skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
If they needed an explanation to say "the terms say this, but we don't really mean it" then perhaps they should just not release a ToS with stuff they don't actually mean.

It's little comfort for a company to say "oh the contract says X, but don't worry it's not true".

The take-away here is to actually properly review the ToS in light of "how might a user interpret this" not in "how can we make sure we have the absolute most coverage on our side".
If you are rubyist, which programming language have you been using before?
I absolutely agree, the legal Terms of Service (ToS) are relevant and not some blogging about intensions. The legal text is in particular important because according to the ToS, you are now allowed to sue Instagram but you have to revert to arbitration.
Rather than throwing the article away in righteous anger, consider what sort of context could be missing that would make the authors point somewhat plausible. Could it be he did not mean just any platform, but only specific type of platform? For example, server platform - MacOS isn't really a significant player there, so that checks out, Windows is a commercial player, so that checks out, there are no other commercial players, so that does not check out. Ok. So maybe he refers to gaming platforms? Xbox, Nintendo, Playstation, iOS, four commercial platforms that all come with burocracy, so that checks out, windows is a player, check, MacOS is not a significant player, so kind of check. It makes perfect sense if the author is professionally employed developing games - these platforms are where all the money is, so that's the only thing on his mind. See, not everything is a hostile dig at your favorite fruity platform.
photojojo - photography

aquabumps - surfing and beach culture
I had the same (great) idea, but your site doesn't do what I thought it would. Instead of being able to download all of my large size images, I now have a publicly viewable listing of thumbnails of all of my photos that are now mirrored on your amazon account. There are no privacy settings, or ability to delete them from your server.

I think you should be clearer about the ability to delete them from your server.
I've have little experience in performance critical code. However (in non performance critical code), many of the assertions I have written are not simple equality tests, but rather depend on the outcome of one or two method calls, which may require a non trivial amount of CPU.
The language we proposed also raised question about whether your photos can be part of an advertisement. We do not have plans for anything like this and because of that we’re going to remove the language that raised the question.

Interesting use of the present tense in the second sentence, in an "I am not having an affair with that woman" sort of way.
To late they lost my trust when facebook brought them, and even rumours of facebook behaviour was enough to walk away.

My account is now gone, same with atleast a dozen people I've talked to in the last day or so. I'd hazard a guess the quick response has been in response to sudden surge in accounts deleted.
Take it with a grain of salt. They tried to sneak this by and it blew up in their faces.

While under oath, Kevin Systrom: “No, we never received any offers,”

Reality, Instagram had an offer from Twitter and Kevin Systrom had direct knowledge.

http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/12/16/disruptions-instagr...

That said, at least it looks like they're going to tweak the TOS change in favor of their users. But with Facebook pulling the reigns, we all know where this will end.
My primary experience with C++ involves game development, so my perspective is a bit skewed. The cheaper chipsets in consoles tend to have weaker branch prediction, so any branching can be a big hit in aggregate. And everything is in aggregate because all your code is running in a tight frame loop at 30 or 60hz.

That said, the typical large C++ codebase is probably losing a lot more performance to bad algorithms than it is to problems that generally are only measurable in micro-benchmarks. There's just something about C++ that makes a lot of people obsess over performance to a degree that doesn't even affect the mindset of most C hackers. And because your brain is so preoccupied with performance in the small, you often miss opportunities for performance in the large.

Unless, of course, you're a AAA game, in which case you're fine tuning at the individual instruction and cache line levels for your most inner loops. I'm sure there are other, similar use cases for C++, but desktop software probably isn't on that list outside of a key component or two.
The risk probability is small for an individual trip. That doesn't mean we get to avoid looking at the collective risk numbers for scanners.

And exactly the same logic applies to flying in general. If we don't consider the harm due to the scanners to be safe, then we shouldn't consider the harm due to flying itself to be safe, since the latter is several hundred times as large (at least) as the former. Both are being aggregated over exactly the same population of people.

And before you say that "I choose to fly, but I don't choose to be scanned", you don't choose what the attendant risks of flying are either. You just have to decide whether or not to fly based on the risks as they are. Basically, with the scanners, when you choose to fly, you are choosing to fly for a couple more minutes than you would in the absence of the scanners. Do you routinely make flight choices based on differences of minutes in flight time? I thought not.
I'm not a computer scientist, but I speculate it's due to Objective-C's compilation with LLVM.
I agree. There is a lot of attention paid to TOS changes lately. How could they not see that this would come with heavy backlash? I know he keeps saying "not our intention" in that post, but intentions don't amount to anything if the TOS clearly gives them carte blanche with your photos. Just some really bad public relations going on there.
Mac OS X actually has three modes:
http://yuhongbao.blogspot.ca/2009/09/mac-os-xs-64-bit-modes....
Ultimately, what you're offering is a pre-vetted application that apartment-seekers can use to try to skip the hassle of filling out and paying for separate applications, right?

