skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
So many times I've had an idea and not long later someone has come out with that exact product - not because they stole it from me but because they come up with it themselves. The ability to execute on that idea is much more important.
Any plans on when 2.0.0 will be the standard? When will it be released to the world and when will it be adopted by people?
It sounds like your real contribution isn't solving high-leverage problems, it's identifying high-leverage problems. This is a rare skill, no matter how obvious they seem to you.
Lots of industries do this. Patents are useful when it's obvious what your idea is, and where it's easy for people/competitors to have have a poke inside. Like a vacuum cleaner or a non-reflective mobile-phone screen coating, or one-click or something like that.

But for industries where that's not the case, like rockets (my current) or to pick another example from a previous job, magnetic bearings for sub-sea tubo-machinery installations like natural gas compressors[1], it makes no sense to file a patent. It's much easier to keep it a secret, because it's not like your competitors are going to scuba-dive down to the compressor control cabinet, whip out a JTAG and see how you've implemented your control loop on an FPGA.

Likewise, if you do patent it, it's very difficult to prove an infringement for the same reasons.

So essentially, in industries where it's not the case that your competitors can see what you've done, secrets over patents is the norm, in my experience, and has been for while.

[1] Mag bearings use electromagnetic stators and magnetic collars on the shaft to levitate the shaft inside a bit of spinning equipment. This means it's entirely non-contact, dramatically reducing wear, especially useful on difficult-to-service installations like sub-sea.
> For years, I used a debit card from Nationwide in the UK to withdraw currency all over the world

Yep, you and thousands of others. Unfortunately expats ruined it for everyone else, simply using it as a way to draw money from their UK accounts when retired in Spain or wherever, never giving a penny to Nationwide. They probably made a loss on each of these customers so they withdrew the service.

They really just charged the Visa wholesale rate for ATM withdrawals and purchases abroad with no fees or markup or anything. It was fantastic.
As long as you can keep control over your organization. With anything significantly large enough, it's probably not too hard to slip a spy in.
Transactional Memory / Automatic Mutual Exclusion in PyPy
A lot of companies choose to keep their intellectual property as "trade secrets" instead. (Like the Coke recipe, etc.) Just like SpaceX, it can often be better for the company than a patent.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trade_secret
What is Inferno?
Indeed, but it's also useful in order to detect at a glance the order of magnitude of a literal. For instance, if I come across 10_000_000 in some code, I don't need to interrupt my train of thought to meticulously count the zeroes; I instantly know that's ten million. I couldn't say the same if it was instead written as 100000000.
Hear folks 'round these parts tell it, Apple deserves anything and everything they get.
It is if you're representing a flag word.
Windows 8 Upgrade: No Touch, No Good
Are you on Facebook? Check out MyPermissions
Is there anyway to see that graphic in a large, explorable format?
I think one should worry if one ever feels they've learned all they need to know. At the same time some 30 or 40 year olds will say things like "just wait until x happens..." and I always wonder why they stop there and don't get into more detail. I guess at 14 most of us wouldn't have grasped theses "truths" which reveal themselves later. Maybe we can't at 24, 44, etc. I'm really interested in what others feel I will learn not because its true (it may be) but because I like to see if our perspectives differ, and why.
The new website of the C++ standard
2'. In many countries, as soon as you step out of the airport and/or a comfy tourist district, cash is the only available payment method. Including the cost of transportation to the nearest ATM. Which may or may not have a skimmer on it.
Bookmarks need a MAJOR redesign, so glad to see this. So much technology has changed and yet no one has kept up. Delicious used to be my go to place as I have been using it since 2005, but no one integrates/leverage social and all the other players out there.

Buffer + evernote + pocket + email + screenshot = awesome new bookmarking tool.

On top of bookmarking, you want content to be able to archive and follow up. Be notified if a site you bookmarked has updated. Get all the details of a sites (twitter/facebook/etc. link up with data and see if ur already following them,etc.)

