skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
No access code means a lower grade, all in the best interests of science.

I ... no. I can't even...

I'm sorry, but I find it very hard to summon an inkling of sympathy for the publishers' plea against piracy when I see measures like that.

When I failed calculus because I didn't prove a theorem the way it was in the lecture notes and then was insane enough to argue the point, I thought it was pretty stupid. Here, I don't think the word even begins to describe the situation.

Commodity. That's a good way of describing the role of the students. It shows a rather alarming failure of the system that instead of incentivizing the pursuit of knowledge, students are set up for failure and milked for as much money as possible during their education.

I know a patent doesn't mean much in the grand scheme of things, and I do hope that most people in a position to make decisions in education call it out for being stupid, though I feel that's a tad optimistic. I'm just sad that a professor is the one proposing this. There go my non-existent beliefs in academia.
Worth noting, though, that those x86 builds used, and that classic theme was built in, Display Postscript.

The newer Quartz display subsystem only ever shipped for the PowerPC in the dev previews.
Now that "follow us on Facebook" has replaced the website, what's next?
Guys checkout how much Apple is paying to it employees http://www.visasquare.com/visa-greencard/salary/apple-inc-20...
"Wouldn't it be awesome if Microsoft and Apple forbade competing walled gardens (such as Chrome) from running apps on their operating systems?"

That's funny because both of them have already done that. Not on Windows, and MacOS, but on WinPhone7/Win8Metro and iOS.
Bingo. This kind of thing should be addressed with a "ground rules" kind of discussions that we need to hear from everyone and people should self-monitor to not take all airtime. And if that doesn't work, it's fine to say "Thanks Dave, but I'd like to hear from someone else this time" or something similar.
No offense taken. Your point is fair. I do think this should be a calculated cost of business for Amazon, and I would buy less on Amazon if I didn't have the convenience that's offered to me by occasionally ordering similar items and expecting to most likely return one without a hassle.

That being said, I honestly didn't think all that much of the broader economic and environmental impact of my consumer behavior in this case and appreciate the comments reminding me of it. Thanks.
I don't see how this is any sort of revolutionary invention... certainly not an idea that is patent-able.

I've already participated in classes where an online code was required to access the publisher's homework... same idea really.
How about if you use "a brick and mortar store to physically compare products first", you buy the item in the brick and mortar store. They already shipped the item, so you are not hurting the environment further by wasting energy getting another one to you. If everyone shopped at "brick and mortar stores" this way, they would close. People in your community would be fired, and you wouldn't be able to compare products personally.

Obviously not a big deal as a one-off, but if this is a consistent shopping habit I would really hope you reconsider it.
Start with this.
http://guides.rubyonrails.org/getting_started.html

Once you have some idea then you can go ahead with this.
http://railstutorial.org

In addition, watch the webcasts

http://railscasts.org
>> Other than renaming(which can be done for ruby, though it requires manual effort), there is no refactoring which Java does better than Ruby.

Perhaps you could name this mysterious IDE which you claim provides reliable refactoring support for Ruby which is equivalent to the refactorings provided by Java IDEs? RubyMine is the best one I've seen http://www.jetbrains.com/ruby/features/index.html, but it doesn't match what can be done in Java.
> If you think piracy is unethical you are either a dolt or benefiting from current copyright and patent laws.

People used to think freeing someone's slave was unethical property theft as well. As soon as the economic interest shift, so does the mainstream ethics. Same will happen to piracy, as soon as authors cannot make money off copyright and patents. Then it's the monopoly of ideas that will become unethical, and not the other way around.
MIT card counter's startup seeks to measure developer productivity
There's a slightly annoying regression (to Emacs 22, behavior, I believe) in the Mac version. Some Unicode characters (like —, “, and ”) cause the line to expand in height slightly. Does anyone know of a fix?
It should be in nix shortly: http://nixos.org/nix

