skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The biggest pile of biased crap I've read for a long time and confirmation for me, at least, that The Verge is ultimately no better than any of the outlets it was trying to replace.

They take some bad apples from a niche and use that to extrapolate a whole business model and set of practices as being bad. I think it's sloppy, non-objective, ersatz journalism that merely peddles FUD. And even their choice of "bad apples" is questionable: https://www.facebook.com/pages/Frank-Kern/137568852956377

I can only speak for Kern and Jenkins but they've both put out some good products and are essentially info publishers who use certain high exposure and highly effective marketing techniques.

But if using cheap products to build leads who you then sell bigger ticket products to is a scam, well, a large amount of HN readers are involved in that "scam" too (yes, offering a webinar or a PDF to get people to sign up to your e-mail list is a "scam" supposedly!) Except, it's not a scam.. and this article is just a badly written pile of crap, all IMHO, of course.
He could simply want to live elsewhere. If you don't live in the US, you wouldn't want to keep paying them taxes for no reason. I see no problem with renouncing his citizenship for tax reasons if those tax reasons are "I don't want to keep paying a country I no longer have ties to".

Taxes probably played a role in the decision, but it could easily have been a minor one rather than just "split[ting] for a tax haven".
I think 80-character lines are less an issue of the availability of horizontal screen space and more about readability. Much the same way proper sentence and paragraph spacing and structure lend to the readability of long articles or other blocks of text, a properly short line length can lend to the readability of commit logs.
Loving it, great to be able to exclude annoying sites pay for content sites. Keep up the good work
Is bitcoinica still solvent? They've now lost $100K + $215K in BTC in published hacks.
Multiple users for the iPad would be another.
Diablo 3, new anime Video
Yep, looks like crap for me too. Windows, Chrome 20.
>Don't forget iOS is a walled garden since day 1, while Windows used the 3rd party ecosystem to gain relevance on the desktop

So? None, not even one, of the 3rd party programs running on Windows will run on Windows RT, so I fail to see the relevance of that point and Windows RT is on day -180 right now, not even day 1.

>Without a JIT they ensure IE will be the only usable browser available on the platform.

Apple does the exact same thing and you can say the same things about Apple, so I fail to see how Apple is better in this regard.
I've actually been denied treatment for exactly this reason.
It's the enfant terrible style. Signals that you are special, and are willing to back it up, so let's just end the conversation. Nice time saver when you actually are special and can back it up. Terrifically destructive for a "B" surrounded by timid people. A good way to drive a team right over the cliff. I've seen a lot of the latter so I tend to react negatively to it. Plus it's never really "nice".
When I worked at Hardees (mid-90s, but inflation hasn't been so high since then), I happened to see my shift manager's paycheck. She was making like $20k/year.

Perhaps shift managers can make $50-75k, but I'd be surprised if it's common. If you have a reference that shows otherwise, I would be very curious to see it.
Makes me think of Arthur Clarke's laws of prediction.

When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.

The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible.

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
Even more like a "vacuum with some water molecules here and there". Even the densest of molecular gas clouds in space are still harder vacuums than anything that can be achieved in an Earth lab.
Great functionality, I look forward to an invite. After I finished getting up to date with the day's event I enjoyed even more your prismatic.js file. Very solid work.
I just skimmed the article, but "serves to block 2.45 - 5.5 GHz Wi-Fi signals" implies that it not only prevents my neighbours from using my wireless, but also from using theirs. Is this even legal?
> you'll note that I left Linux off that list as I believe it will never be a viable mainstream desktop OS and of course I know it powers Android/ChromeOS

Why not? The main issues for Linux in this field are QA of releases, and support from third-party application vendors for a small subset of programs. Those aren't unsolvable problems. Even today Linux may be a superior solution to both OS X and Windows for certain people, especially people who lack attachment to a specific OS (i.e., newbies rather than power users).
This is a useful reference but not really all that current. It dates back to 2006 - the functional constructs in Python now have evolved and changed over the years.
This reminds me of an aggregation site idea I had a couple of years ago: something similar to HN or Reddit, but with blocks up for all the most popular sites. That way trend voting wouldn't be such a problem. Once a site or an author got popular enough, they "graduated" and would no longer be available.

I still think there is a lot of merit to this idea. Too many things are decided simply on the momentum of popularity instead of actual value to the consumer.
Wall Street Is Too Smart For Your Own Damn Good » Borasky Research Journal
It's also worth pointing out that the "pull request" in question here was a 2-liner addition of a USB device ID that should have gone to a subsystem maintainer anyway.
I find it bizarre that you find a person threatening to kill you with a weapon in your face is on the same level as someone who empties your bank account behind the scenes.

