skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"Here is what my DSL can look like with Blocks in Smalltalk"
(condition)
ifTrue: [ ... ]
ifFalse: [ ... ]
ifMaybe: [ ... ]

You can accomplish the same thing with named functions and function pointers, but it makes the DSL very awkward to use. Imagine if you had to write all of your conditional logic (if-then and if-then-else and switch) using the names of functions defined elsewhere. That would be much less readable than being able to write block of code inline.
> The Target receives the submitted material as a tulip that will expire after a certain amount of downloads

Perhaps I am hopeless behind the times, but what is a tulip?
Dealing Sympathetically with Legacy Code
Hiding in the Higgs data: hints of physics beyond the standard model
As usual: This is a decision by a LG (Landgericht), it will surely go to the next higher court: OLG (Oberlandesgericht). In this special case it is a decision by the "LG Hamburg", famously known in Germany for its useless decisions in 'internet cases' that will be reverted by the next higher court. Nothing to see here, people. Move on. :)
I'm probably in a very small minority here, but given that Google is making money by placing ads next to most YouTube content, then yes, perhaps they are responsible for determining who actually owns the content first.
Does anyone else hate the term "idea people". To me that implies someone thinks that having an idea and no skill to execute is a legitimate profession where people should make money. I might be overreacting, but it feels like people see the VC cash flowing, have no discernible skills and think they deserve a payoff for a mediocre idea.
Are you digitally well mannered?
Thanks for being open with your numbers.
Amazon incentivizes you to price between 2.99 and 9.99 (for 70% royalty). As a self-pubbed author (currently on Amazon KDP right now), my Amazon numbers are a lot better than yours. But your web sales dwarf me.

KDP has been an experiment for me. I get ok money from it. But I'm not sure it is the correct model for niche technical books. The idea of giving away my book during promotions (I've given it away probably 100x more than sales), makes me wonder if for technical niche books you aren't shooting yourself in the foot by flooding the market with freebies.

But I'm also wondering if I need to change my price. It seems a lot of technical self-pubs seem to be in the $20-$30 range when they sell them themselves. Care you elaborate on that decision?
Gosh, for the nth time, there is no "don't tamper with the original headline" rule. There's just a "don't sensationalize headlines" rule.
Self-fulfilled prophecy?

Please read http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html especially this bit:

Please don't submit comments complaining that a submission is inappropriate for the site. If you think something is spam or offtopic, flag it by going to its page and clicking on the "flag" link. (Not all users will see this; there is a karma threshold.) If you flag something, please don't also comment that you did.

If your account is less than a year old, please don't submit comments saying that HN is turning into Reddit. (It's a common semi-noob illusion.)
Wikipedia: Education Program users add more quality content than other new users
Even if the idea were worth money, how would you know unless you had experience in the field?

Might as well tell a lawyer your great idea for his client's defense. See how much he'll pay.

As an electrical engineer, I would not presume to understand architecture enough to sell an architect on my lucrative new idea for a building. The architect has probably thought of and dismissed hundreds of ideas like mine.

In the same way, I would never walk up to a web developer and say "Hey, I have this wild original idea about a website! If you build it, we could make tons of money, and I'll even give you half! But you have to sign this NDA before I tell you..."

If you don't know how to implement the idea yourself, chances are it has been though of and rejected already by those who do.
Neo4J is an interesting project. It's not as strong in the SPARQL department, but for convenient graph traversal it's neat.
Enzymes grow artificial DNA
Fexl now listed at Rosetta Code
I'm really interested in the 'fake' sales page idea, thanks for sharing the details. From these numbers, did you have a formula in mind that would determine if you could make money from the book? In other words, if you sell for $27, those 15 buys generate $405, which is obviously more than the $100 spent on Adwords. But how many of the 15 people who clicked Buy would actually buy? Also, did you list a price on your 'fake' sales page next to the Buy button?

Also, given your fake sales page experience, have you considered advertising with Adwords?
It's a device where distance to the display, resolution and screen size are such that someone with normal vision cannot distinguish between pixels.

