skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The app and its infrastructure was created by a single, very inexperienced programmer. The app's original author, Zhou Tong, is only 17[1].

Not that age is an indicator of experience in general, but it's certainly the case here. I'm honestly shocked at the amount of trust placed in Bitcoinica.

An interesting display of the oft mentioned Stockholm Syndrome happening elsewhere on the forum here https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=93100.0

[1] http://coinabul.tumblr.com/post/24022841613/10qs-zhou-tong-b...

Edit: added reference.
This isn't very relevant to the topic, but I wanted to thank you for the colourful and hilarious metaphor. Cheers.
How is this feature any different from the old Everything2 engine which dates from the 1999-2000 timeframe? The PerlMonks system, built with the same engine around the same time, also had a "one click vote" on answers not unlike Stack Overflow only a whole lot uglier.

There's no way this is patentable.
Oh, dear, the sign-up button says "SIgn Up" instead of "Sign Up". I'm worried that that is the first thing I noticed.
Whether it is fringing depends on the decision process of the patent troll owning the patent:

1. Does the infringing party have a stash of money to pay for a quick settlement but not too much money that they could send a battalion of lawyers to countersue?

2. Is the infringing party a strategic competitor?

3. Is the infirning party holding a stash of patents of their own that they can sue you with?

4. Is suing the infrigner worth the risk of losing the suit and therby possibly invalidating the patent and therby making it worthless? You got to know when to save your ammunition for the real fight.

By these criteria HN and Reddit probably do infringe but is not a concern of whoever is holding the patent.

Fact of the matter is you can sue anyone for anything if you can afford the lawyers to do so.
TheBrowser (http://thebrowser.com/) collects the best long form articles from around the web every day.

It's definitely worth checking out, it's one of my favorite web sites.
Ah, but I think it's important to distinguish between ideas that are new in research and ideas that are new in industry. God knows that pattern matching isn't a particularly new concept, but I sure hadn't heard of it before Rust; see also the popularization of list comprehensions due to Python via Haskell. So I think what the grandparent is implying is that even if Rust doesn't end up as a world-shattering language, it still has the opportunity to expose programmers to "new" ideas, even if, in academia's opinion, those ideas aren't so new at all. :)
32 Unusual Ways to Love Ourselves
I'm not sure why anyone would believe him enough to send him money. Perhaps they don't understand how absurd that claimed interest rate is? :x
Look at the PCs in your bank or an airline, most of them are jut screen scraping a mainframe app that thinks it's talking to a bunch of IBM3270 terminals
There are tons of things which can be calculated easily and simply, which are simply wrong or utterly useless. Palmistry, astrological signs, numerology, stock charting, biorhythms, dowsing, etc., etc.

Simply because a measurement is fast, simple, and gives some arbitrary numerical precision doesn't make it useful. It's also got to, you know, like, correspond to the stuff it's supposed to be measuring. Which it doesn't.

Official discussion of BMI actually admits this.

The panel did not search for evidence to prove that
measures of body composition or metabolic rate are
useful tools.

http://www.nhlbi.nih.gov/guidelines/obesity/ob_gdlns.htm
Thanks! Glad to hear it - email me if you'd like the side project to go in the showcase.
Microsoft debuts trailer for live-action Halo 4 series
RIght, right. Unfortunately I can't convince my brain to accept that Sublime+Vintage works like Vim. I need to be in Vim to trigger the Vim mode of thinking in my brain...

I'm curious though: I thought it was Emacs that had a special keyboard in the old days. What do you think could be easier in Vim with a different keyboard? (I can only think of ESC position).
Avon News Flash...New Senior Regional Managers in the UK
This looks very interesting, but I didn't see a download or source link the page. How do you obtain a copy?
I went into a Whole Foods near my house that was built a few years ago. In the checkout line I looked over and could see their 'terminals' in the customer service section. There were 2 and they we're both running some text window app on XP.

