skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This year was 100 early bird tickets at $650 with the usual ticket rush, then 200 tickets at $750 selected by lottery. I don't know what those $2000 tickets are...maybe extras held in reserve for sponsors or something that they ended up not needing.

I'm still not sure about your idea...it just seems to boil down to reducing the incentives while keeping the price high, so of course there is some point where you can adjust that mixture to where you will only sell the number of tickets available.

I agree with the argument that the keynote attracts some people that otherwise don't care (though the WWDC is always super crowded post-keynote), but considering the other conferences that have this problem, the volume of people buying tickets, and the volume of people upset with the process that denied them tickets, I'm not convinced that going keynote-less would be sufficient to erase the issues with ticket buying. And that's really the only knob you have except for raising prices, which certainly does your attendee demographics no favors.

I also really have to agree with saurik that, even if you can reduce demand to have tickets sell out in, say, an hour, simple distractions that morning (kids, forgotten meetings, car problems) still mean you miss it, which will again heavily skew your demographics to the set of people glued to twitter who would never have missed the 30-minute, 15-minute, and 5-minute warnings of impending ticket sales. Some of those people are going to indeed be the true fans, but many will just be seeing those by virtue of attributes that bring no advantage to the conference, and may limit its reach. It takes all types :)
The first edition of PLAI has a nice introductory chapter on types that explains this notation and has a whole section on type inference. It's also freely available online, so that's nice. (chapter 10 is on types) I haven't looked at the second edition at all yet, but the chapter on types looks like it has more code than math.

Benjamin Pierce's Types and Programming Languages seems to be the gold standard of intro type theory, and definitely covers this notation and the math behind it, in a much more rigorous fashion than PLAI. It is a much deeper book though, so it doesn't get to type inference and Hindley Milner until later. I've read some of it and haven't actually gotten this far yet, but can say that it is a superb textbook, it's very well written and easy for an amateur to follow, as long as you're relatively comfortable reading and writing proofs. (but you don't need more math than your standard undergrad discrete math course)

You might also want to look at Lambda the Ultimate's Getting Started page, which has a wide range of suggestions covering more than just types, but programming languages in general.

http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/node/492

http://www.cis.upenn.edu/~bcpierce/tapl/

http://cs.brown.edu/~sk/Publications/Books/ProgLangs/2007-04...
Precisely. Hence it is rational for the public to carry out a manhunt to remove the threat.
> The point of copyright isn't really to keep little Timmy from downloading one or two songs

Oh it isn't? So then why is the MPAA and RIAA suing the parents of Timmy's all over the country?
10 Lessons I've Learned as a Young Entrepreneur
I tried bumblebee it on 12.10, after unsuccessfully trying to install Nvidia drivers. It was...not a good experience. Ended up reinstalling 12.10 just to get Unity and a reasonable resolution back. I have no doubt that there was a fix (possibly involving xorg.conf editing) but I had already spent so much time it and I needed to get work done. Hopefully the new release is better here, but I don't hold much hope.

I'm not blaming bumblebee specifically here, it's just a pervasive side effect of Linux and the modular approach. I can really appreciate the integration that goes in to a Mac.
How high resolution? My laptop looks great and works perfectly with Ubuntu @ 1920 x 1080. What doesn't work?
The problem with the car analogy, as TallGuyShort points out, is that cars are not capable of having as strong an influence over our lives as computers are. When I think about how this used to be done before, usually finances were done over phone where people got to talk to other people who explained to them things that they did not understand.

I agree that learning about SSL is probably overkill; but we do need more computer literacy among the general population. Think of it like this: finance is something that is hard, yet people learn about the basics so that they can keep their money safe. Basic computer literacy should have a similar status as a skill that is required to, say, keep your information safe.
The topic of Affirmative Action, or race- conscious admissions in general has nothing to do with entitlement. Conflating the two is the sloppy thinking I'm referring to.
On a standard 104-key Windows-style keyboard (or the 101-key standard precursor, or anything with a generally similar layout), I'd use the right-side Ctrl, right-side Alt, and the Left arrow in the arrow key array (not the numeric pad). Should be pretty easy to one-hand even with fairly small hands.
They are releasing steady updates for it. 4.1 came out Nov 2012. That's hardly 2 years. That's after the last Ubuntu release. And it's fully supported for the platform. What are you talking about?
TechStars Chicago’s first class of startups
A new class of entrepreneurs is getting ready to take on the Windy City. On Thursday, TechStars Chicago, which was formed earlier this year when the Boulder, Colo.-based TechStars program joined forces with the local Excelerate Labs, announced its first cohort of startups.
IANAL, but I think "knowledge ... a crime" means a particular crime, not a general category. So if you reasonably suspect that your work might be useful to criminals, that's not conspiracy, but as soon as one particular criminal tells you he intends to use your software for a particular crime, you're a conspirator unless you report him to the authorities. So honest cryptographers have nothing to fear, unless a criminal tells them about his crypto-assisted crimes and they don't report it.
If YouTube videos rank highly because Google is pushing them up, that's a problem. If YouTube videos rank highly because people like YouTube, that's not a problem.

Likewise, if someone has an official YouTube page and doesn't have an official page on some other video site, putting their official YouTube page at the top of the list of results is preferable from a user point of view.

If the real problem is that Google controls the 'best' video site, address that problem directly instead of trying to sway users by manipulating search results. If YouTube really is 'the best' then users won't stay away no matter what search results they get.
The topic of Affirmative Action, or race- conscious admissions in general has nothing to do with entitlement. Conflating the two is the sloppy thinking I'm referring to.

>It makes perfect sense. We've traded one group that it is socially and politically ok to hate based on their skin color in for another.

