skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
How Square knows who you are on its iOS app (StackOverflow)
WiGig breaks 1-watt barrier, 5Gbps wireless hopefully on its way to smartphones
Slow is something you're going to have to define more, in which situations? Drawing? String parsing? Concurrency? And in which real world situations does obj-c "slowness" hurt it where any of the others you mentioned would be a better fit?
Digital Pet Portrait Artist
Pages which are blank shouldn't throw stones.
One word: Cython.

Having a fast way to interface C code, and speed up your bottlenecks is a godsend for anything that isn't a strict web app.

I'm sure Ruby has an FFI, and most likely even has a SWIG interface but Cython is far beyond that--its a typed version of Python that compiles directly down to C/C++, so you can port code between Python and Cython instanteously.

Doing just that usually makes it 2x faster.
Annotate it with types to make it more than 10x faster.
Change the algo to something you can only do efficiently in C, and it's 100-1000x faster. Seeing something go from taking 10 minutes to taking 600ms in less than a days work is fantastic.

----

Also personally, I find I like white-space scoping. Python is like psuedocodethat actually runs.
The spray and pray method of water management is perhaps the building science equivalent of my code.

Commercial buildings are not just scaled up houses in the same way that Github isn't a scaled up version of what someone created for Geocities. Thus, the reason globs of magic goop are not a viable solution to my bulk water management concerns. Bad things can happen when you have to put buckets in a server room or surgical suite.

I suspect you might be surprised at the pathways by which bulk water can enter a building without causing structural failure when a hurricane passes by.

I will add that your understanding of roof uplift forces is a bit more intuitive than scientific. Objects are sucked off, allowing air to move beneath them has the potential to reduce uplift because the pressure differential is reduced - something one is allowed to consider when designing tile roofs.
Did you read any of the backstory in the Thomas case? She lied under oath, deliberately destroyed evidence, attempted to blame her kids, and even then refused settlement offers. The best you can say about her is that she was the victim of legal malpractice by her defense attorneys.
Appboy Launches Mobile Analytics and User Engagement Platform
37Signals' New Basecamp now has an API
I just tried it, and it quoted me double of what I'm paying.
Sensationalism. Sure the recent reports are that it is currently disjointed.

But we have seen these reports for every prior version of Windows. How Windows 7 was so confusing for consumers, etc. All it's going to take is a few small changes in a service pack or something else to make it seem more normal for a consumer, and that's something MS could do easily if needed.
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Mobile shopping set to take off in 2012
Mechanical Turk: More SETIHome and less Amazon Web Services
Mike Daisey apologizes for his exaggerations & falsehoods involving Apple
There is per-user authentication. The PFUser class (in iOS, Android is ParseUser) handles this sort of authentication automatically for you, and there are also hooks to do it with a bit more effort through the REST API.

https://parse.com/docs/ios/api/Classes/PFUser.html

If you have more specific questions about how to use this for an app, feel free to drop us a line at feedback at parse.com.
Mike Daisey: Some Thoughts After The Storm
Current 4g pricing is unbelievably busted. At $10/gb, it costs me more to download a movie than it does to buy it on DVD.
In the past i've seen jitter used in all sorts of applications, from cron jobs to configuration management to memcache key expiration. Any time you have a crapload of nodes that all need to do an operation at a specific time you rely on jitter to keep resources from bottlenecking. Probably used anywhere the systems or network has a miniscule amount of resource headroom (like cluster nodes that run at 93% utilization)
Where are all the green jobs?
ADHD Challenges Those Seeking Driver’s License
From a comment on that page by "greg":

Based on their logic, the TSA should also withdraw from the hearings as they're involved in the lawsuits.
> In last months there were so many chances for them, but they missed every one.

If they are so incompetent, but still get 7.4% of the vote, then how will will they do once they get their act together?
Alright, you can't login to the Yelp app then.
I was excited until I saw it was written in Java.
> what you say is explicitly not true in Italy,

Italy has fiddled with its election laws a lot in recent years, and is probably going to do so again, so what may be true right now may not have been true in year WXYZ.

