skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
For those of you who don't think this is a big deal. Instagram is explicitly stating that they're going to sell the use of your pictures to third parties. They're also going to start showing ads in their news stream. I know the pictures are of too low quality to be plastered on a billboard. That's not the point. What I expect they want to happen is something like this:

I post a picture of me drinking a Coke to Instagram. I expect to share this with my friends, and maybe the people who follow me on Twitter. I know it's publicly available, but the chances of anyone beyond my circle of friends seeing it are slim to none. But now, Instagram notices that I posted this picture and sells it to Coke. Now, when Coke starts buying ads on Instagram, my photo shows on total stranger's news streams saying something like "Hey Enjoy a Coke, like this guy here!"

So, what's wrong with that? Well, for one thing, I never agreed to be in an ad campaign for Coke. Maybe I don't even like Coke. Maybe MY caption was something like "Ugh, out of Pepsi".

For another thing, generally, when you appear in an advertisement for a product, you get paid. Your likeness in the context of a commercial ad campaign has value, and when a company says "Yeah, I'm just gonna go ahead and take that and not pay you anything" the appropriate response is "hell no".
On the up side: perhaps a more liberal, open, freedom-oriented society enables people to stay without feeling they need to "start anew" for any number of lifestyle traits that may, in the past, not have been as easy to pull off in conservative environs.

We forget how even as recently as the 60s, (as Mad Men so demonstrates) we lived in a deeply prejudiced society where freedom to live how one wanted really wasn't an option in most places.
In my reading, the plain language of the new ToS states that Instagram can use your photos in advertising without even labeling it as such. IMO this is absolutely at odds with the normal expectations of both people who use social media and people who simply view advertising.
If we relied more on electricity than fossil fuels, you know renewable energy would continue to grow even more than it already is. This is not something to just write off for no reason.

Also, not everyone lives in America. 100% of electricity in my country comes from renewable resources.
Hacking Kickstarter: How to Raise $100,000 in 10 Days
In 1995? Things were VERY different back then. Open source was Microsoft's mortal enemy.
The key difference is that we are a real-time backend. We push data changes down to clients when things change and trigger callbacks so the apps can remain responsive. Parse, Kinvey, etc are based on a request / response model. I know some of them can do mobile push notifications, but those aren't really analogous and are a separate service from their data service.

We're real-time, all the time.

We're also focused on the data layer of your app, and on the web, rather than being a mobile-focused company.
Easy, tiger. I might find paying large amounts of taxes painful, but that doesn't automatically imply I'm an Ayn Rand fan, don't see the need for some form of social safety net, and don't get why a progressive tax system is an unfortunate necessity.
That's It, I'm done with Instagram
Hi Pierre, nice blog post. Thanks for sharing your insights.

I was looking at your AppStore SEO. Like you mentioned, your position for "spelling" has dropped a lot. But there are other phrases where your positions are rising nicely...

For "crossword game for kids" you've gone from 10th to 7th in the past few weeks.

http://www.straply.com/app/apple/l-escapadou/montessori-cros...

And your Android version has a few phrases moving up too...

For the phrase "kids words" you've risen 6 places, from 23rd to 17th. I know 17th isn't awesome, but that's a fairly popular search phrase, so at least you're moving in the right direction.

http://www.straply.com/app/android/l-escapadou/montessori-wo...
How guns became gadgets—lightweight, easy to use, and more effective than ever
Interesting, as this weakens Apple's App Store. If I can get all App Store apps, and MORE, from Facebook, why go to Apple at all?

An anecdotal observation: my step mom has an iPad for 2 years and has gone into the App Store maybe 3 times (at my insistence). But she's in the Facebook app all the time.
I read that comment and immediately thought of this HN post and why i disagreed with everything in that article.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4934417
It is interesting data that seems to call for explanation. Two things that have kept me personally from moving:

1. Middle class wages have stagnated while housing, food and gas expenses have exploded. There are very few jobs worth the hassle and expense of relocation.