Naturally I thought, that OS came out 10 years ago, has been end-of-lifed, this is a fairly new store, and the eol software is connecting to some text-based something somewhere - who knows how old that part is?

I have a friend that worked for an auto supply-something company that would remote into their customers computers. He would tell me (this was about 3 years ago) that he couldn't believe some of the ancient stuff he would come across on those systems. Tons were Windows95, lots of them had malware running on them, and the business owners somehow kept their business going.

I'm not talking so much about old programs that just run, but more about how businesses can keep old stuff hanging around. Even with malware and such on it. It's obviously just another tool to keep the cash flow coming in. Can't blame them, but such a huge contrast to my day to day which is usually working on/with the latest of everything.
My cofounder Pete, was being mistaken for a Drug Dealer and sex offender in college. It was where the inspiration came from
Hey, that post happened after the first hack. Also, I feel this hack is not Zhou's fault.

Edit: Oh, misread that. You were just citing source. Gotcha.
It would also be interesting to see how learning a non-phonetic alphabet, like Chinese or Japanese Kanji affects your brain. Learning tens of thousands of pictographs by heart is no easy feat, and I can tell you that bilingualism does not prepare you for that.
GP means 'General Partner' - Bitcoinica LP is Limited Partnership with a General Partner and a Limited Partner.
Honestly, it was a random name I made for the directory it was in while I was experimenting. I put my very-super alpha on github and it got picked up by thechangelog and started trending for the month and so I decided, meh, I'll just keep it. But, personally I hate the name too :)
IOS hacker posts method to get in-app purchases for free
How about four times? :)
Saying that government regulation for financial markets is a red herring is like saying that SSL for ecommerce is a red herring. Sure, it's imperfect. It's not a complete solution. It gets circumvented sometimes. It creates a false sense of security sometimes. The people who run it do embarrassingly dumb things sometimes. But there's still a big difference between marketplaces with that protection and marketplaces without it.
The rise is unrelated.
Weird. David Brooks in person: rather interesting. David Brooks on paper: easily dismissable.

In this case, I dismiss what he says because he's making exactly zero attempt to control for exogenous variables. There's a lot more going on than just changing from a WASP-only aristocracy to a meritocracy of sorts. Vast cultural shifts have necessitated the change, and cause other things to happen as well. Just to pick a few examples, birth rates have dropped, the US population grows only through immigration, basically. Cell phones happened. That changes a lot. Did the WASP-only aristocracy have computers on their desks? No? Did they have The Internet?
I haven't looked at this in depth but it sounds like they are pretending to be Apple and are sending a counterfeit response to the device. On the device there is a delegate callback that receives a SKPaymentTransaction object which has a bunch of information. I suspect the apps that are affected are just checking the state of the payment and not taking the transactionReceipt property and checking it with Apple to make sure it is legit.

Here is Apple's docs on how to verify a receipt http://developer.apple.com/library/ios/#documentation/Networ...
It does seem like the app store transaction should be forced to use an Apple cert, not just any cert signed by a root CA. Pinning a single cert seems risky, since certificates can be compromised.
It's a corporate press release aggregator maintained by teenagers with severe short term memory loss.
From Basements to Brad Feld: The Story of 126 NOs and 1 Big Yes
This is one of the biggest things I'm grateful my mentor drilled into me: Never make a quick and dirty solution that anyone else (especially management!) sees -- it will become the final solution.
How popular is Varnish?
Agreed. This is one of the major points of using YCN.

You could just take the reddit approach and get "close enough" on more links that have expired.

(Not that I'd want HN to become more like reddit. ;-)
Total blast! Love how each selection can take the sound bytes into a whole new direction. Well done!
I have a doubt about the opportunities vs risks associated. For example, I am not seeing interactive books like the ones on the iOS platform. I understand that from the developer perspective there are a lot of work but this is because the entrepreneur carries the risk and not the final developer/non-founder
Not a website per se, but AskScience (http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience) is an amazing place for various science discussions.
Looks cool, unfortunately I've no iOS device to test it on.