What I say certainly has happened in the past: witness the downfall of the previous Prodi governments, where support from minority coalition partners tanked the government.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romano_Prodi#Olive_Tree_and_fir...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romano_Prodi#2008_crisis_and_re...

Coalition governments built on many small parties are often weak.

> the party decides on the candidate

Often through relatively open primaries though. Witness the Republican race on right now. "The Party" likely wants Romney, because he's probably more electable than the others. A lot of people do not want him though, evidently.

Not to say any system is perfect, I agree with the poster who says that they all have problems. To think that one system is "the best" is a bit silly in my opinion.
YC Conflict of Interest with reviewing Apps and 'No Idea Applicants'?
Is there a conflict of interest with reviewing apps with ideas, and the fact that YC is now in the business of coming up with ideas?<p>I know we've all heard that 'ideas are worthless, execution matters'. However, given that so many YC startups operate in stealth mode for a while, we have to assume YC places <i>some</i> value on the idea, even if significantly less than ability of the founders.<p>That being said, I'm a little uncomfortable with YC reviewing my application that has some novel aspects for a new product, knowing that at the same time they're looking for startup ideas to feed to their superstar 'no idea' applicants'...
It seems too many C++ programmers see a problem and think "Hey, let's use classes!".

That's usually a result of people coming from Java doing C++ work.
The pull-to-refresh patent
He is sixteen. "Meaningful" has a different definition for someone that age. I am in awe of the achievement not only because of the stupendous scope and complexity, but the sheer willpower and colossal amount of time it must have taken.

I hope the kid gets a lot of mileage out of it and goes onto great things. At the very least, he has earned his geek union card for life.
I'm surprised someone hasn't converted the large image over to something like the Google Maps navigation UI for better viewing. I guess I'll be attempting that when I get home from work.
I use Parse on a couple of projects, I also work (separately, I hasten to add!) on apps for carriers with significant security issues.

I would say that you shouldn't really worry about 'sniffing' traffic, because whatever countermeasures you take chances are if someone cares enough they'll work around it.

Parse has an access-control model for objects: objects can have read/write permissions for users, groups, or everyone. For example, you might have an object in Parse representing a comment, which the owner could edit and everyone else read.

Obviously the Parse API itself is rather public, and it wouldn't take a huge amount of skill to extract your client keys from an Android / iOS app: but as long as you've designed your ACL (access control list) correctly, it won't matter as your user will have to be logged in and authenticated to access sensitive objects.
I definitely understand this given all the acquihiring going on in tech right now -- it makes it hard to rely on something for your business.

That being said, for a few reasons I don't think we're likely to go away through an talent acquisition:

1) The majority of our headcount won't be engineers and product, it will be operations. This is necessarily the case because we are such a local service. This means that anyone who wants to buy a team to work on product is paying a massive premium for all these other people they probably don't want (at least, traditional tech firms won't want them).

2) I think Justin.tv / TwitchTV will already make me very wealthy. I didn't start Exec to make money. I started Exec because I want to build something that will take over the world. I want to be Facebook of labor -- not as in "a company that opens up your social graph around work" but as in "a company that fundamentally changes and expands the category it is in, and becomes ascendent in that category".

That said, it is easy to talk. Watch what we do and draw your own conclusions.

As a side note, if any readers are interested in contributing to this vision check us out: http://iamexec.com/hiring
So... did this kid assemble the whole thing manually brick-by-brick, or did he use some kind of compiler? Does minecraft have macros? Stored procedures? Hard to believe every individual brick was placed by hand.
Amazing. All those galaxies and Earth is the only one with life.
This is a pretty awesome hack.
Sorry, we lost
https://twitter.com/BenThePCGuy/statuses/184283190654021632
Deduping, and my other thoughts are two links up. You say "sophistry", and it very well may be, but this is the legal system we're talking about here. Standard logic and definitions need not apply, unfortunately.
We've been working for awhile on this - would love to hear some feedback from the Hacker News community.
>“Nope, I gotta have flat-rate data”, they’re thinking, “because otherwise the telephone company will rape me.”