2. If you are divorced with children, it is not possible to move very far without losing your family.
Twitter implements this feature, there has been some overlap anyway. I was never sure where to share a picture.
Think of it like this: when you were born, the government made a huge investment in you by providing you with healthcare so you don't die, school so that you can educate yourself, roads so you can get to work etc. Now you made a successful business using this investment from the government, but they also own XX% of your business, it's not entirely yours. This is an analogy but I think it holds very true. Sure it hurts to pay back to your investors, but without them you'd never have reached the point at where you are today. Escaping from the responsibility of paying back is immoral in my opinion, but unfortunately it's also good business in this world.
The best part of this article is in the comments. An original programmer on the game explains the reason that the bug was occurring and also why the code was unreadable (hint: they did it in assembly)

Ah, the quantum tunneling pinball!

We ran into this while writing the original code at Cinematronics in 1994. Since the ball motion, physics, and coordinates were all in floating point, and the ball is constantly being pushed "down" the sloped table by the gravity vector in every frame, we found that floating point error would gradually accumulate until the ball's position was suddenly on the other side of the barrier!

(To simplify collision detection, the ball was reduced to a single point/vector and all barriers were inflated by the ball radius. So, if the mathematical point got too "close" to the mathematical line barrier, a tiny amount of floating point rounding or truncation error could push the point to the other side of the line)

To mitigate that, we added a tiny amount of extra bounce to push the ball away from the barrier when it was nearly at rest, to keep the floating point error accumulation at bay. This became known as the Brownian Motion solution.

Since much of the original code was written in x86 asm to hand tailor Pentium U/V pipelines and interleave FPU instructions, but wiki says Microsoft ported the code to C for non-Intel platforms, I'm sure the code had passed through many hands by the time it got to you. The Brownian Motion solution may have been refactored into oblivion.

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/oldnewthing/archive/2012/12/18/10378...
Having tried to delete my FB account a few times, I would gladly give them a $10 one-time payment to just delete my content and stop mailing me about friend requests and new "people I might know".
Yes. However, nobody's considering the rate of actual terrorism attempts. If they were, we'd remove every dollar of the TSA's budget and spend it on highway safety.

Or, if we specifically wanted to spend money guarding potential terrorism targets, we'd spread our security dollars over airports, schools, stadiums, water and power plants, shopping malls, bridges, office buildings, parking decks, subways, concert halls...

... see how impossible it is to actually protect everything? Luckily, it's not necessary in the first place.
Do we need a new term for these? Like "Insta-mob" or "Privacy mob"?

I guess one good thing has come out of this...
If you have Steam set to remember your password and log in automatically, it's fairly reliable. If you prefer to not leave passwords remembered, Steam will not launch even in Offline Mode until you restore the connection and authenticate. This is by design.

http://i.imgur.com/NXCpk.png

While I understand the reasons for designing it this way, it's still very annoying to be caught off guard by it. I'm glad that nobody could get access to any actual account data like my friends list, time played, etc. But I'd much rather it be a system like the Mac App Store, where software will run no matter what once it's been downloaded, and running things I've installed is entirely separate from my account authentication and anything with personal information in.
What? Instagram's current TOS includes the following:

"By displaying or publishing ("posting") any Content on or through the Instagram Services, you hereby grant to Instagram a non-exclusive, fully paid and royalty-free, worldwide, limited license to use, modify, delete from, add to, publicly perform, publicly display, reproduce and translate such Content, including without limitation distributing part or all of the Site in any media formats through any media channels, except Content not shared publicly ("private") will not be distributed outside the Instagram Services."