How does it work? I'm guessing the recipient has to open a link?
I think this is a feature, and not a bug.
ScrumMaster Tales - The Team Learns How to Estimate
Book 'pirate' goes underground after being named by author, Terry Goodkind
Microsoft: Disable Windows Sidebar and Gadget Now
I buy experiences by buying tools.

Owning $800 of camera equipment doesn't make me happy, but using it does. Looking at my Macbook Air doesn't make me happy, but writing code on it does.

A Jaguar doesn't get you to work any better, but as has been pointed out, driving even a BMW 330 is a hell of a lot of fun every day.
nerdgasm
TBH the name does make me think of rusty metal, as in dumped cars which are old and broken. Not sure that's the best mental image to create from the name of a new technology...
Mobile (and AdMob)'s Growing Clout
If the government is selling your personal data then Facebook is the least of your worries.
Yes that's it: we add a unique link to the text message, the recipient then visits the page and share his location, and we then notify the sender.
Main stream editors work differently...

Change forward word is in a mainstream editor: [Shift]+[Ctrl]+[Right]

Change line: Home, [Shift]+[End]

...and so on...

Moreover you forgot to mention that you always need to switch modes...

Mainstream editors are pretty efficient, unfortunately in the UNIX World there are hardly any good ones. The best ones I can think of are Eclipse and gedit.

Unfortunately there is no Notepad++-like thing on UNIX. (And Kate just became messy and buggy when KDE4 came out.)

BTW: Has any vim fan ever used the refactoring feature in Eclipse? Or edited Code during runtime using the Graphical Debugger? I doubt it... ;-)
It seems really strange that the StoreKit framework itself wouldn't perform a signature check (preferably pinned towards whatever built-in Apple CA necessary) before handing it off to the delegate callback, don't you think?
Skeleton: A CoffeeScript Node.js Project Generator
http://consumerist.com/2009/02/facebooks-new-terms-of-servic...

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142405270230477280457555...

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2010/04/facebook-timeline

http://techcrunch.com/2009/12/09/facebook-privacy/

http://www.poynter.org/latest-news/media-lab/social-media/14...

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2008/05/canadian-gro...

http://www.pcworld.com/article/140182/facebooks_beacon_more_...

http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2010/05/facebook-rogue/

http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/facebooks_zuckerberg_sa...

http://www.technologyreview.com/featured-story/428150/what-f...
One big problem with powershell is that it is not installed on all windows machines by default (I think it is only on some server versions). So you can't just whip up a script and have it run on any machine like you can with bash, which is a first class citizen.
Cool! I love tools like google latitude but unfortunately my friends aren't all geeks who know how to use it. This solves that problem completely, well done!

Hope you release an Android version at some point!

edit: just realised there was a slideshow explaining that on the site, in my defence it's 2am and I'm a little sleepy!
Does this article say anything?
Because that only protects against literal copying. It doesn't prevent clean-room reimplementation of innovative circuits, structures, etc.
Fighting Words: Apple's Post-PC & Microsoft's PC Plus
Meh. I do side projects the way other people read a book or learn a musical instrument: to unwind in an intellectually stimulating manner.

You can't be head down in your business 100% of the time; that's just plain unhealthy. You need time to step back and focus on something else for awhile, so that you can come back fresh and full of new ideas.

The good life is all about balance. You can be the jackrabbit who's always first in line, but I'm still going to get my slice of pie, despite stopping to smell the roses.
The real lasting power of two
>how is it going to scale beyond protecting the few wealthy info-elite that can protect themselves?

This is why I have trouble with Bit Coin. I actually like the idea of Bit Coin, a predictable monetary policy that has many of the advantages of a traditional inflationary economy, but without the ability of a political entity to make short term fixes that screw us over in the long term. But the problem is that we're transferring elite status to a different group of people. In the end, your ability to mine coins, process transactions, protect yourself and transact business using a non-trivial system is an advantage and screw everyone who doesn't get it. If you don't have advanced hardware and cheap electricity, you're disadvantaged. If you don't know how to use a mouse, you're disadvantaged.

