skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Nice, does it allow OEMs to decide what to "reset" to though?
Really? I feel pretty much the exact opposite way. I find the docs to be thorough, accurate, and concise.
Visitor Tracking Without Cookies (or How To Abuse HTTP 301s)
Time and attention are worth something
I think that yes, he means the software update. I'm afraid you're mistaken on where the defaults lie, though.

An out-of-the-box Windows will download and install the software and then automatically reboot the PC. You have to explicitly change the settings to avoid that.

On Fedora, Ubuntu, Arch and Mint (the desktop distros I've used at one point or another) you will be notified that the updates are available but you have to explicitly say that you want them installed. If they require special privileges, you will be asked for a sudo password. If they require a restart, you have to approve it explicitly as well.
Bootstrap buttons don't look that bad. What really matters is the quality of the service and APIs.
Thanks, Leon.
An opinion article is not really an reliable source.
Same law says:

>directors of a corporation ... are clothed with [the] presumption, which the law accords to them, of being [motivated] in their conduct by a bona fide regard for the interests of the corporation whose affairs the stockholders have committed to their charge

what that mean, is up to interpretation, but I thank you for encourage me to read up on it. Its clearly not a clean cut case as I first thought.

(better link:
http://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/8146/are-u-s-com...)
> Maybe I am being overly sensitive...?

I think so.
That's what all of these articles about RMS kind of approximately indicate - he has a point, and his point being completely unassailably valid doesn't detract whatsoever from his being a despicable human being.
You can also get non-crapware machines if you buy from most OEMs' "small business" divisions.
Thanks J!
If someone does a man-in-the-middle attack on a clueless user, the user may accept an invalid certificate for your site because they are rushing through to go get one of their passwords. Offline password managers are better at mitigating the non-security-minded user problem.
But politics and money typically do not dictate scientific results, as evidenced by the failure of the amyloid-targeted trials mentioned in the article.
Internet Explorer 10 Brings HTML5 to Windows Phone 8
Michigan is doing a lot for entrepreneurs, especially in Detroit. Dan Gilbert of Quicken is going above and beyond to join the effort. With the likes of DVP, and Bizdom, Detroit is quickly becoming a tech industry.
Is that surprising? I'd imagine the loser in every state's gubernatorial race is also trending down on Facebook. McCain? All washed up on Facebook, too, right?
Link doesn't work (404)
Can you give it a rest?

It's a tongue in cheek description of our favourite open source advocate.

Personally, I find cartoonification (waddling) as a sign of endearment.
I suppose that is true, but it seems disingenuous to suggest that automatically installing stuff like security updates as a default option is somehow bad for the user.

It's not really a "backdoor" either, Windows update makes itself very obvious and tells you what it is doing.

RMS seems to have worded this to suggest that MS have built in some secret way to fiddle with your computer for nefarious purposes.
Sure, and I think that it's a great example of where RMS and other more fundamentalist free software people could engage. Go along to hack days and show the things that the free software community are working on.

Not everyone is going to go along with Stallman's free software puritanism. But a lot of those people produce free and open source software, or would be willing to help.
I'm sorry, what? Relevance?
On the importance of gestures in public speaking
http://garlicjs.org/ works as well
>There's no junk, no spyware, nothing to remove. Occasionally you might get a software bundle, like Office, or Quicken, but literally just drop it in the trash and you are done with it

Microsoft does this too, if you buy a PC from them or from a Microsoft Store.

http://signature.microsoft.com/
I see you never needed quicktime on windows? Their download page asks you for the email to "Keep me up to date with Apple news, software updates, and the latest information on products and services." Their privacy policy starts with:

"You may be asked to provide your personal information anytime you are in contact with Apple or an Apple affiliated company. Apple and its affiliates may share this personal information with each other and use it consistent with this Privacy Policy. They may also combine it with other information to provide and improve our products, services, content, and advertising."