So the "new" ToS is not as far from the old one as you would think.
Good points -- although I suspect that the reason they don't ask permission is they want to be able to transparently do the kinds of things they've been doing with profile pics for years ("your friends love X, click here").
Yes, my biological pattern matching engine has been evolutionarily tailored for this purpose. In this case I think I'm right.
Open source wasn't exactly a huge priority for Microsoft in 1995 when the application came into existence. In fact I think it's a testament to their backwards compatibility that pinball survived for as long as it did with little or no maintenance.
In passing, not fair to blame Amazon because Apple uses effectively public information (last 4 of CC, which is known to every restaurant waiter and shop clerk in America), as a secret key.
Show HN: My morning project to export and delete your Instagram account
A programmer from the original game commented on the article and said much of it was done in asm then later ported to C by msft, so it probably was really that messy.
Neural networks are well understood as additive models. They may not have nice closed form training algorithms, but they are also more expressive than logistic regression.
There might be additional factors like mitochondrial DNA or some epigenetic factors or some accident during development of his brain. Getting 1000 boring Ramanujan clones would prove that the our skill is lacking not that we couldn't replicate a goddess.
You might feel differently if you were a professional photographer or a celebrity (even a minor local one). I don't use instagram, and I'm not sure if the change would cause me to leave if I did use instagram. But I'm not going to start using it, because I expect that anyone who values their pictures is going to leave, so it will suck.
Very good point. I think Apple will eventually allow changing default apps, but I doubt they will ever be forced to do so. The iPhone is miles away from a monopoly, and getting even further each day.
Indeed, the key to success seems to have been finding a high brand recognition word that could be used without actually having to be licensed or whatever. (The apps may be fabulous, but the name is gold.)
Hilarious feedback from clients made into posters
yeah, that's why I say it just looks juicy because when using teamviewer or another screen sharing, we still talk discuss. Then knowing each other mouse is not necessary anymore :)
It should be noted that Bezos also had significant bond issues that nobody thought they could make payments on. They were down in the junk bond basement. If he had failed to make those payments, Amazon would have become yet another failed dot com, just like eToys. (Which went out of business while making a profit - just not enough profit to make bond payments on excess warehousing purchased because they overestimated growth for 2000 after underestimating it in 1999.)
The Daily Habit: What Is Missing From Most Apps
Ask HN: Could you pass a turing test in a foreign language?
Im currently doing a Hollywood consulting gig for the production of an upcomming science fiction movie.

One interesting question came up today: Could a human manage to pass a turing test in a foreign language?

Imagine you would have to convince somebody that you are human. And the test is done in chinese. Could you?

What if the alphabet was binary? What would your answer to "1" be? How many digits would you need to prove you are human?
You can even remove bullets from the market and still easily make your own. A proper die can be machined by anyone with the proper tools, and lead can be easily obtained from any auto repair or tire shop, as they frequently discard large quantities of lead weights when rebalancing tires. Adding a copper jacket is also very simple.

Primers and (smokeless) gunpowder are the only things that are unreasonably difficult to manufacture at home. And even then, gunpowder recipes and materials are easy to come by.
How much is not having your money stolen from you by an angry mob worth? Seems to me like the rich are doing their best to recreate the jacquerie.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacquerie
He must not live in a location where he needs to drive that much. I'm sure I'm a bit of an outlier, but I've driven 30k miles in the last 11 months... 12k in 2 years is practically unfathomable to me.
Try that with an E15 fuel blend.
Being a jerk to win a game is still being a jerk.

The wording also said there was a suggested price of $5. "Pay what you want" is the equivalent of saying "tip what you want". You could "game" an open bar by never tipping, but that would make you a huge jerk.

Society is not based on rules. It is based on social interaction. You can break the rules and not be a jerk, and you can follow the rules and be a jerk. Rules have nothing to do with jerkitude.

Oh, and if I told someone "take as many potato skins as you want" with a bunch of other people there who might also like potato skins, and you take them all, you are again a huge jerk. Being nice to other people is important. Just like you shouldn't take all the potato skins, you should try to reimburse the makers of the game for at least their cost.
This is a phenomenally dumb move. Instagram is (was) cool because of the absence of ads or any other monetization features. It was free, simple, clean, and fun. Now it begins the slow march towards a crowded, busy, ad-littered experience. And this is really bad press.