I wish I was smart enough to come up with a better solution.
I don't know about that, the biased stuff is pretty obvious.

For example, they ran a cover article a few months back about the poor helpless souls in the City of London and how the big bad bankers from other places were challenging them. I found myself laughing at one point.

They are the best source of international news. My biggest issue with it is that reading it is time-consuming, and the weekly cadence is relentless.
I fail to realize why any of these features were "important problems" of Unix shells. Passing byte streams between programs is a very powerful idea and transfers the responsibility of interpreting what the input is to the program parsing it. I realize, from a programmatic point of view, that being able to get a series of objects and to invoke a specific method on them is an intriguing idea, but it breaks the simplicity of the Unix approach of each utility doing one thing and doing it well.

The tight integration into the OS is another weakness - I can grab my Linux scripts and run them on OSX, BSD, AIX, Solaris and pretty much every Unix-like OS around. Your PowerShell scripts will never run on anything other than Windows.
There are plans for an Android version in the future, although there are still a few features I want to add to the iOS version before that.
"When Store Kit returns a completed purchase to your payment queue observer, the transaction’s transactionReceipt property contains a signed receipt that records all the critical information for the transaction. Your server can post this receipt to the App Store to verify that the receipt is valid and has not been tampered with."

A double check to be sure nothing is amiss I guess. I do find it strange that they can't guarantee this callback is not trigged by a response from a HTTPS source. Actually maybe they are and this fake cert is what is allowing it so they added this two phase check just in case. But this ability to verify is also kept around if you store these receipts on your server. Before you write them to your DB you can check with Apple to make sure they are legit.
Median is an average measure. As are arithmetic mean and mode.

You're messing up "average" and "mean" :)
I can't hammer this home enough: it's institutional, the sexism that's going on here. That is, the pillow-fight invitation is not by itself sexism; the sexism is that we live in a world where a man might consider it acceptable to burst into a conversation without prompting and ask a woman to his room for a private pillowfight party, for the sexual gratification of onlooking men. It's not the act, it's the environment which makes the act possible, and the environment which the act fosters, which constitute the sexism. In practice we can therefore label the act itself as 'sexist' -- but the criticism that the act 'is not literally sexist' or what have you deeply misses the point.

If this had been done by gay women, the problem would still be that those gay women somehow felt entitled to make such a request of women. The problem is that a woman was, purely due to her sex, "lowered beneath" a baseline of human decency, if you wish. There might be a legitimate question of "what if we lowered the baseline?" but there is no legitimate question of "what if the person who lowered her was a woman?"
cat is an alias for Get-Content which is notoriously slow. If you do some googling people suggesting using System.IO.StreamReader instead. Have you tried that?
This was my impression when I read it regularly years ago. My close friend now reads it cover to cover every issue and based on our conversations in which he references the Economist, either he is misinterpreting it, or they are very Keynesian now.

[EDIT] Do Keynesians call themselves Keynesian?
How are you positing people measure their weight and height without, you know, like, a scale, and, um, a tape measure?

As many people in the fitness/bodybuilding field will tell you, eyeball estimates of bodyfat are in fact pretty bloody accurate. If you're interested in equipment costs, I could look up eyeballs on Amazon as I did for tape measures.
The absence of evidence is not the evidence of absence. Especially when the absence of evidence is simply a report that is not looking for what you're looking for.

Either way, BMI clearly has some use. Or do you think this chart is completely random and devoid of correlation? http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/b7/Correlati... Do you think the ordering of countries on the BBC link is purely random and has nothing to do with how many fat people are in each country?
Does not look like it is possible yet: https://twitter.com/erlang_on_xen/status/223762947204321280
What's the tech behind this issue? Why do pagination links time out to begin with?
Hacker Offers Service to Work Around iOS In-app Purchases
Seriously, I saw nothing of value in here. Move along.
At the risk of being called obvious, I'm going to say, "Hacker News." I've never found a site that lets me tap into the brains of so many extremely smart people. This site has made me a much smarter person, dramatically improved my writing, and made me far better at what I do.

