skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
How soon people forget! OS X had a software-based compositor until 10.2 -- that's when "Quartz Extreme" was introduced. Pretty sure the OpenGL path was planned the whole time, but the GL drivers were not nearly stable enough to use for such a crucial piece of the system.
Ahh.. I see, thanks for that info. This means I can bargain harder :)
Can we please kill the "considered harmful" meme?
I use SafariOmnibar[1] to add DDG as my default search provider. Since an omnibar will be shipped by default with Safari in Mountain Lion, I am also hoping that Apple will consider providing DDG as an option for search engine preference (especially on iOS as well).

[1] http://hackemist.com/SafariOmnibar/
The mathematics of spirograph art
Has it ever occurred to you that you're a fool?

Wow.

You complain about the site and have no regard for the rules or what the site is.

You have completely failed to understand what I wrote. SO mods, instead of working to form community and value, have become trigger-happy bureaucrats. The entire method by which mods operate is, in many cases, opposed to the stated goals of SO.

Link to your question.

I have zero intention of linking my online identities, and I don't care in the least whether or not you believe me.
Hm, Calcbot on the iPhone also returns 2 if entered without a multiplication after the first "2". Hitting the open parenthesis key removes the "2" from the calculation. Since Calcbot displays what you've entered below the answer, it's easy to see the mistake with a trivial calculation like this, but if you're not watching for it it's easy to miss. Better than the built-in calculator and PCalc, which provide no feedback and give the wrong answer, but surprising.
I'm not linking my online identities.
> So worrying that creators might sit by the proverbial poolside instead of creating new works seems silly to me and completely at odds with reality...

It seems equally silly to worry about squeezing every ounce of profitability out of every work of art that we can think of, and for every edge case.

Artists will keep creating whether copyright is infinite or only 14 years. Maybe 22.7 years is optimal, but this is a boring discussion to have
killing memes considered harmful.
Android only has ~50% market share, which is hardly a monopoly. Also, Gmail was already very successful before Android was released. Also, it's hard to show what consumer harm has come from this bundling. (I was forced to sign up for Gmail when I got an Android phone, but I just don't use it.)
I think his point is even Gmail got over 7GB (which is plenty for mails), yet Drive gets only 5GB.
But this makes almost everybody wrong. Going by this, you would evaluate 6x ÷ 2x to 3(x^2) rather than 3. That is clearly not the intention, so somebody is wrong here, but it's a matter of opinion whether it's the writer (for not precisely following standard notation) or the standard notation (for being counterintuitive) that deserves the blame.
Most of the systems were reasonable. But when they started making treaties, they seemed to adopt the maximal terms from all the signatories.
Replying to comment below (can't see a reply button) - please correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't see anything about Cython handling multi-threading and I don't see anything about dynamic compilation on target. I just had a flick through their documentation, so if this stuff is in there then I missed it...
IMHO the problem is that's old technology, who used to write free software N years ago is now busy doing startups ;) So the "next generation" of free software web stuff is missing in part.
In my test, there was almost a $200/yr. difference between Engineer and Software Engineer. I wonder what makes software engineers specifically statistically poorer drivers?
It's very accurate.

Adobe is targeting operations that are 1) making allot of money of their platform and 2) could benefit from the new features.

And for exchange to access the new features that will make their games port easier, run faster, and allow for more play, they want a small fee back.
Amazon’s Appstore Generates More Revenue Than Google Play
Math PhD student here. The issue is that people are confusing two symbols which are distinct: the solidus (/) and the obelus (÷). The latter is rather obsolete and it's not clear why exactly calculators use it. Anyway, this blog post clears up the issue better than I could hope to in a comment: http://www.matthewcompher.com/posts/trouble-with-semantics-t...
This works great in Firefox 11. It doesn't work in Chrome 18 which has WebGL disabled (on Linux).

EDIT: I really doesn't work because "NVIDIA cards with nouveau drivers in Linux are crash-prone." Firefox has no trouble, strangely.
Facebook Open Graph: going beyond the ‘like’
My developers experience with Facebook Open Graph's custom actions.
Fuck no you aren't cutting a hole in my balls. This was clearly posted by a woman.

