skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
With respect, I think a greater part of the problem is mistreating your stuff. One, two, even three broken phones I can see. Fifteen indicates a problem with the user.

My iPhone 4 fell out of a pocket as I was getting out of my car and cracked the back glass, which was a cool $70 out of my pocket. I got a replacement back and it's fine again, but I made goddam sure not to drop it again.
Before today: I've never heard of either of these sites.

After today: I'll never remember either of these sites.

and yes... the final dig was pretty funny.
Who knew that your readers would be more likely to click on your messages if a button included an arrow icon?

This was referring to a study done by Digital Evolution Group for Heltzberg Diamonds. They found a similar campaign with a personalised gif in emails was effective. http://view.em.helzberg.com/?j=fe5c1677736d037e7414&m=fe...
I'm sure this will negatively impact sales of the new iPad sorry I tried but I just can't keep a straight face.
The original: http://www.willamette.edu/~fruehr/haskell/evolution.html

(Haskell)
Google fixes Chrome security hole, awards $60k
Until Classic Specs gets a prominently-featured set of advertisements with a faux-intellectual, salt-and-pepper haired douchebag, Warby Parker can't cry foul.

I know this is going to get down-voted, but seriously, it is 2012. Who buys a monocle? I want to buy one and wear it around as a joke.
I wasn't suggesting that that C++ is somehow outdated or inferior. I'm just wondering if the percent usage of C++ is declining with respect to other languages.

I'm trying to estimate the chance that me not knowing C++ will pose a problem later in my career. I normally pick up languages quickly, but the C++ learning curve seems a bit steeper, both in terms of language nuances and libraries. So my normal approach of "wait until I need it" may not work that well.
What Happened To Recess?
Did you read the TSA's recent blog post about this? It displays exactly the same sort of attitude.
http://www.chinapost.com.tw/taiwan/national/national-news/20...

Ray Tsai (蔡瑞芳), one of Taiwan's pioneers in laser eye surgery, said yesterday that he will no longer perform the procedure because it violates his medical ethics.
...
He has observed situations in which visual acuity worsens suddenly and rapidly long after the LASIK procedure itself.
I didn't consider that statement to be inclusive of cash for non-foreseeable events. I guess that's where we disagree.
Why blur out the charity donation? It was $2100.
Canadians to Prime Minister: Don't Censor Our Science
> That form of automation doesn't exist for many types of data people would like to collect, such as food intake, or blood sugar testing for diabetics.

When I was looking into it, I noticed that a lot of the blood sugar testers were electronic and could record the series of readings for you. You still had to prick yourself, but it looked pretty easy.

(Sadly, the one non-invasive blood sugar recording device I found was apparently discontinued for causing electrical burns.)
I've always held that the "agency model" pushed by Apple is anticompetitive. The argument for it is that ebooks are different to physical books in that they are infinitely copyable (which is obviously true) and that leads to books being priced at or near cost and publishers don't want to be "commoditized" in that way.

But that's a BS argument. A traditional bookshop will have a 100% markup for recommended retail price to cover costs (store, employees, utilities and so on). The publisher's half will be divvied up a number of ways including editing, printing, distribution and let's not forget the author (10% or less).

Amazon of course reduced their overhead (no physical store) and increased their volume cutting down that markup significantly. They may have through volume been able to negotiate a lower cost from the publisher but I have no evidence of that.

Ebooks change the model drastically. Printing costs disappear. Editing, the author's cut and the publisher's profit remain. Distribution costs are basically zero. What's more, ebooks have no resale market (unlike, say, college textbooks). This reduced utility should lower the sticker price.

Yet publishers seem stuck in a mindset of looking at nothing more than the retail price as some kind of metric for profit. Publishers should be embracing ebook distribution. It lowers their costs and (in theory) increases their profit through no printing and distribution costs.

