skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Alright, textbooks are expensive and it's a step in the right direction. But with average costs for textbooks around $1,200 per year it's not much compared to the cost of tuition.
> Writing the text book is an act of love and/or vanity.
>

You are making the assumption that the author will make a deal with a traditional publisher which will give him/her a 5% to 10% royalty cut. This strategy does not not come out to a lot of money.

I am currently self-publishing a textbook˚ and getting 75% profit margins: $40 sale price - $10 printing cost = $30. My students and friends have been my editors and my proofreaders. LaTeX is my typesetter. If I can sell 1000 copies each term, that would be $60000/year which would pay my rent and allow me two write for a living.

To be honest, though, I must say that love and vanity also factor into the motivation for this project, yet I had always thought of it as a business all this time. Your comment is spot on dhimes, and made me learn something about my true motivations. Thx!

________

[˚] A math and physics textbook for adults. It covers high school math, calculus, mechanics, E&M and linear algebra in just 350 pages. Email if you want to know more.
I've been using zsh for over ten years. Since one of my best friends (now a computational physicist) convinced me to try it in college.

Over time I've temporarily switched to others just to make sure I wasn't being stuck in a rut, but I always have come back to zsh. It's a joy to use as a day to day command line interface.

For writing shell scripts, i.e. actual software implemented in shell, I actually prefer bash. In large part because it's more portable, in the sense that any given machine is likely to have bash already installed.
Let me start by addressing the GNU Radio example Rachel shared:

try {
foo = new foo_bar(a, b, c, d);
return foo;
} catch (...) {
delete foo;
return 0;
}

In this snippet we don't know what the original value of foo is. At first glance that seems to be unimportant because foo is about to get assigned. But actually, whether or not foo is zero is the difference between just bad code and undefined behavior.

In this example, the only thing in the try block that can throw is the expression "new foo_bar(a, b, c, d)" Since the code behaves in the expected way if that doesn't throw, let's only consider the case where that does throw.

Note that if a new expression throws it is the responsibility of the runtime new operator to clean up anything that has been allocated. (There is one small caveat here which isn't consequential.)

Also note that if the new expression throws, the value of foo is unchanged. This means that in the case that we are considering here (the new expression throws) the "delete foo" is deleting the original value of foo. This means that what happens depends on that original value. There are three cases, foo was NULL, foo pointed to an existing object, or foo was uninitialized memory. (The case where foo points to a deleted object is really just the same as foo being uninitialized memory.)

The cases:

) foo is zero. In this case "delete foo" is harmless and the only bug is that it does nothing, can lead to confusion in readers, and should be removed.

) foo points to an existing object. If we assume that this code doesn't leak, then there is another pointer somewhere that also points to that object. In the case we are considering (the throw case) this code is going to delete this object (the one that foo originally pointed to, not the one that new was trying to create--that one has already been cleaned up). This means that when the code tries to access this object (which it will eventually, even if just to delete it) we will invoke undefined behavior.

) foo is uninitialized memory. In this case we invoke undefined behavior as soon as we attempt to "delete foo"

I think that using exceptions is the way to write C++ code, but I don't think anyone should use them until they understand the fundamentals of exception-safe code.

I have an entire talk about why to use exceptions and how to use them safely in C++. My site at exceptionsafecode.com has a video of both my Classic C++ talk given at last year's Silicon Valley Code Camp and my "two-parter" that includes the C++11 information that I did for C++ Now! (BoostCon). I'm giving the two-part talk again in a few days at this year's Silicon Valley Code Camp.

Information about Silicon Valley Code Camp (which free and in just a few days) is here: http://www.siliconvalley-codecamp.com

My session is here: http://www.siliconvalley-codecamp.com/Sessions.aspx?SessionI...

The C++/C++11 Track that I put together is here: http://www.siliconvalley-codecamp.com/Sessions.aspx?track=33

My website with videos of my talks is here: http://exceptionsafecode.com

And I can be contacted at "jon@" the exceptionsafecode domain.
I'm not sure months is enough to just put it out.

