skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Right. The reallocation behavior is so fundamental to the implementation of NSMutableArray that there seemed no point in calling realloc directly. If I did that, might as well just use NSMutableArray instead of writing my own, and then there wouldn't be anything to write about.
There's nothing special in the fact that this problem involved a cloud service, or a bundled feature that some users may consider non-essential (all desktop browsers are shock-full of such features... unless you count Lynx). Consider this: Google might have pushed a regular Chrome-stable update containing a bug that would make the browser crash frequently for many users. Would that mean there's some fault in the process because Google has the privilege to push updates to the core browser? The fact is, there no much difference, Google "trusts itself" to update any aspect of Chrome, from the code that runs in your machine to any cloud services it may connect to; we can screw up in any of these components, and we should obviously work hard to prevent crashers no matter where.

Also notice that this bug was not a pure cloud bug: there was a bug in the client Sync code, i.e. in the browser; but this bug was only activated when the Sync servers also misbehaved, so it could be prevented with a server-only fix/workaround. Still it doesn't count as a real "cloud crash", not any more than an HTML renderer crash that only happens if some website sends corrupt content.
Hack? Really Jalopnik? You mean they uploaded pictures and reviews in exactly the way Amazon intended, albeit in a humorous fashion to make a point?

People annoy me far too often.
Opera mini existed for years before the iphone, and it's what gets used to browse the web on slow networks. I used to run it on a low end j2me phone in 2006, and it browsed the web just fine. I think "the modern smartphone" more than anything is a change in perception of what is possible, no an actual meaningful increase in what is possible.
I don't think that's a fair comparison. You're speaking about a 1100cc 90hp machine and comparing it with a small electric motor.

My commuter bike is a 250cc with 28hp. It has 9 years, carbed. Inside the city (less than 100kph) it gets about 3.2L / 100km and 280km per tank. It's cheap as fuck to fix and the bike itself was like 1K (used, around 3-4K new, it's shinny).
Why *good* companies are getting crunched
This is a really cool idea, and I'm going to have to see if I can incorporate it into future blog posts. I'm not sure if it'll be worth the trouble, but it certainly bears thinking about.
I'm shocked apple hasn't made the "pin is at incorrect location" more prominent.

A very popular dining and shopping center in Atlanta shows up erroneously on my quiet side street. I flag down people in cars when I see they're confused and tell them about how to report the errors. Nobody knows it's there. 1.5 months of doing this and it's still not fixed.

In contrast when I reported my address at the wrong end of the street ( over a year ago ) Google fixed it in a week AND sent me a confirmation email. I want my Google maps back on iOS6!
I am glad a few people get this. High housing prices are an unmitigated disaster. They are sometimes a symptom of something good (a robust job market) but often not even that.

For that, high housing prices have more to do with supply disruptions and destruction than with demand, because housing prices are extremely inelastic. A 1% drop in supply can push rents or prices up by 20% or more. (Ask New York.) Mouth-breathing bourgeois fuckheads clap their fat hands together when prices rise and say, "People really want to live here!" No, fuckface. What actually happened is that all those stupid NIMBY regulations made it impossible for anyone to fucking build, and so there's a supply crunch, making prices and rents three times as high as they should be.

This also explains why New York real estate prices went up after 9/11 (except for Lower Manhattan, which dipped for a few months and then went up) and will probably do so after Sandy. It was speculation driven by the possibility of future supply destruction, which would be bad for the few thousand people affected but increase overall price levels.
Yep, was going to mention this site, never looked as nice but great mechanics for doing reviews (I blew through about 10 on my first go!)
Twitter Releases Its 2012 Year In Review, a personal immersive experience
Never ascribe to malice that which is adequately explained by incompetence.. :) HN's code is weird in places, e.g. it's possible to accidentally kill your own posts by double-clicking submit (I can't remember why it does this, but there was a sensible-ish explanation)
Hey! I love your music! Don't suppose you have any idea what's going on with this doco?
Too late to edit but the end should read: "it looks like a lot less than 30%."
> No way that is worth a flat 30%.