Their needs to be structural separation between wholesale and retail market segments and that means publishers shouldn't be able to dictate the retail price. Period.
Four Days With Microsoft and Win 8
Honestly, the conversion was probably the lowest risk move Valve could have made(short of a new IP) for Free-to-play conversion.

When Valve moved the game to F2P, the game was out for almost 4 years. By that point, basically everyone that was ever going to buy the game had purchased it. Plus, Valve already had the loot chase built into the game(random drops were added in 2009, IIRC). And while it's popularity wasn't waning, it was still usually the third place game on Steam's total users list behind CS:Source and CS 1.3.

So they basically had full market saturation for their product, and probably weren't seeing much new revenue even when they did major content updates. By making the game free, they opened the door to a LOT more people, and allowed them to get a lot more revenue from both new and long time players. I've spent probably somewhere around $40 in hats and weapons since the conversion.

The truly brilliant thing that Valve did was make the transition absolutely seamless for the veteran players. Outside of a few new buttons on the main menu and a very unobtrusive news section that advertised changes, the overall experience didn't change at all for them.
And, frankly, I have no idea how they hope to avoid a charge of horizontal collusion for that alone.

It seems to be an open secret that the big publishers are coordinating their discussions with Apple and Amazon. And that would seem to be an open-and-shut case of collusion.
Those are the inbound emails, not the outbound.
[Interview] with Joel Gascoigne of the Buffer App
Looks like I may have blown it --- confusing this machine with the 603. I hate when that happens, but happy for the correction. (I'll try to delete the earlier comment, mischaracterizing the 601, just to try to head off the error at the pass...)
Register your domain from space
This new Image Sniffer feature at commentto is in private beta at this time, but with the link provided, you can take part in it. 50 invitations.

I think it's pretty cool, because you just select the images in the popup on the page you are viewing, and the result is a nice looking excerpt such as this one: http://commentto.com/excerpt/14660

Here's a screenshot of what it looks like in action (different excerpt): http://commentto.com/images/Screenshots/_privateBetaPopup.pn...
The first iPad image is selected.

I think commentto has potential, because it helps people save online information quickly and easily.

Please do provide feedback, as that will help me make this product more robust.
Thanks!
Or inner arm for that matter.

Also, does anybody know what prevents people from simply taping a knife to the bottom of their foot, under their sock?
Photos: http://bostonglobe.com/arts/2012/03/03/mit-awards-pirate-cer...

Video: http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/video/?bctid=1465014301001...
Try PhantomJs. PhantomJs works better than JSDom b/c JSDom can break on non-compliant pages.
The point is that different personality types enjoy different aspects of programming. For some people the technology itself is the fun part. For some its what you can accomplish with it. There is no right or wrong here.
Yet better date-picker for Javascript
> Just because you can cheat a security system with high confidence does not make it obsolete on that grounds alone.

Actually, it does. Because the threat is not randomly selected from a pool -- it is selected specifically to bypass the security system.

It's like saying that a guard that only works 9-5 in a store that has no locked door is a reasonable security system against thieves because it will catch those that arrive 9-5. No, that's not how it works -- it means no thief will come 9-5, and all thieves will arrive when the guard is not there.

Any easy-to-bypass security system is obsolete as a security system (although it may have other uses, such as extracting money from taxpayers).

> All I'm saying is if you base your argument against TSA on the premise presented in the video, you aren't likely to be taken seriously by the same fraction who approved of this system in the first place and continue to support it.

You conveniently ignore the fact that these people (Chertoff et al, who are directly profiting from it) do not care about security (as has been demonstrated time and again before this video), and are therefore unlikely to care about any rational argument.
budgets?
The underlying problem with the ebook market is the way publishers mandate the use of DRM.

Under the old model, Amazon was free to sell ebooks under cost, with the goal of quickly establishing a Kindle monopoly and placing itself in a negotiating position that would eventually allow them to capture most of the profit in the ebook market. The publishers and Apple introduced the agency model to prevent Amazon from dominating ebooks.