Word has it they're working on the iOS app and have been frantically doing so.

I don't see any advantage in willfully delaying. They only shaft potential lost users in doing so. I doubt any many folks folks are dumping their iPhone due to the maps and all Google does is loose contact with customers in the process and give Apple a chance to fill the void.
Maps is just one item in the iPhone launch that doesn't look to good for Apple. Sure, they are going to sell millions of iPhone 5s but it's the little things that have just never happened:

1. Maps is in beta, when Apple never let anyone see anything without polish.

2. There were no cases or accessories in the Apple store. Best Buy has third party stuff as do other stores. But that is money left on the table for someone else to pick up.

3. No adapters. The local Apple store didn't get any and doesn't expect them for weeks.

I half-joked to my wife that this post-Jobs era is already starting to unravel. Only half because I worry I am right and I don't want to be.
Branding is terrible, especially given that vacation is an extremely American term and they mention the European market.

In Europe people have rented out holiday homes for as long as I know. There are some big incumbents in the market, this one for example: http://www.novasol.co.uk/

Novasol specialise in the Germanic, Scandinavian and Eastern European.

The problem myvr will have isn't just persuading advertisers that they can deliver customers (margins are slim and they can only afford to advertise in one place), but also to convince holidaymakers that the risk is virtually non-existent.

That's one of the things the incumbents work hard on, visiting every property each year and auditing it to ensure that it is as advertised and hasn't dropped in standard, and that all of the safety things (contracts, insurance) are in place.
Sloppy security? Apple and Nokia conceal fewer sensitive sites than Google Maps
Thank you for that explanation. My basic issue is that it is difficult to tell statements with great scientific certainty apart from pure conjecture.
Someone had to know that Maps was a bad idea. A huge step backwards. They had to know.

They know exactly that. Luckily, it's a server driven service, so over time everything can magically get better. They are going to aggressively harvest user data throughout the getting better process. Their options were: launch bad and get better as fast as possible (using millions of devices for feedback) or spend a few years doing things by hand then still releasing something subpar. Rip the bandaid off now.

In every other case HN screams "more data > clever algorithms!" -- this is their way of more data. It'll be painful at first, but it will get better quickly. It has only been a week since public public release. It has been sucking in betas for months too. None of this is new, exciting, or newsworthy. Release your burdens and get back to work.
Isn't that a very recent feature?
Yeah, I've always wished that I could query my SQL databases with Prolog. It's really so much more powerful than SQL, and allows you to actually create abstractions, rather than repeating yourself endlessly in joining tables together or using clunky views.
>We recommend you use inflammatory titles to expedite your case.

No "we" don't.
I would add not using the relevant cursor for things that are clickable. Its not perfect ( especially for mobile), but its a huge hint.
The Terrible Cost of a Bad Hire — Personalities to Watch Out For
To add to your tip #7: Get to know your local user group. Google "PHP/Python/RoR/etc [Insert City here]".

They might be doing monthly meetings, code sprint, bug squashing parties, or just enjoying a beer once in a while. That allows you to stay on top of what is going locally, get to know other freelancers, grow your network and have fun!
Monads are a general concept that happen to be a handy way to wrap up IO and protect Haskell from the ugliness of its impure nature. At its core, monads have nothing to do with IO and are used in a lot of non-IO situations.

I'd recommend Google for "Maybe monad in {insert favorite language here}" to at least grok the idea that monads are a more general concept.
I guess the ultimate test would be if they let the bots loose in an online multiplayer FPS environment and see if anyone noticed.