Certainly there's a way. I left a comment above that a number of cc payment providers, those who cut you a check instead of making you bring your own merchant account, take 15%, without any of the other things Apple is doing. Rep'ing someone's product should naturally cost more than that.

More to the point, the general idea of retail in the United States is not "flat markup", but what the market will bear. Costco claims to have a flat markup, but go into a jewelry store and you'll find they're taking a lot more than 30% over what the wholesaler charged them.

As an app seller, you're the wholesaler and you get to set "suggested retail price". You have the bonus of knowing the spread there.

Let's look at a console game: $7 console fee (call that 10%) and 25% retail markup, so you're paying 35%, which is more than the app store.[1] Before you feel bad about that, look at what the shelf space guys (aka "retailers") get as markup on a few other items.[2]

1. http://www.joystiq.com/2006/12/20/where-the-60-for-new-games...

2. http://www.wisebread.com/cheat-sheet-retail-markup-on-common...
Very neat! I've been searching for WinMerge alternative ...
I'm fond of Warren Buffett's view on gold: you could buy a hunk of yellow metal that just sits there, or you could buy an equivalent amount of Coca-Cola. Coca-Cola will give you about a 3% dividend every year, plus there are thousands of people working hard every day to make sure that they sell even more Coca-Cola next year. At the end of, say, ten years, your hunk of gold is still the same amount of gold. But your chunk of Coca-Cola has grown and even given back to you 30%. So the question is, which would you rather buy?
> Open plan is fine, even for large offices, so long as everyone knows that quiet is the rule.

I don't agree with this.

Bullpens/developer rooms are designed for collaboration and they have been for the last fifteen years. They are for developers to whiteboard or bounce ideas off of each other. If you are in a bullpen the expectation shouldn't be quiet.

With that said you cannot (or should not) have bullpens without open offices that developers can choose to walk in and shut the door. Offices should be some distance away from the bullpen and be unlabeled-first-come-first-serve (they should be designed for quiet focus). You should also be able to work from home whenever it best suits you.

Also, after reading some of the other comments, a bullpen is not a way to stuff the developers, call center team, and the sales team into one cheap room! If any company does this it's a sign of poor management.

I'm a headphones-focus person and I can't stand people talking around me when I focus. However, unless it is excessive (someone doing a conference call on speaker every day) then it's just how offices have been since... well forever. However, in every place that I've worked there has been offices that you can use to focus (or a liberal work from home policy). I typically spend most of my time in a closed door office getting all of the hard think-work done and then the remainder in the bullpen doing CRUD work.

A company that has a bullpen and enforces a quiet rule feels like a company that simply does not know how to build a proper development environment (Oh, developers are supposed to be in, like, big rooms or something, but our developers don't like noise... okay how about we make it a 'quiet only' big room... or something)
Cryptonomicon is a great book, btw. It was definitely the one that got me heavily into Neal Stephenson.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cryptonomicon
The idea is to make buying an app more convenient than the effort and time involved in cracking.

Buying an app was always more convenient than cracking. The problem is making it more convenient than downloading an already cracked copy.
If your service is protected solely on the concept of safe harbor, that will then only work if you can stay small and unnoticed by the state. As soon your service name pops up in politics, laws like safe harbor will no longer protect you.

The pirate bay case is an example of a website, which though safe harbor would protect them in regard to user-uploaded content. They where wrong in that regard.
Get smarter Cerego finally launches its 'Dropbox for the Brain'
Yes they do, but the primary reason bicycles (as well as motorbikes) have stability is because of trail - the contact point of the front wheel is behind the steering axis.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bicycle_and_motorcycle_geometry...

A banked-over bicycle naturally tends to turn into the corner because of trail, and that turning-in torques the bike back towards upright - turning the handlebars towards the centre of the curve moves the bottom of the bike towards the centre of the curve, and that pulls the bike upright.

