skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Sounds impressive (but, no pointers/links? How to differentiate from some random guy on the interwebs?).

Well, that's the trick, innit?

> But surely with those credentials you don't have any reason to belittle some guy for using RubyMotion for development. Heck, even MacRuby itself was initiated and sponsored by Apple for a couple of years.

It was skunkworks, and it was never mainlined as a strategy, because it's not the right strategy. ObjC needs to be replaced, but Ruby is two steps backwards for one step forward.

> It's not like IB is the be all end all of development. People have managed without it.

It's an incredibly valuable tool, and not using it significantly increases the maintenance burden, especially when it comes to letting the design department directly tweak user interface.

> And it's not like Obj-C magically gives more quality to your code compared to Ruby. Most of the "20 years of practices" sound like cargo-cult.

The slavish devotion to Ruby sounds like cargo-cult. I use Objective-C when targeting iOS, I use Java when targeting Android. I use C when targeting the the kernel, and I use C++ when using OpenCV. I use assembly when writing code that can't be expressed in C. I use C when targeting microcontrollers, switch OSs and IDEs to match the target environment. Windows 7 for Atmel Studio, Mac OS X for IntelliJ (Android).

In other words, I use the tools that were specifically made to produce the best possible results for users, while using standard and ideally optimal methods that produce the minimum amount of pain for both myself and for future maintainers.

What I don't do is cargo-cult development practices from one field (Rails/Web), while operating in a completely different field (ObjC).

> I haven't seen any innovate iOS apps from NeXT-era Obj-C guys...

Would you know?
1) No, it does not produce identical results.

Most of the STD containers use copying, not pointers, as the article actually points out.

That doesn't make his larger point valid (I disagree with it, actually), but your argument is not technically correct.
Fixed, I hope. Is that clearer? Sorry for the ambiguity.
> I am too under impression that your music taste is a product of a long and sophisticated coevolution between you and the music you like.

This is the best description of musical taste I've ever seen.
Good questions, but overcoming consumer resistance is not a new science. The autonomous car will be just another in a long line of products that were initially dismissed by consumers.

Many cars you can buy today are practically autonomous anyway. You may still feel like you are in control, but the computer systems will take over in many cases. Going fully autonomous is the natural leap. The trick is only one of marketing to get the people comfortable with the idea. These frequent announcements is one way to build that comfort level before the first production units are ready to be sold.
My impression is the primary purpose of class action lawsuits is to stop bad behavior, not necessarily to enrich plaintiffs. Lawyers do make quite a bit of money IF they win. They also take all the risks since class members don't pay anything for legal services upfront. So, class actions seem to be an important mechanism for correcting bad behavior of larger entities.
Twitter launches 'Interest targeting' for advertisers
> What I don’t like about the bill is that it requires an operator to be able to take manual control of the vehicle at any time.

I'd feel very strange being in a car without a manual override of some sort. Maybe in 10 years and only if the vast majority of cars are self driven it will be a different story. I can't imagine trying to drive through Chicago hoping that my little robot driver is aware of the two tow-trucks weaving through traffic behind me at 90mph.
The manual control at any time is actually a feature I want to have. It doesn't have to be the current style steering wheel, stick and pedals but maybe something else like a joystick.
Well, what kind of problem is that in C? It's C. It has no public/private keywords. Nobody expect struct in C to be well-encapsulated.
Nice backlink to PayPal.com :)
Yep, censorship. Legal, profitable censorship. Caveat emptor.
I'm not so sure the OP's argument is substantive. I don't know whether Roy intended that his architectural style, described in his thesis, to become a loosely defined web service 'protocol', but we're not really making everything up as we go along. A well-implemented REST API is far and away simpler to understand (and easier to use) than a SOAP counterpart.
Exactly, the C example could not be contained in more than one list at a time, so if this is a concern, the C solution wouldn't work either.
I'm surprised we haven't heard from Hoffa.
I saw a demo of this a couple months ago at a small gathering. I was blown away. Another feature demo'd at the time was the ability to make obj-c calls in the chrome javascript console and have it be interpreted in the app runtime. e.g.