It is a post-development sales pitch used to pitch as a differentiation the fact that Apple's naive scaling required them to grossly overshoot the mark. Competitive products already had excellent displays before Apple decided that they had no choice but catch up.

I would love it if any company could call their HD TVs retina displays

Why would you love it? "Retina" display is a misnomer -- unless the device is a fixed distance from my eyes, and it is specifically geared for my eyes specifically, it is horse shit to call it a retina display. It is ignorant marketbabble that lowers us all.
Machinarium is a great game.

I would like to point out, however, that because it is Flash it saves your game state in an LFO. The datastore it uses is the same as Firefox, so if you clear your LFO cookies out of FF you'll delete your Machinarium saved game data.
Actually, one of things that the DCPU reminds people of it's not enough to just be Turing complete. You also need hardware to represent the state of your machine (graphics monitor or console), and ways of providing input. Turing Complete machines aren't very interesting if you can't see what they're doing ;)

Also, don't forget, you 'only' have 100,000 clock cycles to play with.
Thats not the same because iOS and android are both frameworks. Adding framework onto framework especially on mobile which moves so fast cause more problem than it solves because people start complain that google or apple broke there framework which shouldn't have been there in the first place.
and the pacman baddies walk through the walls pretty frequently. Still, it's awesome!
The GEMA can't "prop up their own front" because they don't have any money for that nor is it even remotely reasonable that they will ever get it.
But wouldn't it catch on if they actually thought they could help their favorite driver win? Seems like an idea like that could be revolutionary.
I have heard that although I never used OS-9. I programmed a 6809E on a development board in college after having learned 6502 assembly in high school. Liked it a lot better than the 8086/8 assembly I took the semester afterwords.
"Today, with graphene and carbon nanotubes and fancy membranes coming out of our ears"

Made me shudder. One, for the violent imagery, two, for the trivialization of remarkable science and technology.
Well, it's a bit self-righteous, but it shows the difference between the old scene where cracking was a technical challenge reserved for the able, and the new sort of mass-market scene we have today.

I for one always cringe at the sight of technically illiterate friends who keep up with bad sitcoms through uTorrent without knowing how the file system (even the high-level abstraction of it) works.

When we debate IP law, hackers (rightly) accuse the establishment of not knowing the technological reality of the laws they push. Judges and media corporations legislate based on poorly construed metaphors of theft and ownership. But the majority of today's file sharers have no idea what they are doing---they live in the same world as the establishment. It doesn't hurt to remember this.
LED Fireworks. Or, parent helpers go overboard
"We don't have a mechanism to, as a society, say let's not go all the way with this bubble"

Yes we do. You can short stocks. It's like placing a bet that the stock will go down in the future.

If this is a bubble, and you know that eventually certain companies behaving this way are gonna tank -- then you can bet right now that way and earn a big payout if that's the case.

Put your money where your mouth is.
Protecting them from commercial use of their personal data - without explicit consent. In the US it's more of a free-for-all and businesses can get away with much more; in EU countries, their governments prefer to protect their populations from businesses (before anything bad happens). Just a different philosophy.
I'm not a physicist, but I feel "the desire to resolve conflicts between general relativity and quantum electrodynamics" is like trying to uncover a relationship between the various shapes of the letters of the alphabet and the meaning of the words they make up.
Li-ion batteries don't use lead.
Following the metaphor:

Sure, it sucks when you have to deal with a fop-cum-restauranteur trying to convince you to sell blah. But you need to listen to the ideas anyway, to hear what people are wanting, or your cuisine turns stale. You need to keep up with the trends of what the customers want to eat, or you end up as a has-been, with a restaurant the does business to the people who never got in when it was the hot thing, slowly rotting to oblivion as eventually everyone who cares or cared has been there, or decided to just resign themselves to never having the experience.
Bubbles: 20/20 Hindsight (2010)
Peter Thiel’s CS183: Startup - Class 5 Notes Essay
I believe that by 'Ponzi Scheme' he's referring to the idea that you can sell growth in users to investors. E.g. "We're not profitable, but we're growing by 100k users per week!" The idea being that the only 'value' you have is in user growth, and once that slows down then you're sunk. While this might not technically be a Ponzi Scheme, it has some similarities to one.
Germany doesn't understand the internet from what I've seen. They're the country that legally requires you to post your full name, address and telephone number on your website. (search for "Impressum")
Why recharge when you can just replace the batteries in such a situation? It would make for a better show, anyways.
Crowdsourced Travel Apps like Flightfox Are Taking Off
I think one of the most widely accepted definitions of randomness in mathematics was given by Martin-Löf.

Basically it says that a process is random iff it doesn't exhibit any atypical property that you can test with an algorithm.

In other words: if there is no computable way of proving that it's not random, then it is random.
I think it'd actually be pretty cool if the actual game had multiple DCPU versions in the universe. It would give it even more of 1980's computing feel.

Explore the planet, fight off hordes of zombies to obtain... a DCPU16 - REV C!
drupal already do it starting with version 5.x (current stable one - 7.x)
Kubuntu: Moving Forward
So, you view this as a bad habit, rather than an ethical dilemma.
Surely that depends on how well you name the functions?
Free Information Security e-Book Kit.
There Is No Invisible Hand
What do you do when using a projector, and your DPI is something like 3? (serious question, I don't know how this is traditionally handled)
Depends if these royalties make it less profitable to run in Germany why should they continue and that clone site would get sued just as much.
The justifications for why we aren't in a bubble has been evolving over time. I remember when the reason that we weren't in a bubble is because none of the companies involved were publicly traded, and therefore a failure/depression wouldn't affect the average Joe. Now that we're seeing companies with astronomical valuations reaching for IPOs, I don't see this argument trotted out much anymore.
As soon as I finished reading this I hit the back button and my eyes scrambled across the HN frontpage list looking for the article I just read so I could upvote it. I've never been so stupidly excited to upvote something.

This analogy and article are perhaps the best I've heard on the subject because its a metaphor that the ideas people in my life can actually understand.

The metaphor doesn't fret about engineering time, or how simple programming might look but how hard it really is. Ideas people can't relate to those rebuttals anyway.

Instead it brings a very concrete example that almost all humans can understand right away. You want to understand the difference execution makes in an idea? There's a difference between a 9 dollar steak and a 200 dollar steak and its not just the meat, and lots of people understand that. And so I'm going to forward this to a certain ten people in my life.
Using image processing & HTML5 to generate Red Cross donations
if you notice, my current xen setups have a pathetic bandwidth cap right now... which will change shortly, (after some network upgrades on my part. I don't want to say you can use a lot more bandwidth until you can do so without causing problems.) but I certainly have no room to criticise anyone else for having low bandwidth allocations.

but in a very real sense? for customers doing non-pornographic and legal things? bandwidth is in a real sense close to free, and most customers don't need much. Look for 'penny a gigabyte' overage charges from more competitive hosts soon, and, well, 'unlimited' these days often closer to the real thing than it used to be.
It's an echo chamber talking about a bubble.
They do and they share the revenues with companies that claim to own the copyright. They even check videos and proactively decide who the ad revenues should go too. Sometimes their fingerprinting tool does make mistake (thinking bird sounds are copyrighted music by some copyright troll was an example recently).
Spammers Have Finally Joined the Pinterest Party
It's hard not to appreciate Paul Hudak, who's at the forefront of research in functional reactive programming. If you've heard of Yampa or Fran, they're children of his, as is Euterpea (which this book is centered on). He also wrote the Haskell School of Expression, an introductory text which touches on multimedia more generally.

IIRC he was diagnosed with a serious form of leukemia awhile back. It's good to see that he's still finding time to do cool things!
The cost of paying the police to track down the iPhone is probably higher than the cost of a new iPhone. Should the police have gotten involved when there was no evidence of an actual crime?
“If you look around the bargaining table and you don't see the sucker, guess what? It's you.” -Mark Cuban.
Better than nothing I suppose, but the update was released in January and it's still not here. Insane.
Internet protection?

