skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> curly brackets are syntactically significant in strings - and comments.

The latter trips me up far more than I would like to admit :(

It's a great example of the nature of Tcl as a language, though. Sometimes I love the simplicity, sometimes consequences of it drive me nuts.

For those who haven't used Tcl: You write comments like this:

# this is a comment

But, in keeping with Tcl's simple and tiny nature, this isn't a special case. "#" is simply a procedure that ignores all arguments supplied to it!

While this is extremely elegant, and means you could implement comments in Tcl itself rather than the interpreter, it does mean that you have to balance your curly brackets within comments, which is hugely annoying when you forget.
"Board Gaming's Golden Age" - Fantastic GameCity Talk
I'm not sure about comparisons with the rest of the world, but there are a lot of systems in place here which let a fraudulent transaction be "rolled back" after the fact. So you don't have to worry too much about someone misusing your identity since it's just a bit of hassle (a phone call and a couple days wait usually) to put everything back.
However I've just looked up the donors page on the foundation's website and found your company twice.

The donors page has three columns, one for each of the past 3 years. The reason Tarsnap doesn't appear in all 3 years is that my 2010 donation arrived on December 31st 2010, but for my 2011 donation it took a few days for me to do the final accounting and so I couldn't get the money to them until early January 2012. (Similarly, Tarsnap's end-of-2012 donation will actually show up for the Foundation as an early-2013 donation.)

Have you donated both as a person and a company?

I was operating Tarsnap as a sole proprietorship until late 2011, so my 2010 donation was from "Colin Percival (Tarsnap)", while the 2011 donation (appearing in the 2012 column) was from "Tarsnap Backup Inc."
> What's clear from this is that Flickr didn't (and doesn't) cover what is the use case for most people: sharing photos with a limited group of friends and family.

I don't understand this point at all. Flickr has a feature for sharing with friends and family, in fact it has a group for 'friends' and another for 'family' or you can use both. I was doing exactly that in 2005 with Flickr though to 2008 when moved that to Facebook as more friends and family were registered there. What they didn't have was all the other social network stuff like status updates, chat, people tagging etc.
Pardons are not, nor have ever been, about undoing a false conviction based on later evidence. You don't need a pardon in that case; you need an appeal which will overturn your conviction. That's not to say a pardon couldn't be used for this purpose; but the judicial branch can ordinarily handle it itself.

Pardons are usually an executive power to to absolve someone (clear their record). Commutation is similar, where you do not negate the guilt but reduce or eliminate the punishment. Both are tools used for various reasons.

In Canada, many minor crimes are pardoned years after a criminal has been reformed to clear their record. IMO this is in general a good thing, but then there are cases like this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graham_James_(ice_hockey)#Pardo...

Pardons and commutes are also used to balance out a flawed justice system or one that has its hands tied (e.g. with mandatory minimums). This can include people being sent to prison for years for minor drug crimes, etc.
If only they posted 30 million of them, then maybe we'd get rid of the notion of using a SSN (which is basically a username) as a password.
Dear Open Source Project Leader: Quit Being A Jerk
Pretty nice wasn't aware of this course. A colleague of mine actually has a student that is doing a paper on GGP this semester.

I'll sign up for it but will mostly just follow along and not treat it like a real course (that's kind of how I do all my online courses).
EquityLancer - http://equitylancer.com/

If you're looking for start-up jobs or jobs that are guaranteed to contain equity, then EquityLancer is the ideal place to find those opportunities (http://equitylancer.com/) - simply sign up as an equitylancer and find the job that meets your desired criteria.
Hackers Prefer Android to Windows: Report
Considering they're building a Mac application, I don't see why would they want to attract Windows users, at least for now.
I am working on EquityLancer (http://equitylancer.com/), the world's first equity marketplace. We're setting up to launch our new website, but come check us out before we expand.
Quinns from Shut Up & Sit Down did a fantastic talk about the current "Board Gaming Golden Age" at GameCity this year!