How are people supposed to get that from this?

"Land your dream apartment

Rentr is the world’s best tool to help you land your dream apartment."

That sounds like an apartment search app.

I think a lot of what you have written is good, it's just that what's front and center is the least helpful copy on the page.

This, to me, would be much more useful as the first thing I read on the page:

"Create a Rentr profile [and] stop filling out multiple applications.

It only takes 7 minutes and includes a full credit report, background check, social media links, and tons of other goodies."

The testimonials are made up, aren't they? If the rest of the site isn't live, how can you have thousands of applicants and landlords involved? If they are made up, get rid of them. Success or failure in a business like this hinges entirely on trust.
We (consumers) deserve to have an honest description of how our data is and will be used. We also deserve to receive the service we signed up for and not have the ToS switched on us midway through the lifecycle of the product. The fact that that is happening is dishonest, and is called a "bait and switch" in most other industries.
How many users can your web app reach?
Apple seeded iOS 6.0.2 Firmware To Fix A Wi-Fi Bug
This is the idea behind App.net, right? Although they aren't taking wheelbarrows of cash to the bank, they did prove that there is a small (dying?) demand for it.

Heck I even considered joining App.net, but I couldn't quite talk myself into it because, frankly, nothing that Facebook, Instagram, etc, have done anything that I find that terrible. (In that I"m not alone given the 1 billion users)
This is a real inspiration for all indie developers. I currently work for a startup but I have a ton of projects on the back burner I plan to unleash when I move on in a couple years. Although I understand that success in the app store is subject to variance, this helps validate the idea of a one-man shop (with outsourcing as needed of course).
No. I'll hold my judgement until I see the new TOS, but what they propose in this blog post is much more reasonable. If the new TOS reflect that, I see little reason to bitch about it.
I like this response. Terms of Service often need to change over time and, as of late, the Internet seems to have made a game out of ripping the changes to shreds when put forward by a known brand.

I'm looking forward to seeing how companies handle ToS changes moving forward. Is there a way to avoid the backlash altogether?
Because some day they will want to do the things he is insisting they "have no intention" of doing and this post will come back to bite them.
And the fact that "the US" (I assume the Federal government) trying to do this now, before changing the culture (see Holder's 1995 remarks on "brainwashing") would spark a civil war is ... a minor detail?

Unless by "restrict ownership" you mean, say, the same as the current policy for handguns, can't buy unless you're 21? Can be gifted with one, though.

"Lock up your safety" (so called "safe storage") is off the table per the Supreme Court. D.C. insisted on that sort of insanity and got slapped down in Heller, the state must allow guns to be readily available for self-defense.
I don't know. It depends which racial stereotypes you are acknowledging as sarcastically valid in this hypothetical situation.

I can't honestly say I have ever looked up what schools have had more weapon related violence. The small scale incidents never make news cause that wouldn't sell papers, so other people never really bother me about it unlike this particular incident.
Already exists: http://www.quora.com/shuffle
Instagram: We are committed to answering questions and fixing mistakes
What Are Rhodiola Rosea Benefits?
The point is that it wasn't foolish back then. There was a thread on michkap's blog about this:
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/michkap/archive/2011/11/07/10234592....
Show HN: TShort - a link shortener in C++
Seriously?

So when it's something you personally want, everyone's supposed to chip in and pay for you.

But when it's something you don't personally want, the government is spending your tax dollars wastefully.

Got it.
Why don't they just offer to share some of the profit of selling/using the photos? I think this would gain more users who would not mind being in promotional post, as long as they get a cut.
... and be better gun owners. Lock your guns.
In fact, I don't think the term even existed back then.
First, it was not a minor bug, it is a major bug that made the whole product unusable.

Second, the whole code base was one big, nasty, uncommented mud-ball. From the article: "... we simply couldn't figure out why the collision detector was not working. Heck, we couldn't even find the collision detector!"

I was genuinely curious to hear how you think sprinkling fairy dust open source on top of the mess is going to magically fix the issue. I am not talking about reimplementing the whole thing from scratch (which nobody is prohibiting you by the way). I am asking about the value added to the community to fix this particular piece of crap.

But, based on your response, I am going to risk even more karma and chalk it up to trolling. You did not address my question, and don't even look like having read the article or understood the issue. So... have fun!
There's nothing wrong with setting up a business model like this, as long as people know what they are opting into it from the very start. Luring people into using your service then yanking the rug out from under them by changing your business model is just plain not cool.
I don't think users feel that way. What they want is to be acknowledged and respected for helping build the server to what it is today. No users = no service. Don't sell us out just because you chose to take money and sell for a cool bil.
When you're getting into bed with Facebook, writing poor terms of service in the same week that you lie about acquisition offers is a pretty damn good way of souring the well. If they revise the ToS and remove the offending sections, good, but for some, it will already be too late.
Show HN: My last-minute project for last-minute Christmas shoppers
I think of it as "trying to capture massive amounts of data and somehow get useful information out of it".