Nix and apt are very complementary to each other; apt has all the stable never-breaks stuff, and nix has all the latest new code. And when you pull in something too new that breaks, you can roll it back trivially.
Right, corruption is a global pandemic. Who can say how much the bids are rigged in awarding US military-industrial contracts (funded both by US taxpayers and global dollar-demand), to say nothing of state and local gov contracts (eg NYC paying $632m for a 911 phone system upgrade[1]). And wall street fleecing everyone else, as usual.[2]

The article makes some very insightful points, but I'm not convinced that Chinese SOEs are more evil than any other centers of power (just one manifestion of growing inequality). One casualty overlooked here are Chinese SMEs: "The real problem is the limited presence of other financial intermediaries and the rudimentary nature of bond and equity markets, both of which poorly serve the needs of small private companies and local governments."[3],[4]

The author is right about deflation as the sandtrap up ahead, but that's just the consequence of a decelerating economy and we're still to see how soft/hard China lands. In doing a root cause analysis, one can chase down endless trails corruption. But if you want to find a problem which can be solved with a technological solution (as opposed to a social solution), it comes down to a distinct lack of progress in energy tech. Productivity gains in IT just haven't been enough to offset the rising cost of energy (as argued by Peter Thiel)[5]. Sure, the rising cost of energy is tempered a bit during deflationary cycles. But its a lose-lose, because so is economic growth (harmed both by too much inflation and deflation).

1. http://yro.slashdot.org/story/12/05/31/1953210/comptroller-a...

2. http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/10/business/banks-could-retur...

3. http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-06-05/tall-tales-about-ch...

4. http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-11-06/china-credit-squeez...

5. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XRrLyckg8Nc
I Don't have a problem with it if I can get an ebook for a reasonable place. That being said, throughout college many of my books were ~$150. No way I'm paying that.
It's amazing that actually nobody noticed, including the author, the real problem which are vague descriptions of delivery dates, especially for international shippments. This made him to order two different items at the same time as he had no option to either evaluate shippment time in a more precise way or make a conditional FIFO-driven order. And this is the actual flaw in Amazon UX.
The solution is to take the same method to detect malware in the store and add it to the browser, unless you guys won't support open source solutions because you think it will lead to more security.
Such a shame that this appstore mentality is becoming the norm.
Hilarious - your education system is getting similar to those in Nigeria congrats. Nigerians professors/lecturers have implemented this for years - you don't need a patent for this kinda crap and you can see for yourself where its led them.
There was also the odd Rhapsody project, which delivered a BSD-based Mac OS on x86 since 1997: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhapsody_(operating_system) - wonder how that fits in with the quora post.
You'll find a lot of biz dudes looking for someone like you. Be wary of anyone who says they just need a developer to build their app. It has to be a true partnership. They have to understand and respect the amount of work involved in building a product. There are some really really good product/biz people out there though.

Why do you feel like you need to partner with purely biz people? Many companies you see here have engineers who can run a business with no problem.
Apple rumor Markov chains. Oh, that would be hilarious.
No. They've used celebrities in ads before and they even released a 'U2' iPod. They were just trying something different.
What? The only thing changing here is a default configuration value that actually gives users and administrators more control. This isn't like iOS or Windows RT, where you have to download an exploit and void your warranty to install software from a third-party source.
Show HN: My first webapp - cheatsheets that help you prepare for job interviews
http://www.littlechits.com<br>
This is my first web app; I built this on my own, over the past 4 months, using the Ruby on Rails Tutorial, a few other e-books, and a lot of help from the Stack Overflow community!<br>Feedback would be greatly appreciated, in particular: how can I make this more social?<br>Thanks,<br>Faisal
IIRC when introducing switch to Intel processors Jobs told that each version OS X was running on Intel since day one.
Website link: http://www.littlechits.com
The "redraw" seems faster to me - that might be because of Windows.

