skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Over the past year, Apple has shown (slight) vulnerability, whereas Google has looked like an even more formidable competitor moving forward
Fast forward a few years to a hypothetical future where Apple is the exact same company but with $500b in cash.

All other things being equal, their stock will be more valuable (and hence market cap higher) because each share also controls a share of all that cash. If they have more cash than market cap, something is wrong. Either you should buy Apple, or they have a lot of debt.
the type is statically checked, not dynamically checked. Unlike something that just returns an unknown existential "object" type.
I agree. I also think it is important to distinguish between skeumorphim that is purely aesthetic, such as the leather in find my friends, and skeumophism that informs function, such as the bookcase in iBooks/Newsstand, or the calendar app. They are equally pixel heavy, but I find the former in bad taste.
Good tip, thanks. The description at http://bugseverywhere.org/ looks good, with all the features I am looking for. However, worrisomely the 'Live HTML bug repository views for online browsing' feature at http://bugs.bugseverywhere.org/ is reporting '502 Bad Gateway'.
I think this is a great idea too!
It would be an easy upsell to international developers.
It's both a problem and not. :-) The problem is that people tend to eat sound bytes and marketable ideas without careful regard for the nuances; long-winded technical discussion tends to invoke the "where's the tl;dr" response.

But careful examination of the semantics actually reveals (1) errors, (2) biases, and (3) contradictions. Which - as a blunt stereotype - is where hackers will excel, the technical & careful examination.

Engaging the idea directly: rms is a zealot. His goal is libre software as a grand moral good. He is a ideologue from the 1970s, with all that should connote. This will not make the modern ironic zeitgeist comfortable. I don't know why anyone should expect otherwise.
Which is the reason I abstracted many of the more complex features into easier, less complex and easily groked API.
If you go for windows (host) and linux (guest) for dev tools & console stuff you should definitely check CoLinux. It's a very neat virtualisation, where the linux kernel works as another process on widnows, and the performance is really good. However, for the GUI stuff you will need some vnc pipe.
Sure, but the question is then why AMZN earnings justify 250 times the prices of APPL earnings, or GOOG earning justify twice the price.

Also, growth of growth is flat, not actual growth which is still quite positive.

Last year they made $25 billion, this year they made $41. But of course the rate of growth is smaller than the year before last when they only made $14 billion. This according to Wall St means they are failures.

Lets put it this way, APPL's earnings growth is twice GOOG's total earnings.
"A billionaire may not be able to move a city with his mind, but he could outright buy one!"

A tiny one then. About 20 000 houses in my neighborood would settle you for about $15bn. I'm not talking about a block on Wall Street or in the City with skyscrappers ; )

If one day you think you're rich, just go to N.Y. or Ginza (Tokyo) and look at the skyscrappers and ask yourself how many buildings you could buy. It's a humbling experience, even for very very very rich people.

I mean, sure, he could buy a village in the U.S. or in Europe but some things are just too expensive.

I also think you overestimate the power one billionaire has.

The current U.S. debt is 16 trillions. You could take the money from the 30 first of these list and you'd only be paying back one trillion (back at the 30th position it's already "poor" billionaires who only have $20bn or so).

In other words: you'd still have a 15 trillion public debt and you'd still be utterly and totally f*cked.

I'd say there are much more pressing purposes to deal with than the personnal wealth of a few hundreds of billionnaires...

Also, why does this get posted and upvoted on HN? So that the socialo-commie dudes can come out of the wood and start criticizing wealth creation and entrepreneurship?
I think that python is the easiest and best for random english speaker to learn. The syntax is presented in a way that is extremely intuitive i.e. english everywhere -- not brackets everywhere, and the fact that you are force to write with proper indentions creates good habits. (full disclosure: i learned with python and really only know javascript well, and some ruby)
This seems to be the definitive fiasco, though.
If growth remains the same I believe people would not complain but it cannot "buy itself" in this scenario, the market would adjust for reserves the company has and the market capitalization would move accordingly.