This is pretty good: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_data
2 things.

1. Australia isn't a reasonable comparison.

"At the heart of the push was a massive buyback of more than 600,000 semi-automatic shotguns and rifles, or about one-fifth of all firearms in circulation in Australia."

600k was 20% of all of their guns. 600k would be .2% of the legally owned guns in America.

2. England has a violent crime rate that is over 4 times higher than the US. Just because shootings drops, doesn't mean crime or murder drops. That has been my major point throughout all of this. Yes, banning guns lowers gun crime. No kidding. It doesn't however make you safer. http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1196941/The-violent-...
A few years back, we bought a commercial address processing/validation library to use with .NET. I noticed it had a dependency on the .NET Fujitsu COBOL runtime. So even newer development might pull in COBOL code without even knowing it.
And I think ia64 has yet another different 82-bit floating point architecture that is supposed to be compatible with x87.
I'm not saying it will, but that it's more likely to. No-one knows what technology brings to the table.

Eg. "it is not our intention to sell your photos"

But what if some kickass image analysis startup emerges that can mine valuable data from billions of pics. And then sell that data. So, just like Twitter with its firehose, Instagram licences its data to 3rd parties. They've just ruled that out (except they haven't, because licensing something is legally different to selling it, if not in substance).

It's a lawyer's job to leave terms as much in their client's favour as they can get away with. It would be foolish to close avenues for no reason. There's a balancing act with PR but overall I think Instagram were just unlucky here and handled it well.
Why India Will Displace China as Global Growth Engine
"To be clear: it is not our intention to sell your photos."

That is less clear than saying "We will not sell your photos." It's either a knowingly slippery statement, or they forgot how to not be slippery.
Government is always the problem, not the solution.
The legal text, i.e., the announced new ToS, remain relevant, in particular since the ToS rule out suing Instagram (you have to revert to arbitration). I therefore see today's announcement as an important first step but an amendment to the announced new ToS has to follow suit if Instagram really takes this matter serious from a legal perspective.
There seems to be a disconnect between the TOS and this statement. If/when it comes down to brass tacks, a legal agreement between the Instagram and its users trumps a blog post about intentions. Talk is cheap -- codify the intentions expressed in the blog post in a TOS revision before the current changes take effect.
Semantics aside, there is really no difference between performance in Scala and Java, equivalent code in both compiles to near identical byte code, save for a few niche optimisations (eg tail call recursion) that can make Scala faster. I discussed this here:

https://jazzy.id.au/default/2012/10/16/benchmarking_scala_ag...

Since it's all just bytecode, then there's no difference in what you can do when it comes to scalability. However, it's the semantics, that you think are just personal preference, of Scala that make writing scalable code easier, it biases you towards scalable code with things like default immutability and using asynchronous io and things like that. Anything you do in Scala you can do in Java, but the question is, when the syntax overhead of for example monadic programming is over 5 times greater than the equivalent scala code (and many times less readable and maintainable), would you do that? Most developers don't. I wrote another blog post about that here:

http://jazzy.id.au/default/2012/11/02/scaling_scala_vs_java....
If you click through to http://www.newsobserver.com/2012/12/16/2545386/hobbit-sized-..., you see that that article does not show it from its most flattering angle. It also seems to show a 'cargo' variant.

That second photo shows something similar to bike taxis like http://www.tourpress.nl/materials/pers_images/090114_090114_...

However, I do not see the benefit of having on-board solar. It means you need a square meter or so of horizontal area 'high up' to put it on, and that makes for a fairly large enclosure.

I would keep the solar part stationary (that is: separate from the bicycle). That allows for lighter, better streamlined designs. For examples, look at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Velomobile or at http://en.velomobiel.nl/fietsen/

Also, 20 miles per hour, to me, is asking for trouble, especially in the USA. In the Netherlands, where car drivers are way more familiar with cyclists in traffic, 'power assist' bikes are limited to delivering power up to 25kph (around 15 miles per hour), for safety concerns (there is pressure from recumbent bike enthousiasts to increase that speed, but AFAIK that is not going anywhere at the moment, as bikes that go 20mph by themselves get close in speed to small motorbikes, which require helmets and a driver's license)
How can you say there are none when the very link you provide mentions a release can be required for commercial use? You cannot imply that another person endorses your product or service without permission, and I've never seen an exclusion for babies. One may exist, but that FAQ doesn't say anything about it.
For anyone's subjective answer, one is going to be better than the other, unless they are freakishly identical. Whoever provides the most rational defense of their analysis is the person we listen to.