In my opinion, the decline starts now...
I think that a lot of people are aware of that; they question whether it actually adds value to the game. Given the choice between an entrepreneur that moves between cities (and other similar features) or a game that works when the internet goes down for 5 minutes, I'd take the latter.

Having interactions like pollution between neighbors is pretty cool. But there's no good reason it couldn't work with AI neighbors too. The online only features feel tacked on to force players into staying online all the time.
Another enjoyable book on this topic is "The Mathematical Coloring Book" by Alexander Soifer: http://www.amazon.com/Mathematical-Coloring-Book-Mathematics...
Here's an example of a company building a business model off of people sharing photos on Instagram and Twitter.

http://www.pixlee.com/warriors/albums/527?embed=true

I probably wouldn't care if my photos showed up in a public manner, but I could understand why some people might.
The 'early dev' editions have started to ship. People are reporting that they're getting shipment notifications. However, the 'early devs' are under NDA - so if they keep their word you won't hear much until the embargo is lifted or until the standard shipments start.
If you can't consider that you might be wrong, its dogma, regardless of whether you believe in God, Allah, Einstein or the Flying Spaghetti Monster.

The issue is that so many crazy people use religious teachings as an excuse for their craziness and it hurts the whole thing, as it were. Mind you, crazy people use almost everything as a justification (and we're all a little crazy).

Personally, I liked his definition of religion and God, but then i subscribe to a religion which explicitly forbids talking about itself (which is probably the best part of it). When I say subscribe, I suppose that I mean take meaning and solace from.

Bear in mind that the actuality of a particular belief has little or nothing to do with its usefulness for living a life, so even if I (or the author, or you) are completely mistaken about our spiritual beliefs, then it makes no goddamn difference to our lives.

The only real difficulty is when one attempts to force said beliefs on someone else, and that's where all of the badness and evil that is rightfully associated with religion(s) seems to come from.

Incidentally, could you provide definitions of superstition and reason? Two very tricky concepts I find. Reason once said that of course the earth is flat, now it says of course it must be round, so which was superstition and which was reason?

To carry this analogy a little further, which of your beliefs (rational of course, like all human beliefs) are factually incorrect? I would bet that within 100 years, many of them will be proven to be so. Does that mean that you will be retconned into superstitiousness?

Incidentally, i think that you may have misinterpreted what the author meant with the false and true gods analogy (or at least you constructed a different meaning to mine) so I would humbly suggest that you perhaps try to read that part of the piece again (as will I).
Whatever. Keep complaining about a free service and see what it gets you. Might as well start moving your stuff out now because they won't change.
Instagram Speaks Out On User’s Concerns About TOS Changes
MS implemented NT, which only worked in Unicode. They had to add a compatibility layer to run Ansi apps.

Which is MS's separate OS for 64-bit?

OS APIs are distinct from kernel APIs. You're comparing a kernel (Linux) with a distribution (Windows).
The problem is that the people willing to pay are exactly the people the advertisers most want to reach. The whole point of all this privacy invasion is to target the people with money who are willing to spend it. You take those people out of the pool and offering a free service no longer makes any sense, because nobody wants to pay to reach the people too cheap to buy stuff.

Which leaves you with a pay-only service, competing with a free-only service that consequently has ten times as many users (and therefore much stronger network effects), and the pay service goes out of business.

The true problem with all of this is that we're using services for things we should be using products for. You want to share photos with friends? We could do that in 1999 with AOL Instant Messenger. But now Facebook and Instagram have a better UX -- and it has nothing to do with whether they're services.

