skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> As you said. "Virtually". All of this relies on you trusting the third party involved here and that was my point.

No, it doesn't. That's not what "virtually" means. It's guaranteed, barring some unexpected advance against one of the cryptographic algorithms used. In cryptography you use words like "essentially" or "infeasible", not "completely" and "impossible," because at the end of the day you are just hiding behind hard math problems.

The whole point of OTR is that you don't have to trust the third party, and you obviously do not understand that. They are just a transport. The analogy you are making could just as well be applied to any ISP inbetween you and the person you are talking to. They are a transport. Don't trust the client? Use another. Or are you seriously suggesting writing your own? Then you're starting down a very long path: http://cm.bell-labs.com/who/ken/trust.html

You also keep comparing it to Google's "no log" feature, but they have absolutely nothing in common. The "specs are not different"; they are completely different things.

It's disappointing that you're so stubborn, arrogant, insulting to the author, and wrong at the same time. OTR is a brilliant and fascinating protocol, particularly because it gives people who communicate deniability, which PGP, for example, doesn't. Cryptocat is helping popularize it, and that's good.
Ask HN: A place to get feedback on your website or idea?
Is there a place where you can get feedback on your app or idea? Something like "Show HN", but entirely dedicated to giving and receiving feedback.

And if there isn't, would anyone be interested in something like that?
Yea, good point. The search system leaves a bit to be desired, but I'm working on it!
Adbrite is closed down on 1st February 2013
They do own technology to achieve this:
http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genetic_use_restriction_techn...

It basically prevents G2 seeds altogether, but they've pledged not to use it because of public outcry, instead relying on these contracts.

If you seriously think through the consequences of usage of this kind of tech, it's pretty dire. Due to natural cross-pollination, we could be setting ourselves up for a world where everyone must buy all of their seeds from Monsanto and their ilk, who would have a monopoly on the world's food supply. That's bad news indeed.
Toothpaste, Hotels, and the Hilarity of Social Media Marketing
Wow, nice spot and they have all been submitted to HN. I have never seen anyone's submission history be so hell bent on self promotion:

https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=techdog
Yea, had a few people mention this... definitely my next addition! stay tuned :)
Ask HN: Website for Sale
Hi HN Community,
Me and my partners started a website in 2008 for mobile ringtones and wallpapers. We've been doing this as a part time side business for the past 5 years but now want to move on to something different.

The website grossed approx $150,000 in 2012 with very little overhead and good margins.

traffic wise we did close to 3.1 million unique visitors and close to 11million pageviews.

For obvious reasons i won't be mentioning the URL of the site but if you are interested or know of anyone that may want to take this one and take it to the next level please PM me.

we have a mobile version of the site as well and are planning to develop iphone/android apps soon. but for now we have the full site and the mobile. the sale would include all our coded,databases and content.

Thanks
I disagree. They patented a scientific process, which is what patents were originally designed for. This is a case where patents are actually not disgusting. (If I am misinterpreting the patent, please let me know)

Should chemists have not been allowed to patent the Haber Process? That is a chemical reaction. If chemical reactions are occuring all around us, isnt it disgusting to be able to patent it? No, because patenting a scientific process is a (the?) legitimate patent use case.

pull to refresh is a disgusting patent. Any of the patents mentioned recently by Samsung or Apple are disgusting. This isn't.
Sadly, things don't change all that much in Grad school either.
Note that there are colleges that accept students from earlier years of High School. I dropped out of high school at age 15, spent two years at an early college called Simon's Rock[1], and then transferred to Berkeley.

I am not saying this is the best choice for you, but if you want to skip all the useless parts of high school, this is another option.

[1]: www.simons-rock.edu
I am not saying state protection - more like state-encouraged-socially-beneficial-behaviour

Tomorrow will change so fast that relying on 75 year old farmers to take on esoteric legal points to enforce social benefit is a little unreliable
It's a shame people don't understand that IPv6 addresses are ~twice as costly to route.

Not all things that are better are free.
He also conflates bipolar with depression and anti-depression medication.

They are different conditions (albeit ones that have shaky scientific bases as 'diseases' due to the subjective nature of diagnosis).

Prozac/fluoxetine is not a prescription drug used for bipolar illness as the excess serotonin can in fact trigger manic episodes and it is thus very dangerous in bipolar patients
I'm offline multiple times a week, it wouldn't be enjoyable for me or useful for you guys at this stage.
The specs are not "different." They are completely different things.

You realize it is impossible to talk to somebody over the Internet, or in real life except in person, without relying on a third party, right? You choose who to trust, and OTR, the protocol, makes it so you only have to worry about the software used, not about the communications channel and anyone listening in on it.
Are you saying the ends justify the means?

Wrangling with the legal issues enforces consistency in our approach to the laws that govern our society. This approach is absolutely necessary in order to ensure that the base patent laws that are intended to promote innovation are extended logically in their interpretation.

