skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Anonymous Takes Down Formula 1 Website With DDOS Attack
I don't believe the app store on any platform is a "cash cow". Apple makes the vast majority of their profit selling the device itself, Microsoft charges OEMs a per unit license fee. I suspect the app store, like iTunes, is break even or even perhaps a net negative as far as financials go.
Not this again. Android devices are 'fragmented' but Android seems to be doing okay as an OS. So are Windows pcs. And Linux PCs. And probably every hardware type up to mainframes.

What is it with this obsession with OS fragmentation? I understand that it makes apps harder to develop/test/support, but we've been dealing with this situation for >20 years on PCs.

Is it just me, or are there a lot of articles criticising Windows Phone right now? I'm happy with my Android phone and have no wish to go to WP, but it (WP) seems like a reasonable OS to me. I wish MSFT/Nokia well with it.

This kind of FUD is disappointing.
This will only happen with JPG images, and if you use the progressive when saving, it works fine.
Should it be "<< 'x'" rather than "<< 2"?
Grading job candidates via Github API
No, it's a gimmick designed expressly to confuse the consumer. Other manufacturers of comparable products, for trademark reasons, can't use the term "retina". So only Apple has "retina".

Intel played a similar trick about 8 years ago with "Centrino". The advertising (for what was essentially just a 802.11b chipset with some added processor/chipset requirements) was so successful that many novice users got fooled into thnking that "Centrino" was wifi, and that all those other manufacturers were just cheap knockoffs of an Intel technology. It did great harm to the market.
The distinction is also in CSS specs[0] since version 2.1: “The reference pixel is the visual angle of one pixel on a device with a pixel density of 96dpi and a distance from the reader of an arm's length. <…> 1px thus corresponds to about 0.26 mm (1/96 inch).”

[0] http://www.w3.org/TR/CSS21/syndata.html#length-units

See also http://inamidst.com/stuff/notes/csspx (been featured on HN some time ago)
Joys of Programming
I have a Windows Phone that I bought back in November, but I just ordered an HTC One S and will be making my way back to Android. I want to love Windows Phone, I really do. I'm a UI nerd and the WP UI is fantastic. But there are too many little glitches and issues- not to mention the lack of third party support for apps).

Not only that, the support structure is broken. For example, my phone has one particularly annoying bug: the keyboard keeps disappearing when I type. Microsoft saw the problem, and released an update to fix it. But AT&T have decided that they're not going to implement it, so I'm stuck with a buggy phone. With a track record like that, I might not get WP8 even if MS wants me to.

The cellphone providers should have zero involvement in phone updates. It should be like the iPhone- direct from the source. At least with Android it's relatively easy to replace the ROM when the phone stops being supported...
This is true in any practical machine learning problem and it doesn't cause as much of a problem as theoreticians would have you believe. Having independent variables, or detecting and accounting for all dependencies, will typically lead to a better result. But when there are dependencies it merely degrades accuracy. It does not destroy the accuracy altogether.

If you were to try to address every possible independence assumption in practice, you'd never get through a research project, let alone get a real product out the door as this company has done.

[Edit: syntax]
Ego may be the #1 killer of startups
I got constant updates for almost 2 years on my Android phones. Had a Nexus S, now I have a Galaxy Nexus. It is just a matter of choice, you can choose to buy a device that you know to have bad support or to buy the supported by Google line.
I’m not a native Chinese speaker. I’ve been studying it at college for about two years, so probably around 300 class hours. I am a programmer, though—that’s probably an understatement. I agree that whitespace is like “silence” in a way. But programming has much more in common with written language than spoken—and as much in common with mathematics as prose—so not everything matches up directly.
Ning Security Hole Discovered By Hackers - Millions of Accounts Compromised
You're right, I think the consensus is that the Japanese system is much harder than the Chinese (i.e. Mandarin). The reasons are:

1. it consists os three different systems side by side with complex and sometimes arbitrary rules of switching between:

2. Japanese and Chinese are totally unrelated languages, so the Chinese characters were bolted on due to cultural reasons (similar to how Turkish was written with the Arabic alphabet previously). Chinese characters evolved naturally and are suited with Chinese, since many words were single syllable. They are ill-suited for writing languages unrelated to Chinese.

