skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Informational goods are nonrival: they are copyable and usable with no loss to the original. The relation between copies of information is abstract. A copy adds its value, and subtracts nothing.

That is where I disagree. There's an important distinction between the inventive step leading to a discovery and subsequent copies thereof. A subsequent copy of an idea does not possess the same characteristics as the ``flash of genius'' in the mind of the person responsible for producing that idea. From this distinction, it follows that an idea, alone, has no intrinsic value--intrinsic value arises out of attachment to society.

Your argument is that an idea gains value as it spreads, but I don't think that's correct. Rather, societal advancement occurs when members of a society generate and produce novel ideas. There are two competing forces: (1) the spread of new ideas is akin to a positive feedback loop, since new ideas are based on old ones (there's evidence of this: technological advancement grows exponentially with respect to time); and (2) as an idea spreads, its connection to its creator fades, eventually causing misappropriation of that 'inventive step' and disincentivizing the creator's continued creation of new ideas. The belief that losing control over the spread of an idea on the basis that no harm to the information occurs from copies thereof is flawed: it focuses on the information, rather than the person who created it.

Permitting patent rights to vest only in the inventor transforms his talent into a commodity, rather than the fruits of that talent. It rewards the individual rather than those acting on the information for no purpose other than economic gain.
A Glimpse Behind the Ivy Curtain
Another possible explanation for the increasing rate is that someone is offering 7% interest on BTC: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=50822.0

If that offer is really enough to make the price rise, this might be exactly what this guy is speculating on.
Installing a custom SSL root certificate feels like such a good idea. Not.

But I guess in order to get something for free, people are willing to go great lengths in compromizing their security. Remember: By installing that guys SSL root certificate, you basically allow them to MITM not just the App store in-app purchasing (and by extension likely sniff your app store password) but also any other SSL protected site like, say, your webmail provider.
I'm really not a fan of BMI being the determining factor in obesity. At 27 BMI, I'm apparently 3 BMI away from being considered obese. As a naturally large, fairly muscular 24 year old german/irish man, I'm 6 foot 1 and weigh 205 lbs, but you can see my abs and I'm in relatively good physical condition. Is my definition of obese wrong? I always thought obese meant someone with at least a few dozen lbs of excess fat.
I'm curious about the anatomy of this hack.

Obviously the fake DNS server intercepts the iphone<->apple's appstore server connections, to deliver a fake receipt. But then what? I would imagine real receipts should be signed with an apple private key. Does iOS also allow user-installed custom CAs to partake in this receipt signature validation? Could this be fixed by "pinning" receipt signature validation to the apple key?

Calls to the developer's server could also be intercepted, if you know which URL endpoints the app uses to "call home", and then they could probably be faked on a per-app basis, if you can wiretap a legit purchase to replicate any asset downloads and handshakes, though.
The key for the everyday user probably won't be better AI, but rather the achievement of more natural interaction rhythms. People cajole, beg and bargain with their cars, computers, baseball teams; with no response expected, the rhythms are conversational (if wry).

The one second press-and-hold, then the three second wait for response, are obstacles that keep Siri removed. Once those limitations are inevitably gone, and one can immediately say "thanks" and hear a naturalistic response in less than half a second (like Malkovich in the commercial where "time sequences are shortened"), the illusion will be a strong one. Statefulness, ubiquity, and responsiveness will be a powerful UX combination. To the degree Siri interaction becomes naturalistic, we'll probably say "please" and "thanks" much as we do in everyday speech.
This uses the body-mass index, which does not measure fat. It's just a ratio of height to weight, which does not take body composition into account.
This is just great. I had a very similar experience with http://openexchangerates.org - hacked it together and left it running, and only realised just how popular it had become when, one morning 6 months later, I woke up to over 20 emails, all saying similar things to what the woman said to OP.

"What the hell! It's been down for a day already! When is it coming back?"