I don't. I consider the person who scams someone out of their kid's college fund far far worse than someone who just steals their wallet. I might accept that a mugger is worse than a pickpocket, but just because a crime is non-violent doesn't automatically make it lesser than any violent crime.

Throwing someone in prison doesn't fix anything. It doesn't make them stop committing crimes

That is far too a simplistic statement. It depends very much on the crime in question, and the life situation of the person in question. For unemployed drug addicts mugging people on the street what you say is true. For successfully employed people people committing white collar crime, there is evidence that prison does in fact make them stop committing crimes. Now I'm not necessarily arguing that prison is the best solution, or even a good solution, but any argument against prison in the case of white collar crime, cannot simply rest on "doesn't fix anything" as the evidence simply does not back that up.

Also 'prison' doesn't really mean anything, there is a huge difference between prison in North Korea, America and Sweden for example, and even within those countries there are large differences. Trying to hold a discussion without making clear what prison system we're talking about is futile.
This is highly dependent on the region. I have lived in both the Bay Area in California and in Arizona. They are like studies in fairly extreme opposites. What you talk about is very much how the situation is in California, even in areas where more houses could be built, its always a huge political battle of attrition.

In Arizona, anything goes, they build shit literally anywhere, its flat (for the most part in Phoenix at least) and land is almost literally endless. Property is dirt cheap, houses are too and they have a huge overabundance of houses, I would say probably at least 1/5 of houses in the metro area there are currently unoccupied.

Areas that are desirable and have geographical characteristics that make usable land scarcer (which includes being near a body of water as that limits the land in one direction) are probably always going to have the characteristics of what you describe, IMO. One thing it does lead to is more valuing of older buildings, etc as these areas don't have the "tear it down and build something new" mentality of a place like Arizona.
A more apt analogy would be to require everybody to wear a life jacket and a bike helmet. You can do whatever you want, as long as it's safe.
Something I thought about earlier that would be nice: automatic geofencing based on my interests. So if I'm on vacation and I mark "burgers" as an interest, I get pinged when I'm close to a popular burger spot. May already exist but didn't take the time to look.
An opinion: anything which is that easy to turn into a process will be commoditised.
Another missing feature is scheduled downloads. I want my podcast apps to be able to auto update without having to manually run them just before I leave the house. And no, having to sync through my computer is not an Apple level UX.

This is one of the things I miss from Android since I switched.

Similarly I'd like apps to be able to register things to be uploaded so that even if the app is not running the OS will finish the upload.
>Also, iOS was closed from the start and Microsoft is closing Windows down now...

Err what? You do realize that every single program that will run on Windows 7 will run on Windows 8 right? What do you mean by MS is closing Windows now?

Also, Windows RT hasn't even started shipping yet, so you can say "Windows RT will be closed from the start". Which will make it equivalent to iOS in that regard.
Can you track where the bitcoins eventually end up and then get the thieves that way? If someone takes that money and buys some pizza then wouldn't it be trackable?

I suppose that it is probably going to just be cashed out for other bitcoins or cash and laundered some other way which would make this kind of pointless.
I don't mean to be overly critical, but is it just me or are the 'godfathers' of computer science starting to sound like cranky old men?

I mean....ok....this pull request being inferior to the way HE (the creator of Git) imagined it (or implemented it) is a bit petty imho.

What's with the complaining? I am sure this is not the first time I have heard him complaining about something on Github or some other 'new technology'. The same goes with Crockford and his semi-colon.

Edit: Although, I must confess that it is annoying when the creators of a service that you use totally blow off your suggestions (esp. when that service is built on your own creation).....so I am torn on this one. Still has the 'annoying old man complaining feel' to it though.
Twitter Teams Up with GitHub for Open Source Project
James Altucher has written a few postings about this issue:

http://www.jamesaltucher.com/2010/02/dont-send-your-kids-to-...

http://www.jamesaltucher.com/2011/01/10-more-reasons-why-par...

http://www.jamesaltucher.com/2011/01/8-alternatives-to-colle...

He seems reasonably coherent, although it goes against the conventional wisdom.
It is free and unlimited to the extent that your bandwidth is free and unlimited. Cubby is basically just a program that transfers files from one computer to another; it doesn't need to use the Cubby servers for that. 5gb of online cloud storage is also provided, but additional storage beyond that is not free or unlimited.
Unrelated note: why is there not a news feed for each project? I have a news feed with tons of watched repositories but they all blend together in an unusable mess. I would like to see the history of a project that is not just commits. something like /<user>/<project>/timeline that shows all activity (commits, comments, pull requests, issues, etc....)
Why do you need to transform to CPS? The answer to your question will depend very much on your answer to that question. In the extreme if you are not doing anything with the CPS form, then probably the best optimization of the CPSed form will completely undo the CPS, transforming it back into direct style. Of course if you are actually making use of the CPS form, that's not possible anymore.

