skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
New Instagram Terms, Old Twitter Terms
My guess is that Instagram plans to (further?) monetize access to their API.

From Updated Instagram TOS

...you hereby grant to Instagram a non-exclusive, fully paid and royalty-free, transferable, sub-licensable, worldwide license to use the Content that you post...

...you agree that a business or other entity may pay us to display your username, likeness, photos (along with any associated metadata), and/or actions you take, in connection with paid or sponsored content or promotions, without any compensation to you.

From Current Twitter TOS:

...you grant us a worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free license (with the right to sublicense) to use, copy, reproduce, process, adapt, modify, publish, transmit, display and distribute such Content in any and all media or distribution methods (now known or later developed)....

...Such additional uses by Twitter, or other companies, organizations or individuals who partner with Twitter, may be made with no compensation paid to you with respect to the Content that you submit, post, transmit or otherwise make available through the Services.
I don't get it... I've been using this service state-side for a few months now. Everything seems to be working the same as it was?
I have looked at Haskell, but the problem is getting the team migrated over. Its a lot easier to migrate a team to Scala then to Haskell. Also the library selection for the JVM is unparallelled.
A robot lamp powered by an Arduino [Video]
Hypothesis: removing guns from a society can be done to a tolerance of X within Y years.
(i.e. there will always be some guns, but you can restrict them to rare status)

Hypothesis: doing so reduces deaths from A to B.

... assuming there could be a study of the above, and it came up with yes in both cases, and A >> B, would the case for gun control be made?

The question I'm asking is whether there is a study that would be acceptable, and gun control simply depends on whether this can be proven, or whether the question of reducing death is a red herring, and gun ownership is believed worth it regardless?
Do we have evidence at this point that Ms Lanza wasn't "a good parent" (aside from some apparent negligence regarding keeping her guns stored well)? Or that her son was "cast away into a land of prescription pills"?
UK Inflation Unchanged At 2.7% In November, Says ONS
Don't know what the deal with passports is in the US, but if it's anything like the UK, the fee isn't profit making and covers the cost of running the passport service and a premium to cover the costs of providing consular assistance.

In this way, it's the epitome of "getting value". You don't need a passport, and if you don't have one, you're not paying for people who do have one to receive consular assistance.
I'm really curious why http://instaport.me/ redirects you to http://54.246.82.151/ Did anybody else notice that?
Fair warning: participate for the fun, not for the prizes. Mozilla ran a competition like this in 2010. My game "Favimon" won the "Most Original" category. I never did receive most of the prizes they claimed all winners received, including a copy of Adobe Dreamweaver Creative Suite 5, a guest post on the Yahoo! Games blog, a Think Vitamin sponsorship, and John Resig's "Secrets of the JavaScript Ninja" book. This was despite many polite inquiries to the competition organizer. Overall I thought the competition was excellent, but Mozilla's lacklustre follow-up afterwards was disappointing.
I've been watching for a good Box2d javascript port for the last couple years, and so far there's nothing out there that's anywhere close to useable. It's a shame really, since the Flash version is so good.

Every port is either a bunch of Regular expressions run against the ActionScript source, or a wacky hand port of a version several years out of date. In either case, as soon as you plug it into anything more complicated than the Hello World demos it starts demonstrating in myriad wacky ways that nobody must have ever tried using it on a real project.
I keep checking back, doing the rounds of GitHub and the web in general every couple months hoping in vain that somebody will have put something good out, but thus far no luck.

And of course, I'm part of the problem, complaining about the situation but not actually downloading the ActionScript source myself and putting together a decent port.
The day they do this is the day I delete my account; I've already come pretty close as I've gotten tired of scrolling through the sponsored crap.
I find it strange as well. Blocks $1 and $14 were purchased by the same app developer as they wanted presumably the top left and top right position when I first launched the site. Ever since then it's been going up incrementally.

I think what happened was that the app developer who purchased block 15 was indicating to me that he might purchase block 16 AND block 29 and 30 so that the same icon would stand out (4 icons grouped together). This never eventuated, so it appears to the eye if scanned quickly that block 16 was the next one in line which was subsequently purchased by another app developer.

It's that or 13 is an unlucky number for some.

Especially if purchased on a Friday. :-)
More interesting that they don't bring up nearly anything. I mean seriously, the period in question has the highest foreclosure rate in history. I'm not sure why I read the article, normally I skip ExtremeTech and Atlantic articles (oh and Phoronix ones too), it is a great piece to a bigger puzzle, but I really wish they would go get the other pieces! Its not like the data isn't out there.
Or with how guns could be used as props around which she could construct a new self-image for herself:

I fell in love with guns from the first shot. It’s hard to explain what it was that did it... That I, a historically scrawny, weak nerd who’d been the prey to all sorts of danger, could now be the danger...