There's got to be a better way to say this.
Well....that may very well be the case, but many people will gloss over it and not see it. When I first looked at it, I didn't see it. I didn't even look at the images in fullscreen.

It wasn't until AFTER you guys posted this that I went back and looked at it.

Either way, he clearly went out of his way to be anonymous, so it should be in the HN ethos to respect those wishes.
Because they don't have startups they're limited to working on things that the big companies are interested in. That tends to be flashy-but-useless things executives get excited about (Asimo) or money-making things that executives get excited about.
On that note, does someone know of any good statistics that show how well "niche" social networks fare in the light of the growth of the general purpose monster Facebook? I like very specific-purposed social networks, but I was wondering what the general traction of those networks is, or even what the average number of social networks per user is. I assume we techies are on many, but I feel like the general public barely goes beyond Facebook.
https://twitter.com/BenThePCGuy/statuses/184283190654021632
Being Wrong
Here are a bunch, some better than others: http://www.schneierfacts.com/
Foreign Policy on whether cyber-warfare is mostly hype.
Not trying to rebut your point, just answer the question you posed. I don't think anyone has assumed that Schneier represents the most effective critic, just someone with reasoned and thoroughly correct arguments, and background in a relevant field. I agree that Schneier's voice may not carry the most weight, but that just suggests the need for more voices.
So, "quality control?"
*Citation needed.
Rebuttal: http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2012/02/27/cyberwar_is...
Dr. Neil deGrasse Tyson on killing Pluto: 'All I did was drive the getaway car'
Haw.
"The universe is a big place. Perhaps the biggest" - Kilgore Trout
A slight variation with neither error codes nor exceptions.

template< typename T >
auto findRoots(T a, T b, T c) -> pair<maybe<complex<T>>, maybe<complex<T>>> {
typedef complex<T> C;
typedef maybe<C> Root;
typedef pair<Root, Root> Roots;

if (a == 0) {
if (b == 0)
return Roots(nothing, nothing);
else
return Roots(Root(-c / b), nothing);
} else {
auto d = C(b*b - a*c*4);
auto two_a = a*2;
return Roots(Root((-b + sqrt(d)) / two_a),
Root((-b - sqrt(d)) / two_a));
}
}

maybe is simply a templatized std::pair wrapper that lets you check if the returned value is valid (either via maybe.valid() or if(maybe)). All imaginary results are handled automatically via std::complex. nothing decomposes into an invalid maybe value of the appropriate type.
> Or they simply look for someone on the other side. E.g. in Germany, SPD (social democrats) routinely ignore Left (socialists and communists) and instead deals with the conservative CDU.

When they have the opportunity. In Italy, in recent years, the choice may have been between the communists and Berlusconi, which in my book is not a pleasant choice to have to make.

My point was that proportional systems can go wrong in certain ways, not that they necessarily will do so all the time.
No macros or compilers per se. There are map editors that allow you to make copies of existing groups of blocks, like replicating seven-segment displays.

There are not really any repositories of existing designs, so the logic was probably all done 'by hand'.
Yes, the point of the post was that it had a lot more to do with being a kid with a computer than with being male or female. The point of the title was that it was a story of ... a girl and her computers :)
Have a look at Spout[0]. Its an open source server that generalizes the minecraft concept. They are actually supporting 'minecraft' as a plugin called vanilla which communicates with the stock minecraft client. They also have an improved client which is currently a modded minecraft client but I believe the eventual plan it rewrite the client from scratch also.

[0]http://www.spout.org and https://github.com/SpoutDev
so security theater applies to congress members as well as you.

Not so much ...

"Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge finally called to apologize about the mix-up, and the delays stopped in early April, Smith said."