I hate not having tabs too. About running Pageant, isn't that the Unix way? "Do one thing and do it well"? :)
Very nice, despite the ridiculousness of the idea, it could potentially work. The landing page needs some work though for sure. Is there an email I could reach one of you guys at?
it remembers be about the "I'm rich" iPhone app that was selling for 999 usd. I'm very curious to hear if any user has bought your app.
Author of the Starter Kit here.

For what it's worth, I've come around to this viewpoint. I rewrote ESK for version 2, and the emphasis was on packaging as much functionality in independent packages as possible. So as of v2, the Starter Kit is mostly just about providing a default set of packages and turning on a few flags that it's just crazy to leave off (like ido). But this way more of the functionality is available to everyone, not just users of ESK.

Anyway, it certainly needs more documentation, but these days I recommend the Starter Kit more as a source of inspiration than something people should just use outright, at least if they're not in a hurry.
This is the advice I give to my family members. The solution is to create a one-time-pad in excel(!) that contains all of your passwords. Store it on an encrypted thumb drive and carry it with your keys. There is the possiblity that your OTP may contain a character set that is not congruent with a web-service's password system, but these circumstances are rare.
St. Jobs
Anonymous Austria leaks 2.8 GB Scientology Emails
Bangladeshi Newspapers I Bangla Newspaper I
Not entirely true, it depends on the platform.

While compiling to JavaScript obviously results in JavaScript code (which is what the browser can understand), but compiling to Flash does not compile to ActionScript 3 and then the flash assembly (the .swf file). It goes straight from HaXe to the flash assembly.

Likewise, the Java target (which is still in development) won't merely translate HaXe into Java and then compile that Java. I've seen solutions like that and it's not fast or elegant.
You cannot own an algorithm or idea. Imagine if Newton owned the laws of motion, imagine if he owned calculus.

And you can't copyright them either.

How can someone own an arrangement of words or sounds.

Because that person made it? Are you saying people have no right to own the things they make?
One suggestion: Can you add the player details. May be on hover or on click.
Also, I think site needs a bit more help in terms of what a user can do once he reaches the play page. May be a small tutorial or a help page might work.
Out of curiosity, how do you keep track of the events? Do you have a live feed that you parse for certain phrases?
I'm struggling to figure out how this can't be a hoax that the professor is pulling on the system. But after closer reading, he does seem serious. And he'll likely give his cause more harm than good.
An interesting (albeit smaller scale) approach would be Panic software's Audion application - http://panic.com/extras/audionstory/

At one point they were the highest selling piece of software (mac or pc) in Japan, which they achieved via a Japanese distributor - not sure if that counts as an office in the country or not.
In Barcelona I had a ride where the taxi driver spent the whole time moaning about how short it was... (he claimed to have misunderstood the destination when he received the request, implying that he would have refused).

No rip-off, though, just very poor customer service that time. Again, not all were like that, but it's harder to come across a driver like that in Germany or Britain. Perhaps it's just some superficial pattern of behaviour.
Thanks. Still picking this up myself.
There should be a name for the phenomenon on the internet whereby any article about any phenomenon in any non-US country of the world will inevitably result in someone piping in with "oh yeah? it's even worse in the US"
Weekend project: Password hasher bookmarklet for Firefox
To be clearer, my point was that HN not using HTTPS doesn't seem like a reason not to require sites to use HTTPS, let alone introducing any security regulations at all.
I don't actually shop that way, I take my chances based on Amazon ratings (not a hard thing as I buy mostly electronics and media). My only direct concern is that he keeps Amazon prices low for my own benefit.

I don't really see the point in artificially trying to keep business models afloat that can't compete. If anything, it's harmful to the free market. It might warm your heart a bit, but the overall benefit to society is to cast your vote (your $) for the most efficient business method.
The patent itself doesn't stop students from sharing textbooks, it stops publishers from implementing systems to stop students from sharing textbooks without paying this guy a fee...
I assume there are restrictions which prevent Chinese people from easily investing their money in other countries? On the other hand, I assume these restrictions are somewhat permeable which is why you certainly do have rich Chinese buying up property overseas?
Hi,

This is inspired by the Password Hasher addon for Firefox. It will hash a password and generate unique strong password from the same input, varying by websites where it is called.