I was pretty bemused, so I checked the server logs and found that it had been hurtling along at what looked like 60,000 requests per day (I later found out it was closer to 200,000).

Needless to say I jumped in, fixed it, and got talking to the users who relied on the project for their businesses or personal projects - it's been a blast.

edit - it's since been completely rewritten, so I can't say the code went unchanged..
Quirky idea, gave it a little whirl. Really love the feel of the website; the graphics are awesome! Nice work.
Canadian banks rushing to offer virtual wallets
It is really irresponsible of the BBC to be promoting BMI as a measure of health.

I'm a Marathon runner who is apparently fatter than 99% of the world...
Pretty cool! There are some hilarious submissions: http://images-cdn.braintripping.com/trips/4f9efd4088cbda0300...
I was thinking maybe he meant something that produces thrust by ionizing the air, like this except on a larger scale:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ionocraft
>The first half of that sentence is absolutely true. But judging by the enormous number of upvotes, StackOverflow itself (i.e., the people who make it up) disagrees about that second bit.

That's a very dangerous thing, look at what happened to Reddit once there was an influx of people from Digg and 4chan. In fact it is critical that a site's focus is maintained in spite of people's opinions.

>It's just possible that the SO masters have fallen out of touch with the SO community. To the extent that they have done so, they are a detriment to that community.

Not really, SO is just maintaining their site's USP and doesn't want to generate flamebaity discussions. I appreciate them for it.
You might be interested in Benjamin Franklin's Thirteen Virtues.
Why Our Elites Stink
> To me, it's a matter of cultural differences. Think of it this way: a shell operates in two mode, script or interactive (the new fancy word now is REPL). How much time does your average PowerShell user spend in REPL mode?

I realize this is anecdotal, but I spent about 2 years using powershell exclusively, instead of mingw/cygwin, and I during that time I would always keep one or more powershell windows open. I see no reason to believe that anyone with bash, etc experience would not use powershell the same way. Imho it worked well as an interactive shell, its biggest failing was Microsoft's awful console window that hosts powershell. I would be really happy if Microsoft provided something better by default, like Console2 - although that program has it's own set of problems too.
Someone is going to buy a lot of drugs.
First legal victory for Wikileaks in its battle against financial blockhead
Fun Fingers Creative Designs
I think if you are not a native English speaker, you get a second language for free! And Indians in general have three languages, their local mother tongue, national language (Hindi) and English.
"I had forgotten about it, I had neglected it, I had basically written it off but this soft voice reminded me that all though I had written it off she had not and that she actually relied on it to run her business."

Is this likely to become more of an issue as people move to Web based applications for things they used Office and file folders for before?
Really nice! Amazing graphics. Did you do them too?
So Reid Hoffman invested his own money and then LinkedIn blows several million in acquisition of IP from a company that is in the deadpool.

No conflict of interest there. Can't wait for the lawsuits.
A peek into Test Driven Design
Cycling and Coding Collide at Performance Tracker Strava
I appreciate that you're trying to be helpful but it bought to mind this: http://www.dilbert.com/strips/comic/1994-07-18/
> In the mean time, I will be looking for about 50 hours a month of contract work to stay afloat
Invent a way of easily measuring body fat percentage, and we can do away with BMI. Until then, muscular people can simply ignore these things. BMI works well enough for the rest of the population (the vast majority of the world). If anything, normal people have the opposite problem you do. BMI tends to underestimate obesity in the general population. http://www.cnn.com/2012/04/03/health/obesity-rates-maybe-wor...
San Diego fireworks fiasco blamed on overzealous computer backup
http://projecteuler.net/ made me try so many different programming languages just for fun.
This is flawed, very flawed. I weight lift now and workout 6 days a week... in college I was a skinny 5'11" and 130. I'm not 5'11" and 186.

This is going to tell me I'm fat.
I doubt people are stupid enough to conflate Bitcoin with 3rd party websites that use bitcoins. Maybe a few will, but the success or failure of Bitcoin does not ride on a what a few dumb people do.