If you, or I, got on the no-fly list I doubt the head cheese would call up and offer an apology.
Not a new species, an old species. Remember, laboratories were producing research code before even IBM hired its first "software engineer".
Worth noting that the inventor has said that he won't enforce this patent. https://twitter.com/#!/lorenb/status/21684045608

(That said, as commenters below correctly point out, Twitter, not Loren, owns the patent and gets to decide whom to enforce it against).
Return of Lulzsec, Dump 170937 accounts from Military Dating Site
Why Developers Should Worry About Google Play
HN Comment Generator
Great question! As we get stats we'll let you know :) Feel free to email me and I can let you know how we're faring within our private alpha pre-launch. Also I wouldn't say Family is a "niche" network. People generally reflect and understand that the three most important things in life are work, friends, and family. We want to help bring that third (and most important) graph online.
MegaUpload reportedly accounted for a quarter of all corporate traffic.

And yes, YouTube did implicitly encourage piracy. I'm not sure if you remember the days before the Google acquisition, but you could find most anything you wanted on there. I remember watching whole TV series' on there. Their laissez faire attitude towards infringing clips had a large role in making YouTube the dominant player in the online video space.
Hacker News Comment Generator
If a half-dozen more qualified individuals step up to make the same arguments, perhaps the inclusion of Schneier would prove redundant. I don't see those people lining up to make those arguments, and I see plenty lining up to defend the current state or try to make it worse.

It also helps to hear from someone who starts from the perspective of "only do things that work and are worth the cost", rather than someone who starts from the perspective of "do anything that could possibly make a difference, it couldn't hurt (given that we don't place any value on anything other than security)".
It is probably not in YC's best interest to steal ideas. If YC started stealing ideas, they would lose trust of the startup community. Then the best people would stop pitching to YC.
Most likely he used an out-of-minecraft editor to put together logic gates that can be copy/pasted, and then larger structures. The map format for minecraft is pretty easy to edit, and there are CAD like programs that'll build out an environment you want.
(meta comment - downvote so it doesn't appear in the discussion)

Kill the name calling. We all agree on the ethical standing of these peeps. No need to state it, let's keep HN authoritative and professional. Great list of the witnesses though - really eye opening as to who they allow in.
They are in both businesses. Without SEO, Leaky is going nowhere in the long-term. And to us, Leaky may seem like the best insurance comparison site, but if you don't have thick, valuable content (that can be crawled by search engines, you aren't going to be found.

Also, google "TeachStreet Panda". This was a site you could've said the same thing. "No way they should be penalized"... they went out of business after Panda because Google deemed their content to be non-valuable even though it filled a need.
I am willing to bet that prices being only comparable through an agent is completely intentional on the side of the insurance companies.
As a datapoint, we use jitter a lot in cache infrastructure at Facebook
Fascinating! The real time aspect is actually fun to play with.

It allows you to probe the black-box and see what comes out the other end. For example, I would be saying a lot of money if I were a married 60 year old woman called Mary. But I guess we all knew that!
Where Linux Needs To Change
You can always put more than one ad per page, and CPMs go a good bit higher than $1.
With constexpr, if the parameters are constants, the whole computation can happen at compile-time. The line is somewhat harder to read for people not used to functional programming, but unfortunately, constexpr functions are required to have a single expression.
The honest truth is that it's not them, but it's you. Like you said, gauging a potential great technical co-founder is not hard if you have a chance to work with them on various projects. However, that is close to impossible if 1) You are located in China. 2) Going to school there full time. 3) Traveling every few months for fun.

As an entrepreneur, I would never seek out a co-founder who isn't local, isn't always available, and wouldn't sacrifice entertainment/travel/fun for some serious hard work. I have worked with those people in the past and none of them are co-founder material. Working 18 hours a day off of Ramen is simply not something they'd do to realize the bigger dream.