If growth begin to stall with their reserves there probably would be a pressure from those with voting rights in the company for the company to pay more dividends on the profit. If that do not happen the company could announce a buyout of all its shares and if everyone agrees it can go private if it wishes.

EDIT: Adjusting the 2nd paragraph.
I think you mean "casualty". :)
I'd be delighted to answer your questions:

1. I don't believe that the two documents are in conflict. Our privacy policy states:

"When you use any Wolfram|Alpha application associated with a Third-Party Site ("TPS"), including but not limited to social networking sites such as Facebook, we may collect personally identifiable information about you from the profile you have established at the TPS."

When you use Wolfram|Alpha Personal Analytics for Facebook, we do access your Facebook data, which you have to authorize through Facebook. That data does contain personally identifiable information. That isn't in conflict with the FAQ. The FAQ states (apologies if this is repetitive):

"In order to do analysis on your Facebook data, it is necessary to cache it temporarily on our servers. We acquire the data through the Wolfram Connection app using the Facebook API, respecting whatever privacy settings you and your friends have given to Facebook. Our system is set up to cache your data on our servers for one hour, which allows you to perform queries efficiently. The default behavior is to delete personally identifiable data after one hour."

We do collect personally identifiable data from Facebook, but we don't save this data for more than an hour (unless you specifically enable Historical Analytics which tracks changes to your Facebook over time).

2. There shouldn't be any conflict between the FAQ and the Privacy Policy, the FAQ is specific to Wolfram|Alpha Personal Analytics for Facebook whereas the Privacy Policy is global to all of Wolfram|Alpha. As far as my being pseudonymous, my name is John Burnham and the above link is to my blog post. Send me an email at johnb@wolfram.com if you like.

3. & 4. Yes, the privacy policy is subject to change, which is standard for many TOS's. I'd like to point out though, that our Privacy Policy also states at the bottom of the page that we haven't changed it since March 2009. If we do change it, you can refresh the page at any time and check the bottom of the page for the date of previous change. What's currently on the web is the current legal document.

Links:
FAQ http://www.wolframalpha.com/fbfaqs.html
Privacy Policy http://www.wolframalpha.com/privacypolicy.html
Show HN: Fromation - Build Interdependent AWS Cloud Formation Stacks
Do not disable foreign keys
Right, except they now have 137bn in cash and equivalents, the quarter was a week shorter (~ 7 percent more of everything at a constant rate), they explicitly warned that ramp-up would affect margins and availability in their last call (and the margins actually are better, so go figure about the margins next quarter and on), etc etc...

So, yeah, I guess I'm kind of confused now by the market reaction. Perhaps you can explain to me again the rationale? But perhaps I shouldn't be confused, really. I should finally learn from history to not overestimate humanity.
I'm not sure "deserve" is the right way to consider it, more like "what is the social value of billionaires?" Or, why isn't the marginal tax rate on $1B+ 100%. I don't have much to offer in the way of an answer, just something I regularly ponder.

Furthermore, and I'd say far more indefensible, what is the social value of billionaires who inherited their net worth. Or, why aren't estate taxes on estates over $1B 100%.
GOP asking for advice on how to improve
Strongly agree. Last year, I had the misfortune of being sent to the ER for lightheadedness and confusion while hiking. All different doctors ran a battery of very expensive tests, none of which I was in any condition to consent to. They discovered nothing. Most of the time I spent on a bed in the hallway under piercing lights, being ignored, surrounded by such chaos that I had PTSD from it for months. Nobody was able to provide any form of tangible help. I got better on my own just resting for a few days.

That was only the beginning. I received dozens of singleton bills for the co-pay amounts for dozens of separate procedures and tests, which each arrived in my mailbox over a period of seven months. Seven months of surprise bills for various different things they did in a period of a couple of hours. The charges totalled in the thousands. And of course, for each separate charge, I got mail from both the insurance company and the hospital.