Build a bookmarking system with utility as a service/tool and not as a storage/organizer. Think about how many links you tweet/share/etc. Make it easier to do this and actually find stuff that you saved but can't remember.

Okay - enough of the rant!
A picture should not be worth a thousand words. Any chart included in a report should be an illustration of a single sentence like "sales are way up this quarter" or "visit frequency is highly correlated to user age".
C arrays that live on the stack have to be created with a constant size (at least before C99). It's a limitation of the language regardless of any machine or stack size.
An understandable guide to the statistics behind election prediction
Hey Google, Your Nexus 7 Marketing Images Look Like Crap
Of all the Apple conjecture on the internet, the writing about the new connector is the worst.

So the author's premise is that the new connector is a profit grab. What evidence supports this claim? Is there even one source from within Apple who has disclosed this? I haven't seen it.

Let's look at what we do know. The connector previously used on iOS devices was the 30-pin connector. This connector hasn't changed (on the device end) since the first iPod was introduced in 2001. That's an eleven year run on a single connector. To give some sense of perspective, the first iPods only had Firewire connectors, because USB 2.0 wasn't ratified until late 2001. The 30-pin connector is old. In technology terms, it's ancient.

So I have to ask you, does a company who changes connectors once in eleven years seem like the type of company that is motivated by short term profits? I think that's a pretty stupid assertion.

Let's also have a look at the connector. The new lightning connector is small, strong, omni-directional, and all digital (only important in contrast to the old connector). All of these are dramatic improvements. I've seen a lot of complaints that Apple didn't just use mini-USB. Guess what, mini-USB sucks. The connector is fragile and is omni-directional. It's tiny, so many people have a difficult time identifying which direction it should plug in. All USB connectors suffer from this pain, because USB is designed to be dirt cheap. Apple doesn't care about dirt cheap, they care about good design.

If you have read any background on the various connectors available on mobile phones, you'd know that the Lightning connector is one of the best designs out there.

If I had to guess (and my guess is as good as yours), I'd say that the biggest motivation for the new connector was size. The old 30-pin connector is HUGE. The female side of the plug is even larger than you're picturing in your mind. Watch the iFixit iPhone 5 teardown, then watch the iPhone 4 teardown:

http://www.ifixit.com/Teardown/iPhone+5+Teardown/10525/1

http://www.ifixit.com/Teardown/iPhone+4+Teardown/3130/1

The internals of the Lightning connector are much, much smaller. Given Apple obsession with small/thin, this seems like the blindingly obvious motivation.

The real truth will be the test of time. If they switch connectors again in less than 5 years, I'll take apart my iPhone and eat the pieces.
Good visualizations show trends that would take longer to discover by reading the numbers. They're a lot more user friendly, too.

I think they're a great communication tool between the technical people and everyone else, and it creates a simpler dialog. "Why is there such a big drop in the graph here" "Well, our traffic was lower because..."

I think it's also an emotional/psychological thing. Business people like to see upwards trends! It makes them more confident in the business.

etc. I'm sure there are far more qualified people to answer this.
Like this? https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&...
You get the key once and its fingerprint is published repeatedly.
Whenever I make assumptions about HN, I'm usually wrong :) thanks for the info
I spent a week in Quebec City a month ago and didn't use any local currency -- just charged everything. Hotel, restaurants, gas; they all take Visa/MC. I don't expect to travel there often, so I didn't want the hassle of withdrawing too much and then getting screwed on both sides of the currency conversion (USD->CAD->USD).
And if it was LISP doing this, people would be gushing all over it...
Windows 8′s Greatest Sin
How to Find the Image That Best Represents a Web Page
> does it really matter how it's implemented in this game?