Guns seemed the pinnacle of virility, and the ultimate way for me to be a badass woman—a tough girl in a man’s world, just a hair shy of being an actual man.

(Which, in her defense, is the same thing a lot of male gun owners get out of them. They're not shooting because they love shooting, they're shooting because they love the image of themselves that holding a gun plants in their head.)
I really hope business advertising directions is more of a service than a nuance.
The 75% tax rate is for people making over $1 million euros[1]. If you make below that, you pay 45%.

[1]:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taxation_in_France#List_of_taxe...
"Stack Overflow has reams of bad advice for Objective C. The dominant suggestions (that I encounter, anyway) routinely come up at the next-year's WWDC as things you should not ever do for any reason (and then they continue to be the dominant suggestion for another year)."

Can you provide some examples of this?
But it isn't as if they hadn't been paying all along. It's a complete mischaracterization to say these people have "used all the resources and infrastructure and now it's payback time." It's been payback time all along. It's a pay as you go system.

He is moving, and thus won't be using anymore of the resources, and thus shouldn't have to pay for what he is no longer using.

Just fyi, from what I've read, Belgium's top rate is 50% vs France's soon to be 75%. I don't recall if the tiers occur at the same earnings level. I assume that what I've read is accurate but I haven't cared enough to follow up on it.
Airlines are already optimizing for flight times - time in the air is fuel burn which is a major cost input for the business.

Airlines certainly try to do this, but they don't control either the weather or the air traffic control system. That said, I don't disagree that further optimization for flight times is likely to have a low payoff compared to lots of other things. My only point is that any flight time optimization that's worth more than two minutes per flight, on average, must, of necessity, have a higher payoff than changing the type of scanners at the checkpoint.

politicians and TSA bureaucrats have placed an outsized symbolic value on air security via X-ray machine

This argument applies to any type of scanner, not just an X-ray one. It applies equally well to the millimeter wave scanners that the article mentions as the chief alternative to X-ray scanners. And it in no way affects the point that the additional risk due to the X-ray scanner, given that you have already accepted the risk of a flight, is negligible.
I'm sure that some people own guns for irrational reasons. And it is valuable to know her story.

Still, there is one key fact that simplifies the gun control debate to me: 3 times more people died of accidental poisoning last year than gun homicide. The number of people murdered by gun yearly is shockingly low.

To me, that means there are other more important areas for us to focus on. (And btw, I'm not a gun owner).
I signed up just last night! Great to see such an intuitive product. Can't wait to start building with it :)
The lack of imagination coming from Facebook today in terms of the monetization of their products is disappointing.

Is there really no way that they can make money without pissing of their users? It seems like at that scale there should be new ways that they can try to make money other than simply following the tried and true method of shoving adds down everyone's throat.
It is true under the convention that we color each contiguous region the same color, and each contiguous region can get any color. It is pretty clearly not true if you insist that non-contiguous regions must be colored the same, which is what happens with enclaves.

This latter case is covered by the more abstract version of vertex coloring general graphs, which started with the four color conjecture by Guthrie in the late 1800's, but continues to this day with things like register coloring in compilers, schedule coloring in timetabling, and with the knowledge that graph three (vertex) coloring is NP-Complete.
Anyone on HN want to cooperate with me on a game for this competition? I've created some HTML5 games previously, also participated in the previous Mozilla Gameon (with Freeciv.net), and think this sounds like a lot of fun! Feel free to post game-proposals in this thread.

Twitter: @andreasrosdal
Thanks for replying. How has the site done traffic / sales wise?

What are you doing to generate traffic / leads?
how many items have been stolen by TSA agents from luggage

As far as I know, the amount of theft due to TSA is negligible; virtually all of it is due to airline employees.
These are the most annoying kind ads. Not only do I have to make sure my sound is off (if they implement it like that), they often times are REALLY loud and annoying. I make it a habit to ignore any company that has these kinds of ad offerings and shop a different brand on principle. Depending on how this is implemented, it could really be the final straw for me with Facebook. When Yahoo implemented those ads where it covered the entire screen and you couldn't click anywhere until that ad was exited, I quit using Yahoo. This would be the same level of annoying for me. There has to be other ways to get peoples attention than video ads with sound. Regular video can be ignored, although can still be distracting and annoying. I really hope they avoid defaulted sound or have a way to shut it off with a setting.
I'm a bit suspicous of that method... will it still work for people right clicking and opening in new window, or shift-clicking, or middle-clicking, or right clicking and copying the URL?
From the near the end of the submitted article: "Taylor summarizes some of that study's proposed explanations. Two-income households might be less likely to move, but the share of such families has been pretty stable in the past 30 years."