And Bitcoin does not have a "brand." You could say, and probably meant, "reputation."
The rise and fall of Digg, and what we can learn from it
That's worth pointing out.

The site has been offline for months, lots of people are simply caught waiting for a refund.

So basically there's nothing they can do now, if Bitcoinica's operation gets hacked again (their MtGox account this time).
I am pretty sure "but think of the children" is exactly the sort of thinking that goes into a program designed to stop child predators. I don't get the freakout here. Facebook communication is not private communication and they're clearly targeting child predators. Now obviously it could creep/evolve to target other types of crime but I still think communication over Facebook is not private and it's silly if one is surprised to find that out. Outrage over this feature is a step short of saying "well how come concerned citizens are allowed to notify the police when a man in public is exhibiting the behavior of a child predator?"
There are techniques for doing this.

I weight lift... a lot. So BMI is utterly useless for me (as you said)
I find this fascinating from a legal/political perspective.

Facebook is essentially using the same techniques to monitor private communications as the NSA supposedly does. This means Facebook has the power to report, for example, selected messages but not others. (I'm not saying they do, of course, just that they could be selective or discriminatory that way.)

The fact is that Facebook has taken upon itself a role similar to that of the police, but without any democratic oversight.

This is different from a bar owner overhearing a conversation about a crime and calling the police, because he wasn't specifically monitoring every single word said by every bar patron. But Facebook is casting a wide net by analyzing every conversation that happens.

Questions: should Facebook be permitted to do this? Should we ask for laws preventing companies from "eavesdropping" on their users' communications with the intent of detecting and reporting criminal behavior? Should this be the role of the democratically-elected government instead? Should sites be required to turn user communication over to the government for such analysis?

It's a fascinating area of law/politics with so much room for future development, and gets down to the heart of what values a society has.
Studying Math in Budapest
Our key differentiators are (1) Being able to filter inappropriate content on trusted websites (Google, YouTube, Wikipedia, etc) that children use frequently. Domain based blocking allows or denies the entire website. But cannot for example, filter out a "bad" page on Wikipedia without blocking the entire domain (2) Being able to provide easy parental access. Parents login to Securly via our website and immediately get unfiltered Internet access.
Argh! Beaten by auto correct and my own laziness in not reading properly, thanks for pointing that out :)
Erlang on Xen [without a traditional OS]
No, there aren't. BMI can be calculated by anyone in about 2 seconds without taking any measurements they don't already know. Body fat percentage can't.

And while BMI may be useless to you, it's reasonably useful for the vast majority of people in the world.
Before complaining about "wah wah that's BMI, BMI sucks" please think twice. Everybody knows it's BMI, BMI is a rough measurement of your ratio height to weight.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Body_mass_index#Limitations_and...

"The medical establishment has acknowledged major shortcomings of BMI.[...] found that BMI-defined obesity was present in 21% of men and 31% of women. Using body fat percentages (BF%), however, BF%-defined obesity was found in 50% of men and 62% of women."

Take it as a statistical game and stop getting self conscious about it.

Note also: If you are very muscular with a crazy BMI despite no fat it's not healthy either.
Hmm, if you just need to expand the air, could you just use really powerful resistive electric heating? think super powered hair dryer meets on demand hot water heater.
"some of the best practices (IMO) on HN/Reddit" - link?
I enjoyed the way that the "intelligence" of it left a lot of room for ones creativity.
Nice game/tool when one is in need of a little something to get the writing flow going!
This is starting to prove -- the hard way -- why regulations, certifications, and all that other stuff that feels like meaningless overhead the majority of the time has become a grudgingly accepted part of our lives.

It comes back to the most difficult problem: you inevitably need to trust someone, so how do you minimize your risk in that trust? I always thought the Bitcoin trust issues would revolve around the inability to trust that a service would be delivered once the provider is paid -- something that could theoretically be worked out with their reputation over the long run in a free market.