We don't need to play fast and loose with the calculation though. Real data would be trivial to accumulate, were it permitted.
Though they probably won't admit it, I'm betting Hanlon's Razor fits this situation (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanlons_razor)

After reading some of the TOS changes and this blog post it really seems like a case of overzealous lawyering - trying to cover Instagram for all possible uses of the photos.
How to Succeed at the 4-Hour Body
IOS6 Adoption +29% Thanks To Google Maps
most often, it's us developers becoming users of some other software. And real users are puzzled sometimes, there were at least couple of emails to the sqlite mailing list about missing sqlite3.dll from users. In one case it was some tax program installing it in the system32 folder, messing it up with another one (why would they do that is another matter), also as someone posted below, there is Program Files, and Program Files (x86), but there apps that do not follow that convention (internally they have their own bin32, bin64 folders), and it comes to users again - usually plugins for various creative suits - audio, video, etc.
Connecting - Full Film
Some language in the post I found interesting:

> The language we proposed also raised question about whether your photos can be part of an advertisement. We do not have plans for anything like this and because of that we’re going to remove the language that raised the question.

Note that he doesn't say "we won't use your photos as part of an advertisement", he merely says "the reason we're removing that language is because we don't [currently] plan on using your photos as part of an advertisement".

I'm sure if they thought of a way they could make money by doing so without losing critical mass, they'd be all over that.
There's a huge difference in searchability for one.
For list comprehensions and a different style of generator, look at https://metacpan.org/module/List::Gen

And then there are a pile of modules that implement python-style generators, some using https://metacpan.org/module/Coro (co-routines implemented as threads), some using crazy hacks:

https://metacpan.org/module/Compile::Generators

https://metacpan.org/module/Coro::Generator

https://metacpan.org/module/Attribute::Generator
What do you mean they tried to sneak it in? They already had it there in the old TOS but no one bothered to read it, or at least they didn't care when Instagram had full rights to advertise with their photos before.

The new TOS actually limits what they an do more than the old one.
No one is asking for a free service. But businesses are giving it. I don't see why businesses deserve to monetize my private information. I'd gladly pay for a feature-rich gmail or facebook where my privacy was guaranteed. But no business is standing up to take my money.
Autoplay does have some legitimate, non-spammy uses.
They are using a low-level hook to disable the expected behavior of a "get me out of here" key.

They deserve all the stalls they can get. The reason it was so complicated to get this behavior in the first place is because its heavily discouraged.

Not to mention that calling SetWindowsHookEx will flag you as a keylogger in every antivirus snakeoil in existence.
Oh for crying out loud, they did not try to "sneak this by".

Stop trying to cast a simple snafu regarding a ToS as some evil conspiracy.

Remember that the people running this company are you peers. It's disgusting watching the community salivating over burning them all at the stake today.

They're your friends, or just like your friends. Knock it off.
As a Facebook cynic, I welcome this development. Finally Facebook is introducing some changes, that do not only touch those of "us" with privacy concerns, but contribute to the improvement of the Facebook experience for the whole family.
And you can get those same services, maybe better quality, for a 18% flat tax in Hong Kong. Patriotism doesn't mean accepting a poor quality of government.
Yes and no. While the syntax of the language is becoming more stable, there are still some pretty big changes coming. Mainly to the core libraries that the Dart team publishes.

Mixins are still in the works (a way to do interfaces... sorta...). As well, interacting with data flows will be changing to use a stream based model. This means if you are doing any server-side Dart and you are reading a file or a socket, you will probably need to make changes to that code with M3 releases.

But ya, the language is definitely getting farther along. One of the more popular books about the language just his the printing presses this week as well [1].

I'm most excited about M2 as it brings SecureSockets (so I can do HTTPS connections) on the server. There are lots of other goodies in M2 (like smaller javascript from dart2js). I also like that they are publishing performance data for 2 tests, showing that the VM is already faster than V8.

[1] http://www.manning.com/buckett/

[2] http://www.dartlang.org/performance/
Is there any way to translate between this rather visual proof and the degrees of 8's neighbouring vertices?

I tried to find if there was some theory behind it but all I could really find was "saturation degree".
Education and Software Engineering
For those interested in the tech: Bottle.py on EC2 (static stuff on S3) backed by the Amazon Product API (cached in MongoDB)

For those interested in the UI: layout designed in Fireworks, snowy hills in the background made in Blender

For those interested in the idea: eh, it's not that interesting, just a pretty wrapper around Amazon products
The 18 minute "Connecting" documentary is an exploration of the future of Interaction Design and User Experience from some of the industry's thought leaders.