Monsanto has spent incredible amounts of money and effort in pushing genetic engineering forward in order to create more food for the planet. Shutting them out from being able to profit from that effort would seem to be the only notion that is "ridiculous".

The exercise of coming up with a consistent legal approach in dealing with their claims is perfectly legitimate and noble.
So, what is the difference between value noise and perlin noise?
Here's a fun little challenge: Python in Python
Except America is the only industrialised nation that allows direct marketing of antidepressants to its populace.

Other industrialised countries - Australia, the UK, France and Germany, etc have also experienced a rise in patients under treatment for these conditions, in lockstep with the US experience, despite this difference you suggest is responsible
"My education taught me to value getting the right answer. (It also taught me to value prestige, prizes, etc.) So I worked hard at memorizing things, and anytime I wasn’t sure I’d get the right answer the first time, I’d be scared to try, in case I failed or made myself look stupid."

Here's where the above really starts to hurt: during high school, I got away with avoiding failure because everything is set up for you to 'succeed'. As soon as I went to University the opportunities for failure increased by an order of magnitude and at the same time there was nothing and no-one there to assure you that this is OK and part of the process of learning. The spiral of self-doubt, depression and fear that this created almost completely ruined my academic career.

I got lucky and it all worked out such that I am now a software developer who knows failure and experimentation (on almost any scale) are part and parcel of getting better at what you do, and the impact of this knowledge on one's emotional well-being is immense. It's what I would tell my 18-year-old self if I had the chance.
Rethinking the Parking Garage
I dont get it , for the price of a chromebook , one can get a netbook with a full linux plateform to install whatever stack one needs (and ides like netbeans/eclipse/sublimetext2...) , what's the point being a chromebook for development purposes ? ( it is a question not a rant against chromebooks )
Go is a "Google language" about as much as C is "the AT&T language".

So you really think Google is paying developers to blog about Go? Where do I sign up, I want some of that cake...
Chrome web-cam and Gesture recognition
Thats the point :-)
In Mathematica the `+` is supported
Ask HN: What things would you like to track?
An open question to the HN community. If you wanted a website service to alert you when something happened, what would you want to track? I'm thinking kind of Siri like service, but it only notifies you when things happen.

For example, here are a couple things I might track:

+ When the next Jason Mraz album comes out
+ When it reaches 40 degrees at 2am in southern california
+ When a crime occurs within 5 miles of my home

etc.

What would you guys/gals want to track?
I've been using Private Tunnel which offers 50gb for $12. No monthly usage limits or anything.

I think they have a free tier which limits to 100mb.
I feel it is the hacker mentality.
People here are very intelligent but (some often) make the mistake of feeling as though their experience and success in one domain is applicable to multiple, that they are, in fact, renaissance men and women when in fact they are largely unskilled in the Domains they are attempting to analyse in depth.

As someone heavily involved in medicine j see this all the time when the subject matter is something medical or biological- people really so feel that they can talk about issues of medicine and science with just the same authority as they can when otherwise discussing programming/whatever their day job is, when in fact they dont know just how much they don't know
On mobile, none of the custom header or the sidebars show up. In other words, I see only what seems to be the default Tumblr mobile layout, with no links to the product page, etc. Kinda defeats the purpose of the blog.
You could try Erlibird - http://erlibird.com. The crowd is typically less technical than HN readers, in my experience.
When Good Ideas Bear Fruit
This definitely seems like the best way they could handle the recent coverage of their security.
Why don't sandwich toasters have an on/off switch?
Zerofund: Innovative platform to kickstart Greece’s startup scene
It's a good idea, but don't you think people would be afraid giving away their ideas?
I'm not a believer in the "non disclosure" approach, but still think that asking wide open would still be too intimidating for people.
Why? Patents expire. If G2 seeds did not exist then there would be a greater market for alternatives.

Monsanto wants to have its cake and eat it too. It wants to benefit from G1 seeds through GX seeds while contaminating the supply of available non-Monsanto seeds.

In cases of cross-pollination, that's Monsanto's fault. They should be required to clean up their own mess. I don't see how they'd have grounds to control seeds that were cross-pollinated through their negligence.

Monsanto is worried about more than just some outcry if they put in termination genes. They could be opening themselves up to a great deal of pain.
I was never satisfied with the chroot solutions because of the separate <your distro (Debian, Ubuntu) here>/Android userspaces. Unionfs was supposed to provide a way to merge the two environments but I was never able to get it to work. All I really wanted were to use the Debian userspace tools as if they were installed into the Android FS.
Yes. Are there people with a preference for pocket Ts who don't use the pocket?
If you want to see how crazy this can get, know that you can actually take the derivative of a type (with respect to another type), and this yields useful information.