Depending on why you want CPS, you can apply the following strategy:

Keep all code in direct style. For each function, designate a special return token CaptureCont that indicates that the continuation should be captured. The source of this token will be callcc. After each function call you check if it returned a token, and if so, extend it with the continuation for the rest of the computation. Then on the main() function of your program, pass the continuation to the appropriate place. This strategy avoids most overhead in the common case: one if instanceof check plus a branch per function call.

For example, take this function:

def foo(x,a):
y = g(x)
return y+a

Transform to:

class CaptureCont:
member target # the function that we will pass the continuation to once we finish constructing it
member partialCont # the part of the continuation captured so far
def extend(f):
newCC = new CaptureCont()
newCC.target = target
newCC.partialCont = lambda v: f(partialCont(v))
def invoke():
target(partialCont)

def foo(x):
y = g(x)
if y is CaptureCont:
# now y is the part of the continuation captured so far
# our job is to extend it with our stack frame
# and then return it so that the callee can build it up further
return y.extend(lambda y2: y2+a)
else:
return y+a

Instead of just invoking main(), do this:

loop:
v = main()
if v is CaptureCont: v.invoke()
else: exit(v) # well I guess this is not necessary in JS

Eventually the CaptureCont will bubble up to main, and at that point main will invoke it so that the continuation is passed to the right target.

Callcc:

def callcc(f):
cc = new CaptureCont()
cc.target = f
cc.partialCont = lambda x: x
return cc

There are various optimizations that can be applied (like eliding the capture code for functions that you statically know don't call callcc and thus will never return CaptureCont), and this approach also (trivially) works for the more general delimited continuations. As described capturing the continuation is O(n) in the size of the stack. You can make it amortized O(1) with some more trickery by lazily rebuilding the stack, but the current approach is already blazingly fast in the case of no continuation capture. I'm really tired now, so there are probably lots of errors in the above description, so tread with caution. I don't know if this approach is new or not, but it probably isn't given that it's a fairly obvious approach to capture the stack. Does anybody know what it's called? Then the OP can find a better description.
Well, no, it's rock most of the way down.

There's a common misconception, incidentally, that the mantle is liquid.
Depends where. Projects like the linux kernel (obviously), Xorg and Firefox had all moved to git before github ever showed up. It was well on it's way to popularity all on its own merits
Obviously security is only one part of what he gets.
Pretty impressive, it also does movies. And if a game and a movie have the same title you can just add "game" to disambiguate. https://encrypted.google.com/search?q=hitchhiker%27s+guide+t...
I have some good things and some bad things to say.

In the good column, I signed up (looks like you fixed the signup) and am looking forward to taking the course. Alas, I can't design my way out of a wet paper bag, so it may prove to be an exercise in futility...:)

In bad news, the site looks horrid in Chromium 18 for Ubuntu 11.04. Feel free to send me email if you'd like a screen shot.
Pacific Garbage Patch the Size of Texas
I can confirm this.

Americans living in Denmark don't seem to worry too much about US tax. This is due to the insane taxation level we have here, which blows all other levels out of the water and makes calculating US tax very easy.
Scamworld: a detailed look at Internet marketing scams
> But you can't get everyone to agree to do that.

Bitcoin is essentially a network of mutual trust, right? It is possible to get enough machines on the network to vote to void the transaction. It is even possible to set up some kind of body or bodies that investigate thefts, and make recommendations about which transactions the community should void. Of course, now we're inching towards a central bank, and so whether such a step would be "in the spirit of Bitcoin" I don't know, but it's probably a requirement if Bitcoin is to be taken seriously as a safe medium of exchange for business purposes. Of course, perhaps it doesn't want to be used as such, which is fine.

> sort of like having 100 $1 bills of which two were marked by police — what is the probability that you're a criminal?

The convention in the real world is that you are deprived of the stolen property you've received even if you did not know that they were stolen. This may seem undesirable, but it does incentivize ordinary people to perform some basic checks that they are not purchasing stolen goods. Allowing innocent people to keep stolen goods may seem like a fair course of action, but it also can increase the market for stolen goods, and incentivize for thievery, ultimately leading to an escalating situation.
Perhaps Apple does it for quality purposes, while Microsoft does it to avoid competition.
I really hope I never make enemies with anyone around here.
The fonts are horrible in Firefox 12 on Windows XP, too.
Occasionally you'll see a story about a dramatic months long heist take place in Eve Online [1] - the in game currency of Eve is loosely convertible to real world USD currency and the amounts 'stolen' (this is a tricky point because it happens in game) are real world significant: tens of thousands of dollars.