The larger the trail, the more stable the bike is. Sportsbikes tend to have shorter trail so that they turn in faster, cruisers tend to have longer trails so they are more stable on long straight roads.

Loss of gyros would be far more noticeable at low speeds (less than 20mph) than high speeds IMO.
Not only that - you make sure that critical components, like hard drives (rotational or SSD, doesn't matter), are from different manufacturers or at least not the same production, or at the very least not put them to use at the same time. Basic design flaws (intentional or not), that result in non functional hardware, tend to hit at the same time - so you'd rather not want to have all 12 drives, and the hard drives of the 3 replicas, fail within the same week.
Why are dead people liking stuff on Facebook?
I think the current YouTube system is pretty good. YouTube detects you are using copyrighted music, and the copyright owner can choose to block it or allow it but gets the money for the ads. Most of them seem to be choosing the second.
So, we get a lot of questions about how to implement 2 factor authentication. You can do it quick and simple, but it is more secure to run it through your directory (AD). This eguide shows you how to do it end-to-end using standard protocols, so it works with any 2 factor solution, not just ours. Enjoy.
People are usually a destabilizing factor on bikes. Very common to see bikes that lose a rider in motorcycle racing to actually continue quite stable on their own.
I got my WP installation hacked again and thought this tutorial could come in handy for checking and removing the malware code for some of you.
I think the question was content vs service.

Your app, like Dropbox and Skydrive, is providing a consumable service.
I hope Tesla buys them. Model-B.
Probably because of the horrible link-bait title and general inaccuracy of the article. Especially when this link was also on the front-page (a clear, concise description of what happened without the added FUD).
Ask HN: What are some possible solutions to the IP problem?
I think most of us would agree that the current patent/copyright system has gotten a little out of hand. I also think that most of us would agree that sweeping regulatory changes are not our government's forte. So, with that in mind, what are some possible solutions to the current IP system that would foster innovation while still providing profit for those producing IP?
Tell the World Your Big Idea
A reasonable explanation I thought of is they're having trouble keeping track of who is liking what across their databases. i.e. Alice has liked Company X, but the like turns up on Bob's account.

While this is a bit of a poor show, it would be an explanation that doesn't require any nefarious behaviour from Facebook, just some slightly dodgy code somewhere.
US patent lawsuits now dominated by 'trolls'
I like where you're headed with this. I'd really like it if you provided an interface for marking and critiquing specific parts of a web page. For instance: let me draw boxes and drop pins and write comments specifically on those areas.

In short, having a single comment as you would a typical Amazon product review provides less depth than I'd like to see from peer reviews in this domain.
Worst case I had with them was when I migrated my personal account to a company account with an employer.

When I left my employer they removed my account from the company account, which in turn DELETED my previously personal dropbox account, took 4 days to get it recovered.

Used google drive ever since.
Absolutely.

There's a tendency for people to get a server and sling everything on it without really thinking about the different aspects of serving a website. As always, it's all about using the right tool for the job :)

Heroku is a good example of this. It's absolutely brilliant for hosting application code because it pretty much eliminates all our sys-admin work, but it sucks at a lot of stuff. Unfortunately many people then complain that it's slow or doesn't scale cost effectively.

I've become a huge fan of Cloudinary over the last few months for the same reason, it gives me time to focus on things other than handling image processing.

Thanks for those pointer for other options. There are so many toys in our collective toybox that it can be difficult just keeping up with them all :)
I think I'm getting everything I need out of email right now, but I'm also a very disciplined email user (an empty inbox is a healthy inbox).
I didn't know a fallback could be so simple. Thank you x 3 (the number of scripts I remotely load)
yeah, meanwhile in another thread https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4904320
Show HN: Rock, Paper, Scissors, Lizard, Spock + SignalR
https://github.com/jjchiw/rpsls
It has a steering wheel. Can you imagine counter-steering with a steering wheel? Swerving to avoid something on the road? Gyros would greatly reduce agility if they were not deeply tied into the steering, so I wonder if the steering isn't a direct mechanical linkage.
https://github.com/jjchiw/rpsls
Five sensors to measure the world, inspired by NASA and Yves Saint Laurent
The baby elephant message is cute - i'll know i'm safe if I go to a safari park.

