skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
EU Court says: Social networks can't be forced to filter copyrighted content.
How to remember everything, ever, and forever...
You know, I've always thought of "MM" as "millions," plural, the same way "p. 55" is "page 55" and "pp. 55-56" is "pages 55-56." No idea if that's common usage/interpretation though.
This is China's iPad. The One Apple Is Getting Sued Over.
Google Busted With Hand in Safari
Didn't apple come inches from extinction going down this road once in history already?
Hong Kong's GDP might be rising, but most of its people's income has been steadily decreasing since 1997.

In 1997 a university graduate earns $10000-$20000 per month. In 2011, a university graduate still earns only $10000-$20000 per month. After inflation it is a net decrease.

Why? Hong Kong has monopolies with no anti-monopoly laws. Buses, Trains, Electricity, Supermarkets - All monopolies or duopolies. (There are several bus companies all with their own local monopoly regions).

The Chief Executive of Hong Kong is, for all practical purposes, appointed by the Chinese government due to its influence in Hong Kong politics. The Chief Executive writes polices with China's interest over Hong Kong interest. In any other country you would call that treason, but since Hong Kong is part of China...

The largest political party in Hong Kong is almost directly funded by the Chinese Government and it votes in favour of every bill the government proposes.

The minimum wage law of $28 HKD ~= $7 USD per hour was instituted only last year.

This might seem like Hong Kong was fully in support of a vibrant capital market but consider this: during the early 2000's recessions (remember SARS), Hong Kong refused to budge their fixed exchange rate with the US so that China can use Hong Kong's fixed currency as a buffer. China's currency wasn't internationally traded then, and so to get its currency fixed with the US, the only way was using the Hong Kong dollar as an intermediary, at Hong Kong's people's expense.
Android 5 rumored for Q2 launch, could potentially converge with Chrome OS
Leaving out commentary for or against the Obama administration, this says something about the growing influence of the valley on the nation as more of the media US citizens consume flows through and is amplified and/or filtered by digital products made by popular and powerful SV companies.
Does this mean I get to say Apple did what I suggested in March of 2009? http://karmcity.com/post/457611779/os-x-app-store
How to Make a Bootable OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion USB Install Drive
OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion may be offered exclusively through the App Store, but it’s still possible to create a bootable OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion installer from any USB drive.
Hey all,

I am the author of the linked blog. Many nice comments in here, but may I start by a question of my own about hackernews itself. I had submitted this link myself 6 days ago after making the post. Can a link be resubmitted multiple times? The title was a bit different but the link was the same. I am new to the site and want to learn the way it works.

As for the comments by many people, it's a given that this will not appeal to all. Heck to most people especially C++ only programmers it will look ugly. The fact is that if for one reason or another you want to provide functions that have default arguments this is a neat and nice way that works for C99.

As for needing default arguments, well there might be cases where having them is just a way to spoil or even confuse the programmer. But consider an API. An API of a GUI library. Do you REALLY want to be giving all the customizations offered by the library for every single widget/element? Or do you want a TextBox of size(100,100) at position(200,50) and you are done by letting the default arguments handle all the rest?
This should be more popular, it's a compelling read.
"whether or not one can demonstrate a process which leads to the significant effect" - we can

"Vagueness alone does not necessarily imply invalidity." [continuum fallacy] - apple loves vague communications
As far as I know, once you turn something like this over to the FBI or other authorities, it's out of your control. You've already lit the fuse -- where the rocket goes from there isn't your choice.
I know and do realize. I know there are people in jail in California for not stealing anything at all but enjoying in their privacy some activities that the government does not condone and considers bad for them, so it puts them in jail, which is obviously much better for them. I realize all the sad state of it. I'm just noting one small point that the size of the harm does matter and always had and will matter in the court, whatever we may be thinking about it.
Tim Cook on Hardware, Apple’s Structure and Being ‘Simpletons’
Man, sounds like me before I got married. Though to be honest, my wife keeps telling me I should get out and do more stuff, so I can't blame it on her/kids.
I would rather drink piss like Bear Grylls than log in with Facebook
A good motivation is find someone else to buy it from you. Offer to make it for the cost of materials plus a little more.

They get a good deal, and you get some fun (the build) that actually has a purpose.

Or find someone to make it for as a gift.
The fact that I read your post means I've lost 50% of my daily news quota. Damn.

Good advice nonetheless.
You're missing the point.

Don't be evil isn't the standard I set for them, it's the standard they set for themselves.
Tough call---part of me says that they blew it off while the rest of me says they put the information to work (as best as they were able) In any event I doubt they got back to him...
Kickstarter campaign for iOS game on community generated Internet memes
Microsoft seems confused, but I am genuinely interested in Windows 8 and Metro. Hopefully they ditch their legacy stuff though and make a clean break a la iOS/OS X
If you have Google analytics and Facebook like button you may have this problem.
Well put. My only counterpoint: sure, if you want to be 100% productive 100% of the time, don't succumb to distractions.