Bitcoin strikes me as similar, it has a weird quasi real feel to it, there are markets that trade between BC and USD and spot prices and everything, but I have a hard time thinking how/if a prosecution could occur with it.

[1] - http://gamergaia.com/pc/1724-eve-online-space-heist-one-tril...
Verizon stands up for its users in copyright lawsuit
I ordered an emacs reference mug from cafepress.com a couple months ago. I'm fairly certain they would still have them.
That sounds like an interesting project for an indie app developer. foursquare, highlight, and others have been working on geofencing stuff, so it's not impossible.
The reason that Apple does not allow other engines in iOS is simple: it keeps all performance and security issues restricted to a single code base. That's good for users too. Considering that browsers implement the gross of their functionality (rendering + javascript) according to standards, there is no reason to have two different platforms that do exactly the same thing. As long as the standard is not owned by any private individuals, this is beneficial, and the same would apply to Windows tablets.

That said, leaving everything on the hands of Internet Explorer scares me, so maybe this fight should be supported :)
I think it serves as a barrier for Wi-Fi signals not something that disrupts Wi-Fi signals. So if you have it lined around your house it would keep your router from broadcasting outside while preventing any other outside Wi-Fi signals from entering your house.
Hacked, or the guy who created the site just stole customers money? There's really no way to tell.
Wow.

You got me, you're totally right. I point out issues, complain if you will, on an open source project without contributing to it in any way has now made me a lame moocher who is beyond contempt in your eyes because I somehow have a problem with the entirety of the open source community.

So, I guess when I see a problem with an open source project done on a platform I don't have access to or coded in a language that I do not know, I'll just keep my mouth shut on the subject. Too bad that's the majority of people who use open source software. I guess they all should be quiet as well.

If I see a problem that's easily fixable I'll start installing software, learn Git, get an account on Github, learn the procedure of pull requests, learn the terminology, and then hope I get everything right so that someone like you won't call me lame. Scratch that, I'll go with your other suggestion and email the devs directly.

I believe your tirade goes back to my original comment about people developing in their bubbles. You are assuming quite a lot, your examples are not proper comparisons; to me anyway. I'm also still confused on whether I can complain or not, since on one hand I can but then you clearly state if I haven't done A, B, or C then I should be quiet.

But, you got me, I'll go into my corner and be quiet since that's the only thing I'm allowed to do in your worldview. My big corner with lots of people who are apparently not welcome in your club, sorry I don't know the secret handshake.

I apologize for insulting your community so much and causing so much aggravation/anger in your life.
Do you think low stress heart surgeon jobs exist?

Work conditions in tech have more to do with what those jobs are than economic conditions. Companies are desperate to fill positions and you see many going out of their way to create as low stress office environments as possible but after a certain point you just have to come to grips with that's just what the job is.

That said, low stress programming jobs do exist, but in my experience they tend to exist in companies you would not normally look at for programming jobs. Damn near every sizeable company has programmers but we tend to only look for jobs "in industry" at the Googles, Microsofts, Facebooks, etc. Think east coast, foundations of the company not in tech, non-glamorous. Basically the equivalent of your heart surgeon working in some sort of research instead of in a hospital on live patients.
Microsoft and NetApp bring FreeBSD to Hyper-V
So he does NOT support the Warren Buffet Rule?
I agree whole-heartedly with the dynamic icons.

- Weather apps that display weather directly on the icon (I don't understand why Apple never did it for themselves).

It would be trivial for iOS6 to implement a protocol where the OS could "poll" the app for a new icon only when the icon is visible, and only occasionally for performance.
Crockford is heavily opinionated, and it's reflected in his work. JSLint is like a virtual Crockford, that yells at you for misplacing whitespace, semicolons, using functions with the word 'Sync' in them, bitwise operators, switch statements, and more.

If Linus wrote a lint for C, I really wonder what it would be like.
in the twothousandzero years i read "free, unlimited" and thought "sounds like an awesome deal"

now i read "free, unlimited" and i think "not worth trying, will be gone soon"

strange how perceptions change over time
This is a cool idea. Initially I wondered how you would be able to 'teach' such an amorphous skill set but your use of experts/peers seems smart.

I'd like to be more involved than a user= if you all were open to it but I don't consider myself an 'expert'.
Note that if you crave this kind of world of limited resources and ingenuity for packing things very small, it still exists in a professional setting in hard real-time embedded systems.

I heard a story at my company about fixing a bug a couple years ago. Memory was full, so in order to do that, the engineers rewrote the UI messages to allow the extra instructions to fit into memory.