Amazon's strategy wouldn't have worked if not for DRM. If the publishers instead mandated that ebooks couldn't use DRM but let Amazon sell at any price, there would be no reason for Amazon to sell below cost because customers would be able to migrate to another vendor's platform at any time.
I don't think so; I think you also need polymorphism and probably exceptions. I think GC would also greatly improve expressiveness, because it makes functional style much easier to implement without redundant copying. But minimally some kind of polymorphism, and no, discriminated unions aren't enough - but Go's interfaces would probably do. Also, some way of hiding data members that doesn't require obscuring casts would be nice too.

The biggest problems I've had with large C codebases are deep assumptions about data structures, spread throughout. The biggest benefits of OOP, IMO, come from firewalling off internal details from client code through the use of an interface; knowing that client code has to call you, rather than simply follow your internal links, gives you a lot of freedom to change things after the fact. A polymorphic reference that the client can't dereference and poke about with gives you that.
Agreed completely. I'm doing a decent amount of development with MCUs these days and really like having a minimal abstraction. It's easier to think about what the hardware is doing when you're only slightly removed from the assembly; what would be a convenient abstraction for most application development quickly becomes a liability as knowing the implementation details can be pretty important (due to limited resources).

As for an implicit "this" for function pointers, I've had the same wish myself. I've settled for just a function namespace (ie: myListPush(myList,foo);) due to the verbosity of your example but it's not quite the same. At this point I'm pretty happy without it, and even think it might be hiding too much information, but it makes a nice piece of syntactic sugar for sure. My current unneeded-but-desired change to C would be the addition of lambdas like in C++11.
For what it's worth, I've done a lot in Lua, dropping to C (on rare occasions) to offload heavy processing elements where a scripting language would choke. Many game developers do their interface and game scripts in Lua then run the engine in C as well. It keeps the C code light and clean and brings down the number of manhours required to build and maintain a project.

I don't know what FLINT is or what Julia is used for (Wikipedia makes it sound like a functional language?) so Lua might not be the best fit, but it's designed from the ground up to mesh with C (to the point where the solution to many otherwise simple things is "write that bit in C")
The New iPad: Hits and Misses
The Java comments are wrong IMHO. Yes it has some legacy cruft. Yes you can import 10 million libraries and build abstractions on abstractions. Yes you can architect your application to resemble a Rube Goldberg machine.

Guess what? Those same points apply to an language. Heck the evolution of a Python programmer https://gist.github.com/289467 currently on the front page which does the same thing for Python which is usually pretty clean. Even PHP which is mentioned as the alternative can quickly become a spaghetti ball mess of imported code and shared snippets.

I don't love Java, but for certain classes of problems it is an excellent choice and to discount it based on a wrong perception just shows how shallow a technologist you are.
Haven't studies shown that it's not the physical act of interacting with a phone that causes distraction, but rather focusing on conversing with someone not physically present?
Past a certain point, the reasonableness of the board's belief is open to question, and that's what's going on here. The cash pile has been building long enough that some investors and commentators are skeptical about whether Apple has a long-term plan, or is suffering from a lack of imagination.
Unfortunately, the author seems to have misconceptions about a variety of things.

> projects with more than 10k LOC.

Other comments have discussed this. Linux kernel: ~4million lines. Compilers, interpreters, and so on... all well above 10k LOC. While C is not the best language for such things, by no means is it unmanageable.

> But when you try to do the modern funkiness of dynamic languages (lambda functions, map/reduce, type-independence, ...)

All of the features can be used in much stronger type systems than C++ gives you. ML-family languages have all these features and are strictly type.d

> Javascript
Javascript's whacky semantics suck, that's for sure, but for a dynamic language that's par-for-course anyway. I don't really understand his argument about embedding. Why is that relevant? Java and C# are not embeddable either. ...So?
Cloud Computing As a Man-in-the-Middle Attack
B&N Could Face Rough Justice
Linux Graphics Apps for Just About Everything
I didn't know about the factorial function.
To me, one paragraph in this post stands out far above the others in importance. I find it interesting that it is getting so few comments here. It is the "P.S.".