Just take your pill, Honey. That way they don't have to cut into my balls.
Those Bieber Beliebers Dial Up Quite a Mess via Twitter
Our java engine (Jetty) logs 200s even when it's generating 500s.

Learn me to trust my own fucking logs, will you.

One of the more useful monitoring tools I've got is a simple shell-wrapped "HEAD" script that polls our cluster and reports an "OK" or "ERR" (slow responses trigger a "Hrm..", along with the current, median, and standard deviation of the response, and total error counts. That sits in an omnipresent, always-on-top small-font terminal window.

Something like:

2012-03-30 12:03 i=9948
Host Status Cur Med sd Err
www OK 0.22 0.24 0.44 6
Crowd Funding Update: GPS Tracker, Makerslide, Smart Controller
Video: Data Analysis in Python with Pandas (no more R!)
I've just spent a few years being paid to maintain a lot of simple scripts exactly like this one, so I'm in a good position to say: These kinds of scripts really are incredibly simple. Until they break.

But, they break.

Would you like to start a pool on how long it will be until this recipe breaks, or becomes hopelessly obsolete because some portion of it is now out of date?

Hint one: To get an idea, one could try the problem in reverse: How far back in time can you go before you reach a time when this script would not have worked yet? (Hint one, sub-hint A: The first commit to Homebrew's Git repo was in May of 2009.)

Hint two: Homebrew formulae aren't guaranteed to build at all times. They sometimes have bugs, especially when any of their dependencies (including the version of OS X itself) has recently changed. Those bugs tend to manifest as scary messages from (e.g.) the linker.

Hint three: Better get that version number out of the recipe before placing the bet. 1.9.2-p290 could become hopelessly obsolete at literally any minute; we're always just one zero-day away. It would be more reliable to pull that number from some canonical source like… um, any ideas? What is the answer to the question "how can I reliably determine, at any time over the next five years, the latest, least-buggy version of Ruby that is compatible with the version of Rails that I've got installed on my machine?" I don't know what your answer might be, but mine would be "pay someone like Yehuda Katz or the Rails core team to continuously recompute the answer, and to maintain the website that hosts the answer".
Great story. Especially impressive how you guys outsmarted the insurance companies (so far) by basically reverse engineering their systems. This feels like just the things startups should do when faced with tough challenges. Very inspiring, thank you.
The netscape rewrite became Firefox.
The most common personality types on HN are INTJ and INTP. Might have something to do with it

Source: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=943722
What's wrong with pointers? I quite enjoy working with pointers - they are a very simple concept.
OSX 10.7 and Chrome 18 is OK.
I think the elevator in my building is a perfect metaphor for New York city...bear with me...

When we were first shown the building, all I noticed was that the walls of the elevator were covered in graffiti! The very picture of urban blight.

A couple of months after we moved in, I took a moment to actually read the graffiti: "Bach!", "Ravel", "Beethoven sucks!", "Tchaikovsky 4 eva", and so on. Turns out, we live 2 blocks from the Manhattan school of music.
Most bizarrely almost all of their advertising seems to have the same script: "switch to us and save money". Some even go so far as to mention you can call them when there is an incident, but you'd think that is standard!
Your forgetting that this favors your more than them.

People dont want to learn a new system, and they are confortable with wordpress.

There are millions of devs and designers also familiar with wordpress - which can mean they can leave you in an instant and get anyone else to make changes or add feature to the site easily.
Why does the multiplication in "2x" have the same precedence as in "2 * x"? The previous poster is saying that the no-operator version binds stronger than the versions with operations. I agree that the no-symbol version has different rules than the explicit symbol.

Consider the expression "h-bar is h over 2 pi". That's "ħ = h/2π", and is definitely not the same as "(h/2) * π". This is because of the convention that you write the numerator terms and then the denominator terms. That is, if you wanted "h/2 * π" then you would tend to write it hπ/2.

As another example, consider Schrödinger's equation, with (-ħ²/2m) * Ψ(r, t). There too the 'm' is well-understood as being in the denominator.
This is a great story.