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4921146
Cool, useful. Thanks.
Great! Pl. Keep us posted :)
They give us code, which is even better than money, really.

Not to say that we wouldn't appreciate monetary donations too, but Apple doesn't "owe" us anything.
Sadder still, the press would be all over this if the Republicans were pushing it, instead they are complacent.

As a conservative I can say that in my experience that Republicans are rarely against big government. In the recent election many I know had to hold their nose as neither Romney nor Ryan were true conservatives.
I have experienced feelings similar to these in the past as a freelancer working from home. My advice is to join a local coworking group where freelancers come together to share office space. I have found the social atmosphere helps everyone get more enthusiastic about their work and allows for easy collaboration between designers, developers, marketers and businesspeople.
The main motivation is to have some standing ground to prevent legislation.
In-App Billing Version 3
There doesn't seem to be any sort of overarching strategy here, just flailing.

I thought we were were calling "flailing" a "pivot" these days?
Pure virtual final functions : legal in C++11
We're not talking about small-claims court here. Your profile says that you're an attorney; I would be absolutely stunned if any trial attorney would suggest that a pro se defendant could prevail in a patent lawsuit against a much more resourceful organization without any more experience than reading a book or two (let alone a "how to").

You would know as well as anyone that legal actions are more a game than an effort to determine who actually is right or wrong. The entity with the greater amount of money in the bank can afford attorneys who are better at playing the game; while everybody loves a good story of the self-taught layman winning a case, in reality most laymen would get absolutely screwed.

Certainly if it's a fight worth fighting -- if the patent dispute is that important to the victim's business -- then they should fight it as well as they can, especially since they would have so much riding on the outcome: potential grievous damages awarded to the plaintiff, for one.

And, this all presupposes that the layman is lucky enough to get a judge presiding over the case that has some competence in the area of expertise covered by the patent. If the suit is held in the East District Court of Texas, well, the defendant already has the odds stacked against them.

Even if the lawsuit doesn't go to trial, and gets settled like 96% of other such suits [1], the layman's ignorance of process could likely end up costing them far more in the settlement than they would spend on letters from a patent attorney's desk. The layman would be attempting to negotiate from a much weaker position, and the attorneys for the patent troll would know it.

[1]: http://www.ipwatchdog.com/2011/06/02/what-to-do-sued-for-pat...
> How do you handle that anyway?

Reddit does it by limiting both the tree depth with a "continue this discussion" link (often seen in pun-offs) and the vertical tree length / number of replies with a "load more comments" link.

This ensures that the top thread is never really more than 1.5 screenlengths. Works very well IMO.

(For completeness sake, there's one other comment hiding feature, "Comment score below threshold", but that serves a different purpose--a bit like HN's [dead] comments except you can collapse/expand them and reply to them).
Apple could lose key patent
Hubble Images Reveal 7 of the Most Distant Galaxies Ever Seen
i guess that depends what is important to you. I highly value being able to skip the mouse. this is also my #1 feature of gmail, and biggest gripe with Outlook (it has most keyboard support but some is missing or hard to remember intuitively). Thanks for the good tip about construction! Often times though, items are managed after creation and that's where keyboard support comes in handy for me.
Suppose that someday you run for office, or lobby for a cause, or run a prominent company. Suppose that you OR someone you love has something in their past they wouldn't want shared, OR which could be misconstrued in the press.

Suddenly, you learn that unless you drop out of the race, or stop lobbying, or withdraw from a business venture, you or someone you love will be publicly shamed, fairly or not.

Or worse than shamed: framed and locked up. We already threw out due process in cases related to terrorism, right?

Not plausible? Not with thousands of intelligence workers and officials, with information on everyone retained for decades, with the NSA working hard to break old encryption so that archived conversations can be made searchable in their databases? Not plausible for this administration or any future one?