I'm much more interested in what happens if an SUV at speed hits the bike (or, I guess, an adult elephant at speed). I see more SUVs on a day-to-day basis than baby elephants.
Hotel in Yerevan – Ararat Hotel
Ararat Hotel Complex is that it is the perfect place for the active people to set up ground zero when visiting Armenia. You will definitely feel yourself like home being free to choose any kind of activity you like and the staff in the Ararat Hotel Complex is always very polite and ready to assist.
10 Keys to Successful Entrepreneur Relationships
Thanks! I'm afraid I don't really know much more than anyone else here. I could tell you anything you'd like to know about the soundtrack itself, but as far as the rest of the film goes, I pretty much have just the trailers and archive of the website to go on, the same as everyone else. Sorry I couldn't be of more help!
Make It For & Sell It To Yourself
This is a common misconception about why bikes stay balanced.

Generally the gyroscopic force caused by the spinning wheels is not enough to counteract other forces.

What actually keeps the bike upright is the steering. When you steer the bike slightly left (by pulling the left handlebar), the bike will lean to the right (because of the apparent force caused by inertia). Thus, if you are "falling" on the left side, steering left will bring you back upright.

(This technique can be also used explicitly, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Countersteering)

You normally don't think of it in this terms, partially because once you learn riding a bike it all becomes automatic for you, and partially because the geometry of the bike which causes it to steer in the direction of a lean.

This is accomplished by having a "positive trail". See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bicycle_and_motorcycle_geometry and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bicycle_and_motorcycle_dynamics.

Although there is also a demonstration of bike self-stability which doesn't depend on the positive trail: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Two-mass-skate_bicycle

In any case, if you find a way to make it steer in the lean, then it will be self stable.

This is also why you can be stable on a bike at very low speed. The amount of steering becomes very apparent. You might be surprised how long you can stay balanced at extremely low speed if you just allow yourself to change direction.
I once had demigod access to Southampton University Computer Centre. The ops staff used to rip erroneous job cards in half and put them back in the deck for repunching. Clueless or lazy students sometimes repaired them with sellotape and resubmitted. The resulting bang as the card hit a high speed reader could be heard across the whole room and would take out the card reader for about 15 minutes while glue was cleaned off the innards.

This time that user's whole job would be returned, guillotined in half and tipped into a manilla envelope, with a suggestion that next time they repunch error cards. Savvy users realised that you could repunch the correct code and use chad to fill in unwanted holes. Stacked in a deck these could last a surprisingly long time. (Yes, I'm that old.)
4399, the third most searched keyword in China
Hey - you can get a URL instead of an image, if you click under the big green button "Get Logo", the "Get Image Link here" right under it. Let me know if it works.
I hadn't known that Bruce Schneier created Pontifex for the book as I didn't know who he was back in the 90's. Kinda neat to circle back to an old favorite and learn that someone with whom you've become familiar since the last read contributed a key plot point.
Open Sourceome
Thanks for the tip. We wanted it to be the size logos usually are, when placed on the websites, so it'll be fairly easy to upload it when done. We might reconsider this size due to the fact that some just want to share their holidized logos on social channels and therefore need it bigger.
If abstract math is the only "pure" mathematics is open to debate :).

On other hand, in 1st, 2th, and 3th year, there are still more women in abstract math classes than men. I do not think any "who is better at what" can be said, beyond the stereotype "women are bad at math" can be explicitly be stated as false.
Hull.io, an open platform for social apps
It's a legit site, and the linked post isn't dodgy at all. I'm guessing the domain is on the filter list because textfiles.com hosts an archive of all sorts of old BBS textfiles, some of which are probably erotic fiction (it's a gigantic archive that includes a bit of nearly anything).
> One of the most common accidents for motorcyclists is falling while turning a corner.