Yes, I imagine it would affect gameplay quite a bit.
Brilliant Collection of Sexy iPad App Icons
In the limit, that is zero. Area goes as O(N^2), volume as O(N^3), so if you make it big enough, you could wrap it in a meter of solid steel, and it would still float (guesstimate: a liter of this would lift about a gram of steel, so a cubic kilometer would lift about 10^12 grams or 10^6 tons of steel. You would need 6*10^6 square meters of cover, so you could use 160 kg steel per square meter => you will need something much bigger than a cubic kilometer to get at a meter of steel)

Your real problem is keeping the fabric from being pushed in. It does not matter much, but for that, you may not need to fill the whole thing with stuff.
I was looking forward to this having seen the video, but it crashes every time when I click on from the screen that shows the controls - no reason given. I have 8Gb of RAM and good performance attributes in a Lenovo Z570, so there's nothing immediately obvious in my hardware environment.
Much more brittle, handicapping, and more expensive to boot. What if the user wants to zoom in a portion of the data, ignore all but top 3 categories, pan over 100s of points in a series?
An alternative distributed os, descendant to plan9.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inferno_%28operating_system%29
There's a Boost header with macros that provide this for C and C++.

int i = BOOST_BINARY( 1 0010 0010 0000 1000 );
I always thought the fundamental difference between a functional and imperative language is that a functional language is built up from expressions, whereas an imperative one is built up from statements.
It's scheduled for a Feb 2013 release, and adoption among Rails folks will likely depend on how painful it is to upgrade to from 1.9.3.
Apologies for being somewhat off-topic, but does anybody know if there are citizenship requirements for working at a place like SpaceX?

I have a solid background in materials science and metallurgy from a world-class university, and find what Musk is doing very inspirational. After I finish my PhD, I'd love to be a part of it, but I'm British and I know with some companies in the industry there're citizenship requirements for security reasons. As he mentions in the interview, they wouldn't want China stealing their ideas, for example. And I know a lot of the job postings on SpaceX list "US citizen or permanent resident" as a requirement, but I didn't know if this was a hard and fast rule, or whether exceptions are possible.
Resharper is too unreliable to be productive from experience. We bought a crap load of licenses but after about a month, devs were uninstalling it.

It's ok for tiny projects, but not medium to large sized ones.
Cloud is a marketing term and is pretty worthless. Most of the time cloud = some datacenter, datacenter usually = rented space in someone else's datacenter or a VM. Cloud does not automatically mean better, faster, safer. You can build an app to be more resilient but you dont get that for free just because there's cloud in the title.

The author seems to think there's a magic cloud switch that makes your app work in multiple datacenters all at once. Apparently virtualisation makes that easy. VMs are going to keep you data in sync? They're going to fail over perfectly in all conditions? They're going to make sure data is routed to the best zone?
"There is now (thanks to CERN's presence :-) a working group on reflection in C++."

A few years ago I built an entire framework for automatic reflection in C++ - it worked by querying the export table of the executable or library. Eventually I lost interest and let the project slide, but I think this approach would be a good one to build on.
My (limited) understanding is you can still argue prior art to invalidate the patent. First to file would only come up if both SpaceX and a Chinese company had patents and went to court.

The wiki article expounds a little:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leahy-Smith_America_Invents_Act...
Yes; Edison invented some toys. Tesla invented the modern industrial power complex, almost wholly from his own head. You almost have to think he was a time traveler or alien or something, to get thousands of details exactly right to propel a civilization into the electric age.
PF90 right next to the body armor on the upper level? Unstoppable. Especially if you added proximity mines.
I think it would be better worded as this: if you create a port/version/mod of Shen, it must be able to execute spec-compliant Shen code.

Who decides whether a language I come up with is a port/version/mod of Shen? How much of Shen's features can I include without crossing that threshold? Does that threshold move if I can point to other non-Shen languages as the source of those ideas?
Dropbox-as-a-Database, the tutorial
I've been using Amazon for years to sell. They make it so easy. Also, they have added a slick way to buy shipping now too. I love it!