That's a huge bet. I'm with the Founding Fathers and the 4th Amendment: the government has to be limited in its searches to specific cases with specific justification.
Big Idea 2013: This Year, the War on Drugs Ends
12 Days of New Games at 888
DRM only needs to fail once. Then an image is in the wild and can be endlessly replicated (think Streisand effect / network effect).
Turns out there is a workaround. In the Edit menu there is "Web Clipboard", you can use it for now.
I've seen people ask for this on Quora I think. When I invest in a project I love, I try to share it with my friends but sharing it with people who actually put money in to help awesome projects succeed would in fact be more effective.

Like it
I use Tcl for a number of analysis scripts inside some scientific software. Recently, I came across a situation in which I had nested loops:

for {set i 0} {$i<$n} {incr i} {
# Some comment
for {set j 0} {$j<$n} {incr j} {

The script refused to run and eventually I figured out that the comment was somehow impeding execution. I still don't understand why.
TCL is still used extensively in the EDA (Electronic Design Automation, i.e. hardware design) industry.

As someone who works in the EDA industry, I can't say that our adoption of a given technology is exactly an endorsement!
IMO with the Guardian you'd be wrong - them and the NYTimes are the two leading the way in transforming newspapers online. They've yet to find the Holy Grail for their future business but things like their data blog have been groundbreaking - http://www.guardian.co.uk/news/datablog
As others have said, most uses of Tcl was no doubt Eggdrop bots. I made an eggdrop bot to do some interesting stuff in an irc channel. I also learned nice and important lesson in the process about Tcl and dynamic execution in general (such as in SQL) : Fully dynamic execution is great as long as you spend more time checking input than actually writing logic.

As an example, you can do the following in Tcl as the article points out:

set a pu
set b ts
$a$b "Hello World"

Awesome! I'll use this kind of dynamic behavior to let users of the bot have more freedom. Bzzzzt. This was back in the 90s and the idea of 'SQL injection' wasn't as widespread as it is now... Getting around these kind of injections in Tcl requires constant vigilance and sometimes is very confusing.

Another interesting issue is the lack of types and how Tcl interprets them. Ask the user for a number and check if its between 1 and 3, and reject if it isn't. Works fine until the user tries the number 0x01, which matches 1 in some places but not in others. Gave me a lot of appreciation for typed languages where an int really is an int.
Re contentedness: I said this last time this topic came up. It is not uncommon for suicidal people to seem happy or at peace once they've committed themselves to the act. The stress that causes the desire has been in some sense resolved, they know it will be over soon.

Re note: Not everyone leaves a note. None of the people I've known who killed (or attempted) themselves left notes, though most of us could guess at why. What would he have said in a note? A quick google search suggests that only about a quarter of suicides leave a note.

EDIT:

Re method: People kill themselves with all sorts of methods. A poisoned apple could've struck him as ironic, poetic, or perhaps easier to use than pills or a gun.

Overall though, suicide is a messy business. Method, motive, behaviour of people who commit or attempt it is all over the map. Sometimes you can (in retrospect) say that it was obvious, many times you can't. Some people are good at acting happy or at least not sad. Others pass it off as just being tired. Some will plan out their methods in detail (like a poisoned apple may have been), others will see a bottle or a gun and use it that instant before they can reconsider.

However, since some evidence wasn't examined at the time it's impossible to rule out an accident. On the other hand, nothing in the narrative easily dismisses the notion of suicide. This was 60 years ago, any attempt at this point to rewrite it is based on speculation from second hand accounts and has no ability to examine physical evidence to prove the theory.
And with sites such as boardgamegeek, there isn't as much risk involved unless you're buying just-released games.

I've had my copy of Dominion for over three years. I got it on sale for $30. I've played literally hundreds of games since I bought it.