As a visionary who clearly doesn't mind getting her hands dirty and has design skills you seem like every tech co-founder's dream! I'm honestly surprised you had difficulty finding a tech co-founder before launching.

I'm dabbling with the idea of becoming a tech cofounder for someone, so I'd like to know what were the criteria that you looked for in a tech cofounder and how did you finally find one?
Thanks, internet!
Yes, this is the operative point. Analyzing intentionally obfuscated code is a whole different deal than analyzing ordinary code. Throw in an interpreter for a bizarre language of your own design, along with some code in that language, and you will frustrate any extant static analyzer.
Poll: What are your prime hacking hours?
I am mostly a night hacker (most productive around 10PM-2AM), but I am thinking of changing my routine.

Non-engineers too have hours in which they are most productive. Anecdotally, these hours are when they are not forced to sit comatosed in meetings or at their desks.

So, what period of day do you get the most work done?
2:00 AM - 6:00 AM
6:00 AM - 10:00 AM
10:00 AM - 2:00 PM
2:00 PM - 6:00 PM
6:00 PM - 10:00 PM
10:00 PM - 2:00 AM
Am I missing something? What's the significance of this link?
Now that the insurers know you can do this (legally), they should just let you back in (which would improve your accuracy slightly, and make it easier to cover other states).

Once someone's on Leaky, they're going to buy the best priced insurance they can. An insurance company trying to block you basically just guarantees that no matter how good their rates might be, they won't get Leaky customers.

(Also, if you're in California, I strongly suggest bumping your insurance up to 100/300 with high uninsured/underinsured motorist, unless you're utterly broke. It doesn't raise your premium much, and really keeps you from getting screwed. The minimums are utterly insufficient in a place with both lots of expensive cars and lots of uninsured/illegal drivers, even if you drive a $500 Honda.)
A web comic discovery tool that solves the copyright infringement problem
I have Chromium 17 on Ubuntu (WebGl desactivated) and it works.
It's pretty. That's all, I think.
showing off google's webgl rendering of equations in search
its neat
The moral purity police are always with us and always find some excuse to save other people from damnation: witch hunting, regulating the surface area of women's clothing, statutory rape, and so forth.
> Still, the $50K limit and 3D/memory-specific technology seems like there is only a handful of companies that will ever fulfill these conditions... and Adobe surely has a list of exactly who they are. So this is a very targeted policy that will never apply to 99.99% of us.

> Is this an accurate assessment?

No.

If you want to create a 3D game using Unity and deploy to Flash, for example, you will need to pay the 9%. That's a lot of people, Flash support for Unity was a much-requested feature. So that's a lot of people right there.

And this isn't just Unity users. Any fast 3D game will require the premium features.
Reports identify Chinese grad student in hacks against Tibetans, others
I presume he actually kept a copy or draft himself (so the "only copy" part was not strictly true), which he published seven years later in his autobiography, figuring that was long enough after not to be taken for opportunism but mere historical interest.
RIM trying to save BlackBerry platform with 'its not a toy' ad (video)
is that a sombrero?
What could possibly go wrong.

edit: since I am being downvoted, I will state it explicitly. We are creating a simple, resiliant lifeform that grows and reproduces as long as it can eat carbon dioxide, of which there are essentially unlimited supplies on earth. We know from observing complex fragile invasive species that are brought in to new environments with unlimited food and no controls on growth what happens. They reproduce and grow until they run out of their food source. For example, bringing cats to australia to control rodents. Releasing this bacteria, which is neither complex nor fragile, into the wild has a reasonable chance of consuming vast amounts of CO2, producing petrochemicals as a waste product. The easily predictable outcome of this release is the elimination of nearly all life on the planet and creation of a toxic atmosphere similar to that on Titan.
> this violates the fundmental openness of the SWF format

Since when has the SWF format had "fundamental openness"? It's the exact opposite.
Sand Flea The 30ft Jumping Robot
You can enable it in about:flags
With latest Chrome, you get a nice 3d viz of the result.
Sure, they could do with a better privacy policy.