My only complaint is the fees, but I accept that as the price I pay for making it so easy and painless and such a convenience to sell nearly anything.
A Google Tax?
This is such a dumb idea it blows my mind. Create something useful.
sure - but signing a generic NDA on a cheap piece of copy paper doesn't cost much...so w/e, if it makes someone feel better then don't worry about it.
So, the speed of an observer affects its perceived energy of light. How does "conservation of energy" apply? (I don't know what is contributing to the energy of this system.)
On another satirical but deeply intellectually serious note:

http://conal.net/blog/posts/the-c-language-is-purely-functio...

By Conal Elliot.
> you might get hit by fees from your own bank for using an overseas ATM as well

Check with your bank before you travel. I'm with Citibank, and they have a bunch of packages that they can enable on your account for free that remove foreign transaction fees (e.g., if you're a student; if you have more than 50k in cash; if you have a mortgage with them; etc.).

But, it being a bank, it's not like they're going to enable that stuff unless you ask for it first, and don't even think about getting it waived when you get back...
It pretty much explains the 50-70 year old exec with the 23 year old arm candy that seems to be so common...2 people in their relative primes.
WordPress uses them in a similar way to how it sounds like Facebook is using them. I wonder how many others are misusing the term.
He was a piss-poor research leader, with a sweatshop for researchers and about zero participation of his Engineers in profit sharing. He was a greedy Gilded Age industrialist.
I guess this is the other side of the coin as far as their brashly-use-trademarks-and-sort-it-out-later methods go. Not a bad track record though.
If you fight this, will you :

a) change the system and improve your success ?

b) fail and lower your success ?
very cool! I love .NET!
Windows 8: Not for desktops
Political Correctness is about hypersensitivity to possible insult to the point that using direct and clear communication is frowned upon in the public discourse.

Political Correctness is an extraordinarily sad advance of style over substance that has attempted to address the language used to describe problems in our society over actually addressing the problems themselves.

Ultimately, Political Correctness is yet another societal/political power grab in an attempt to control the very words that come out of everyones' mouths. Free speech is just too much individual power for many Utopians in society, but they've had so much trouble trying to legislate against the First Amendment[or other country's free speech protection]. Political Correctness is the next best thing for them, I guess.
DECAY: a zombie movie from CERN studients
It's strange how I can read an article in The Economist about Benoit Mandelbrot's "multidisiplinary" approach that makes almost no mention of his work on Economics.

To be fair, most of the stuff that isn't pretty pictures goes past me. However, one thing he did do was completely eliminate the validity of the (Nobel-prize winning) Black-Scholes model.

So we have E. Fama (another Nobel prize winner) with his efficient market hypothesis, stating that in a perfectly rational market, prices are random. The loophole for economic theorists, and the basis for Black-Scholes, was that price variances were thought to be predictable. Prices were random, but their fluctuations were generally not, and could be modeled as a Gaussian distribution. Mandelbrot suggested that this a soothing inaccuracy: prices were capable of varying much more wildly than that. He suggested that a Pareto distribution was more accurate.

So then we have one of the more fundamental problems in Economics: it is not a science. It's more of a cult for math geeks, in my opinion. If you can't prove that markets follow a Pareto distribution (implying an unpredictably-random price volatility), then why should economists listen to you? Black-Scholes gives them partial results, and that's better than nothing, right?

Right?

B. Mandelbrot: The Misbehavior of Markets: A Fractal View of Financial Turbulence
http://www.amazon.com/Misbehavior-Markets-Fractal-Financial-...
A related question: are there any credit cards which don't charge exorbitant fees when used abroad? A friend of mine is planning on travelling extensively in East Asia, South Asia, Turkey, etc. for several months, and I'm looking for recommendations for her.
Graphics help make stories memorable. There is a well-documented physiological phenomena called the “picture superiority effect.” Stories told with pictures and words are more memorable than when told verbally or with words alone. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Picture_superiority_effect
Address space is not limited by RAM. The only concern is fixed vs expandable width address.
That's already been granted in this argument. The question now is, given an infinite stack, is this programming style Turing-complete?
Yes -- the Capital One cards are well known for not charging a foreign transaction fee. I keep one just for international travel.
I love seeing smaller companies take on Adobe, but branding this as a replacement for Photoshop is a mistake.

