborhood KML shapes for major cities?
but.... facebook login only :-(
Oh man, the OS X integration utility is remarkably obnoxious. I wasn't pleased that it was getting a bit more into the guts of my system than expected without letting me know (although the system authentication request at the beginning was clearly a tip off, assuming I'm remembering correctly). After completing the install I suddenly had a Google Music menu icon and the app was accessible only through my system prefs pane. I much prefer Amazon's approach with their standalone application.

I've also had issues where the app wanted to completely reupload my entire library. No thanks---I now just keep it set to monitor an empty directory.
Pwnium: rewards for exploits
Yes, I agree with this completely. It got so annoying that I either needed to start un-watching repos, or just ignore the news feed, and I chose the latter.
If only there was a way to just 'star' projects without having them take over the news feed...
He's being downvoted because knee-jerk unionism is bad for discussion, just as any other kind of knee-jerk politics is bad for discussion.
sounds to me like a "check this box to post to subscribed watch lists" would fix this?
If you ever find yourself in a situation where static electricity is a problem as in this article, find a regular wooden pencil, break it in half, sharpen both ends and then blunt them a bit so they don't poke you. As you approach the metal object, touch the end of the pencil to it first. Make sure you are in good contact with the other end. The graphite "lead" is a conductor. You won't feel the shock.
I would guess that the current economic climate provides an incentive for management to push workers harder than before, since there's a greater pool of replacements and a worse fate awaiting those who can't keep up.
This app fails to do anything innovative in my opinion, as the fact that you have to hand your phone to a stranger and ask them to add their details illustrates. How is that better than just using the contacts app on your phone?

I think Cardflick is a much better solution. It is still not optimal, but definitely a better solution than Evernote's hello:

http://cardflick.co/
Diapers is not a seasonal business. The problem with full automation is that your capacity has to be whatever peak load is - and peak load can be two orders of magnitude above your normal steady-state. That's a lot of robots sitting around doing nothing, whereas manual labor can be just as seasonal as the demand they are meant to fulfill.
> the reason US has a slightly more advanced economy than, say, Sweden, is not due to harsh working conditions. It's has more to do with human capital, a large unified market PLUS tons of military might abused to ensure cheap oil and resources.

Russia: huge human capital. Check. Large unified market. Check. Tons of Military Might abused to ensure cheap access to ressources. Check. Oh wait, I can do the same thing for China, too.

Of course those are NOT the only factors to predict how rich people are going to be. The economic system is the only KEY differenciator to build an economy. That should have been obvious by now, after we had so many great examples in the 20th century. Let's not spread the old false myths around.
The back issue access is for digital only :)
Google Confirms Search Ranking Update
It's stated, that it's FB-only for now. Made me left the page, though.
I think that there's definitely room for an app that helps you remember people, but this is not it. First of all, photographing people to save them in your phone is just plain weird. At least in my circles, it is not socially acceptable to acquisitively photograph people and add them to your own personal database. I think many people would react with, "Is this because you don't think you'll remember me?"

Secondly, "Add an encounter" is too involved.
It's an interesting system. Workers actually have votes on corporate governance; in fact, a 50/50 split with shareholders if I recall correctly.

I wouldn't be surprised if that led to a less antagonistic labor/management relationship.
It's actually much simpler, don't buy or use software from a vendor that has a track record of vulnerability issues and questionable ethical decisions. I don't use Facebook for this very reason. I did not like something that Zuckerberg said once about his users and decided I could do without the service. It really is that simple.

The whole if you deliver source code you get to limit your liability idea looks like a Trojan for open source. Companies should not be cohered into providing their code base to users via regulations. If you don't like that a company does not provide it's code for inspection, then don't purchase from that vendor.

This type of regulation would fail in it's intent, the day it was enacted, vendors would raise their prices to reflect the new risks involved and the cost of the regulation would be passed on to the consumer. Further the markets would securitize the risk in the form of insurance and that risk and profit would be passed to the financial industry, who can manage the risk portfolio. So the cost gets passed to the consumer and the increased fees do nothing to further innovation but rather give the financial industry a foothold in software. So we up the cost of innovation by creating the artificial necessity of a middleman that brokers risk with no benefit to either the consumer or the innovator. This is how needless regulation kills a market and it usual happens due to those clamoring for regulation having a secondary agenda. Such as forcing code to be open. Don't get me wrong sometimes regulation is needed, but regulation should be looked at as a last resort measure.
"Economists dismiss costs that aren't included in price. For them the cost that matters is the price paid by consumers."
- Paul Craig Roberts, Which Is Worse: Regulation Or De-Regulation?