I don't think they're different from other companies at all.
The easiest way to deal with this crap is just to do a fresh install of Windows when you buy a new PC, and download the drivers from the manufacturer's website. That way you can be sure that it's as clean an install as you can get.

Unfortunately, this is complicated by the fact that manufacturers don't ship Windows discs. I haven't had the opportunity to try it yet, but perhaps Windows 8's built-in restore feature will be the solution to this problem.
Sorry, by "your" I meant "the list you quoted." Thanks for the links to the breakdowns; they succinctly answer my previous question: "very little."
After almost 20 years of running Linux, FreeBSD (and even NextStep!) on x86 bare metal, I've for the time being gone back to Windows.

It's a fast dual-head box. One screen is all Windows (and I'm typing this from IE 10), and the other is xmonad and emacs on Arch Linux on VirtualBox.

I'm also an Apple user (and AAPL shareholder), owning two (2010 and 2011 model) MBPs, and it is my opinion that Windows 8 is gorgeous and very, very stable. Microsoft has finally simplified the desktop experience, with sane security defaults, and in my opinion are very close if not at par with Mountain Lion on ease of use and attention to detail.

Finally, the system's performance as a desktop machine is at least %25 better than Unity/Gnome 3/KDE, and the overall fit and finish is years ahead of any leading open source DE. It was the Desktop Linux experience that has encouraged me to look elsewhere.

I'd encourage everyone to keep an open mind wrt MSFT. They're on the right track. This is not the same company I grew up hating.
I was wondering about the wind as well. One of their use cases is recording yourself on a hike, but that seems like a pretty precarious environment...
Software in this regard is not different from other products - There is always risk involved.

To use the authors analogy: You could purchase a car, and then the car dies. You will not get the money back for the car unless you have a warranty. You probably would not buy a car without a warranty, because the risk/benefit analysis is not very positive. However, you buy software without a warranty. Why? Because software has an element of risk, yes, but the risk is much less significant than the risk of purchasing a car.
That's essentially part of the legend now, much like Musashi and his alleged lack of personal hygiene :)
"doing a clean Windows install is difficult if the only means of reinstallation you have is the bundled "recovery DVD" which puts all of the shit right back on there."

That's not a clean install.

A clean install is buying a retail version of Windows and blasting it down on your HD.

Recovery DVDs recover what the hardware vendor put there in the first place.
Don't Fail Facebook When Applying to College
That's actually pretty exciting, I love having an alternative to OpenCV (which, while extensive, has many faults)
I didn't think it was an attack, and I think it mostly comes down to your initial impression of whether the author agrees with RMS.

I personally read it as a socially awkward gray beard wandering through, imparting wisdom that will inevitably fall on deaf ears - they're going to have to learn it the hard way.

In this context, the comments serve as a contrast against his wisdom. Despite his disheveled appearance, RMS happened to be the smartest person in the room at that particular moment.

But many people seem to be reading it in a context of "weird old guy walks in and says something silly", which could fit the text too.

Personally I think RMS is so right about this issue that I didn't even consider it the other way at first.
yeah, like everybody should wait until a US company decides to expand to European countries and corners the market.
Ask HN: Are Monads Really That Hard?
I've been experiencing something lately. I don't understand the difficulty of monads. So here I present my understanding of Monads in the hope that someone will be able to point me in the right direction, or at least point out something that I'm missing.

* Monads Hide Failure (kinda)

Monads allow you to call a function that may or may not (Maybe/Just/Nothing) return the value you need in the next function. If Nothing is returned, you can pass Nothing through your future function calls or composed functions with no ill effects.

* Nesting Monads

You can nest Monads, or use do notation, to create easily replaceable failure possible sections of code.

foo :: Maybe Integer
foo = do
x <- someMonadicFunction
y <- someOtherMonadicFunction
Just (x + y)

someMonadicFunction and someOtherMonadicFunction can be anything that returns Nothing or Integer and it doesn't matter if they fail because the do will return Nothing in that case.

# End

I keep reading about how Monads are a really hard topic, so I think it's possible that I'm not looking at the right pieces here.