But it's unsettling to see that breaches like this don't evidently leave the impression with the Bitcoin community that a believer in the free market might hope they would, that providers in this market might not be driven to produce quality and reliability because somehow there isn't the demand for it.
Microsoft Office 2013 set to debut July 16th
That's a fallacious argument. The reason it's mainly used by criminals and speculators is because it's brand new, as far as currencies go. If Bitcoin had been used by lots of people already who then abandoned it, you might be able to make the argument you're trying to make.

And one thing I've noticed it increasingly being used for is basic (small-scale) financial services - for example, loans.
BMI is an utterly bogus means of determining individual fitness assessments, and there's some reason to believe it's not very useful for population measures of fitness.

- Top 10 Reasons Why The BMI Is Bogus : http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=1062684...

- Beyond BMI, Why doctors won't stop using an outdated measure for obesity : http://www.slate.com/id/2223095/

- Do You Believe in Fairies, Unicorns, or the BMI? : http://www.maa.org/devlin/devlin_05_09.html
ha! i love open exchange rates! - i hit it once a day with a side project of my own. thanks for running a quality service!
I'd argue for a management, design or testing roll specialising in "mobile development" is fine, even a benefit.

But for developers it makes no sense, an average Android developer makes a terrible iOS developer and vice versa.

A 100% iOS dev is going to be 50% better (at least) than one that splits their time between 2 (or 3) platforms.
Very simple.

Either:

$copy = $original;

Or, if you must have a function,

function array_copy(array $a) {
return $a;
}

Arrays use the normal copy-on-write semantics of PHP. They are not passed by reference or object handle...

The only potential issue is if the array contains references deeper in.
Please go back to reddit.
I know nothing about bitcoin, can someone provide a tldr about why it is (seemingly) so difficult to build a secure site around exchanging these things?

I don't get how you can simply "Loose" a few hundred grand without a horse head winding up at the food of your bed.
As the big banks in the USA have proven, government regulation is definitively not the answer to the question "How can you know whom to trust?"

Seriously. Knock that shit off. It's a red herring.

You can't abstract away the personal process of choosing trust anchors and metrics, no matter how hard you try.

Changing your trust anchor to "the government" just means you end up getting fucked on a larger scale, over a larger timeline.
The solution is close to hand and it does not involve regulation--at least the kind that regulators want. The solution is transparency. Just make all the big banks report their actual transaction on a live feed. This simple solution would have been infeasible even 20 years ago, but not any more.

The implications would be enormous. No more need for accounting reports, indexes or anything else that requires a judgement call by a corruptible human. The job of watching the banks would pass from the power hungry (or worse, sleepy) regulators to the public (you and me).

Once upon a time I performed the risk mgmt. function for a portion of a large bank. We used a couple of servers running every night to track a few thousand positions. The system knew every detail of about 95% of the positions. Today a team of 50 could track the entire banking system--given the right feed. Make the same information I used public and open to competing teams of analysts and then risk becomes a known quantity.

Of course, banks and regulators would be strongly opposed to this approach. They will howl about privacy, proprietary information etc. But the fact is when you ask a bank for a loan, they know all of your relevant financial information in order to judge your risk. It's only fair for the taxpayers to turn the tables and end our old-fashioned and broken system of disclosure. And if the risky part of banking is driven into a part of the industry that doesn't share information, then their investors should do without a safety net.
Thanks. That's the best explanation I've ever heard. That makes sense!
I've said this, or variations of this thing a few times in the past, so I'll try to be brief here.

Mainly, MVP is an overused term. An MVP should mean "a completely barebones product that solves a problem to test the market." Time tracking is a proven market, and it's no mystery that you can make money in the time tracking market. There are probably hundreds of companies doing exactly that.