UIApplication.sharedApplication.delegate.navigationController.navigationBar.tintColor = UIColor.redColor;

and the app's navbar changed color. Is this still possible with this release? I haven't been able to try it out at work yet. Thanks for this awesome tool.
That's how it usually works, companies are liable for damages resulting from defective products. Doens't really require any broadening of "government involvement".

A lot has been written about software liability, but not
much has happened (except lots of countries have adopted
US style "EULA click through makes a contract" stupidity)

See eg. this article about a staged debate about it
between Bruce Schneier and Marcus Ranum at RSA 2012:
<http://www.law.com/jsp/lawtechnologynews/PubArticleLTN.jsp?i...;
* What's a good BlaBla Meter result?

High-quality journalistic texts are usually in the range of 0.1 and 0.3

* Are there any texts with an indexof 0.0?

This is rare, but occurs. Too low of an index is rather suspicious though, and might also indicate stilistical deficits.

* What is the highest index value?

Thile the BlaBla Meter was designed for index values between 0 and 1, but in rare cases the scale can be exceeded. The highest measured values so far have been over 2.0 even.

* Does Google use a similar algorithm?

We don't know, but if we were Google, we'd probably try! Our samples for highly competitive search terms show that highly ranked sites often show good index values.

* How does BlaBla Meter work?

BlaBla meter checks texts for various linguistic traits, e.g. it checks for exceeding use of Nominalstil[1]. In addition, the text is checked for various phrases [buzzwords] with a certain weighting. We don't want to reveal the secrets though ;)

[1] Heavy use of "nominal style" is a German particularity. You can replace most verbs by nouns, adding suffixes like '-ion' or '-age', and transform the sentence into passive. This is often found in legal texts, where the author doesn't want to appear as a suject.

* Why does my scientific text have such a high index?

Nominalstil has crept into scientific language at large. This often serves to 'beat around the bush' - in this regard, there are analogies to typical PR tongue.

* My mindless text gets a good score, why?

BlaBla Meter can't really understand the topic, it looks after linguistic traits. While rainbow press can be attributed all kinds of substantial weaknesses, their language is usually short and concise.

* My text is wrongly devalued!

As every computer algorithm, BlaBla Meter might be at fault - in doubt, human beings must decide of course. Generally the hit rate is quite large, so you should usually tweak the wording upon receiving high indices.

* But humans read texts completely differently ...

When BlaBla Meter crys havoc, one can usually assume that a human reader is alerted too. People are trained every day to tell authentic messages from artifical advertising messages - it'd be naive to belive they couldn't!

* What happens with entered texts?

Texts are private matter of course, and are neither saved nor processed in any way or shape.
Coming to CED Tech Venture '12? Fogbeam Labs, PragPress present The Escape Hatch
I ditched my car and have walked everywhere for the last 5 years, I must honestly say I'm glad they didn't take off. People riding bikes on pavements and people in their motorized chairs are annoying and dangerous enough.

Sometimes governments actually get it right.
Are linked lists good C, though? Arrays with some double-on-full code - that is, vectors - perform much better and are often easier to work with.
What about them? Relying on the menu button is a very, very, very bad idea because there are devices that it doesn't exist on.
Setting our tech standards is something I've been very strict about and have become more strict about it recently. I believe this is an area that I've been pretty good on.
I wish school systems would ask parents to become regular volunteer teachers.
You could solve some of that by making the buyback non-transferrable (so people couldn't use this as a money transfer mechanism).

Beyond that, any pointers to information on regulations about things with a low bid/ask spread?
The need for a new removable device filesystem
HTC's new phones, every single tablet released after Honeycomb.
>Really? If today were the last day of my life I'd do things very, very differently - I can't imagine that answer ever being "yes".

Sure, if it was your very very last day and you knew it, you might did something extremely different (e.g, get partying like crazy, spend all your cash on expensive gifts to yourself or go out helping people, etc). That's not the point, you're seeing it too literally.