The net effect being that I received nothing except doctors saying "we see nothing wrong" and being sent home. But I had to endure finding surprise bills in the mail, and doing the paperwork to pay and file them, randomly for the next seven months. Every one a reminder of how a system took advantage of me while I was down and couldn't answer for myself.

I felt betrayed, like could not one person have the sensitivity and take the time to let me rest somewhere and feed me food and gatorade or something? And no matter how much I wanted to move on from it and get on with my life, I still had to face the bills streaming in like randomized salt rubbed into the wound.

Lesson: Take outstanding care of yourself at all times without fail. Don't have medical problems. If you do, have amazing health insurance.
That actually seems very reasonable.
Aaron Swartz, Wikileaks, & Senator John Cornyn
Exactly. I am not sure what maven people are looking at. I too have gone out of my way to not use maven.

I am really good at make and reasonable at ant. If you cant build a java project with those then you are the problem not the build system.
A built tool should allow (when needed) the full
flexibility of a Turing complete programming language.
Because eventually your project is probably going to need
it.

I've never seen a situation like this - but perhaps I've lived a sheltered life. Can anyone give me an example of when this would be a good design decision?
Or Bitcoin RPC password!
I think Benjamin Graham's Mr. Market allegory is applicable here: http://www.investinternals.com/2009/08/grahams-mr-market-all...
in chrome console:

winCount = count = 404;
while ($('img').length > 0) {
$('img').remove();
}
Added the deletion methods and simple tests:
http://pypi.python.org/pypi/leftrb/0.1.1
https://github.com/peterhil/leftrb/tree/v0.1.1
Thx. It works, though the line height seems kind of weird.

http://topicmodels.quora.com/Test-post

Still kind of cool to create a blog in two clicks ;)
I assume the service uses funds to prevent things like cards failing and causing domains to expire.

Maybe they're sick of subpoena requests from criminal domains?
ArchBSD:  FreeBSD distribution in the spirit of Arch Linux
I subscribe to several blogs by members of both Free Software and Open Source communities, and I hear about all of these things "that are never admitted" quite often.
Really don't get all the Quora hate on HN. I usually agree with HN on things but on this I'm the polar opposite. I love Quora (and HN).
Apple can't "buy itself" with its cash any more than you can use your credit card to pay your credit card bill.

Apple is owned by its shareholders. That cash pile ultimately belongs to them. To "buy itself", it would have to purchase itself from its owners. It can't use their money to do that, can it?

(NB: Don't get confused by stock buybacks: they keep the value of the company the same, they just concentrate it in fewer shares. It doesn't transfer the ownership from shareholders to "Apple")
The submitter was probably playing around with it before submitting the link and didn't notice the URL was being updated.
Techcrunch, seriously?
Kids at CES, sucky LifeFyre comment box, and a stupid hotspot article about nothing, Are they deliberately trying to go down?
Why do you think the stock will stay level? Investors take cash on hand into account. Also, Apple is distributing some cash as dividends.

Stocks seldom trade under the book value of the company, but it sometimes happens. The business may be bad and the stock is just anticipating, or the book value may be hard to realize in cash (hard to cash in on goodwill)[1]. None of that applies in Apple's case.

[1] And very occasionally there is something that is just that much undervalued.
It is obscene that obscenity is still illegal.
I've been thinking a lot about this also. Metro seems too flat, the lack of depth really makes it hard to know what can be pressed. I've added small drop shadows to my own Metro-like interfaces and they make a lot of difference!

I also have had an idea for a new kind of "flattish" UI based on layered construction paper that is lit and shadowed by a simulated overhead light. The idea would be to let natural lighting algorithms do their thing in giving the otherwise flat interface depth.
I'd agree, but I have found people get confused on that point. Of course, I worry with "minimum desirable product" they'll miss the "minimal" bit.
So, how do I create my blog on Quora? Or is it invite only?

Edit: Create your blog here: http://www.quora.com/blog/add

Edit 2: Won't be using this. I can't write code snippets using a monospace font. What gives?

http://sergiotapia.quora.com/adsf
In Texas, they don't convict homeowners who shoot trick or treaters trespassing on private property

Please clarify. Are you trying to say that there exists any justification for this idiotic Texanity? Because there isn't, and therefore you can't logically use it to justify this other unjustifiable thing.