If one business sends a C&D to another, then they can't expect it to be kept private. You can argue about the wisdom of posting it, or what this says about the poster's attitude; however, Classic Specs is certainly within both legal and ethical standards in doing so.

But posting a customer's personal information without permission is unacceptable.

If anyone from Classic Specs is reading this: You need to remove that P.S., and you need to remove it now.
I wonder if that means Apple could take the individual facts from OSM, add a few in from their other sources, reorder the facts (or just build their own tiles from them since that's all they're presenting) and be okay legally?
Does anyone know where the sizing charts are that are mentioned in the letter? Did classic specs change images?
Facebook Launches Its 'Web Newspaper'
Does anyone have some independently verified numbers for the amount of radiation that a FBS exposes a passenger to and how it compares to the amount of radiation exposure the same passenger would get from 3 hours in a plane? The TSA claims that the latter is significantly (like 100x) greater than the former.
Umm..ok. So this is just plain Marxism.

So - if entrepreneurs give away all surplus value to their employees, what motivation do they have to start businesses?
I have to wonder if there's much of a mid-to-long term market for these "NHS-style"* specs. Sure they're fashionable now but in a couple of years it'll be all brushed aluminium. Or green.

I've been buying that style of glasses for years from goggles4u for £20 a pop. Nice and cheap, look terrible but can take some punishment.

[*] NHS = National Health Service; it's a British expression based on the fact that the only glasses covered by the NHS are the cheap, thick and most of the time unfashionable frames/lenses.
Taking a term out of context and then sticking it next to another term doesn't make it clear. It makes it confusing. Think about terms like "irradiated food" (failed in the market) or "nuclear magnetic resonance imaging" (had to drop the N-word) which ran into exactly this problem.

You probably have some idea about how GPUs work, so the idea of having "multi core" ones wasn't shocking to you. Most of the people to whom that presentation was targetted don't have that context. To them, it sounds like "The Quad-Core A5X CPU enables faster graphics!", which is perfectly reasonable IMHO, and matches the use of Quad-Core in other contexts they know.

But Apple, of all companies, knows this already. They are masters of communication strategy. They picked "Quad-Core" deliberately, probably as an attempt to dilute the branding Tegra has already established with it. And that's sleazy.
It looks like "security in deployment" (aka sane defaults) is a concept difficult to grasp for the CouchDB devs. I wouldn't expect this from a project that claims it is passed over version 0.x.
> What makes me stay away from it is the non-free nature. Yes, there is Mono, but I wouldn't like to base my stuff on a language that is there because of Microsoft's benevolent permission which it could turn into patent-lawsuits any time. We all know the tricks that company (well, actually any large company) has up its sleeves.

Microsoft has standardized C# and the CLR through ECMA, and issued a promise stating that they will not assert their patents against alternative implementations thereof. Non-standardized APIs like ADO.NET, ASP.NET, and System.Windows.Forms are not protected by that promise, but Mono discourages their use anyway and if they had to remove them, it would not affect the C# compiler or CLR in any way. So this is not a legitimate reason to avoid using Mono, unless you (a) need to use the non-standardized Microsoft APIs or (b) are Richard Stallman.
Bacon.js - Open-source reactive framework for JS
New iTunes Terms Hint at Possible App Demos
EuroPython 2012 registrations are open
Unprecedented Map Pieces Together Titanic's Wreck
I wonder how much of SongKick's data is sourced from ArtistData: http://www.artistdata.com/us/network ?
Interesting. I always wondered what those little black boxes on NICs were - but I never bothered looking them up. It's pretty amazing that modern manufacturing can fit that kind of component into the ethernet port itself.
Computer chip with holes is speed demon
"Totalitarian democracy is a term made famous by Israeli historian J. L. Talmon to refer to a system of government in which lawfully elected representatives maintain the integrity of a nation state whose citizens, while granted the right to vote, have little or no participation in the decision-making process of the government."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Totalitarian_democracy
"Amazingly, the trick even works when the phone is just sitting there, its screen black, and sleeping. Say “text by voice” and it wakes up"

I'm pretty sure this is impossible without aggressive battery draw. Altho if you're driving you can be using a car charger. The GPS already makes this neccessary unless you want to risk killing your phone before it guides you home.