Bonus points if the bot can sing annoying, off-key pop songs in the pre-game loading screen, to mimic the true CoD Xbox Live experience.
This is immediately what I thought when I saw the title. It is pretty difficult to tell a human from a bot when you only have a very small set of predetermined actions.
Lisbon Javascript Conference - Live Stream
If humans get a 40% of 'humanity', we have a problem with the definition of 'human' or with the rules of the game or whatever. I guess in order to pass as humans they should get a 'standard' score of humanity. Either that or the rules are strange.
On Facebook and Twitter in China
meta: I hate posts about "you should hate this post because I don't like it" :)
apple, aapl, app
Oh. I did not know that. I will have to investigate further. Thank you.
In order to add an mp3 onto my iPhone I need to: start up iTunes and wait for it to load; plug in my iPhone to my iMac; find the song and drag and drop it into iTunes; click on Sync, and then wait for Sync to finish everything. If I haven't synced my iPhone in a while, then it could take 10+ minutes, since it has to backup, copy new Applications, etc.

What it should be is: plug my iPhone into my Mac; my iPhone should show up in Finder or on the Desktop; Find my mp3 and drag and drop it onto my iPhone icon; unplug my iPhone. I have no idea why I need to interact with iTunes at all.
"Human players received an average humanness rating of only 40 percent."

The judging system needs to be seriously reevaluated.
Beautiful demos like this make me even sadder that Microsoft don't plan on supporting WebGL in IE.
HoneyMap Offers Real-Time Glimpse of Cyber Attacks as They Happen.
Thank you for this input that seems obvious, but appears to be overlooked by most in this thread.

It also strikes me that Apple Maps do not have a web interface (unless I'm wrong). In my experience, anytime something I care about in my neighborhood is misplaced on Google Maps, I use the web interface to correct the location. Without this ability, I imagine that it could take Apple a long time to reach parity with Google Maps.
As witnessed by the other comment below yours, I have heard people refer to iTunes as a good piece of software in the past. (I am, incidentally, not one of those. I hate iTunes with a passion). The point being, this is a subjective measure.

Does a bad UI make software like iTunes "incomplete"? Again, it depends on your perspective. Missing, or bad data, as is the case in this instance, seems to be a bit less contentious, as can be seen in the quasi-unanimous anger towards the new maps.
Germany Efforts to Recruit Men in Child Care
On a tree branch? Never seen one of those at a park.
In bash, I press ctrl-r and then enter part of the command. additional ctrl-r's cycle.
I get that the real world doesn't work like that, but I feel like that is the reality that I was sold by their marketing. It is incredibly disappointing that they cannot see it realized.
So, use your paying customers as beta testers? Not an ideal solution.
Microsoft calls for $5B investment in U.S. education
No, really, I'm not being snide. I honestly believe that Rust is of great interest, as is the effort and front of new language exploration. However, there is an intrinsic quality of language: it is infinitely useful, or not useful, depending on one thing only: the user.
People keep saying "this is their way of more data". Can someone explain exactly how this data is acquired? If I enter an address, and it gives me the wrong location, how does it know that it was wrong? How does it get better data?
c.f. every google product ever
I think many people in IT want to believe in "AI that's as good as human" so much that they erode the notions of humanity to make computers pass.

For example, a chat bot can certainly behave as the worst chat user, but that doesn't mean they can hold an intelligent conversions, which is really what we should care about. AI should simulate human intelligence, but very often all we're seeing is simulation of human stupidity. That's what happened in this case as well.

To me, good AI would be characterized by ability to handle highly unusual situations, not by mimicking irrational behavior.
I think after you write a manual for your first few projects and clearly less than 1% of your users read it, it gets hard to motivate yourself to write another manual.
Another thing. A freelancer starting out and one who is "experienced" are quite different scenarios.

I have loads of work that I don't often have to chase, because I have a profile.

Starting out you need to do the legwork to find clients. Think outside the box in contacting people you think could find you work. It will not come find you.
I am opposite, I almost never watch video materials or movies, or listen to podcasts.

I prefer learning from books. :-)
Not quite but still cool.
Well, given what I was asked when a friend was getting a Federal clearance, I can imagine it would pop up in government. Although, to be fair to the interviewer and FBI, they were looking for stuff that was not public but could be used for blackmail.