Your MVP should then be to test what you are doing differently in that market to see how people respond to it. If you were, for example, tracking time through a Tweet-like-system (like IDidWork.com, for example), then build the barebones system that does that and see how people respond. If you can get them to sign up and keep using it, you know you have a winner.

If you have a winner, then you need to progress beyond MVP as quickly as possible, and into a more fleshed out project. Add the other features that you think are necessary to the goal, but only if they're absolutely needed. Figure out what users are asking for, or if they're leaving, find out why. If they're staying, find out why. Respond to that feedback, but be careful of taking everybody at their word -- look for kernels of commonality in the feedback that speak to a bigger truth than what people are actually saying and try to implement.

Add polish. Add all the polish. Make your product inviting, enticing, attractive, gorgeous if you can manage it.

Figure out what use cases your product excels at (based on user feedback) -- target THAT. If your product is better at tracking time spent on customer work than say, other products who are better at tracking time spent for the same project or company, accentuate that. Everybody has a need, and if you have a number of users for which you are solving that need, then play it up and find more.

Then, charge. Figure out the relative value you add. Split-test pricing. Read books on pricing. You might ask your users what they would be willing to pay for this service, but that comes with risks too.

Profit.
Ouch.... http://qrauth.com - Login using QR codes

Password is stored on your iOS device and securely transported to the site you're login into when you scan a QR code. No more excused for duplicate/easy to remember passwords!
For the claim that all forms of love, respect etc. Boil down to sexual attraction? Yes. I don't know where you've been for the past 40 years, but Freud's theories on sexuality had no basis in empiricism and are no longer accepted among modern psychologists.
Hotel Impossible Gurney's Inn
EAM, CMMS, Hotels, software, etc.
Microsoft may scrap full retail edition of Windows 8, offer OEM and upgrade only
I wonder if all the TechCrunch sock puppetting will kill hacker news ? Not that that is happening in this thread ...
> that providers in this market might not be driven to produce quality and reliability because somehow there isn't the demand for it

Also, the market is young and small and very inefficient as yet. The tools for allowing market participants to reasonably evaluate trustworthiness of service providers don't really exist yet.

You can't really blame that on "lack of demand for quality and reliability". Give it five years and try your analysis again.
>The internet is for marketing yourself, not expressing yourself.

I'm just old enough to remember when the exact opposite was trued. Terribly saddening to see how that's changed.
The other thing is that you're dependent on the validation server's availability to check the receipts. Apple's got great uptime in this respect (and others), but there have been outages (a big one last September: http://www.ilounge.com/index.php/news/comments/app-store-suf...).

It's a tradeoff, really, that most IAP implementors consider:

Cost of support and loss of goodwill when legitimate customers run into issues vs. loss of revenue from pirates (heretofore only jailbroken phone users) who likely wouldn't have purchased anyway.

It makes fiscal sense for big players with big IAP scale like Zynga to strictly validate. Little players may find it is less critical to the bottom line to be strict about it.
As a recent college graduate, I can tell you that they still teach the comment everything everywhere method, and in fact for most of our programming projects, documentation was at least 20% of the grade. I professionally, do not comment, but instead, write "clean code" that can be understood simply by reading it. Anything complicated I comment, but usually that means I need to refactor and rethink my approach.

I highly recommend this book: http://www.amazon.com/Clean-Code-Handbook-Software-Craftsman... as it changed my life when it comes to software development. I have a real problem with commenting everywhere as most of the time you'll find a lot of public String getName() with like a comment of //Gets the name, uh, durr its name is get name! If you create concise methods with one general purpose you can create very readable code. Definitely check the book out, it is a very good read.
Online Video Tutorials in Python.
Python double-call hack for mocking date/time
I expected http://www.3quarksdaily.com/ to be somewhere near the top of that list, but it’s nowhere to be found, which really surprised me. It’s one of the most consistently interesting sites on the Internet, if you ask me.
You mean 3372% interest— The 7% number is _per-week_.