Photoshop is such a large and complex beast that nothing small and focused could ever replace it. That's Photoshop's true strength. It manages to be the industry standard across a whole slew of slightly different industries.

Nobody uses the whole thing. Few people use even half of Photoshop's features. Competing against it on a specific feature may be possible, and that's precisely what this app does.

But even matching what Photoshop does for one segment of users won't be enough. To beat Photoshop, you have o be 10x better at that one feature---otherwise users will stick with the industry standard.
Somehow I'm not worried about their brand getting usurped.
I think most people would be more likely to click this if it didn't say "Seriously, just do it."
Googler on language of the future (website)
Imagine An Inconvenient Truth[1] with all the charts and visuals replaced with tables of percentages....

[1]: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0497116/

Edit: where's that Markdown standard spec...
RubyMotion is 20% off until Sunday
Try applying and find out. You have nothing to lose but a little time.
That is a purely theoretical concern, not a practical blocker against any program anyone would ever run.
Sorry about this - we'll take a look. Can I ask What browser you are using?
"Basically we felt that we wanted to prove you don’t have to charge $600 to deliver a phone that has the latest-generation technologies."

That's disingenuous. Without LTE this phone does not have the latest generation technologies. I think Google screwed up with the Nexus 4. The previous Nexus phones were definitely flagship, top of the line devices. This one is already obsolete before it even ships.
WTF is doxing?
ok but how did Musk got to be a millionaire? hint: execution.
libre office seems to be more hip :-p
"just not anonymously"

Just not depending on anything in the environment either except globals, which is a huge limitation. So writing a function
inc by = \x -> x + by
becomes unnecessarily difficult for example.
You don't even need aerographite for that: http://www.dangermouse.net/gurps/zeppelin/vacuum.html

However, you need a material strong enough not to implode due to the outside pressure of air. Not sure how good material tech is for that.

Even if it were strong enough, you would have constant "leaks" of air into the vacuum cells. So you would need a vacuum pump working all the time. Still might be worth it, though.
Native vs. HTML5 Mobile App Development: Which Option is Best?
Or we could be more precise and acknowledge there are several related features in the realm of "functional" and a language may have some but not all of them, and not make it into a fan club battle.

Same goes for OO, which has something like 9 well-known defining features.
Conversion without asking is actually against credit card merchant agreements (and I assume the debit card agreements too, although I actually can't find this anywhere). I wouldn't be surprised if you could complain to your bank if what was reported here was actually true.
I'm on my feet, step aside man

Get out my way, I got a mind of my own

Beat all my fears as a young man

Now that I'm grown, I don't fear the unknown

-- Living Colour - Young Man - http://youtu.be/T7e2kVEFPrE
>>First to file would only come up if both SpaceX and a Chinese company had patents and went to court.

If they went to court in the same country, you mean.
Note that this has a double meaning. He's not just talking about "the Chinese" and their well known cavalier attitude toward intellectual property, he's specifically talking about the government of China, which is ultimately the operator of the Long March launch vehicles. Suing sovereign governments for patent infringement has historically not been a winning proposition.
Hurricanes & Earthquakes: Prediction vs. Forecasting In Information Security
And look at all the linux distros that do that. Oh right, they don't. They just go "here's our public key" and people download it over ftp from the exact spot they are getting the binaries, do nothing to verify it, and pretend that got them security. Hence, theatre. Anyone who would actually do it right already has the tools to do so, ssh public keys work just like pgp public keys.
Infographic: 1.36 years lost in planning a trip
http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=doxing
I won't be in a position to apply for another two years, but if I thought there was even a chance of being accepted there're things I could do in the meantime to make myself a much more attractive applicant.
Emoji Apps No Longer Welcome in App Store Following Native iOS 6 Support