Also, sending packets to an internet-connected device, and then reading the packets it sends back to you, is in no sense "trespassing". Trespass is being physically present in a physical location in which you aren't welcome. You can't trespass while you're physically in your mother's basement. Please don't mangle the English language.
Apple Earnings Edge Higher; Shares Slide
That's interesting, I've never heard that before
"Rockefeller is widely considered to be the richest person ever"

But back in a time when life was not as good, for even rich people, as it is today. Not to mention medical care or even pain medication or air conditioning or any creature comforts (I'm remembering when cars didn't have even electric windows when I was really young).

Would you rather have 10 times the money you have and be back in the 1930's?

Similar also to computers. As anyone who has worked with a teletype, floppy drives, punch tape, or green ascii terminal can attest to vs. being able to ssh into your server from an ipad mini.
It's not so strange, pretty straightforward actually.

When the Soviet Union fell apart a whole load of state assets were privatized right into the hands of well-connected people for below market value [1].

Pretty easy to make money when you're handed a monopoly, at a deep discount.

1: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Privatization_in_Russia
Ask HN: are there (addicting, video) games which improve mathematical thinking?
There are a lot of really addicting video games on the market today and so I wonder: are there video games which encourage, or provide feedback for, a deductive style of thinking (or the same sort of thought patterns a mathematician uses)?

If you were to expose this game to kids, I think it would be of tremendous value (assuming it was just as entertaining as other modern games).
You can click on "Create Blog" at the bottom of the "Write" menu at the top right of your home page.
Namecheap probably makes you fund an account to avoid paying processing fees for each transaction. Also, most people don't use 'hacker' like our relatively small community does. The person that wrote the blacklist might not even be a programmer, or maybe they are but they know something we don't about problematic domain registrations.
There's also an article he wrote in Wired debating the philosophy of what to do after finding an exploit:

http://www.wired.com/opinion/2012/11/hacking-choice-and-disc...

It doesn't quite answer your question on what he did in this case, but it shows his perspective on it.

He is correct that the end result of disclosure is shades of gray - not black and white, as we've seen recently with the student in Montreal who was suspended.
It's easy to pay a credit card with a credit card, you go to an ATM take out the minimum payment, and then go to the teller with the cash and make the payment. If you have two credit cards or online banking you can do it from home.

I've bought houses on credit cards, you just need the right paperwork and the knowledge of how financial leverage works.

The primary reason why APPL can't buy itself back with $500 billion in the bank is because not everyone wants to sell, and would only sell if they were offered a premium such as $750 billion.

If AAPL wanted to buy itself it would use a leveraged buyout. It's certainly in a position right now to buy itself. GS, etc would love to issue an interest paying loan and/or bond to AAPL for $750 billion instead of having it in T-bills paying nothing.
Ask HN: Any startups in urban planning, cities, etc. space?
I think you might find this line of inquiry more productive if you roll back on ethics, and don't give up either of "deserve" or "have" for free.

Start by tabooing "property" and assuming consequentialism. We have a monetary system that abstracts the idea of value; ownership isn't necessary for that to exist. The question we want to answer is, if we give an individual control over some value, and through their actions they cause additional value to come into being, how much of that additional value should we, through use of violence, enable them to control? The answer may range from "none of it" all the way up to "all of it".

Why would it be any of it? Possible reasons are at least twofold: First, that person may have demonstrated a unique ability to multiply value, which we wish to harness. Second, it may incentivize others who desire control to be more productive.

But lots more questions fall out of that. How likely is this person to be unusually productive again? How much of an incentive is this control to others, and how does it affect the overall growth of value? How much of an incentive is necessary to maintain our desired rate of growth? What is our desired rate of growth?