One of the danger signs used to be debt held by people in the defense industry. Someone paying off the debts for some secrets was modus operandi.
Are there really only five? I think you could write a book ;)
The economics of video games
Oh. Is that what they are? Never knew that. Well, you learn something new every day. :-) (Thank you very much).
That isn't the only problem. It's the only problem _you_ care about.
If that is the case the Apple is done for. Getting complacent like that means Apple is dead.

And I fear you may be right. This is not something Jobs would have allowed.
Honestly? Not having to deal with support ranks slightly above dealing with support and having a great outcome. I suspect I'm not alone on this.

I've never had to return anything to Amazon or raise a support issue with Google (at least on their free products).
IO is just one example of a monad. (It might be called the "canonical" example, since monads provide a very neat functional solution to the highly non-function problem of interacting with the real world.)

Other examples include lists and functions. (Anything which satisfies the monad laws can be called a monad, there isn't any restriction or definition other than that.)
It faded away because it was too difficult to get the prompt working?
Context is, as they say, everything. "Meh to 'risk' in the context of "I as an employer should consider females more risky".

But... touché.
changing apple to orange and putting shitty in front of the word maps isn't satire. it's find/replace in notepad.
Yes, you're going to lose some of those early customers as you keep raising your rates. Most of them have some really bad experience with lowball bids that they'll stick with you quite a ways. As always, it's the referrals that matter most.
makes me wonder whether this also has to do with root access into the device (debug mode). I.e., Apple has its own version of the chip that allows them to enter in that mode.
Take it to the next level selecting textbooks for required classes at a school with 10,000+ freshman / year that's far more tempting. Even just as an ego thing where you assume 'your' book is much better than all the other options.
Three.js lists about half a dozen of car related demos including the one featured

http://mrdoob.github.com/three.js/

A real Camaro: http://mrdoob.github.com/three.js/examples/webgl_loader_ctm_...

A car you can actually control: http://helloracer.com/webgl/

Or even two of them: http://mrdoob.github.com/three.js/examples/webgl_materials_c...
>>To pay for the $500-million-a-year investment in education, Smith proposed that Congress add 20,000 high-skill immigration visas dedicated to workers in STEM fields to the existing 85,000 H-1B visas allowed each year. Congress should charge $10,000 for each of the 20,000 H-1Bs, he said. H-1B applications normally cost about $2,800 for large companies.

As a current H1B holder, this infuriates me. How is it a rational plan to more than triple the cost of H1Bs? Doing so will only make it more difficult for skilled foreigners to find jobs in the United States, creating a very large shortage in the short term.
Great game!

It needs a way to keep score or timer on how long you last.

It took about 10 games before I became good at it, and I had to read the comments here to figure out the space bar.
Isn't that because they have China using a local dataset, that doesn't even have the rest of the world on the map?
Yeah, they haven't passed the Turing test, which is a test of very complex and difficult problems (ones which humans do effortlessly but computers cannot emulate).

This is a much simpler set of behaviors for a computer to emulate. It's an interesting test of AI for sure, but it shouldn't be called a Turing test.
Seems exactly wrong to me - Google uses its free customers as beta testers, whereas its paying customers (Google Apps users) don't get to see the products until a year later.
It doesn't take a 'state actor' to launch a DDoS attack. Money buys a botnet. CloudFlare CEO Matthew Prince was on Bloomberg TV the other day discussing these recent attacks: http://www.bloomberg.com/video/wells-fargo-is-latest-bank-hi...
"Find work, don't let it find you"

Why not let it find you as well ? If you have experience and the right skillset, you will usually be found more often than you finding work yourself. I usually get good gigs in my industry by getting found a lot more than finding.
Jobs was well known for being biased to shipping over having a perfect product aka "Real Artists Ship". The first version of OSX had non-functional CD writing, from what I recall (fixed in the first update). Siri was released as beta, attenagate, the iMovie and Final Cut rewrites -- these all happened under Jobs.
Any one else reminded of Minority Report? The google precogs found you guilty of future crime..
Note that jQuery isn't necessarily a monad in the strictest sense (i.e. it's unclear whether it satisfies the laws), but it certainly has many attributes that are similar, and so is a good example nonetheless.