See McBride's paper http://strictlypositive.org/diff.pdf , or this guy who is discovering it by himself: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/9190352/abusing-the-algeb...
I think our discussion focused on the degrees themselves misses the point. What we see here is plain dishonest conduct. Not having a PhD is acceptable. Plagiarism is not - and shouldn't be.
At least my zoom button works...
Apple's walled-garden is becoming quite large and it might be the case that they don't have enough engineers to tend that garden at the moment. Apple is, however, not a hardware company, they're selling an entire ecosystem to their users. It is in their best interest to make sure the user's entire experience is pleasant, so you can feel confident that someone does care.

I would suggest you leave for greener pastures, but Job's genius was such that you're probably not even considering that: it would mean giving up all the content and apps you've bought.
Excuse me, why?
"This guy who is discovering it by himself" is me (the OP) about a year ago!

Derivatives of types to come in part II or III (or just watch the talk on YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YScIPA8RbVE)
Questions are not merely an assessment tool but a learning aid. In fact doing problems is probably the most important aspect of learning.
I think the benefits of getting valuable feedback outweigh the risk of someone stealing your idea.
You can believe that Assange had sex with someone without a condom, in violation of their expressed wishes, without believing that 1. sufficient evidence exists for a case to be brought 2. that he is safer in Sweden from onward extradition to the US for what arguably amounts to political persecution.
My head is already spinning with interesting applications for this.
Alert Theme Users To Required Plugins
Well if you need real cheap plumbing, you can still hire some eastern European guy and pay him cash. But quality control is your problem then and god forbid if you house is flooded after you come back from a weekend trip...
> You seem to think non-nullable references force the programmer to use extra checks all over the place.

No, the other way around. The demand for extra checks all over the place seems to demand non-nullable references. I probably wrote unclearly about this
K&R is great! For a really deep understanding how pointer and arrays are related I also recommend Expert C Programming by Peter van der Linden (http://www.amazon.com/Expert-Programming-Peter-van-Linden/dp...)
Disclosure of bias: I'm ideologically against the idea of messing with fundamental aspects of life (and the basis of agriculture) for the purposes of copy protection. That said, I very much agree with you. I'd like to explain though and at least elaborate on my biases :)

What you might see would be e.g. the spread of the copyrighted genes without the terminator genes rather than some farmer grovelling through a pile of seeds trying to find something viable. Or descendants of copyrighted plants growing where they shouldn't be - because the ones that could, did. It seems to me that even if you have the terminator genes, as a "corporate innovator", you still need IP protection. A reasonable and conservative person should assume things fuck up at scale and especially with viral technologies like, say, life.

On the other hand, if terminator genes work well, they start looking like a bad idea. For a start they're strategically bad for any nation which might ever be at war or subject to terrorism, due to the fragility of centralised seed production and distribution.

Also, the idea that the terminator genes would spread to other plants (e.g. http://discovermagazine.com/2003/aug/featgenes which I never was too worried about) starts to look more like a real thing.
I remember in Lion I had to always re-enable Trackpad zoom in preferences because it wasn't working otherwise.
I found it to be thought provoking, even if it wasn't able to form any definite conclusions. Correlation is still interesting for many reasons.

Your post suggests that it has been researched before (and presumably proved to show no link), but searching Google did not yield any results for me. I, and I'm sure most everyone who has read this article, would love to look over the findings if you are able to share what you know.
I've found that Chrome works especially poorly with a weak internet connection. When I'm tethering from my phone, Chrome sometimes cannot load webpages (I have to close tabs and reopen), whereas on Safari I don't experience this issue. Could be all my extensions though?
> Almost always it is a matter of 2 seconds to find the source of a nil pointer error

Either you're some kind of a super-human, or your code bases are really tiny. Yes, you usually can figure out the trigger of a null pointer exception, but not the source that made it happen and with complex software the stack-trace can get a mile long ;-)

The biggest problem with null pointer exceptions is precisely that (1) they get triggered too late in the lifecycle of an app, (2) such errors are unexpected, non-recoverable and sometimes completely untraceable and (3) you need all the help you can get in tracking and fixing it.

Either way, throwing better exceptions is just one of the side-effects of using Option[T], because in 99% of the cases you end up with code that functions properly without throwing or catching exceptions at all. And you completely missed my point focusing only on a small part of it that's also the most insignificant benefit of Option/Maybe.

> However having a language that combines this Scala feature with Go's exception-free error handling

First of all it's not a Scala specific feature, as the Maybe/Option type has been used and is proven from other languages, such as Haskell and ML. That the Go language creators took no inspiration from these languages is unfortunate.