If you see coworkers chatting over a coffee, do you think, "wow, they're being totally unproductive. They don't need those coffees, they should be working!"? Of course not.

Consuming _and discussing_ news is a social activity. If your life is your work and nothing else, you'd be a very boring person.

Consuming information by choice allows us to express ourselves later with our opinions. Everyone should make an effort to learn about their surroundings to be an informed, contributing member of a democratic society. People say politicians are out of touch, but compared to a lot of Americans who willingly cut off their exposure to news, are they really?

It's actually funny reading your post, because you sound exactly like me when I was your age. As you get older, I think you'll learn to appreciate relationships with people more. The 18+ hour startup days lose their appeal.
Maybe it's time to set up European youtube without all the content blocks.
Osama who?
The Pentagram blog also has a writeup on the new logo:

http://pentagram.com/en/new/2012/02/new-work-microsoft.php

including a nifty animated logo
I can't help but think that the NSA would have taken the letter more seriously if had been typed.

http://www.nsa.gov/public_info/_files/nash_letters/nash_lett...
The new design, or the old?
Oh, my bad - that's "indefinite imprisonment without trial" thanks for clarifying.
Worth noting that this is in the UK, where there isn't an absolute right to remain silent. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right_to_silence_in_England_and...
To show that they are actually on a slippery slope you have to point to facts that would lead Apple to make decisions to that effect. You have to substantiate why they are slipping. It still remains only a prediction, but it at least becomes more than a fallacy.

Here is why I think a slippery slope is very unlikely: I can’t think of any examples where Apple gradually limited the freedom of developers, at least not in the grand scheme of things. The restrictions were always in place from day one and in general tended to become less restrictive, not more. Yeah, the sample size is two, but still.
People are looking at Gatekeeper the wrong way. Apple could have made App store only the default. Or they could have prevented all non-signed apps completely. There would have been a backlash but they still could have done it. Instead they went to the trouble of creating Gatekeeper which helps protect users and will only minimally affect devs.

Enough of the 'slippery slope' argument. If it really is one and they start down that path use a different product. Use Windows or Linux.
LOL at the title
How do you responsibly participate in a democracy when you ignore world news?

For example, how can you judge two presidential candidates' positions on foreign policy when you don't know what other nations have been up to?

The OP doesn't discriminate between junk news, entertainment news, and knowing what is going on in the world.
While "importance" is a pretty subjective (read: bullshit) metric in legal terms, using the dollar value of theft to threshold criminal charges is used around the world. In the U.S. you can press charges for any amount, but depending on the state they have different thresholds between misdemeanor and a felony (grand theft) usually around $500-$1000. Interestingly enough, in some places such as China (where I originally learned about the theft lines / thresholds in a class at Peking University), there is a minimum value that must be stolen before one can prosecute, which is on the order of US$100. This obviously saves the court from wasting too much time on judicial abuse, but clearly discriminates against people in among the lowest rungs of the economic ladder. On the other hand it sets the priority for handling larger cases that impact more people (such as official corruption scandals which admittedly China does a more prudent job of enforcing responsibility in white collar crime than the States).

Of course the argument could be made that criminal prosecution is largely a function of who you know rather than the spare resources of the judicial system, which is probably correct, but it is still food for though.

(Sources: http://www.california-criminal-lawyer-blog.com/2010/11/grand... and http://www.chinareview.info/issue2/pages/case.htm and some classes I took, but IANAL)
This. As soon as data is fetched from the system (that is beyond what's required for the hack), you're headed square into darker territory. To be white hat, you find the vuln, alert the company to it, and that's that. There is no "no, really, here's a load of data I grabbed using it!". White hat is generally hired gun to hack for the good of the site/company, grey not hired, but hacks; black is for the lulz/profit.
Reality check: Windows Phone less popular than Samsung’s Bada
Can someone revive Wall Street so it absorbs these kinds of assholes again and we can have only nice people in tech? It was nicer before the likes of Glasner and Pincus got in this game.

Also, threatening to revoke a title is just idiotic. It provides nothing to the organization. (If you need to fire people, just fire them.) Titles only matter when people are leaving, and so the only effect of reducing a title is to (theoretically) make it harder to leave, but people who want to leave will use their old titles and sue the fucking shit out of their employer (libel, blackballing) if contradicted (and win).