However, what exactly is the sensitive data here? Your first name, your zip code, your car make/model/year, and your profession.

99.99% of people would happily give you that data for a free pen, just for the asking.

Also, while the Leaky guys (being in YC) are likely to actually be better than their privacy policy, what happens when you click over to the actual insurance company and give them your full details (SSN, credit info, vehicle accident history, license info, etc.). I'm more concerned with how AIG will use my data than how a small startup will, and the insurance company is the one collecting vastly more -- and their privacy policy allows them to use it for all sorts of things which are opposed to the user.
You must be young, and Not remember. Registration worked fine for majority of history, pre 1970, I believe thats when sono bono copyright act made copyright automatic.

In fact auto registration has shifted power towards the fewer.
Cloud9 IDE - Code editor in your browser
So it should have given 3.
the question is are those sites selling it or did some scripter just scrape a bunch of the public information from bigger sites?
The relevant concept is Theft Of Services

Theft of services still implies the consumption of someone else's resources. By not paying for the service, the provider faces tangible losses (because the opportunity to service a paying customer is lost). In this particular case, Apple loses absolutely nothing. The designer is still wrong (and IMO, plagiarizing copyrighted design assets merits termination), but Apple's capacity to service their customers is not hindered by this.
Using pointers adds a certain amount of complexity, and they also introduce the possibility of security problems. This was particularly important for the work we were doing on the browser plug-in. For the type of work that developers use KL for, they aren't needed.
Remind101′s Messaging Tool for Teachers Growing Quickly
$79 is half of a percent of what you just spent on that software. While I agree that charging you is disappointing in principle, it's odd to fume over a penny when you just spent $150.
Good article!

I think "Complete Turbo Pascal" by Jeff Duntemann had a treatment of the spirograph (might have been another book on Turbo Pascal though).

Good times, good times. :)
It is Palm all over again.

Pioneer -> Innovator -> Market leader -> Complacent -> Sit on your ass too long -> Competition overtakes -> Sell off , Go Home.
I wonder how often the advice in these How I Succeeded posts are actually related to their success. Hard to filter out these things when you're the one experiencing them.
In the UK, what would an official permanent address be? Electoral registration?
Working in Public is Weird
You are correct that SFTP is not FTP. To be fair to the parent, he didn't say so either. Here are the differences between FTPS, SFTP and FTP over SSH: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File_Transfer_Protocol#Secure_F...
For a book about startup smarts they sure are missing something very important on their site: A button to get on a list to be notified when the electronic version is out.

I have zero interest in the printed version. Lately there have been only certain books that I might consider buying in printed form. I want to buy this book but will not do so until it is available on iBooks, Kindle or ePub format. They should have had a "Want the upcoming electronic version?" button for others who share my sentiment.
I was taught the same, but with strict precedence - division comes first. Having said that, a mathematician would never write those down anyway, as it's too confusing.
Anywhere particular in NH?
I seem to see a distinction between purely software-based startups (based in the Bay Area or NYC) and more hardware-based companies based in Mass (Boston) (MIT spinoffs, boston dynamics, iRobot) or New Hampshire (DEKA, Segway...) ... I wonder why?
Because humans often make the fundamental attribution error: I am having a bad day, you are a dickhead, he is a dangerous lunatic.
Nah, you must be thinking of this.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mexican_hat_potential#A_pedagog...
No wonder. She's a woman. (READ THE WHOLE POST before you downvote)

I keep seeing this over and over again in my life. Nearly all the women I know, from family to friends, are self driven, independent (even with a family they have a strong sense of self), stable, educated or self-educated, and self disciplined. Earning degrees, starting businesses, or properly investing the family funds. The men I know.... well... we're the worst kind of failures. Not the good Silicon Valley "I failed but I learned" kind of failure. The bad kind of failure where you keep doing the same thing over and over expecting different results. Out of all the men in my the family, my mother is the only one that played her cards right. Financially, career wise, everything. Same with my aunt. Same with my other aunt. Same with my childhood female friends. WTF.

I think I've developed such a bias favoring women that I specifically want a female co-founder. At least I know there's a much less chance of testosterone induced ego trips, driving the company into the ground from unnecessary overly risky decisions. I've noticed that these women's decision making is VERY different from the men's.