So my question is, where do I go from here? Do I understand Monads, or am I missing something here?
Microsoft should do what Google does with Android and release a clean 'reference' system without all the 3rd party crap-ware.
Space X, patents & china "If We Published Patents, It Would Be Farcical"
Isn't the word "despicable human being" just a tiny bit hyperbole and untrue?

Has he hurt anyone? killed? imprisoned? injured? threatened? Stalked? preyed upon? or been in general mean to someone?

If being of a different opinion and expressing it is enough to be labeled despicable human being, I don't know if I would call that fair.

For me, that's like calling Linus an despicable human being for criticizing Gnome 3. It's a really strange use of the word despicable.
It would be nice if webyshots.com took an accurate screenshot of webyshots.com. The left side of the content does not get rendered ....
http://api.webyshots.com/v1/shot/123456789/123456789/webysho...
Apple loses bid to nix patent troll's 'screen rotation' suit
It is an implicit ad hominem attack: here comes the unkept weirdo with his weird ideas!
The vast majority (90%, 99%, more?) of what makes GitHub a great and useful site is closed source.

I really appreciate RMS' purist stance because it brings my attention to the things I use, and how their openness or lack of openness affects me.
This is major news for startups in Europe. Major news.

The only issue I have is that the activation process seems like any other merchant account application. It will be interesting to hear from people who are rejected in the activation process to see how 'frictionless' these guys really are!
How to protect me on Facebook?
Бокс: Владимир Кличко - vs Mariusz Wach - (2012) - HDTV / HDTVRip / SATRip
There's a common fallacious argument in here:

A. The corporations that have the most power in this industry have lobbied for and gotten a consumer-hostile regulatory regime.
B. It's the government's fault that the regulations are less than ideal.
Therefore the consumer would be best served by getting the government out of it.

This is like saying, "The problem with being stranded in the desert is the lack of water. Therefore water is the problem. Therefore we should remove all the water from the desert."
I feel like the easiest solution to this is to insist that closed APIs must be made opensource in the event that they are ever shutdown (for whatever reason).

Create a movement and a website that lists closed APIs with this 'terms of service' condition.

That way, startups and large companies can still make kickass APIs and profit off them, but developers are never left hanging.

The only problem is from an acquisition POV, this likely decreases the value of the company. e.g. Face.com, Tokbox. But that's only an issue if the company cough facebook decides to shutdown the API.
No matter how hard I try I can't understand this comment. Are you implying that Linux is a Mac OS X clone?
I find I prefer SQLAlchemy's Table.query.filter(Table.bar > 5) to a lambda that gets compiled to an AST in an odd way.
> You've got jQuery on your own site. Why are you moaning about it?

May be he does not. May be He uses Dojo, Prototype or any other JS library.

At least jQuery doesn't extends Object and Array like other libraries so it's quite safe to have as an extra dependency.
I'll repeat my advice to take this to the python-ideas mailing list. You'll get real reasons why this shouldn't (or should) be included in __builtins__.

As far as two libraries agreeing on using the same instance, one can define it the way you've done with `NotSet = object()`, and they can both use it just like they share any other named object (classes, functions, constants, sentinels). Better yet, it can carry a more meaningful name when "NotSet" doesn't really describe how they're using the sentinel.
I actually love the idea of this tool in general. Would be neat to open it up where you can just paste in the URL of any FB page and get the counter/deltas!

I'd also suggest adding a cumulative delta counter, rather than just the delta per poll. That way I can load up the page and come back an hour later and get an even better feel for the changes. Maybe also add a rate (delta/hour) field?

Awesome work!
Scott Adams: I speculate that Larry Page has Spasmodic Dysphonia
Why are you going via your server? Couldn't you have the JS get the data from Facebook's Graph API directly?
Did Microsoft just promise a universal translator?
holy shit, they support turkey. yay!
Definitely NOT Apple. Despite their open source site, the most important bits of the OS are closed, and so developers can't dig into the OS to figure out if the bizarre behavior they're seeing is a bug in the OS or not. Worse, they can't submit patches for things they do find. Instead, they have to go submit a radar report, which can't be seen by anyone but themselves. It's so bad that it has become common behavior to copy/paste the report to openradar and then have other developers submit duplicate reports as a way to "upvote" a bug. That is most definitely NOT developer friendly.