You actually mean a copyrightless internet. That's never actually existed or everyone would still be using KaZaA.

YouTube got greedy, they got slapped. Good for Germany for actually doing this to an American monopoly. Big deal.

YouTube lied for too long about it being able too expensive to filter content. But now suddenly they can do it! And that now coincides almost exactly with when they started to want to justify injecting ads into everyone's videos.

We're still in the scenario where aggregators, Google, YouTube, are making money when the content creators aren't.
It used to be possible to make shortcuts that had access to these settings [1] on standard (non-jailbroken) iPhones. Unfortunately the most recent iOS update removed the preference links that made it possible.

Really frustrating, as its very cumbersome to wade through those menus.

[1] http://brdrck.me/settings/
"Any privacy you have today is purely through obscurity."

That is, indeed, the definition of privacy. Good show.

"The reality today is if you want it hidden, don't do it, or hope no one ever has a reason to care if you did it."

Yes, because there is never a time when I might want to do something that others might not want me to. Say, stand up for my rights, for what's good, for what's unpopular.

Don't be a fucking imbecile.
Watch jesus Henry Christ Online
Watch jesus Henry Christ Online
Watch Henry Christ Online http://sites.google.com/site/watchjesushenrychristonline/watch-online-megavideo Too deliberately eccentric to attain quite the level of wigginess it aspires to
'coming out of our ears' is a colloquialism meaning roughly 'more than we know what to do with'.
It's not certain if there's going to be different DCPUs with different specs. Notch has said[1] that there's definitely going to be versions with different clock rates floating around in space or on abandoned spaceships.

[1] http://vps.thomascomputerindustries.com/logs/freenode/0x10c-... (search for "[11:38:45]")
NameCheap Overtakes Go Daddy In Google
I tend to think of randomness as a quantitative measurement of our ignorance of the world.
I don't think there is an equity bubble and you can't short private shares.
HealthCheck Fedora - Where's the beef?
In addition, Navizon also has the ability to assign real
identifying information to a device, but it's a process
that could hardly occur without your knowledge.

When the user buys something, you have their name and credit card information and maybe an existing member/discount card. Connect to whatever dot is closest to the cash register. Maybe make it more of a Bayes weighted connection instead of a certain connection to handle edge cases like "spouse using other spouse's card", "member-card swap club", etc

Easy, effective, and transparent to you, the person being tracked. You're just buying something right?

You can track people in meatspace using cell phones the way you track them online using browser cookies. This just makes it affordable (especially compared to the cost of tracking via cell tower)
Javvad Malik on Hacking Tools and Ethics
Agreed! Potentially, you could be causing greater data charges/slower loading just because you have an iPad 3... Anyone know if there's a setting to turn these image loads off on an iPad 3?
Come, come, surely this would never be a concern. Don't ruin the poor kid's delusions.
Welcome to the UNICARIBBEAN BUSINESS SCHOOL NIGERIA
HN Podcast #1 - Three HNers discuss the week's news
Improving on Google's match-type "improvements"
Or maybe people just break it up; Amazon's strange response curve would encourage that.
Another startup in this space is Euclid: http://www.popsci.com/technology/article/2011-11/euclid-anal...

Founder started Urchin, which Google acquired and turned into Google Analytics.
No string literals are evaluated as code.
Everything is rewritten and then evaluated and executed at full speed.
I can honestly say that the ability to write your own control structures is one of the quickest ways to make me hate developing in a particular language. Any time you use them, your code becomes significantly less readable, and significantly less portable.

It all just becomes a giant clusterfuck way too quickly. Small set of well-defined semantics, please.
Thanks for posting the notes. I really appreciate it!
Please pardon my off-topic question. What does `woosh' mean on reddit anyway?
i am not quite sure it is right fit. sql and nosql are so different, that "rewriting" module to connect to mongo will just give support, but not actual benefits, IMHO.