Sadly, customers often act the same way as economists on this issue.

EDIT: Punctuation
Now that you've written a full technical book, what are your thoughts about how technical book publishing is done and how it can both better serve the authors creating the content and be better presented to your readers?
My overall experience with Google Music has been kinda meh. I like their sharing functionality, but my first purchase was a pain in the butt….

I finally decided to buy a few albums during the big music sale G Music promoted during the holiday season. Unfortunately every time I'd check out it would prompt me to log in again. During this I noticed that at least some element of the process was using a different subdomain than the album page I was checking out from. Not sure if the login cookie just wasn't persisting across differing subdomains domains or my browser was set to block cookies set by third parties, but I vaguely remember having to manually whitelist the domain in Chrome's cookie exception manager to complete my purchase. It took a moment to figure out because there was no particular useful error - just the prompt to log in again.

I have no idea if I previously changed a setting in Chrome that resulted in this annoyance or if it was a default setting in Chrome, but that nearly prevented me from buying from Google's music service. There's no way someone like my Mom or sister would've figured that out. I hope they resolved that component assuming the problem wasn't limited to just my set up because at the time I thought it was rather silly that I wasn't able to easily purchase from a Google browser without modifying settings.
There's certainly precedent for punitive action to be taken.

http://targetlaw.com/consequences-of-filing-a-false-dmca-tak...

"...A California court agreed with the Group and granted a request for summary judgment, after which Diebold settled with the Group to pay $125,000 for their monetary losses and legal fees."
You also need to not use:
STL(most implementations are too slow)
Boost or STLPort(namespace and compatability issues if you're not producing executables)
Most OO features like inheritance and polymorphism(a lot of that is resolved at runtime, which eats cycles)
Function overloading(debatable, since the compiler should resolve the function signatures at compile time)

You're pretty much left with C with namespaces at that point.
Now this has me a bit confused, why no love for STL ?

I wish Linus had added more detail. Is the complaint that the binaries are too big (not quite, if you strip them of the unnecessary symbols) ? or is it that it can be a tedium to go over the reams of error messages that compilers spit out when things go wrong. The second point I am willing to concede, it requires you to read messages inside out, which lisp does train you into doing. Or is the complaint about something else entirely ?

Something else that I hear often that bothers me is the claim that STL adds huge runtime overhead. Maybe it was true with the old compilers, but with the current ones, GCC4.5, Intel its not true at least not in a noticeable way. The whole point of STL was the ability to generate optimized code. I have actually verified that the iterator based access patterns on vectors for instance gets optimized away into simple pointer based indexing into memory blocks.

I like STL, in fact I will go so far and admit that I will not code in C++ unless I sense that I will benefit from STL and or templates. Though STL gets used often merely as a container library I think you get more out of it when you use its algorithms. I really like it that I do not have to write for loops (and potentially get the indexing wrong).

If one squints the right way, it has map, reduce, filter and
map-reduce all built in (transform, accumulate, innerproduct) though I miss a vararg zip function. An un-ignorable side benefit to using the STL primitives is that if a parallelized version comes along the way, you get a fairly painless way to make your code parallel. You do have force some of your snippets to be sequential to account for the fact that there is not enough work to parallelize. This is the direction were GCC's STL library is headed with its parallel_mode. http://gcc.gnu.org/onlinedocs/libstdc++/manual/parallel_mode...

@cube Appreciate your comment. For writing kernels and VMs I gladly buy your argument, to add to what you said there is the ABI mess.
We needed a file management paradigm because we couldn't simply say to the filing system "bring me the X file, the one about Y". Now we can.

The machines have caught up to our need and we may now be lazy.

I am 46. I have worked in IT long enough to remember having to be obsessively organized.

Why? Because I had no choice. The machine could not help me.

I have become lazy in my dotage.

Why? Because the machine lets me.

gmail search is so fast I no longer organize email - it simply isn't worth organizing. I enter criteria, I find my email. When I was organized, I would have to break my current flow to remember my organizational method - which morphed over time, good luck with that.

find is now so fast - because of fast hardware - that I no longer even bother to try remembering where I filed things, I just type

fndi criterion

(fndi, he said?

function fndi () {

tgt="${1}"; shift

echo find . -iname \*"${tgt}"\* "${@}"

find . -iname \*"${tgt}"\* "${@}"

}

In other words, case-insensitive search starting in CWD, with optional additional criteria.)