Granted, I've added expansions over the years. But let's assume I paid full retail price for the game and four expansions: around $225. I've played at least 300 20-to-60 minute games. Conservatively, 100 hours of gameplay time. $2.25 an hour to entertain myself and 1 to 5 friends is an amazing value proposition.
Hah! This is neat. I was really blown away by Lytro, but this solution is one of those things that smacks me in the face as a "why didn't I think of that?"
Seriously. I have been trying to figure it out or at least get started, and I can't ever get past "Hello from Ember.JS". At some point they will have some decent tutorials or something, but until then I have to pass. Just can't get my head around it.
Title should be "Working alone sucks for some people".

I've been working from home for years and love it, for instance.
both Google and Amazon need to clamp down on these sorts of things. A few short years ago, if I was considering a new product XYZ, I used to be able to type "XYZ Review" into Google and quickly get a pretty comprehensive list of reviews on the topic. Now, I get page after page of auto-generated fake reviews, that source some specifications from the product page and throw in meaningless accompanying text. It has absolutely destroyed the utility of Google for that particular use.
The simple, uncluttered thing (which, let's face it, Curtis is hardly the first to think of...) is the design. Who knows what the code for Svbtle is like?
If true (and there's probably more than a little fire behind that smoke), then don't work at those places. Supply and demand works both ways.
China's GFW now automatically learns, blocks VPNs
What would a US Apple factory mean for American jobs?
As a long time Alfred user, the workflow feature looks really astounding. Custom google searches were a huge boon to my productivity when developing (i can search APIs in a flash now).

If im reading this correctly, with intelligent workflows I can populate my Alfred results list with carefully curated search results.

This looks like the push I need to pony up and support andrew like i shouldve been doing all along.
I've worked with youth in various churches the past decade, and it is very interesting to see the way they approach technology. They have perhaps a maximum of 3 years attention on any given technology, except a precious few that have always been there (email, SMS). As others have pointed out, right now Instagram and Tumblr are popular, and Twitter seems only popular for those near cities; in my rural area Twitter was only popular for maybe half a year or so before it died out. Facebook is still used, but you mainly see them posting stuff for family these days (not interacting with peers). Pinterest is very popular with the girls, but the guys get made fun of when they use it.

More interestingly, I'm recently seeing a love for Google again, especially with Hangouts. I wouldn't be surprised if this were the next big thing with teens.
Hey! Thanks for the feedback :)

> The website has a pre-5 image

Will fix :)

> The app name is not search friendly

Anyone have any idea how to fix this one? It baffles me that it's impossible to find it by searching its name. Never had this issue before with other apps, but then again, those were all released before iOS6 and the new search rankings.

> Re-searches too soon

Will fix.

> Video quality

Always picks the lowest quality video for streaming speed.

> Feature requests

I hope to add support for YouTube playlist integration as well as at least a warning when one goes to 3G.

> Pause/stop

Pause will buffer the song that's currently playing. Long pressing on the pause button lets you stop a song fully.
Games Workshop - Space Hulk.
The argument seems to mainly be: Sports are unpredictable, code is always predictable, so try to make your apps have the excitement of unpredictable experiences. Also, there is a lot of money in sports.

No thanks. I believe designers should strive for predictable experiences when it comes to product design. Unpredictability is the #1 reason why I get those evening phone calls from my 84 year old father-in-law who just saw a new message on his computer and doesn't know what to do...

Regarding the money aspect: Those of us that don't really like sports think it is pretty appalling that so much money is spent on mindless entertainment. In so many Texas towns young boys are being told they will never be men unless they play full contact football and sustain debilitating head injuries at an extremely young age. They spend their entire school life being forced by their parents to try and attain some unattainable dream of being a professional athlete, and being deprived of a good education and a healthy life.

Is this not a shame that our society places so much value on sports that we would destroy our kids lives to try and live our dreams through them? I choose not to contribute my money and energy to sports because there are many other things in this world that are much more deserving of my time.
> Sports are the exact opposite, they are almost completely unpredictable.

No they are not. Sports are very predictable, but they are a stochastic process. You simply have to use a different way to reason about them.