I see only one case where it might be beneficial - integrating with another app which already use mongodb. Otherwise it would make more sense to create new nosql based CMS leveraging all nosql features instead.
Yes. But this was the age of font-tags.
The problem with multiline lambdas it that no one knows a good way to indent them. If they weren't butt-ugly python would probably already have them.
Cloudflare Offers Independent Developers Access To Its 400k-Strong Network
Researchers create brain-computer interface that bypasses spinal cord injury
That would be stretching it. For all you know, I'm plenty stupid in other, arguably more socially relevant problem domains.
Do you know Core Wars? It's doesn't count as the same game, but shoots into a similar vein.
There's a tremendous advantage in making new things feel "comfortably familiar". His iPad drawing apps are great examples. I showed Paper to a Mom recently, who immediately purchased the full kit for her kids.

It's interesting to me that the riotously successful iPhone 4 has a somehow more familiar form than the iPhone 3. The Braun influence let Apple step out of a specific time and make an object that doesn't feel out of place on a Mad Men set.

http://30.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m1w15nFNOH1qcuwbao1_500.jp...

It has a comfortable approachable familiarity, unlike the other plasticky gizmos at the mobile booth in the mall. These are known materials, glass and brushed steel, familiar to the touch, and emphasize the touchability of its OS.
Twitter to sponsor Apache Software Foundation
"Some people may consider: [example A] uglier than: [example B]."

Do people really think that? I ask in all seriousness. I am a hardware developer by profession and don't often dive very deep in software, though I love exploring software space.

I find example A to be very clear and readable. I like to look at things in bite sized chunks.

I also like to create things in bite sized chunks. In hardware design, specifically digital chip design, I will know what my overall problem is to solve (aka the requirements), but I don't always have a clear view of what pieces I need to get there.

In the cases where I'm not sure about the smaller pieces, I'll write the larger overall structure and when I get to a spot where I'll need a block of smaller functionality, I'll just make up a function name on the spot and pretend it's already written and does the right thing.

Then I take a second pass, implementing those smaller blocks, and keep going down. I guess that's a typical top-down approach? I don't know, but it is what I do.

But I also do bottom up. Even without knowing all the steps between, I'll often have some idea that there are some basic building blocks I'm going to need, and I'll implement those.

So I iterate with some steps top-down, others bottom-up, until I meet in the middle.

All that is a long winded way for me to say that your example A fits both approaches for me. I can start with the overall structure and implement "main" first, or know what my basis will need and start with "is_prime" first.

Whereas example B seems like an all at once approach that is both more difficult to write and read. At least, that is how it seems to me.

edit: wording
Q1 Software Vulnerabilities
Which is where the old evergreen 'People who are really serious about software should make their own hardware.' comes around. Pebble is a new way to interact with data. Like the iPad, the iPhone, the notebook, the PC, the television, the radio, etc. All the rest is just re-organizing that data. Even if you're not going to create new hardware, this mindset helps thinking about a problem in a physical space. 'When' would I use this and 'where', instead of only 'for what purpose'?
this does not work so well if you're probably about number 500,000 on the list of people worldwide who could best execute it - but if you do it first, you still have a solid chance of publicity and a reasonable shot at making 10x-100x the investment, and maybe more, combined with an almost inability not to at least get bought out by someone more competent for a mild profit (loss if you consider your personal opportunity cost, which an investor doesn't care about). This is a common scenario in my humble opinion.

I'm not saying this should change. When it does, and investors are happy to invest in people who admit they're about #500,000 on the worldwide list of people who can execute on this idea - well, that is so far into a bubble you're almost out of it again.
As far as I know, WiFi triangulation indoors is only good to an accuracy of about 10m, depending on configuration of the building.
I think maybe we are talking about different things, but I'm happy to be proven wrong. If I want to create a View of the latest content across a network of 10 Drupal sites, how would I do that now?