While you have ambition, you are definitely biased. If you want to create something great, you need to chase after your dream with reckless abandon. That could mean a number of things including moving, finishing school, networking, or picking something you can do from China that isn't necessarily coding related.
Maybe I'm being pedantic but the article misuses "sting". The action seems to have simply been a seizure of critical botnet infrastructure, using some information secretly gathered in court, but a sting is "a deceptive operation designed to catch a person committing a crime".

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sting_operation
I think it has nothing to do with the languages themselves, and more to do with a sort of tipping point around tools, libraries and adoption. Through random chance, I prefer Python simply because people I know use Python so I started to use Python.

At the end of the day, there really isn't much inherent that makes Python better than Ruby. Which is exactly why the world would benefit from the eventual dominance of one over the other. Even if it is a randomly driven tipping point process.

On the other hand: Ruby vs Java vs C++, each has clear advantages in certain situations. These languages seem less likely to compete with each other.
Can everyone be below average? Yes, with infinite expected values.
The evolution of PhantomJS build workflow
WWDC Dates turn up in Moscone Center calendar?
Thanks for the link, that's a great way to evaluate ideas.

As for this specific problem - it's hard to say without doing surveys, but I'd say every webdev shop in the world does all 5 to some degree, unless they are developing for a corporate intranet with a controlled client base.

The spread of browser platforms right now is the largest it's ever been. There are many shops who have to fight IE6 on the rearguard while trying to be iPad-compatible in the vanguard.

The higher end shops do some formal or scripted testing, but my intuition is that what the average person really want is to do a quick check by hand in one browser, and somehow magically know that it works on all the other ones.
It's interesting to me how little difference there is between her experience and my own (male) early experience with computers.

Though on second thought, it's not at all surprising.
Why redirect from nathansuniversity.com to nathansuniversity.appspot.com? Shouldn't it be the other way around?
Every few months I do similar calculations (world land mass divided by current population, world carrying capacity, land coverage at given density with/without farmland, cost to "recover" the Mediterranean for farmland, etc.). Tickled to see someone else work such numbers out with nice maps.

Source site is persquaremile.com, worth a closer look.
"The rules for conditional operator are quite sophisticated and one of them says that if one of the sub-expressions is a throw expression, the type of the entire conditional operator is that of the other sub-expression." [1]

[1] http://akrzemi1.wordpress.com/2011/05/06/compile-time-comput...
Interestingly, as he no longer works at Twitter, he no longer owns or controls the patent.
Bill Gates: In Search of One Energy Miracle
Looks like the author of the C solution has never written a lot of C, but too much C++. ;-D
While documentation is good, I still don't get the need for programmatic documentation.

I suppose the desire is to have a service describing itself so proxies can be code gen'd, but I'm glad I've stepped away from that world and don't miss the WSDL days.
Free Peek devices now being sold on Ebay for $84?
Same, will keep looking for something similar not in Java...
You can now buy actual PC hardware with in-game currency in EVE Online
CouchDB and CouchApp. Part 3
This is also starting in 3 weeks: http://www.udacity.com/overview/Course/cs262
When I was starting learning Python, I considered Ruby. At the time, Ruby was Active Record only. Active Record does not let you use SQL procedures without defeating the whole purpose of Rails. For me, it meant that Rails was only good for toy CRUD apps.
I believe it is just a nag window that pops up on file save sometimes. I used it for about 4 months before buying with no other interference.
I like the declarative way of defining/extending the highlighters in code. Clean, direct and easy to grok if you're familiar with regexps.
Phone calls and real mail are supposedly more effective.
The argument of the article is that when computers were new, they were new to everyone of either genders whereas at present gender-based expectations can take over in expectations and decisions about who would play or work with computers.

"In some ways, it is like the very ubiquity of technology has led us back to a world where socially normative gender roles take hold all over again"
Alone yes, you might however be able to say that it has meaning if you can show that the registered cars per capita stayed at the same level over that period.

I'm not positive that would be what you'd need to say that but It sounds right in my head, anyone have any better ideas?