A lot or programmers deal with stochastic processes as well and we have plenty of tools at our disposal that make us able of reasoning about even the most random seeming stuff. Case in point: software that predicts how many cash registers a store might need to never have a single person waiting for more than 3 minutes, while keeping costs at an optimum.

Good movie on this subject: Moneyball
'Transcendence' Revealed: Johnny Depp to Play Supercomputer
Apple Censors Matt Damon Question from Anti-Fracking Movie Podcast (Video)
I read the article and don't come to the same "generous" conclusion. You've got a visionary, well-respected, CEO running a very (by many, but not all metrics) successful business with a lot of runway. The result is analysis that runs from calculated, to wildly optimistic, to delusional. There are people afraid to miss the boat if Amazon conquers the world and people already counting their millions as they wait for what they assume is inevitable. Amazon has the benefit of being a very proven business with sustainable competitive advantages, but at the core, this is no different from any of the other speculative manias in financial history. Amazon shareholders could be right, they could be wrong - I'm not good at predicting these things - but they're definitely not generous. They're fearful, and greedy, and emotional, and human.
It would probably be less shocking if you were thinking of expanding your toilet seat factory, and you needed a reference for the financial projections you were proposing to the bank in support of an expansion loan.

I've, more than once, spent several hundred dollars on "reports" from "well-established analyst firms," that happened to be the only source of up-to-date, relevant data. Most of those, upon receipt, could have easily been automatically generated from the dataset, and the value of the human was difficult to ascertain.
A 360-degree view of the world
The Church of England is in a bit of a weird position here. It's not so much that Parliament has unilaterally decided that the C of E shall not perform same-sex marriages, but that, as the established Church with the monarch at its legal head, it is as much a creature of advised royal decree and legislation as it is of the 39 Articles or the General Synod (represented by Canterbury). That results in areas of church law originating outside of Parliament winding up in legislation.
"If it keeps safe, what do I care!"

I feel bad for you. Really do.

I know it's a not a constructive comment but with him it seems like a lost cause.
Quicksilver is probably more powerful, but Alfred (to me) seems much simpler and there's a lower barrier to entry.

Where with QS I had to "think" whenever I used it, Alfred's interface, in the parlance of apple, "just works".
Role Reversal – A Fashion Frenzy
Unmatched brackets in includes.

Bane. Of. My. Life.
That is a fundamental change in their business model. Retail businesses have two fundamental elements; price and service. Amazon's Prime membership is part of their extraordinary service, as is their return policy (in general), and the convenience of ordering online.

If Amazon elevates prices a significant amount (what investors seem to be expecting), then they cut out one of their fundamentals.

Now there's a lot to be said that investors aren't looking that far ahead. My personal belief is that most investors these days are looking for stocks and bonds based on the greater fool theory, as opposed to investing with the expectation of earning a future stream of money. Growth stocks are particularly prone to the GFT, and "investing" might not be the best term to describe what buyers of AMZN are doing.
The Facebook vote and a nation-state in cyberspace
Do we live in a computer simulation? How to test the idea
I'd love to see some more analysis on "Button Men" - (http://www.beatpeopleup.com/start.html)
> If we accept the mainstream American definition of middle class as being about income levels, then Andreessen can still be correct if...

That's a lot of hoops, and at the end you get a result that doesn't really say anything interesting about changes in society. :-)

In the European definition of class, the big divider between working class and middle class is the value placed on education, and the optimism of the middle class. They believe that through the power of education they will have boundless opportunities as adults to shape their lives, lead a good life, and see their own children do the same.

And that class of people is growing, those values are spreading, so under that definition he is clearly wrong.

But as you say, under the American definition, yeah median income might be falling, and that makes him technically right. But is that position useful if the values of the middle class are spreading? If I were to make meaningful predictions about society, I would place greater importance to people's hopes and dreams and visions of the future, than changes in disposable income...
When to say no