Yes, due to loss of traction or excessive cornering speed. But those are both issues inherent to two-wheeled vehicles, and adding gyroscopes won't solve either.

So you gain the ability to ride in the rain without wearing rain gear, but you give up cargo space and visibility. Not to mention the fact that your head will now be in the perfect position to get rammed by a bumper, and the lower profile increases the likelihood that other drivers won't see you.

It's a nifty trick, but I don't see who this would appeal to. Most motorcyclists already have rain-proof gear, and non-motorcyclists will still think it's a death trap.
Very good point there. That still seems to be a big taboo.

OT: Proud to be German today :-)
Not sure, maybe. I think they'll be trying to target people who likes MCs but are too afraid to hop in one, so it would make sense to have the counter steering mechanically done instead of giving you the full control... I also couldn't find anything about speed and power.
Show HN: Office World A free/no ads Time Tracking App.
Hey r/Android,

I've finished my final year project, which lets you to track your time. it is free and contains absolutely no ads.

There are certainly many apps on the market to do this, but most of that was complicated and require more task just to track your time. my application was designed with Holo design in mind, you guys should love the interface.

If you are interested in trying it out, here is a more detailed description with a screenshot, and links to google play http://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.rheza.officeworld and the website http://www.officeworld.my/

Let me know what you think!
Do you mean that you want your sim card to live in your wristwatch, and then your phone/tablet/laptop to access the wider world via your wristwatch using wifi/bluetooth/whatever?

My uninformed opinion is that I'd worry about battery life (both because you've got to run two receivers/transmitters, and because you've got less space to fit it in).
Woz: "What about Apple Records"

Jobs: "They are a record company, we are a computer company"

Woz: "That all it takes?"

Jobs: "Yeah"

Someone should take a Delorean to 88, and play that bit to Steve a few years back... I think he forgot.
There is a case to be made for having precious metals as part of a diversified investment portfolio. (IIRC Burton Malkiel, mentioned elsewhere in this thread, suggests that it be about 1% of your holdings.) But the “gold bugs” are the people who treat gold as the measure of value.

Paul Krugman wrote an excellent critique of the gold bugs in 1996: http://www.slate.com/articles/business/the_dismal_science/19...

The price of gold has had a nice run since Krugman wrote that column, but if you look at the longer-run historical data, you can see that it’s gone down before: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Gold_Spot_Price_per_Gram_f...
"Devil's advocate: where do you draw the line?"

Individual and not-for-profit uses are fair.

http://torrentfreak.com/file-sharing-for-personal-use-declar...
Supply and demand isn't that simple especially in housing or other assets seen as investments. Rising prices in housing increases rather than decreases demand. People want to get on the ladder, banks throw money at people with no incomes and the world goes mad when house prices go up. It may be than supply can do a little to moderate the effects of the backwards demand curve but I don't think it can generally fix it.

Where there is a real building boom (Ireland/Dubai/Spain... 2004-2008, probably much of China now) the building industry can actually be a large part of the economy bringing in migrants (and housing demand) into the area temporarily increasing demand. Also the building tends to happen when prices are rising and people build and purchase speculatively based on the rising prices. So in the short term affordability falls due to the increased demand. In the slightly longer term prices start to fall and the building stops and therefore the demand falls further and no one will offer a mortgage to buy anything so affordability is still rubbish.

[Edit: typos. Added Spain to list of 2004-2008 boom areas and put a "probably" on China]
The assumptions in this paper are quite weak. It's like testing whether or not your code is running in a virtual machine. It can be done, but only if the virtual machine authors have made some glaring mistake.

Yes, computation is finite, but that doesn't mean that the authors of the simulation can't use more resources than usual simulating your test of the simulation. Not all parts of the simulation need to run at the same level of detail.
Here's a little Ruby implementation I wrote a while back: https://github.com/jsomers/solitaire. I hope it's correct...