A certain large company (name withheld) had a practice of hiring people in between levels and "downslotting" about 75% of new hires to title the level below what they were promised in hiring. It didn't save any money but it flew a fucking plane into morale. That company abolished the slotting idiocy, but far too late, and it's probably a contributor to the cultural mediocrity and general decline of that company over the past 3-4 years.
The App Store is a very successful distribution engine and marketing service, most devs I know are quite pleased with it's existence and Gatekeeper ultimately will make it stronger. I would be extraordinarily disappointed if Apple ever went 'App Store only' though.
It looks like the submitter added a & to the end of the URL. This is generally considered to be cheating. I guess it worked out this time though... There are probably a few articles out there that will tell you the best time to submit a link. If you're really worried about getting karma/clicks, you should consult one of them.
YouTube's HTML5 Presentation: One Hour Per Second
The thing is that nontechnical people want to use the same OS at home and at work. This is because of the differences between OSes and applications which trip them up. Microsoft is simply putting up consumer computing as a first line of defense against competitors trying to attack their hold on business computing.

Apple's chief weakness is that it doesn't really try to attack business computing, from what I can tell. That's all fine and dandy - consumer computing is rather large - but it essentially relegates them to second place because of Microsoft's dominance in business computing.
The New Interface Is There Is No interface
The title of this submission is completely inaccurate: the person in question is in no way a "white hat":

http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2011/aug/17/facebook-ha...

> Between 17 April and 9 May he is accused of downloading a computer program "to secure unauthorised access" to Facebook; of attempting to hack into Facebook's "Mailman" server; of using PHP script to secure access to another Facebook server, dubbed "Phabricator"; of sharing a PHP script intended to hack into that Facebook server; and of securing "repeated" access to another Facebook server.
Global Android Dev Camp Bangalore livestream
While yes, that seems to be the case and would be smart for them to charge in the future to maintain the service. Unless the product is already mature, I'd say take advantage of a free offering while you can and until your are profitable enough to pay for a service. Can't imagine there are any 'real-time' offerings for market data. Companies like Bloomberg, Thomson Reuters, etc, etc wouldn't exist in the financial sectors if there was.

With regards to market quotes, latency is where companies like that compete. Good luck with your product or app.
Surely the money for their security team was already spent though?

I doubt Facebook's security team is just sitting idly waiting for an attacker to give them something to do. Each hour devoted to this is an hour they can't use for other tasks, besides the possibility of having to pay overtime.
Macs will eventually be more like PS3 and less like a general purpose computer.
New Apple Book: Insanely Simple - The Obsession That Drives Apple’s Success
The PDF record shows both parties replied to each other a couple times but the NSA thought his method didn't meet their security criteria.

But they also could have shelved it for years until someone had a use for it, the same as Hedy Lamarr's frequency hopping patent. (Granted, they probably modified it slightly so they didn't have to give him any credit)
Wait.. wasn't the article talking about Obama?... huh? Man, you got me all confused
No no, I don't care about karma, just discovered the site recently and wanted to learn how it works.
Exposure on the other hand is always a nice thing. I am actually really glad to the submitter since this generated a nice discussion in the blog itself and made me fix a few things I was wrong about.
The fierce reduction at the root of Metro's design allowed me to fairly accurately envision the new logo as soon as I read, "It’s a window… not a flag."

One color, simple shapes, simple text - MicroSoft clearly has a design vision.
Or door #3: steve jobs thought 3rd party apps would do more to ruin the experience than to improve it, and all-in-all users were better off without them. Given his control freak tendencies, I'm inclined to believe that last option.
Let me be the contrarian here. If you limit yourself to a few content sources, you won't be able to make the leaps that come out of having access to information outside those sources and will eventually fall prey to group-think.

Might work for you for a bit but if you want to change the world, you have to be aware of it.
I tried OneNote in university and I just didn't "get it". Can someone explain?

I have 2 use cases for notes - short term stuff I need in the next day and longer term notes I might need for 6 months+. The first I used to do with something like the "stickies" applet in Linux - eventually I found those to be too much trouble to maintain/delete and moved to a paper notebook. The latter case I keep in plain text files. When I tried OneNote it seemed to have a horribly complicated interface and I didn't understand what it added to the equation.
Yeah, but not as good as the 2015 Nokia.
Show HN: Most liked Instapaper articles from Twitter
I don't understand your second paragraph. If Apple does lock down the Mac like iOS, I certainly will look into using a different product. But I'd really much prefer that it never come to that. To that end, I will add my voice to those complaining about this, in the hopes of encouraging Apple never to let things get that far.
John Irving nailed it in A Prayer for Owen Meany:

"Newspapers are a bad habit, the reading equivalent of junk food. What happens to me is that I seize upon an issue in the news—the issue is the moral/philosophical, political/intellectual equivalent of a cheeseburger with everything on it; but for the duration of my interest in it, all my other interests are consumed by it, and whatever appetites and capacities I may have had for detachment and reflection are suddenly subordinate to this cheeseburger in my life! I offer this as self-criticism; but what it means to be "political" is that you welcome these obsessions with cheeseburgers—at great cost to the rest of your life."
On 50/50, yes, we write lots of JavaScript for Ajax. We've done that since 2005 with Tada list. The debate here is over whether going client-side MVC for everything is a pleasant experience. I contend that it is not.