Reason I made it is 1) it has a custom salt, so a hacker cannot potentially bruteforce with this as a layer if you have set your 'unique master password', and 2) this is bookmarklet - no strong dependency on Firefox.

Sharing since some of you may find it useful too.
In addition to issues such as books being "print on demand", out of print, 5 new editions every year, etc. Didn't need many textbooks for CS, but the ones I did need were a pain to get.
So the saying that OpenBSD developers are paranoid is not true after all?
> Because that person made it? Are you saying people have no right to own the things they make?

"I can only see so far because I'm standing in the shoulder of giants."

Imagine if you had to pay for every one of the thousands little concept that your own idea (inevitably) derives from. That system would be unsustainable. We can only make progress because we can expand and improve on what were created before.
And also that it wasn't possible to discern the practical differences between two products where one cost twice what the other did.
So you'd also rather read

"An unordered tuple Z going from a1 to an is a defined as for every x in Z then x is a1 or x is a2 ... or x is an"

than

"An unordered tuple Z (a1,...,an) is defined as [x : x = a1 v x = a2 v ... x = an]"?

I take that as not being (or not wanting to be) familiar with the language you are reading. If you'll read Ruby, at least browse a manual to know what {} and # mean.
+1 for TLDR.
Yes, it may be not evil like WindowsRT and iOS and it may improve the security of users. But it's another brick in the wall being erected between 3rd party developers and users.

2000 Microsoft: "Developers, developers, developers"

2012 Apple, Microsoft, Google: "Won't someone please think of the poor users' security! (and give us a NN% cut off the top while you're at it"
Unfortunately, this is nothing new for students.

I have been forced to buy institution specific versions of my books (which simply means they regenerated the practice problems), preventing me from seeking cheaper bookstores like Amazon or the mom & pop down the street. I have been forced to purchase physical CD's with serial codes to access lecture notes (of course, only provided at the school bookstore). But worst of all, I'm very often forced to purchase WebAssign keys. Web Assign is a service that allows professors (in my case, in the math/physics departments) to create online quizzes and homeworks that are graded automatically. Usually the keys cost $45-$60 and they only work for one semester per class, and while they come free with new books (which are exorbitantly expensive, might I add) any used book purchase must be supplemented with these keys. Of course, the professor is glad to tell us we have the option not to buy the key, however we will then get a 0 on the respective assignments.

In my very humble opinion, the greed has gotten so out of control that it's hard for the publishers to see what is even wrong with forcing students to PAY TO DO HOMEWORK.

Something desperately needs to be done. My hope is that e-books slowly democratize the process, but that could be long after I have graduated.
If they had talked about storing unsalted passwords in the first place, this whole thing may not have happened because somebody would have told them, "Hey, that's dumb" before the leak.
> "If you used the same level of scrutiny on religion as you do with evolution or gravity ... you'd reject religion."

I've used the same level of scrutiny on religion as on science -- an extremely evidential approach, I might add -- and yet I have become more religious rather than less. Your idea of the required process(es) is in error. Indeed, you appear to be guilty of exactly the error you accuse the religious of -- you are not applying an appropriate level of scrutiny to your assertion that "the processes to be religious aren't compatible with the processes [of] science". Given your assumption that the Bible would normally be interpreted literally, I submit that you've probably based your conclusion on interactions with a vocal minority which has only been around for about a century [0]. You would do well to expand your horizons to a broader cross-section of the religious community before making such sweeping generalizations about "the processes to be religious".