Thanks!
> How does this compare with Flattr? It may be slightly different, but is it sufficiently different?

Gittip works, flattr does not for the most part. Flattr works probably if you push out a ton of content, but that's pretty much it. If you want to get recurring donations for an open source project or something similar without spending a lot of time with the system you can pretty much ignore flatt.

Also you can't be paid on flattr unless you pay others at the same time.
The regulators, themselves are also bankers. Or have strong tires to bankers. Kind of hard to ask the SEC (for example) to come down hard on say, Goldman, when most of the executive staff at the SEC worked and have their own positions at Goldman.

(I'm only using Goldman as a example).

But the opposite is also true. The best regulator is a experienced regulator. And you get that experience by working in the field.

A better approach is punishment. Look I used to trade (on the CMO floor at Kidder), and the more important thing is not to lose money. If traders (actually everyone in banking) don't lose money nothing changes. I mean, why ruin a good thing, right? Just that simple.

It used to be easier, because before 1999 investment banks were a sort of a partnership - if you lost money the firm lost money. Now so these days. Why even care? Traders take such stupid risks cause it's not their money. And now, we all know, they don't even face any sort of punishment. In fact, most of the banks MADE money, in the form of TARP (and cheap loans from the Fed).

And now we have Libor. No trader has gone to jail. No executive has gone to jail (and I doubt anyone will). The bank (in this case Barclays) might have to pay a fine, which is peanuts compare to their profits.

So what's the message? Steal, loot, lie. And until people are made to pay, personally, it will remain so.
I have to admit I might have been hot-headed about that comment. I definitely apreciate the increased productivity one gets by using an editor that he knows.

I will try Vim sometimes as a weekend project. Thank you for the comprehensive reply.
Why would you check someone's profile?
Hi! Author of NoFlo here. This has been sort of a longtime hobby project for me, since I read J. Paul Morrison's FBP book: http://www.jpaulmorrison.com/fbp/#book

The UI side of things is still in very early stages, but the engine itself is quite solid. We've been using it for various Extract-Transform-Load tasks, like report generation, as explained in http://bergie.iki.fi/blog/business_analytics_with_couchdb_an...

At Nemein we also have been using it for routing messages between different message queues. This is useful when you want to apply some business rules on them.

For example, in one of the web apps I've been writing, the ORM sends a message on each I/O operation to a queue. NoFlo listens to the queue and routes the messages to correct "business logic queue". This way the ORM can focus on being an ORM, and our workflows can be kept elsewhere.
Good reading there, but the part about the difficulties notes that it holds nuke-scale energies and states "Therefore for safety and astrodynamic reasons, launch loops are intended to be installed over an ocean near the equator, well away from habitation."

That would exclude the downtown-to-downtown feature.
Performance is generally fine only because this is a ridiculously obscure feature that no one sane would ever trip over. Frankly I had no idea "sparse arrays" existed, nor would I have ever used them if I did (that's what a hash table is for). No doubt they're there because some browser did it once, some important site relied on it, and now we're all stuck with performance constraints (don't explode for huge unassigned array sizes) that don't make any sense.

No, O(N^2) sorting algorithms are just dumb in library/runtime[1] code. No one expects that, it will eventually bite anyone who uses the code. And this code is a booby trap, no one even knows if they're using it!

[1] In application code, where you might know a priori that they'll never sort more than "one screen worth" of data, I can see it being a reasonable hack. But never as part of a standard feature called "sort".
I second Towards Clarity and Grace.

Additionally, Orwell's Politics and the English Language https://www.mtholyoke.edu/acad/intrel/orwell46.htm.

And as for listening to editors, the world is your editor. Put your writing into the hands of anyone you can and ask for feedback. When someone says it is great, thank them and move on until you find someone who can honestly provide constructive criticism...your work is never great.
These Are the Best Programming Skills to Have if You Wanna Be Rich
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