And then we have Xcode, the program that has inspired a twitter account dedicated to its severe brokenness.

And let's not forget their terrible provisioning process that always breaks in continuous integration systems, and the asinine limit of 100 test devices. Oh, and their train wreck of a command line tool suite.

And then there's their absolutely bizarre behavior of replacing every internal function name with <redacted>, and disabling stdout on iOS 6.

And then we have the "eat all memory" pager system in OSX that can chew through 8 gigs like candy and bring your system to its knees should you ever try to run more than 5 programs + Xcode.

If there were an iOS development environment + simulator for Ubuntu, I'd wipe this laptop and switch over.
Google has a massively distributed global storage infrastructure. Pulling one hard drive would get you a millionth of a million people's gmail accounts, along with a sea of other unrelated crap.
By building interesting/useful software that you otherwise couldn't (with the same time/effort)?
http://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~eroberts/courses/soco/pr...

That is probably because there are fewer instructions to memorize.
I suspect that in no small part the performance edge is due to Mike Pall's LuaJIT, which absolutely thumps other dynamic language implementations.

And even the reference Lua interpreter is very fast -- it's small enough to fit entirely into a CPU cache.
How to kick that Amazon habit
Little secret: if you click the download button below without entering your e-mail, it just works.

Apple is very discreet in their e-mail marketing. They send maybe half a dozen emails per year, mostly after product launches or before christmas/school term/black friday/etc.
Thanks for the compliment :) The focus of the service has to do with the focus of the interface, that is why community based services (500px, flickr, social networks as such) will always have a polluted interface (comment widgets, buttons etc) because they need to generate engagement around user content. I could be wrong here about the extent to which this pollution actually matters for users.

With dofsome we are trying to separate the photo presentation into a stand-alone service and allow the user to use their social services as distribution channels for their content.

Yeah, no point in competing with S3, better focus on a product built on top of it ;-)

At the moment I am thinking about just doing imports from online backup solutions and really focus on the presentation. For a viable storage MVP you definitely need device specific uploaders..
Liu you're an animal. Nice work!
On Twitter, Steve Jobs Is Immortal
I don't think it's surprising, but to watch the actual data change in real-time is fascinating. We're entering the era of real-time, fine-grained, high-scale opinon metrics like never before.
The way to do this properly would be to have a separate device that also has WiFi and have a way to stream video to it. The device would have no screen.
Working a small development shop I can tell you that if we buy an off the shelf workstation it can take almost as much time to clear our the crap ware and configure the drivers as it does to build a machine from parts, even considering the work it takes to quote/order/pickup/assemble a system.

It is a very sad state of affairs when NONE of these vendors offer a service to sell you one without crap ware..

This costs small business so much time it is a very bad joke!
ARM is still a bit icky, but nearly anything this side of a VAX mainframe will be easier to grasp than x86.

If anyone's looking to learn, MIPS is really easy to pick up. There's a good simulator (SPIM[1]) with terminal and GUI interfaces and lots of tutorials, as it's used in a lot of undergrad computer architecture courses.

[1] http://spimsimulator.sourceforge.net/
Ad hominem implies abusive, but abusive does not imply ad hominem. Fair enough. The reason I still think it's ad hominem, is the implication that because RMS is this crusty old weirdo neckbeard legend that doesn't exactly fit in with a bunch of young hip-to-be-nerdy hackathoners, his arguments about Free software (using RMS capitalization) don't fit in with hip and modern web API-using programs. But, of course they do, hence the AGPLv3.

Of course, the implication isn't stated explicitly. Say what you will about that.
JavaScript, Open Source & The Cloud
I think this really depends on the point of view.