For reference, my masters degree is in applied mathematics; my masters presentation was a mathematical biology model of adaptive speciation. If you search through my HN comment history (consider using hnsearch.com and looking for terms like "evidence" and "falsifiable" with my username) you'll find I have a pretty firm grasp not just on the conclusions of science, but on the process as well. You'll also find a fair bit of discussion of such topics as the relation of faith to reason, and the role of evidence in religious belief.

[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christian_fundamentalism
> I really wouldn't mind living in a world where you can have a monopoly over ideas, if I am one of the few who can afford paying for those ideas.

I would. It has much further and deeper implications in the bigger picture than just that one textbook that you could afford.
Revenue is mid 5 figure so far from desktop and flash versions, the ios & android version were just released but I'm hoping to break into 6 figures altogether across the game's total lifespan.
His point is science is all or nothing. If you half ass it your simply wasting time.

Perhaps you can't do controlled experiments with people that's fine, give up and go work on something else don't compromise and still call it science. Because your results are meaningless.

PS: How much useful information has been gained from human nutritional experimentation over the last 50 years?
You do know that after installing the downloaded deb it adds the google apt repository to your sources and adds the key so that all future updates are done the apt way? (You can also edit files to prevent this behaviour.)
I'm trying to imagine a demographic that exclaims: "I love that John Malkovich guy. Wait, what's this... sear-ee?"
MIT Psychologist, Sherry Turkle: Facebook For Pre-Teens ‘Agonizing’ (incl. vid.)
Mobile advertising: the $20B Opportunity Mirage
Brilliant. Possibly even more stupid than making people use E-mail addresses as user IDs. Do they do that too? Apple, Facebook, and LinkedIn make this blunder: http://goldmanosi.blogspot.com/2012/06/forcing-people-to-use...
I'm pretty sure that exact formulation is irony on part of torrentfreak author, not actual formulation of the "professor" (sorry, but if you pledged to promote science and knowledge and then do this, you get quotes around title).

Still, I agree completely.
The Future Fruits Of Apple + Facebook
Since time immemorial students have shared information on good and bad professors. This will be yet another thing that is passed along. Don't take his section, he forces you to buy a code. Take her section and you can use my book.
Is this a "should" as in "is it in my own selfish interests" question, or a "should" as in "is it right to harass my friends in order to marginally promote my own interests as part of yet another goddamn evil viral marketing scheme for yet another goddamn internet startup" question?
The Godfounder - Clever Stuff No One Can Refuse
No, nobody has purchased that app. A few people have purchased a $5 recipe app that I made, but nobody has purchased the $999 joke app. If they did, I'd feel really bad and offer them a refund.
I'm surprised the university would allow him to do that, since he's effectively charging an additional tuition fee.
Back to the future at the TTM symposium
I knew the law, but didn't know Betteridge is "a technology journalist who primarily covers topics relating to Apple/Mac." How apropos.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridges_Law_of_Headlines
Reflections on the first month of my startup
> So, the best solution is to disallow other sources by default

No, it's not. It's the best solution you can come up with at the time, and one that likely presents the least amount of effort. Doesn't mean it's not a piss-poor solution. It also doesn't mean it's not going to cause additional problems.

Now if we want to distribute a plugin, we effectively have to bow to the whim of Google. And when I read stories like this: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4092080, I'm not comforted.

> I'm also surprised Firefox hasn't proposed something similar

Maybe because this isn't the only solution?

Let me put this in simple terms: this is the easy way out. The simple way out. This is the low hanging fruit. It's a solution that is, in effect, the worst possible solution. It's the lazy solution. If you can't admit to that much, you're blind.

Time to go donate again to Mozilla.
Working for free, and why you shouldn't do it
I have always thought that Universities should offer self-contained courses, with original homework and practice, specially in technical courses. Books should be considered as reference/reinforcement materials, never a requirement for anything.

After the irruption of Coursera and Udacity, I heard a couple of professors in my university talking about the impact those courses can have in the future. They saw themselves in the future as TAs of those courses, where the students only "use" them to clarify concepts.
How ‘systems thinking’ is making the cloud transparent