And on to more complicated ones: Say we decide to afford some amount of control. Should that amount be the same regardless of the value created? Should the scale be linear, quadratic, what? How should we respond to actors who fail to create, or actually destroy value?

As if that weren't enough to think about already, we now have to consider the externalities, what you might call "ethical" concerns. A couple of major ones:

Does our system unfairly determine the course of an individual's life based on the circumstances of their birth, making a mockery of the concept of freedom?

Does our system perversely incentivize us to manipulate it in order to increase nominal value, without an according improvement to the human condition?

This isn't intended to answer your question exactly, just to point out that 1) There are a lot of problems with the way we set all this up, but 2) We did set it up this way for good reasons, and 3) Anyone who takes all of this and gives you a "Of course they do" or "Of course they don't" has been indoctrinated.
True. Add to this the fact that things like the Wall Street journal are now Fox News puppets, and MSNBC's desire to be the liberal Fox News, and there's almost nothing left for reliable news.

Still, BBC, Al Jazera, NPR are where I go. That, and hyper local sites.
It appears that this was due to supply issues for the new iMac. A bad situation- they've announced the new product, so the old product is less desirable, yet they can't supply the new product during Christmas.

They kinda osborned themselves.

While the large PC industry is declining (according to Tim on the conference call) and Macs are generally doing better- growing or declining less, depending on the quarter- I don't think Apple's Mac business is destined to become a hobby.

Speaking of hobbies, the AppleTV device is selling more every year.... pretty soon it may not be a hobby at all.
Leiningen doesn't use Maven under the hood. It understands the Maven repository format, and imports a few classes from Maven for searching Maven repos, but that's pretty much it.
Ah, well that's where we disagree. I can't control what genes I'm born with, and I don't think there's anything wrong with socializing those risks across the population. Let's say there's a 1% risk of me being born with some condition. I think it's perfectly fair for me to pay 1% of the cost of treating that condition, whether I'm born with it or not. I don't see why I should pay 100% the cost if I get unlucky in the genetic lottery, or 0% if I get lucky. That's just upping the ante on a bet I wasn't even around to make. And that's the kind of pooling insurance usually does, but the mechanics of this particular risk are very hard for insurance to pool, because it happens to take place before I'm sentient enough to purchase insurance, unlike a tree falling on my house.

If anything, it strikes me as exceptionally petty and greedy for people who have the misfortune not to need to undergo surgery for a congenital heart disease to be angry about having to pay for their 1/risk chance of it.

I mean, I'm not even arguing anything particularly leftist here: F.A. Hayek made basically this argument.
I agree. I don't necessarily see diversity as a virtue, but more the ability to adapt. When choosing a tool, people will naturally pick the most popular one, provided it suits their needs. Open source allows for everyone to get up and move if a better alternative appears. It may be a 'monoculture' of sorts, but that doesn't have the same consequence as the biological parallel. Open source can adapt.
Google Tells Cops to Get Warrants for User E-Mail, Cloud Data
Not to be confused with this Delorean: https://github.com/bebanjo/delorean
I hate how people echo Saints Row and Company of Heroes whenever someone mentions THQ. Darksiders and Darksiders 2 (especially the latter) are brilliant games.
The community has an opportunity to publicly judge whether the charges levied on Auernheimer match the severity of the actions he allegedly took. Specifically, is the prosecution trying to "make an example" of him by heaping charge upon overlapping charge? Are they pursuing a strategy of maximum years in jail in order to obtain a plea deal for an easy win? Are they claiming to the press that they Auernheimer is a Arthur C. Clarke-ian "frightening technology wizard or witch"? Do the prosecutors involved have an unreasonable stake in this case or political aspirations?

Let's get some answers to these questions.
Where is Oprah?
Crowdsourcing Penetration Testing
The application in your screenshot doesn't suffer from a lack of gradients and drop shadows. The problem is the almost uniform treatment of every element of the interface. This isn't a problem with "flat design" ( whatever that is ) but poor typography. One can ( and should ) create a clear visual hierarchy through type and color without resorting to shadows to give it more "depth".