3. Finally, Japanese has a complicated honorifics system which is hard for foreigners to grasp.

The super complicated Japanese writing system is to be contrasted with the Korean system, which although it uses many Chinese characters (again die to cultural reasons) has a system that is ideally suited to its phonology. I think the difficulty of learning spoken Japanese and Korean would be on par; the writing system makes learning Japanese really hard.
This is the same as saying gun manufactures have liability in any murder committed with their product which many argue, they have not done enough to prevent the wrong people from getting firearms. But it is the wrong analogy. In sites like youtube, it is more like a property owner that rents a building and is aware of his tenants performing illegal activity on a regular basis. Which depending on the crimes and the amount of knowledge could make the property owner liable or even an accessory.
But all of this leads to the same arguments and worthless discussion about semantics. The correct discussion is what value we place on media as a society. The easiest way to solve this is to stop supporting artists on major labels. Advances in technology have lowered the barrier to entry in recorded music to a widely attainable level. Artists trade the rights to their music to labels for the label's marketing and distribution. Now days, interesting things go viral with little to no marketing effort and there is no argument that the labels are decades behind in their distribution channels. Even if you wan to avoid iTunes or other services, It is relatively easy for a moderately tech savvy individual to push a digital album to S3 or the likes, link to it from a static site and serve millions of downloads. Could even get fancy and deploy a web store template from godaddy for taking payments. Yeah, it might take some learning but so does negotiating a 100 page recording contract... ask Aerosmith.

We can't keep bashing labels for defending/protecting their aging distribution channels. You can't blame a dog for acting like a dog. We can create truly disruptive new distribution channels with better terms for artists and go head to head with the labels.
Didn't the Vista release date get delayed by almost a year? Don't get me wrong, I think Microsoft has come a long way since that debacle, but I wouldn't say that they have always erred on the side of cutting features (I would say the opposite).
that particular string is very memorable ;-)
Domains are, in the first place, needed so we don't have to remember ip addresses.
Yeah I had this comment there
// Assuming Mustache.render = promised(Mustache.render)

But my hope is that more libraries will be accepting promises in a future so one won't have to do the wrapping
of a world around.
Security is one concern, but business risk is a much bigger concern.
My wife doesn't need an excuse and I didn't offer one. I provided an explanation for this discussion lest you think we were recent immigrants or had some other cultural norm different from mainstream US. In fact, we're about as mainstream as you can get in this wonderfully diverse country, and no one I know bats an eye about us having different names. No one except PayPal and that one grumpy old Cuban* in south Florida who wanted some proof of our marital status for a rental car contract.

* and before I'm branded racist for pointing out his nationality without relevance, I'll add that he was the one who made a long case about how things were done properly in his country and how I lacked machismo for allowing this sad state of affairs. There was much wagging of fingers and clucking of tongues about this "American way".
Maybe he works for PayPal now.
You could be conscious and live under the illusion of free will...

That's unlikely, though. See http://www.ams.org/notices/200902/rtx090200226p.pdf
Remember the Chris Prillo's dad tries Windows 8 video from a month ago where he struggled to use it? He had a follow up video where he tried the beta of Mountain Lion and said "well, I know these apps because they're the same on my iphone, so that is kinda like cheating [because he was being tested on how easy it is to use the os]". That is the reason why Apple is doing it.
Unravelling the anatomy of a website visually
Uh... of course it's about semantics. What josteink was complaining about was the use of a proprietary marketing term to refer to something technical.