Also, people bitching about Exceptions have yet to give us a more reliable way of dealing with runtime errors. The only thing that comes closest to an alternative is Erlang and yet again, the Go language designers took no inspiration from it.
> You can't trust a garbage collector; you don't know when it will run, how long it'll take, or how quickly it will free the memory you used

You can certainly control the GC somewhat. For example, disable unpredictable automatic GC and run GC yourself at a more opportune time, or never (if the program terminates before consuming all swap space of course).

I have one app where I loop continously and invoke the GC every second. Why so often -- crazy, right? No because the "garbage" generated over that second --thanks to some memory-aware development practices-- is minimal, so the GC call will typically return in way under 1ms. Of course that's a meaningless number without app context and other numbers, but you do get some control.

Basically Go gives you both philosophies. On one hand, you can auto-GC and never worry about mem or perf and simply "code out" your need, like you would in Java/C#/Python etc. Or, you can carefully design data structures and operations with allocations and GC (or supressed/non-existing GC) in mind. Sure, you don't get direct access to malloc()/free(), but implicitly (via Go's data structures, struct values vs pointers etc etc) you have a great deal more control over memory accesses, allocations etc.
Another one in a long list :)
The case for Go: https://gist.github.com/ungerik/3731476
I wish, but sorry, what pastures? Everything else is even worse. And I am a web-developer, not somebody who buys stuff because it looks nice.
If the greeness of the pasture is defined by how well 'things just work' then there are no other greener pastures. You would be trading one set of bugaboos for another.
"Trying to get answers before fully considering the problem."
"Being uncomfortable with not knowing."

These two things seem totally at odds to me and it's something I struggle with constantly. How do you ever know if you've considered the problem enough? If you come to a problem you cant solve and go to someone for help there's always a chance that person will ridicule you and put you down, destroying your motivation, because you didn't "fully consider the problem" in his eyes.
I've never done any asp.net programming, but then isn't C# competitive with everything else in that space (like python, ruby...)?

.net has a pretty good back end and the only thing you really fight with is not instruction compilation/execution time, but garbage collection. GC is mainly why you might want to use C++ sometimes instead of C#.
Yes, there are systems but they aren't anywhere near geared towards real-time because they are basically very large Finite Element Analysis (FEA) problems.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geomorphology

For example, OpenSees is used for earthquake modeling.

http://opensees.berkeley.edu/OpenSees/workshops/OpenSeesDays...
Invariably it seems the majority of people who have these problems have done something to their computer. Either downloading an app they shouldn't have, or playing with settings they shouldn't have, or there's a hardware issues (power/memory problems will cause all manner of weird behavior)

Something along those lines.

The problems mentioned here are simply not shared by most users.

Show of hands, how many Apple users here can't get Chrome to work reliably?

How many iTunes users have had the app crash on them? I've been a fan of their products (software too) for at least a decade now, and the only crash issues I've ever had on iTunes were on Windows. (Apple's ported software is invariably crap) And I've got a library approaching 50k songs.

I've never had a problem with Preview corrupting files.

I've never had mail from the past appear on an iPhone.

Either I am incredibly, incredibly lucky, or these problems are rare and don't affect that many people.

And I am not that lucky.
Light cigarettes are in fact
Worse as a whole as previously heavy smokers switch brands and start smoking lighter cigarettes

The effect is real and had been studied.

In fact, all of the effect size attempted to be attributed to 'warning labels causing cancer' can be explained by this paper here

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov.ezproxy1.library.usyd.edu.au/m/p...
You were lucky at least to find a better place in college. Although not all classes I took was as bad as high school, unfortunately I just graduated memorizing my way out of college most of the time. The idea and the gist of the subject was always elusive, there was no connectedness with anything else. There was no exploration however the workload was enormous, we were taking 5-6 college level math classes per term. Quantity ruled over quality.
This is why the computing industry should move away from this behaviour and into what is common in other industries, where if something is broken the seller is accountable for it.
Pedants would add that the analogy with number of inhabitants is all a little screwed up in Haskell since bottom is an implicit inhabitant of all data types, which means that e.g. Either Void () has a different number of inhabitants than () and so they cannot strictly speaking be made isomorphic.

Strict languages can sidestep this problem to an extent but still end up with "wrong" numbers of inhabitants for e.g. T -> (), since (\_ -> ()) is different from (\_ -> undefined).

So the only guys living in pure algebraic bliss are the total functional programmers like the Agda aficionados.
We have a lot of the same problems in my home too. My wife's computer, iPhone, and iPad refuse to behave with her email.

I'm using an old iMac as a media server, but every time I connect remotely using Team Viewer, it complains that I don't have a mouse attached.

My new iPod touch still won't sync remotely.

We were Apple fans "back in the day" (1990s) because it all "just works." The funny thing is my new Desktop/Gaming machine (running Windows 8) is more trouble-free than anything else I own.

Apple should work harder on household integration. Otherwise they'll lose out to Almond, Roku, Kindle, and all the other boxes that "just work together."