The gist of the question is "given your days are finite, do you want to continue to do what you are about to do today?".
I think that fedex and ups will use them only for the long haul driving and still employ a lot of drivers at the last mile delivery points.
Most people wouldn't want a 90 minute commute even if they didn't have to actively drive much of the time. That's still 3 hours a day lost to sitting in a car, which isn't an ideal environment to do much of anything even if the car is driving itself.

But even if the commutes do inch up somewhat, that should be offset by new opportunities to save energy via algorithmic collaboration. Future generation self-driving cars could organize in all sorts of energy-saving ways that human drivers aren't practically capable of doing (eg. self-driving cars could intelligently draft one another).
I'm pretty sure that long-haul truckers are well under half the truck driving profession. Pay attention to the number of semi-trucks delivering food and other products to schools / restaurants / convenience stores etc. Oh and those drivers have to unload the shipments as well. I don't think the truck industry will disappear, but there will be a shift in the mix of long-haul vs. short-haul truckers.
From yesterday's bug hunting session: sets (okay, not exactly hash tables) are not ordered data types, so do not use a set for intermediate values when order matters. (My fault - I'm just pointing out that it's not that hard to get Python wrong either.)
One of my blog posts got a .16 so you have my seal of approval ;-)
Google said it was no longer "required" but even through 4.1 SDK it is still supported.

Interestingly, the button that HAS died is the search button. Any device I've seen with a physical home button has opted for a long press to be the app switch, and then to leave the menu button in.

Personally, I like the menu button. It feels very natural on my SGSIII (and also did on my SGSI and Galaxy Tab). It feels weird to hunt for the soft menu button (either top or bottom) on my Nexus 7.
Crowdsourced API Terms of Service
Ugly No Barrier For Apartment Sales In German Boom
That's what I thought at first, but friend is for when you want class A to be able to view private things of class B. That is, B needs to know ahead of time what A is interested in. He wants B to remain ignorant of what A wants - he wants A to be able to insert new fields into B. But we can accomplish the same thing with mixins.
> We're simply not interested in the subpar engineering that comes from the inexperienced web developers joining the gold rush.

I'm sorry but that's a super douchey thing to say. It's not like there's a limited number of "seats" in the iOS community room, and oh no you wouldn't want to waste some seats on web developers.

And who are you to speak for the iOS community?

There is room for everyone and anyone to join development communities and contribute as much or as little as they want. No one is forcing you to help anyone out if you think they're not smart or cool enough for your tastes.

That's the beauty of all this, everyone is welcome. If you can't see that, you've missed out on some important lessons in your decades of engineering work..
I think it says something about the current status of Java outside the "enterprise" world that distros don't bother to patch this.
http://www.boost.org/doc/libs/1_35_0/doc/html/intrusive/usag...

Not sure if this qualifies as not "breaking encapsulation" but it's as close as you're going to get.
Financial industry is strictly regulated. Otherwise, imagine what would happen if banks could freeze your accounts freely, leaving you out without any means to pay for food or housing. Paypal could be that for larger merchants who could have substantial part of their assets tied up at Paypal.

What I find interesting is that Paypal is essentially a bank, yet it's completely unregulated.
This is fantastic! The adoption could be very fast, e.g. if insurance companies give benefits if you drive a self-driving car.

One current roadblock is the price of the system: the LIDAR (the thing on the top of the car in the picture) retails for ~$75K currently. There should be significant volume to drive the price down. But a lot of people would buy them for prestige, too (e.g. many early Prius adopters), so if the cost of the system can be reduced to perhaps $4K-$5K levels people will seriously think about this.
It's a lot different these days where so much is on the web and undeniably Javascript-driven. While there are always going to be purists who refuse to recognize Javascript as anything more than a dinky toy, their opinions aren't exactly relevant or prevalent anymore.
> A robot-driven version of my personal car (and how I use it today), is moderately appealing.