The maintainability story with pjax+caching is exactly the same as its always been with a Rails app. We just celebrated 8 years with Basecamp. That's a pretty good run.

You can write shit, unmaintainable code in anything, but to point at pjax and granular key-based caching schemes as somehow specifically prone to this? What? That doesn't make any sense to me.

We also had a swanky in-house client-side MVC framework cooking with Cinco. We used it once for Basecamp Mobile and while it was a good experience and the end result was great, it did little to sway my thinking on client-side MVC being a step forward in programming happiness (one of the key things I evaluate platforms by).

Again, it's perfectly fine to have a different opinion. I don't like the aesthetics nor the sensibilities of Python code much, but I certainly respect that people can make cool shit with it and even that they might enjoy the process.

The hoopla here is over the terribly flawed notion that client-side MVC is somehow The Future of web development and if you don't follow that pattern, you're living in The Past. Ha.
Actual Headline: "Tiny Review and the Perils of Facebook Login"

Realistic Headline: "Tiny Review and the Perils of only offering Facebook Login"
How is this an API? All I can request is a different number of dicks, and that's it. And then the dicks come out at random length.

Will there be a version 2? I would like parameters for length and girth, and possibly a drop shadow.
Hypothetically, could Facebook later say, "Oh, actually, we're retroactively granting him access to our systems, so he didn't actually access beyond his authorization"? Or would that get someone at Facebook charged with making a false report to the authorities?
I agree, dubious use of the term white-hat. He hacked into their systems, stole the code, and kept a copy on an external hard drive. Didn't do anything malicious, but didn't contact Facebook about it either. They discovered the intrusion by accident, and it took them months to track him down.

So "keeping the data to himself and doing nothing with it" is considered white hat?
Type math? In 1955? That would have required specialized equipment, possibly a secretary. Nash clearly believed that the contents were of national security interest.
Perhaps. But more people are likely to read the 2-page article than the 9-page one. And if the point is to communicate "business knows more about you than you think they do" then they've done the job.
Isn't not caring about current political issues the basis for the dystopia that underlies Brave New World?
What you don't see is that Bear Grylls travels with 5 support vehicles and a helicopter and spends his nights in a hotel. I'd be very surprised if he was actually drinking piss on camera, his whole schtick is fake.
Hmm good points. Also, what if you create an account with Facebook, and then later decide to deactivate your Facebook, what happens to that account you just created?
Interestingly, it seems that MS will revive the "divider" concept in the Metro UI for Windows 8. Slide the divider to the left, and the left-side app gets narrower. You can even do this with a Metro app on one side of the divider and the entire traditional desktop on the other side.
What it sounds like from the article isn't that he destroyed $200,000 worth of property; it's that $200k is what it cost Facebook to fix a security hole he discovered. Meaning it was money they needed to spend on security before someone with truly malicious intentions found it. Does Facebook seriously think that sending kids to jail is a viable substitute for building good security into their product, or that it will deter future attempts and mean they won't have to spend another $200k next time? More likely, next time they won't know about it, or it will come from a country where they have no power to find the responsible party. They should be on their knees thanking this kid; just another reason to loathe FB, I guess.
I changed my habits a few months ago after reading http://www.marco.org/2011/09/04/sane-rss-usage. I'm really happy I did that.

"RSS is best for following a large number of infrequently updated sites"

I have 6-7 feeds in my Reeder.app and check them weekly.

(Edit) related HN submission and comments: news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2959928
Or Apple could have sandboxed unsigned apps by default instead of telling you to trash them. Too bad they don't have any sandboxing experts[1] on hand....

[1] http://radian.org/
What always shocks me is that if you have a traditional sign-in method, people will be more likely to Facebook Auth. Well, that's been the case for me. People enjoy the ease of logging in with Facebook, but are weary of its repercussions.

Also, I would love to see more sites that Facebook Auth to just asking for e-mail address permission and that's it. Just simply as a log-in tool..
Show HN: QuickStart.me - Business Made Simple
haha, that's fascinating -- I can appreciate that some perspectives don't form correctly until you're older.

i'd like to mention that i wasn't really writing this from the perspective of productivity. i think it's a wellness thing to fade out noise.
> how can you judge two presidential candidates' positions on foreign policy when you don't know what other nations have been up to?

If you read/watch American news, you think you actually know what other nations are up to?
Since the title is Developers React to OS X Mountain Lion I'll add mine.

I sandboxed my application last night and turned on code signing. Including reading up on it and running tests afterwards, it took me 30 minutes.
A word of advice about using the comment links in the hn's rss feed, from personal experience: try not to scrape them in an interval. I mistakably ran a piece of code that went through 7~10 different posts in a short period of time (30 secs) and my server was banned immediately.