Your interpretation is a fine one, but it's not the one that everyone shares. Specifically, it's not the sense that Apple uses the term either. Take a look at Apple's marketing page for the retina display and see if you can find anything about "resolution independence" at all.
Google is using Twitter bootstrap now?
Ah I thought that was Joomla :-(

At my previous employer my junior colleges refused to work on client joomla sites as they where scared that the site would crash if they looked at it in the wrong way and they woudl be blamed.
Good question. When I purchased my first smart phone 18 months ago, I was pretty compulsive about turning the wifi off if I was in a place where I couldn't use it. I figured it would save battery. I lamented how the phone (iphone 4) made it a little cumbersome to turn off the wifi (and bluetooth, also) and asked others what they did (maybe 5 people). They said they just left it on. Any lessening of battery life was outweighed by the convenience of getting out the phone and going through the menus every time you leave the house or office.

Now, I also don't turn off my wifi.
Turkish (not just the language spoken in Turkey but spoken on a large swatch of Asia, including Kazak, Ozbek, etc.) was perviously grouped with Korean, Japanese and some other local languages as the Altaic group. They are quite similar. This grouping is no longer widely accepted. I've read that Japanese academics want their language to be treated as an isolate and certainly not grouped with, e.g. Korean, because of nationalistic reasons.
Adidas Mega Soft Cell RF
Could you give a little more insights as to why this is happening specifically in your country?
I love when financial types talk about a "20% chance" of X happening (like earnings miss, default, etc) If you are familiar with the postulates of probability, you realize that they are talking out of their butts, and are trying to sound oh-so-precise-and-mathematical.

Much of the financial world is about the appearance of quantitative thinking and not actual quantitative thinking.
Neat. What would be really cool is if that also lets you share content between multiple Drupal sites more easily.
Bleachers | Design-Build-Deliver | JoGo Equipment
Tldr; argues that skeumorphism has its place, when used appropriately to immediately get across the purpose of the app.

That also accurately describes the importance of visual design overall, not just this one particular flavor of realistic-looking interfaces. It's what helps a product instantly "impute" what it's for, for those that read the Jobs book.

Straightforward UX will only get you so far and if functionality were the only thing people cared about, we'd all be driving Volvos and Ferrari would be out of business.
Site-specific permissions for Firefox's opt-in plugins
Surely the act of enhancing a function like that, where you don't want the original code to be available, is more commonly dealt with in Python using decorators?
In which case, you have a different limited conversation for the initial meetings. There's even less need to tell a prospective developer about the secret sauce.
Hacker Literacies
FBI Seizes Activists' Anonymizing Server In Probe Of Pittsburgh's Bomb Threats
Your guess is as good as anyone's.
I guess music in Germany is going to suck for the foreseeable future.

No matter, as long as I can still discover Scandinavian metal regularly, this court ruling won't affect me as I am not a fan of the Scorpions or David Hasselhoff.

Rammstein is ok though

http://youtu.be/Ef3zxiOaYgI

:)
It's still pay what you want to get DRM-free games. Only the steam keys have a minimum to prevent abuse. I don't see the problem here.
Cook something or get out of the kitchen
Facebook To Provide IPv6 Access For Developers On May 18th
There is a good discussion of it here: http://fail0verflow.com/blog/2012/dcpu-16-review.html

The key criticisms center around it being not a instruction set for compiling C and other higher language code. The biggest reasons for that are:

1. No ability to store based on the stack pointer (this is great for handling local variables not in registers)

2. No ability to deal with negative numbers

3. No way to address single bytes, everything is full words only. This makes many basic manipulations take many instructions

4. Not very many registers, particularly in light of limitation 1

The 6809 and 6502 had far fewer registers, but didn't have any of the other limitations listed above.
Not the whole story. Code blocks can be used to protect encapsulation and create DSLs which are first class citizens of their host language.

So your named functions, functions, lambdas, code blocks, etc, become.. well.. equivalent.

They can also become so lexically awkward as to be unusable. For example, one code a toy "fuzzy logic" system in Smalltalk with a handful of methods. The result looks like a 1st class member of the language, just like the control structures that are already there. (Same goes for the loops)

"Here is the standard if-else"
(condition)
ifTrue: [ ... ]
ifFalse: [ ... ]

"Here is what my DSL can look like"
(condition)
ifTrue: [ ... ]
ifFalse: [ ... ]
ifMaybe: [ ... ]

Doing this with named functions is going to scatter code between different functions. It's semantically equivalent, but harder to read. Write anything involved in such a way, and it becomes untenable. Blocks can make such DSLs an order of magnitude more readable.