What we need is an open source P2P Instagram. No ads, no paying anybody anything, just photo sharing.
Objectively Inconsistent
Better way for Instagram to move forward: Change the app to $0.99 and avoid this advertising shitstorm-in-waiting.
I have a virtual machine running XP for testing installers of internal tools (many engineers at HP are still running XP).

Just played a round of pinball. Despite having used Windows since 2.0, I didn't even know Pinball existed before.
How can it be theft, when the rules are agreed upon beforehand?

Or, choose a country with low tax rates before setting out to make a fortune. Then, there's no conflict.
This is unfortunately a federal restriction on electrically assisted bicycles. The motor cuts off at 20 mph, the driver can peddle faster than this but the electric assist is only for the low speed range.
Didn't the same thing happen with Scribd?
Came here looking for someone else wishing Perl many happy returns as it reaches this august landmark.

I have been working as a programmer for 25 years and started using Perl in 1993 or so. I cannot express what it felt like to have this incredibly powerful tool that seemed to integrate all of the sed, awk, shell, and C code that I had for research. Using Perl absolutely felt like magic, particularly for analyzing text.

I love Python, Ruby, and Lua too, but Perl will always be the tool that quickly gets things up and running.
Minecraft: The Story of Mojang Premieres on Dec 22
Didn't they profit from your work before this?
- How did Scala make it easier to design scalable abstractions - both for performance and for features?

- What kind of tooling do you use? Which version of Scala?

- Any tips around hiring and ramping up a team?

Thanks for the offer.

Edit: formatting
What other technique do you have at your disposal in a code originally written in assembly and then translated to C, and then refactored several times without rewrite?

I personally didn't hear of one that would be usable in this case.

Also, I'm starting to think I should write a script to cut out every comment here that has "code" and "comments" in it - among with several other phrases that signify neverending debates.
You have to delete your content, and then delete your account, BEFORE the policy comes into affect. With the way things are worded apparently, if done afterwards, they can still keep data on their servers even if your account is gone.
I'm not so sure about that.

In my Golf TDI I have a demonstrated of $0.114 per mile. That's in less than ideal conditions, with lots of city driving. If I drove almost all highway, I'd be getting more like 45mpg rather than the 34mpg lifetime I have, so at the current price of diesel ($3.90/gal) that'd be more like 8.6c/mile.
Why didn't you call Amazon to let them know, instead of waiting for them to call you?
Nah I didn't think that at all, it was clear from the way you said "minimal commenting". I just have an axe to grind when it comes to comments of the form

// assign the integer value 10 to the variable x
x = 10
> The lock-in to Facebook is much, much lighter.

WHAT? Pardon, but I don't see at all how you could come to such a conclusion. The primary assets of Windows are: ease-of-use, ubiquity, hardware compatibility. But if you have an application you love that works on Windows, chances are (if it's not a game, but even then there are other games and entertainment software) that there is a port or clone for another system (like Linux or Mac OS X — I'm speaking consumer-grade stuff here, business is another matter entirely.)

Facebook on the other hand has these assets: your Mom's on Facebook, your dad's on Facebook, so is your neighbour, your aunt, all your friends, (ex-)class mates, acquaintances, that boy or girl you had a crush on in first grade…

Your social graph is much more difficult to migrate to a different social platform than it is to port an application from one OS to another (or to find it on the Net.) Because it is pretty much impossible. Mass-migrations sort-of happen (like StudiVZ → Facebook a while back in Germany, or Digg → reddit, but there the social cohesion was rather low,) but only in high pressure situations. You can't easily bring about such a situation without the point of origin of said migration fucking up in a major way.

Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Tumblr — they're all sitting on social gold, and they're keeping it for now.
How to Get into Yale, Play lacrosse
Fortunately all of these calculations have been done by scientists. http://www.inference.phy.cam.ac.uk/withouthotair/c20/page_13...

TLDR: Electric vehicles still win, but only just barely when you include the battery manufacturing costs.
PPC Predictions for 2013: Why Not?