It would be nice if they could hook into the 'car dock' app or google maps nav - so that their background service auto launches when those launch. I believe that's possible with some egregious permissions.

Also maybe get the 'charger in' permission and actively listen whenever the phone is plugged in.

Cool idea.
I could not agree more. If this story was meant to engender sympathetic feelings that last paragraph ruined any chances. However I doubt most people got that far...
Great going, DoJ!

Ignore the aggressive, predatory monopoly vendor with 85% of the market (AMZN) and go after the other guys, why don't you ...

(I wish I was making that 85% thing up; alas, that's how much of the US ebook market Amazon have got.)
I think the point is "for the level of abstraction it targets". Add all those abstractions that are generally a good thing in a perfect world, and practically you shifted the language enough to be unsuited for many tasks we use it today.
"But posting a customer's personal information without permission is unacceptable."

Let's be honest, now... in the age of social media, Google, Facebook, etc., that cat is long since out of the bag.
I thought the way they used the "Meet the Team" teasers was really clever:

"Each content update started with a teaser trailer that hinted at several possible new items or features, and Valve developers would monitor the community reaction in the forums to determine which aspects caught the players' attention."

I had seen these, and had always thought Valve already planned out what was going to be included. Like magicians, they set themselves up for victory - no matter what the player ends up wanting.
Over 140 comments here:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3675195

I don't know why the built in auto dup detector didn't get this - the links look identical to me.
"Core" isn't even really that well defined for CPUs, look at the controversy over whether AMD's new architecture is 4 clusters with 8 cores, or if you should really count the the clusters as cores but with two threads each.

A good way to do it might be to count the number of structures that can independently schedule memory operations, in which case AMD is correct to call their chips 8 core, but if you use that definition then the "512 core" GPUs are suddenly only 32 cores. Or you could count independent execution units so that the GPU is still 512 cores, but then your "4 core" CPU is now suddenly 12 cores.
It was like ICQ but only for people physically near you.
Live ships map
Apple pulled a clever ninja word dice, knowing that most consumers don't really know or care what the difference is. The problem Apple faces is that in BestBuy, Target Etc.. you will have sales people that don't know a lemon from an orange yet will push whatever tablet has "Quad-Core" because it sounds better. With the use of the term Quad-Core Graphics Apple more or less guarantees that the average consumer looking at a Quad Core (Cpu) Android will think that is more or less the same as the Quad-Core (graphics) from the iPad.

Understandable however disingenuous it may be.
What I found interesting was that people who should know better (I'm looking at you Bloomberg) got confused as well.
Interesting. Maybe the problem is with the fact that the books tend to cost more on Apple's setup combined with the MFN clause? I don't think that the government could sue Amazon for conspiring to raise prices since it has a public and prolific history of trying to reduce them. It's also telling that Amazon tried to force publishers to do things they don't want to do, which is not like a conspiracy, whereas Apple is giving them what they want, which is.

But in the end, IANAL so I can't give you a definitive answer. I'm just speculating, same as everyone else on this thread. ;)
I dunno about studies, but for me it's definitely the eyes-not-on-the-road. I'm so thankful I haven't gotten into a crash despite the few times I've been stupid enough to text while driving.
Show HN: Want Technologies - Merchant Portal For Want
We just launched a new marketing site for Want(http://www.wanttt.com). We used Bootstrap as a starting place. You can see the Want button in action on our newest merchant Wiz Khalifa http://store.wizkhalifa.com/apparel-1/black-yellow-mens-standard-t-shirt.html