The lack of granularity in the data indeed makes it difficult to ascribe a reason to the change. The data reported in the article are consistent with the idea that workers are most likely to move when they are at an age to possibly not have spouses, and very likely not to have children. The divorce rate among previously married couples has dropped over the same time span, and as I note that the last few moves in my birth family were occasioned as often by realigning households after divorce as by seeking a new job, I have to wonder if maybe some of the decline in mobility is just a reflection of greater family stability. But it would take better data than we now have to be sure.

My last two moves were international--one away from the United States to Taiwan, and the most recent a move back to the United States--and since then I have been glad to stay put, as I can now seek employment in many places from my base here in Minnesota, and we like the neighborhood we live in as a place to bring up our children. We have no particular reason to move.
Despite his attire, Crusher was not a redshirt: http://gamerjargon2.wikispaces.com/red+shirt
Pearl Jam had this right in Glorified G's lyrics:

"Don't think, dumb is strength
Never shot at a living thing
Glorified version of a pellet gun
Feels so manly, when armed"

The problem is a lot of people feel that being able to fire a gun validates their masculinity or -in the case of women- their tough image, without first realizing that guns were developed first and foremost to kill other people, not making paper silhouettes go pop at 20 feet.

I've been firing guns since I was... I don't know, 6? I fired my first shotgun at age 10 or so. I was taught guns were hunting weapons, and encouraged from an early age to skin and clean the animals we hunted. It's much easier to appreciate the mess a gunshot makes when you have to dissect the animal to extract the pellets. Starting at certain age I was told to eat whatever I killed, so no more killing animals just because they were within range. Being able to fire a gun stopped feeling like something glamorous and became just what it should be: a useful skill in case I ever needed it.

I guess what I'm trying to say is: take the glamour out of having guns, make them as expensive as they should be through taxation (after all, how many machines capable of killing a man can you need in a household?) and the issue of overarming should fix itself out.

Can't say whether that would fix the mental issues associated with the super individualistic American society though :/
Not everyone who needs mental health care knows they need it, nor might they be willing to seek it, based on how we treat "mental patients" in our society.

I guess what I'm saying is that, you are right, attacks like this are few and far between, and that's good. I'm not sure what we can do, if anything, to make them fewer and further between. At some point, this all becomes security theater, that is doing something simply for the sake of "doing something", regardless of it's actual efficacy. In fact, "mental illness" is becoming a red herring to deflect discussion away from the harder topic of "gun control".

FWIW, I feel as safe sending my kids to school today as I did a month ago (that is, I don't give it a second thought).
We started a complaint to ask Instagram to reconsider.
http://www.publikdemand.com/s/dXpDf7/
Creating Apps in a Global Village
The "much harder to read" varies greatly between codebases. Most "sane" codebases are 90% (random percentage) as easy to read as Java. Just collection initialization, transformations, simple pattern-matching, method invocations...
Some times there is an ugly nested flatMaps/maps/filters. But in my experience, in general, they're more the exception than the rule.
Not sure about what the parent poster's town was sued for but a quick Google shows this:

http://arstechnica.com/uncategorized/2008/07/telco-wont-inst...

that resulted in

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2009/10/want-50mbps-inter...
sFile = "filename.xml";

then later

sFile = File.ReadAllText("filename.xml");
> In my Golf TDI I have a demonstrated of $0.114 per mile.

Hawaii is a worst-case scenario. Many electric vehicle owners (including Tesla) see about two or three cents per mile.
Mud Pumping
As long as there's no auto play audio I'm absolutely fine with this.
Maybe the reason the Brownian motion stopped working was a shift from 80-bit x87 intermediaries to 64-bit SSE in x64, and the removal of long double support from MSVC.
The contract explicitly specifies that they can, and will, retain all your photos if you don't delete your account by the deadline. After that, they have a permanent license to do whatever they want with your photos.
Darpa and Defense Department look to a more open source future
My predictions for future retro photography
"Instagram does a few things really well - 1.) Help make photos look pretty"

I've never seen an instagram photo I've thought of as 'pretty'. I'm not really a fan of seeing pictures other people's lunches and bathrooms, but maybe I'm just weird.
And that's one of the great problems with the entire debate from both sides; the mythology of the gun often overshadows the utility of the gun.

From the gun control side, there's often a fundamental misunderstanding of the operation of firearms which breeds emotional fear rather than intellectual caution. On the gun rights side, there's often a romanticism about the firearm that's just as emotional and absent the view of cold rationality.
kjhughes is correct. A lot of these pages are meant to gauge interest. If the market doesn't seem to be there the founders won't launch the product and you'll never hear about the product again.

At Beta List we try to be selective and only publish startups that have a custom designed landing page. This weeds out a lot of startups that aren't really dedicated to launching something. This tactic is obviously not fool proof so I welcome any feedback you might have: marc -at- betali.st
If you fancy collaborating with me on a new photo sharing service then email me at James (at) heyjimmy.net
Cool. Heroku Postgres could use a challenger.
I thought HN is a place where people don't take everything so seriously (or maybe I should provide some emoticons not to be taken so seriously?). And I also don't understand why people always try to lump together such comments into troll/hater/(in this case)Python-enthusiast category (ever heard of sarcasm?).