Reference: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/10496932/is-jquery-a-mona...
Having done a little bit of reading, I would have to agree. Yes, this is exactly what monads are for.
I keep hearing from iphone users that phrase almost verbatim: "Turn by turn navigation is awesome though".

If it's so awesome, why didn't you buy a standalone GPS or an Android phone over the last few years? Because it's nifty but for most iPhone users this is not a must-have feature. Which is why Apple can get away with shipping a crap maps app.
When you have access to a lot of machines run by different organizations but not administration privileges on most of them, it's a hassle.
It was easier to learn to program in several languages than in one
So? It's a truth in advertising legislation. It's why you can't buy a piece of toast in a box labelled Pizza Napoletana, or (for HN) a Galaxy SIII in a gox labelled "iPhone 5"
Ah, so a lot of it is that you like the config language better! That would not have occurred to me. Thank you for your reply.
http://www.apple.com/hotnews/openiphoneletter/

> We want to do the right thing for our valued iPhone customers. We apologize for disappointing some of you, and we are doing our best to live up to your high expectations of Apple.

Steve Jobs

Apple CEO
Looks down from here :(
(and here: http://www.isup.me/www.bitcoinfoundation.org)
Gizmodo claims to know why Google Maps were dropped: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4577866

According to their sources, Google was keeping Apple from adding turn-by-turn directions without complying to some conditions that were too onerous for Apple.
Yeah, they totally picked the wrong 4-letter domain.
http://benvanik.github.com/WebGL-Inspector/
Python decorator for retrying a function N times
This has been tried over and over.
I didn't make a comment on previous behavior of Apple, or whether or not Apple has a monopoly. I was saying that Google could force Apple's hand in terms of how they behave in approving or rejecting apps, if Apple acts in an anti-competitive way with respect to a Google Maps app. If Apple doesn't play it right, it could draw the ire of the DoJ or FTC, which they definitely do not want.

If they don't allow a Google Maps app on the iPhone App Store, or if they drag their heels in approving the app, especially given all the outrage from the customers, I believe this is clearly anti-competitive behavior.

Once Google has one available, if Apple doesn't readily approve it, I think a very, very strong case could be made that they are holding back Google's app in order to help their App gain traction. Since only Apple has the power to approve or reject apps from the App Store, if that isn't the definition of anti-competitive, I don't know what is.
I downloaded and installed the application yesterday and got caught playing some silly tower defense game for an hour when I should have been working.

From the time I was playing around with it, it seems to work really well. I didn't notice any weirdness with the applications. They provide their own "store", so my guess is that they've vetted certain apps to make sure they work properly.

Once thing that I did notice is that the application is using the default program icon from Visual Studio (the one with the three colored boxes). All that work and they can't put in their own application icon?
I'd like to add: Don't reprogram the command sequence for browser page search to a site specific search bar.
Completely agree. Perhaps I don't rely on the app as much as others, but I do find myself using it at least once a week. I personally haven't had any real problems since launch. But expected there to be quite a few hurdles at first. I'm an iOS user, but don't consider myself a fanboy. But I expect them to really push this and create something beautiful and useful over time, hopefully sooner than later. I'm anxiously awaiting.
I think the original swing patent is pretty interesting. It is different from just a piece of wood held by two ropes / chains. Heck, there seems to be a lot of different types of swings that got patent protection. Must of been a competitive field.
Great post!

I would just add - keep a library of your own design/code snippets. Developing my own CMS system made my work a lot faster on a long run.

I also always explain to my non-tech clients what technology are we using and why some things take more time than other ones. It makes the communication easier, they learn something on the way and during our next project together I can always refer to it - You know, just like last time, if you want to completely reshape structure of the database, it might take a few minutes.