I remain somewhat organized, lest my search results be too chaotic for me to read. But I need not be as perfectly organized as I once was, for the machine can now be useful and not a hindrance.
Fun fact: China's GFW designer, Fang Binxing, during a national TV interview, accused Google's censorship with DCMA and Chilling Effects[1].

His argument is basically like this: since Google will censor web content with bullshit copyright claims in the US, why can't Google censor taboo topics in China?

[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fang_Binxing#cite_note-4
It would be cool if they implemented a QR style code that would work out as such:

1) I have evernote Hello and create my profile. You do the same on your device.

2) We meet and each snap a picture of our QR-like codes generated by the app.

3) Data is imported into our devices and we go on our merry way. It's like bump, but using a QR code.

Downsides: both of you would need the app, but if it saved a lot of typing a networking event I could see it being really popular. Why make someone type their details more than once?
OCaml isn't actually a pure functional language: it has side-effects and mutation. In fact, you can code that looks an awful lot like C if you want, except with automatic type inference. But then you can also lift up your level of abstraction in the same codebase to use a purely functional idiom where it's appropriate, or use an object-oriented style for something else. All of those styles are supported as consistent, first-class features in the language.

There are several event-driven programming libraries in OCaml, and two that I like that use monadic abstractions (to hide the messy control flow that makes node.js so painful) are Async (https://ocaml.janestreet.com/?q=node%2F100) and Lwt (http://ocsigen.org).

You have good low-level memory layout in OCaml, either via an FFI or the Ancient module to import in non-GCed values. You can read about the OCaml heap and GC at this blog series by Richard Jones. http://rwmj.wordpress.com/2009/08/04/ocaml-internals/ (and yes, the memory representation is a straightforward mapping from the type declaration; very little magic happens in the compiler)

OCaml is used all over the Xen Cloud Platform (http://github.com/xen-org/xen-api), and I'm running an ongoing microkernel research project called Mirage (http://www.openmirage.org) which has a full network stack written in pure OCaml (and is also competitive performance-wise).
Living to 100? That Will Be $3.5 Million
The Mounting Minuses at Google+
The author mentions that picking 800 items filled 52% of her daily quota. An extra 5c shipping cost per item could thus double her salary, or pay for an entire extra employee.

There's no need for this kind of brutal efficiency. It is detrimental to our society and our economy. Workers who develop crippling health conditions and can never afford to retire are a massive burden on our systems of welfare.
How many distributed version control systems have you worked on and released to the public? Any worth critiquing?
Facebook and others aim to make the mobile Web a competitive app platform
The economy changed. The mid to late nineties were the years of the Clinton relative prosperity when unemployment was low jobs were not that hard to get so one could not treat people like shit, especially in low level jobs.
Yes, so I can email him and hope he will update or edit or admit he's wrong, and also accept that by the time he does so most readers will be gone - rather than post a public comment he would specifically have to censor, and my correction be visible in time for most readers to see if they care to.

I hope you can see why I would regard one alternative as way better than the other.
Really, the issue is that the news feed is broken.

Absolutely. I coded up a replacement using the GitHub API:

http://gilesbowkett.blogspot.com/2010/10/node-miniapp-minima...

It broke when they changed the API, but by then I had found http://defunkt.io/dotjs, which allows you to execute any code in a ~/.js file for a given domain.

So I put $("div.news").hide(); in my github.com.js and instantly had a more relaxing, comfortable life.

I completely disagree with this part of your post:

Facebook has done a really good job solving the problems of information overload and would provide a good model.

But I do agree with these:

The most important step is to group updates from each project. Right now half of my news feed is comments on a single repository. Those should take up only one or two slots.
The next step is to filter according to some metric of "interestingness."

My advice is do it and share the hack. I think the best way to find trouble spots in your UI is to find out what people are writing hacks to work around.
Amazon is the worst e-commerce company I've ever dealt with. They treat their marketplace sellers like garbage.

I have been selling for the past 5+ years. They put a review on my account and when I called them to find out some more information about it, I was met with a call center rep in India who gave me absolutely no help.

They don't actually have call support for marketplace sellers. You have to email them. When you do, you get mostly automated responses.

After this ordeal, I finally left them for good. I still can't believe people are giving Amazon this much money (most categories are between 8-16% commission) to sell their goods (plus $40/month if you have a pro-account).

It's a slap in the face when you can't even talk to someone when you have any sort of account issue. On top of this, Amazon doesn't even abide by the same harsh rules they expect all of their 3rd-party sellers to follow.