Really... you wouldn't find never having to park again very appealing? Having your car pick you up somewhere, or go get serviced while you're shopping?
They go hand in hand, I'd say.
I suppose O(n/(m-n)) time is the appropriate measure, where m is the deletion point and n is the number of items in the vector.

The removal time seems to be O(1) for the last element and only slightly higher for the second-last, but for the first it is O(n).
Not the only occurrence of this problem, see http://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/16350/which-sed-vers...
Show HN: GitHub events in Mountain Lion's Notification Center
On a similar line of argument: "How many blocked apps were in the App Store? A few? A dozen? Thats a pretty good ratio out of the hundreds of thousands available."
> drops out of school

> starts "facebook but for X" startup

way to go
They both came after the Android Google+ app...
How Pinterest can drive traffic and increase sales
Not sure about Angular and Knockout, but in Ember the convention is for actions to target a state manager by default. This means you can handle the action differently depending on what state you're in. You could think of it as the action being just a custom event type that a state can sign up for.

I wouldn't consider actions in the template to be logic; if the actual event handler were in the template then I'd see a concern.

I like to think about it like a cycle: the template actions are received by the states, which make changes to the models and controllers, which update the views and templates.
Why? Because one needs to be 18 to legally sign a contract.

If you had a credit card before 18, that means you were added on your parents account as an authorized user and you were piggybacking off of their credit history.

The greater problem here is that credit cards exist in the first place.
Sounds great. I'll buy one. Where's the kickstarter?
Uh, reading that just hurts.
Can you elaborate "a well-implemented REST API is far and away simpler to understand" statement, please? Or do you have some examples or points that may make things clear for me? Thanks in advance.
I agree with you in principle but pragmatically disagree. For better or worse the cultural usage of words and terms define what's appropriate.
You're not refuting the argument. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tu_quoque)
Yeah, that put me off immediately.
the new american dream.
> His story is also a perfect example of why it is so important to get out, give talk

Yep, bullshit con artsist style.
I still don't get why someone would do that...
Can I suggest changing the CSS units for fonts from points to pixels? That way HN will look the same on both Chrome and Firefox for me :)

On Chrome 10pt HN type is 12px on Firefox it's 13.3333px (Mac OS X).
Nicely put. Seems reasonable.
2012 Election Hackathon
I thought about the possibility of somebody hogging all the local ports in the level 2 server but I read somewhere that Stripe was resetting unused ports.
Show People Kindness
Hi Kyle :D Thanks for the comment! Nope, we don't discriminate people based on the their sexual orientation. Due to limited resources and time, we could only focus on problems within our reach. And of course, I used to have problems with staying intimate when I was away.
Evaluate Scheme in Ruby's virtual machine
> That's the beauty of all this, everyone is welcome. If you can't see that, you've missed out on some important lessons in your decades of engineering work..

Not all ideas are equally valid. Socially-driven technology shifts are often not an improvement, yet they can change the industry we all work in. If mobile development is overrun by Rails developers -- and the engineering approaches they promote (often while ignoring history) -- the mobile development community (and the industry) will suffer.
At least you were able to see what it was in. That alone in a massive step forward. And I don't see any problem with Ruby - at least it isn't some proprietary Accenture framework.
The WP store is a little more relaxed than the iOS app store - but - it still doesn't have any way to sideload any apps, which means it's still up to Microsoft, a single central entity, to decide what apps you can install on your device. The same is true for any Metro apps.
Since CED's "selection panel" didn't pick us for their "demo room," we decided to put on our own event. We'll be four blocks from the Raleigh Convention Center, at the offices of LocalSense. All CED TVC12 attendees (and anyone else) are welcome to come visit the Escape Hatch hospitality suite.

Escape the noise and activity of the CED Tech Venture Conference and join us at our hospitality suite. You'll get a chance to meet a select group of North Carolina-based startups and their founders for product demonstrations, networking and one-on-one conversation. Oh, and there will be beer, water & food available as well.