Hipsters, don't confuse the young ones with your 30 ways of jumping into a block of code. Cheers!

A good heaping fraction of hipsters don't understand what's good about code blocks.
Thanks! Can you expand on this notion that ideas and execution are not independent? What I think you're suggesting is that the act of executing (or attempting to execute) will add data to the process of what is good or bad about a particular idea, and perhaps provide hooks for new thoughts/improvements to that idea. Is this accurate?
I think that "readability" also depends on what you're used to reading and writing.
To me, my code blocks are quite readable, but that's only true because I've seen a lot of them in these last two weeks.

Code blocks let you write

with myfunc(iter) << 'x, y':
code which uses x and y

instead of

def some_func_name(x, y):
code which uses x and y
myfunc(iter, some_func_name)

If you prefer the second form, then you don't need code blocks.
I think the first form is much better.
It's not just a matter of saving one single line: you don't have to define a function which you'll never use again, so the first code is actually more readable.
Is this the new demoscene?
"Horizontal lines"...? What? No, I'm saying that the toolbox palette is cluttered and takes up more space and is less usable than the PS equivalent.

"This is a limitation of the Operating System," is not actually a limitation of the operating system. All you do is create an invisible root window that handles events for your application, and then all your visible windows are children of it. Or any of several other solutions.

Most of the rest of your points go back to defending duplicated functionality. This is bad design. There is no reason to apologize for that--it's just a failure. It should be redone.

As for the mapping--at least for "alien map", those used to be in the same plugins menu. This is a regression.
It's hard to believe that the police cared, or really that anybody cared so much.

> Davis arrives at Ippudo NY sweating and a bit shaken up

Davis might benefit by not being so attached to his phone.
As of Gingerbread, the 'turn wifi on/off' button is in the top pull-down menu in Android (that was previously reserved mostly for notifications). It's as easy as swiping down and touching the button.

EDIT: After reading this[1], it's probably a Samsung-only thing. My wife's Samsung phone is my only experience w/ Gingerbread. That said, I think that this is an awesome addition based on my experience with Froyo.

[1] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3868005
EU Commissioner Kroes: We Cannot Allow ISP Disconnects
20 Teams Pitch At Seedcamp Estonia
TSA Behavioral Detection Statistics
I run CyanogenMod, and have the pull-down. I agree that it saves battery. I probably wouldn't bother turning WiFi on and off manually though -- and my wife definitely wouldn't (and didn't, before I set up JD on her phone). That's why I like Juice Defender...
Yeah, it was nice. OS-9 was pretty nice too.
AT&T’s Research Lab: Connected Cars & Bio-Acoustical Transmission
The downside is that some countries have restrictions on names; in Australia, a .com.au must match up to a registered business, which is awfully useful to prevent squatting when you add trademarks into the mix. No such dice with the straight .com, .org, etc.

(I like that we have both "restricted" and "unrestricted" zones; I can go register beiberloveskittens.com, for example, but know that beiberloveskittens.com.au won't go polluting the .com.au namespace without at least someone going to the effort of setting up a business for it to be attached to.)
I don't really think so. I would say the movie industry is fairly well established, and don't need the same kind of availability to start selling DVD players in homes... By many accounts the PC gaming industry nearly died many times in it's infancy.

However his main comparison seems to be between "cracking games takes work and is therefore alright" vs. "ripping movies doesnt", which I don't necessarily agree with.
Hacktivists in the frontline battle for the internet
Mozilla Smartphone To Go On Sale In Late 2012
وفاة زوجة احمد شفيق
وفاة زوجة احمد شفيق
I bought Lumia 900 the day it was put up on sale online, and I'm not pissed about the possibility of not getting an upgrade to WP8. This whole uncertainty on Microsoft's side might be pointing to some issues with running WP8 on the "old" hardware. And you know what - it's OK. I'd rather have an "obsolete" solid phone rather that a bag of hurt in my pocket that I'll get just because it's "latest and greatest". Surely, I'll appreciate having an upgrade path, but its presence or absence is not something that would be deciding reason for me.