From what I've seen. Women change their success strategy much more often, whereas the men keep the same one despite years of failure. Women adjust to change much quicker than the men I know. When women mess up, they say to your face "I'm sorry, it's my fault". In fact they blame themselves a lot more when things go wrong, whereas the men place blame on others and don't apologize at all. Men don't see it as "I screwing up", they see it as "things didn't go my way". Women gather information first, then make a decision. The Men skip the information gathering step. They rush in and just call the shots. It's quicker but more risky and eventually leads to a lot of failures. When business doesn't work, women blame themselves and try to change themselves (get a degree, educate, find new partner, find what they did wrong) but when business doesn't work for men, they try to change the business itself, refusing to admit that it might just be their fault. And lastly, the men I know seem to think they are correct by default and tread ahead into the darkness, whereas the women think they are incorrect by default and carefully tread through decisions.

I think I'm sexist. But I can't help it. You call it sexism and generalizing but I call it 'pattern recognition'. Literally all the women in my extended family and friends have good jobs and the guys (me included) have nothing or terrible jobs. I feel as if I'm destined for a life of failure. I know I shouldn't feel that way but I can't help it. It feels inescapable. The more I think about it, the more it makes sense and becomes evident. Sorry if I dragged any men into the same depressive pit that I'm stuck in.
very cool.

what i made for the lulz:
https://www.google.com/search?btnG=1&pws=0&q=sqrt(x*...
Massive credit card data breach involves all major brands
Ask HN: What would you do if you were RIM's new CTO?
If you accept the idea that there may be people who see someone using an iPad without knowing it is an Apple product, that "Google" or "Samsung" logo does not say anything. I accept that idea because I know not everybody is as obsessed with technology as the average reader of HN.

I also think that, by the time that customer sees the box, it likely is too late. Who is going to say "did I buy that?" at that moment (if they actually actively look at the box at all)?

I do think there are some examples of blatant copying, but I also think the difference between blatant copying and the combination of inspiration and copying out of necessity because it is the only useful approach is subtle, very subtle in cases. It will be hard for judges to define where the border between the two lies.
One of the differentiating factors of Wolfram|Alpha: Gone.

Google's doesn't require a 250mb plugin to become interactive (just a webgl capable browser...). And it seems to be about 8 times faster than W|A...

W|A still does a lot of things other sites don't do, but it tends to be unusably slow, and inconsistent (running same query twice in a row will sometimes not give all of the same results).

I figure the end is probably closer than one might expect for W|A. They don't seem to be moving quick enough to stay infront of the curve forever. Also, the site is becoming littered with obtrusive ads, and that's a pretty negative experience. (I also hear Wolfram's company may be struggling.)

This should have been praise for Google's new tool, but it turned into a rant on Wolfram|Alpha... whoops.
Very cool. Worked for all equations I tried with x and/or y but not z. Also doesn't work with greek letters. Worked with f(x) but not ƒ(x) or f(x,y).

Edit: Here's the official announcement http://insidesearch.blogspot.com/2012/03/graphing-on-googlec...
Prove that p2 – 1 is divisible by 24 if p is a prime number greater than 3
Reality check:

[x] Claims to support a multitude of languages with wildly varying semantics while still achieving some goal that seems unrealistic (or thus-far un-achieved) even for a single one

[x] Claims to achieve performance similar to C/C++/fortran/some other traditionally-considered-fast
language

[x] Claims that some traditionally-considered-hard-to-do-task will now become easy

[x] Uses buzzwords like "in the cloud"

[x] Shows meaningless benchmarks without context, code or an in-depth look at the actual bottlenecks of the benchmarked code, suggesting the particular solution by far exceeds all the competitors

[ ] Extensive usage of the words "flux capacitor" or "Gigawatts"
http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/03/29/us-rim-idUSBRE82S1...
> 3D charts require a web browser and system that support WebGL.

Courtesy of Firefox 11.

(edit) Apparently webgl.force-enabled needs to be set to true in about:config, and then it works.