Visit http://fogbeam.com/september_2012.html to RSVP.
Your second paragraph is what I meant

But I've never seen a "software consultancy company" do a project except in Java

Ruby and Python can be beautiful yes, but in the hands of average Java programmers it just becomes a horrid mess
Hey Paul, I'm not opposed to anything you've done but just replying with what I believe the general sentiment is that I'm referring to.

I understand the reasoning. I think the question was more around the idea that KS campaigns are typically viewed as a one shot deal. It's important to pick your rewards and funding goals accordingly. If you pick them incorrectly you blow your shot.

If that's not the case then KS becomes a much less interesting place where people abuse it to raise funds.
The Cupertino company says the content is “objectionable and crude,” according to Apple’s latest rejection letter.

"We train young men to drop fire on people. But their commanders won't allow them to write F-U-C-K on their airplanes... because...? it's obscene!"

-- Colonel Walter E. Kurtz
Mario Kart IRL?
It would get rid of the remote, but it doesn't get rid of the interface. And who wants to talk over a movie you're watching just to change the volume?
Very interesting review. I also get the AppSumo email (although rarely read them any more), but good to see people are seeing much success with it.
Love it. I suspect if the app was based on real data it'd be blocked. Apple would let you attack the same spots though.
Remote debugging ( Chrome for Android ) has been around for a while : https://developers.google.com/chrome/mobile/docs/debugging
what products do you love?
Interesting, it loaded just fine in the text-only "links" browser for me.
From my own experience, a decent RESTful API is perfectly easy to use from the command line using curl. Try that with with a SOAP interface!
> You're being needlessly pedantic.

Um, no. I was being exactly as pedantic as he was.

The difference was that my word choice was actually correct.
This is discussed more up-thread: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4452490
It's great if Brandon got into the YC batch and can pursue his interest in the way he thinks is the best way possible, but I don't see anything in the article that people should use as an excuse to drop out of college for.

I'm happy for Brandon, and it's a fine personal story, but the article made it sound like "I kept procrastinating and getting bad grades, so I dropped out".

There are other ways to address a problem like that. :)
I sympathize, but I'd much rather somebody send me an HTML email than an attached Word document, which is the next likely candidate in most workplaces.
Oracle releases patch for Java vulnerability
I've heard that AppSumo's percentage is as high as 75-80%. Is what you got for your product?
Just Googled the "O'Reilly Data Science Kit" mentioned as one of the prizes and it looks like a really good deal!

http://shop.oreilly.com/category/get/data-science-kit.do
It's certainly not curing cancer or inventing the next generation of transportation. I guess this might be part of the "start small" realization?

It seems like a lot of the college dropouts opting for startups are ultimately limiting themselves from doing the sort of hard problem solving middle-school Brandon wanted to do. I think some level of formal education would be necessary to cure cancer.
That's a bit of a false dichotomy though. SOAP is a giant turd, but it's not the only alternative out there. JSON-RPC is just as easy to understand as REST, without all the pedantry.
Interactive console support is coming. We need to work out a few kinks before it is ready to go
1000x mobile data
Yes, I am aware php allows one to open urls via the file*-procedures (unless it has been disabled on the server -- which is generally a good idea for production deployment). I meant -- what did you end up using for the challenge (url/$filename and $attempt)?
GIS and Public Restrooms?
But there is no regulation on banks that would affect this policy. Actual banks that offer merchant accounts do the exact same thing. They can and do freeze your merchant account freely, leaving you with no access to any undisbursed funds.

I've been through this myself. I had a merchant account about 8 years ago, underwritten by First National Bank of Omaha (the largest private bank in the United States). I got a couple large, unexpected chargebacks all at once from a single scammer that used multiple stolen cards. FNBO decided to create a reserve on my account for several days while they reviewed my account, then decided to terminate it due to the chargebacks. They held several thousand dollars of my money for exactly 180 days before returning it to me. That's money I needed to pay vendors and pay my bills - and it was perfectly legal for this regulated bank to hold it.