I won't explain myself, smoyer's example (except the 'hate' part) pretty much sums up what I think about Perl. And yes, I believe it's a great language, although looking from a state of development of modern languages point of view, objectively speaking, it's a bit outdated language. And therefore, in my opinion, will find less and less applications in the future (and yes, Python is and will be its main competitor in many fields).
Now would be a good time to build The Next Facebook(tm)
legitimate reasons for class warfare.
Scala compilation is indeed slow (although I think C++ is worse). But I always have a "sbt ~compile" running, compiling every file as they change. So the compilation time is pretty much irrelevant to me. While using eclipse, I guess, you'd get the same speed too.
I've seen plenty of Instagram photos I've found as "pretty". Personally, I think the filters can be annoying, though...but it seems as if most people enjoy them.
Cost benefit analysis. The cost is huge, the benefit is negligible.

Spend the money on something else: (hello healthcare!) High cost, huge benefit.
This article links to Timothy Taylor's blog entry -- that's also definitely worth reading. Interesting that the same thing isn't happening in Canada or most EU countries.

I keep wondering if the population shift towards urban areas explain part of this? Does mobility vary significantly between urban & rural dwellers? Suppose: urban dwellers tend to stay put, and there are simply more of them than there used to be.
> When you serve high-rise apartment buildings, ethernet is a viable alternative to DSL. I don't see a technical reason why an independent ISP can't serve a few central districts of a city with fiber and ethernet as the last mile (in this case, the last few meters).

That's what's happening in Australia with our national fibre network. Fibre runs to the bottom of apartment blocks, router in the basement and Ethernet to each individual apartment.
But this isn't even "your data" that's being used. It's "you" whose likeliness is being leveraged to attain higher ad engagement.

While the use of our data for advertisement is covert in nature, the possible scenario I suggest where "we" ourselves become the advertisement seems very overt to me. I agree that this is similar to facebook likes and shares. However, facebook likes are voluntary actions by me. That is very different from my personal photos (which are even stronger impressions that likes or shares) being used in their original form as advertisements without my knowledge or consent (well I guess I do consent to it if I use the service under the new TOS).

Maybe this will be accepted by society in the coming years, but right here and now, it evokes an eerie "evil-mustache universe" type reaction in me, where my "normal universe personal photos" become mirrored as "evil-mustache universe advertisement photos".
An educational App writer has much better operational leverage than a single teacher of 30 kids. The App also has to compete on a global stage, so the rewards to the winner are likely to be higher too.
There is a good implementation in Mahout and it scales well on Hadoop, so its a pretty good out of the box whole data set learning algorithm.

No advantage over taking a decent statistically valid subset and running C4.5 (or a variant with floating point splits) apart from it's less work.
Flickr can capitalize on Instagram's Terms of Use changes
Good point. I'd love to the mobility data graphed against female participation in the workforce over the same time period.
Why PyPy is the future of Python
should have died 20 years ago its an awful language in my opinion
Yet somehow, I doubt many people would appreciate that kind of uniqueness...
The original post had no title, per se. The most title-looking piece of text on it was in fact just "Wil Wheaton".

What do you think would have been a better title for submitting this piece to HN?
Twelve thousand soul suckingly boring miles. I know hybrids are the future, but I'm happy for the future to wait until I die.
This point gets brought up a lot, but I'm not going to complain at all. In fact, just 5-6 months ago I used to be one of those programmers who would do

# gets the xml
def get_xml():

It took comments like this to help me realize just how silly the whole thing was. Now I write as much self-documenting code as I can, but comment as needed.
The cost is huge, the benefit is negligible.

How are you evaluating benefit? We haven't had a major terror attack using planes since the TSA was brought into airports.

(yes, I'm playing devil's advocate here, but only because that's exactly what would happen)
I'm fairly sure they could make big bucks charging for their developer API. They'd roll in cash and users wouldn't experience much of an implact.
One concern that has been raised is that while the radiation is weak, it does not go through the body but is localized in the skin, and that the machines were not properly certified as medical devices, so there was no way to know whether it leaked radiation, would malfunction in an unsafe manner.

I think radiation concerns may be more relevant for people who have already had many X-rays due to disease, or workers who go through or have to be around these machines all day.

My primary objection is that the cost of the machines isn't justified in the security improvement and potential privacy threats, and it's still easy to fool it as long as the X-ray isn't through-body. Getting through-body scanners certified and proved to be safe is going to be even more difficult, no matter how few minutes of flight you can compare it with.
"someone is profiting from my work without my consent and it isn't me"

That's the price you pay for using a "free" service.
I don't think we stand a chance. Look at the navy they've got!