Now, if Nokia would not react fast to the connectivity issues they had after launch - that's something that would really upset me. But so far they were very good.
We don't like/understand or want to enter the market for selling to end users (low cost, high volume, high earache, low clue). We sell the underlying JavaScript diagramming library at higher cost in lower volume and I find the more developers pay, the more polite they are to deal with.

This is simply the main example application that ships with the library. We just deploy it on Google App Engine, it does all the availability and scalability for us. Because it's pretty much entirely client-side, we pay trivial costs for serving a little static bandwidth and it gives us free marketing for the library.

So, it will stay fully featured for free and I don't want to pollute it with ads and you'll be seeing a large number of new features added through this year. We're also considering open sourcing the diagramly part (not the core mxGraph, you'll be able to use that hosted Google Maps style) so people can throw up their own custom diagramly sites.
My university had a wonderful pair of courses in the first year of its CS degree. The first had us build a Z80-based computer on breadboards, with a couple of hulking ancient HP logic analyzers to debug with. For the second, they gave us an assembled Z80 single board computer and had us do something interesting with it -- games displayed on an oscilloscope, control a small robot, etc. For both courses compilers were strictly forbidden.

It was a great way of bridging the abstraction gap between the physical hardware and the code we typed at the keyboard. (We were also required to take courses in basic digital and analogue design and compiler construction to give an overview the rest of the stack, too.)

Nowadays, I think they've switched to using ARM boards for the second course in the build-a-computer series. From a hardware reliability and cost perspective it makes sense, but it's a little sad that the "I built one like this! Just not quite so neatly..." factor has been lost.

As a software guy, the details of the Pi's PCB layout are about as impenetrable to me as the internals of the SoC itself are. It's Magic Electronic Stuff!, but just a tad more powerful than the Z80 I used to play with.
Google’s Piracy Filter Cuts “Pirate Bay” Searches in Half, But…
All this drama over one WP update when this happens every couple of months to millions of Android users.
Indeed. Writing a book creates a passive income stream. Much like a blog with ads. It's arguable it's not completely passive, you can/should do promo - but equally you may want to do SEO on a blog.

The Hunger Games trilogy will be getting a lot of sales now, since the movie has been released and it did well on Amazon. The first book is 4 years old though, plenty of books pay off after the initial release.
Why $1m Netflix algorithm never went to production
The startup scheme is more like betting on horses.

So startup bubble is a gambling scheme, not a Ponzi scheme.
Uh... If Sony and all the other Record companies couldn't make it, then what makes you think that GEMA can do what they can't? It's not like they have any sort of innovative platform - they seem to be spending most of their time enforcing copyright!

That business model is... limited.
The thing about software and engineering is that it isn't like singing--you aren't stuck in your range. You don't have to grow comfortable and complacent.

The wonderful thing about learning to program and engineer is that you can, on any day, pack up your bags and head to the new frontier and makes friends, and soon you'll be a part of that community too until it's time to move on.

It's liberating.
sweating: running back to try to find his iPhone + trying to make it to a meeting on time

shaken up: losing a 500-600$ iPhone would shake me up too

I don't see anything out of the ordinary there.
I don't believe it. Let's try to fix it again... thanks.
ATT have announced they will release that keyboard bug fix in an update.
http://mobile.theverge.com/2012/4/11/2941969/att-planning-wi...
That does seem to be the prevailing attitude in enterprise software.

I cannot help but look at the history of the big 3 Detroit automakers and their love of using service and support as a revenue source. It bit them pretty badly when Honda came along and made cars that didn't need the repairs.

I look at the example of the automakers every time someone tells me the proper business model for software is give away the program and charge for support, consulting, and training. I would much rather pay for software that I never have to call support about.