It is a back door because the user (even a sophisticated one) has no visibility into what's being installed (all the information the user sees is being controlled by Microsoft and the user has no way to verify it because of the closed nature of the system).

This means that fundamentally, the user has to trust Microsoft every time time an update is being rolled out. And as any other large corporation, Microsoft doesn't always do things that are in the best interest of their users.

Mind you, this is the back door that we know about. I don't want to go get into the conspiracy territory, but one of Stallman's points is that the user really can't know whether there's a hidden back door or not. And even if there isn't one now, they can use the Windows update to put it there.

Richard Stallman feels very strongly about this. Others may not. Depending on which side you're on, you may either make this a big deal or say that Microsoft (or anyone breaking and hijacking the system) is trustworthy so this is nothing to worry about.

How you talk about the facts is retorics. But at least on this subject he's not saying anything that isn't true (he may be bending the truth on other issues -- I haven't read the article so I can't honestly say).
I wonder why they require you to "apply" for a merchant account, when Stripe just lets you get started ASAP.

This is nothing but good news, anything that makes accepting payments easier is a god send. If Stripe were gone tomorrow, how more difficult would our lives be?
Corporations have a duty to act in the interest of their shareholders, but this is broadly defined. There is no requirement to maximize profit.
API Message Localization
Funny ZapBot built at StartupWeekend
Bringing tablet computing, multi-touch, voice control, quality screens (IPS etc), video-calling on phones, small utility software, ubiquitous (real) web access, to mainstream (before someone attacks: yes, all these existed for a long time, but only became common place after Apple pushed them)? Pushing hardware design way past what anyone else was doing in the past half dozen years? Cornering the music industry with a digital distribution model that works?

I can't even begin to enumerate the things you see everyday that are influenced by Apple, besides their own products.
Getting a 404 on the OPS link.
This seems to work
https://github.com/guillaumepotier/Garlic.js
I thought that, perhaps it's just to remain compliant on their side. Maybe it's the reason they've been able to ship despite the fact Stripe haven't.

Then again those Samwer brothers aren't short for cash.
FT exec: HTML5 is not dead
They are not affiliated with us.. (said in the voice of Mr. Incredible) http://pixar.wikia.com/Bob_Parr
Well then what exactly is the point of government, in principle, if they have no authority at all over people's lives? If everyone could do whatever they liked and ignore any rules set by anyone else, all the benefits of collective action vanish.
Yep, this page handled entirely client-side, with some analytics JS on top for good measure:

setInterval(
function() {
$.getJSON(
"https://graph.facebook.com/mittromney",
function(results) {
console.log("Mitt Romney Like Count: " + results.likes)})},
5000)

Edit: Love the idea, glad the page is out there! Great conversation starter.
Reddit Set To Prove A Business Point With Gold Investment
HTC and Apple Settle Patent Dispute
Why is Andy Bechtolstein on this list?
There is a nice VIM plugin for renaming the current file you're editing. I use this a lot:

http://www.vim.org/scripts/script.php?script_id=1928
Toshiba also has to pay the bills as well

Toshiba pays its bills by selling computers, or perhaps by selling preinstallation of mostly-useless trials of software and services on those computers. It does not pay its bills by selling service manuals, and probably wouldn't lose a measurable amount of money by making such manuals freely available.

Behavior like this, on the other hand might cost them a bit. It offends the sort of people other people ask for advice on new technology purchases. Offending me doesn't cost you a sale; it costs you ten sales. Offending this blogger probably cost them thousands of sales worth hundreds of thousands of dollars, though they'll never be able to measure it.
HTC, Apple Settle Patent Fight
Reddit's challenge: More users and higher costs
Yes! "decide to just do something else"

Write software, play a musical instrument, have your kids act out a scene from Shakespeare after dinner. Seriously...unending consumption of entertainment, even when it is infotainment (and maybe that's actually worse) is not beneficial to culture, or to you.
His mistress accessed his e-mail first, not the FBI.