Let's not conflate the hatred leveled on Blacks which kept them out of higher education to not wanting your school full of bookworms (generalization, but I'm just making a point). This is just more sloppy thinking from you folks.
Neat! Wish I could select by just domain name (i.e. just nytimes.com rather than dozen or so whatever.nytimes.com subdomains).
Indeed. Document the Whys, and let the code itself document the Whats.
When I read this, especially the word "patented," the question that springs to mind is: why isn't Tahoe[0] succeeding?

(The same reason Linux on the desktop isn't? Other?)

[0] https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/tahoe-lafs
I've finally put my finger on what's been rubbing me the wrong about these. Although these are mostly factual and non-sensational, they smack of cable-news disease. The sort of preoccupation with a continuous update that has people glued to news and stock tickers.

For some things, a stream of information is useful. But for this sort of stuff I feel it fosters a climate of more short term thinking and concentrating on the wrong things in the community at large.

In a year, releasing and examining these numbers is going to be really valuable. But right now, I feel like it's CNBC for Startups (hint: that's not a good thing).
iOS game with $99 in-app purchases.
2880x1800. On a 15.4" screen, mind you...

As if that wasn't enough, the 13.3" version is 2560x1600. Which is completely insane.
How to Prevent the ‘Do Not Track’ Arms Race
I misspoke. The slop was in the interpretation of the definition, not the definition itself.
No, it's actually the opposite of childish: being able to digest new things is exactly what children do and exactly what adults do less.
>I suppose you could have an even less centralised system to resemble Tor hidden services. This transcript of Assange and Schmidt's meeting discusses this at a certain point, just grep for 'hash'[1]. That way the domain name itself is proof of its authenticity.

Using a hash as the name can be useful, especially where the name is only being read by a machine, e.g. you post a link and somebody can just click it, or it's part of your app which you're only using instead of an IP address in case the IP address changes. Or you can put it in a QR code or use NFC on mobile devices etc. The trouble is that it causes the name to be full of encoded data and humans can't remember it. You would still like some way of using memorable names for instances where someone is going to have to type the thing.

>Couldn't you also have something akin to bitcoin's blockchain, where the identity of a domain is agreed upon by the majority of the creators of the blockchain? I don't know what the equivalent of mining would be though. Assange also suggests how domains could be made hard to make, so that they can be 'mined', creating scarcity so that "some arsehole" doesn't "register every short name themselves"[sic].

I was thinking about something like that, it seems like the trouble is how do you calibrate the amount of work to be done. If you make it massive (like $200,000 worth of CPU time on Amazon) then you're excluding a lot of the people you wouldn't want to exclude, or causing them to waste a lot of money. But anything significantly less formidable just isn't going to solve the problem -- at $200 you can still imagine a slew of jackasses registering all the short names. Especially when they're evildoers who are using a botnet and don't actually have to pay anything for the computing resources. And that also doesn't solve the problem of scammers getting ".bank" or ".irs" or something, where the point isn't that they're getting too many names, it's that they're getting unreasonably misleading names.
If one wants to work for SpaceX we can assume that he's at least aware of the space industry environment and SpaceX's goals to get to Mars by the end of this decade (plus some years of buffer). It should be clear that SpaceX utilizes the available (human) resources intensively to iterate quickly over new design approaches.

I'm positive that with a more cosy, relaxed way grasshopper wouldn't safely land and no Dragon would dock at the ISS. In this case SpaceX wouldn't exist any longer.
"So didn't they generate the magnetic field by running a current through that coil"

Yes.

"in which case we're talking about a changing magnetic field?"

No. Why?
> If all property rights is government granted monopolies, you are then saying that the government is the owner of all and everyone’s property.

Your trouble stems from a boot-strapping problem. Property ownership doesn't exist in the statute of nature. Thus, the government doesn't need to "own" property in order to grant rights to it.

What exists in the state of nature is control of territory (or anything) by virtue of force. The government's right to grant monopolies in the form of exclusive property rights doesn't derive from its ownership of say land, but from its dominance over that land through force as against any other entity.
Why I Let My Students Cheat On Their Exam
Customer server is important, but in order to build and maintain a truly good CS team you need to treat them like a good CS team.

This post mentions following rules too strictly as a big part of the problem. However, the bigger part of the problem is treating your employees, even your customer server employees, like hard working, creative, valuable people and not 10/hr calling center pawns. That means pay them a living wage, give them benefits, ask for their input, include them in the process and allow them to have a personality.

I've worked in CS for a large social networking site (about 11-12 million users), and even at those numbers the amount of anger and hatred poured at you day in and day out is hard to handle while remaining 'empathetic'. Luckily, we were allowed to be creative, to break rules and we got paid pretty well. Had it not been that way, I can guarantee you that on angry, idiot call/email number 49 for the day I wouldn't give a shit about you or your problems.
You might want to start thinking in terms of lumens and color temperature. So 800 lumens at 2700K. Philips make ones at higher lumens and lower (warmer) color temperatures. I have one for my one and only floor lamp and it fills up the room and still enough for reading.

Granted, I tend to prefer darker rooms anyways and I'm quite happy to have candle light in the evenings (about 100 - 200 lumens).
Funny, I just built a HN article catcher that uses Diffbot to collect and classify submissions from the /new page [1]. I've been a Diffbot fan for quite a while now (although their entity recognition/tag classifier needs a bit of work as you can see from the categorization on my catcher page below).

[1] http://lahiri.me/more

I should add that their API is fantastic, and far better than using BeautifulSoup/NLTK for extracting textual content from webpages.
Featured apps in the Windows Store
Watch out for this this game if you have children. They might run up a bill if you have your account open to downloads without a password. Turn off in-app purchases if you want to try it out.
Explaining Data Recovery from Hard Drives and SSDs
Video Explains How damaged a drive has to be in order to recover data from it.
What an amazing insight! Turn on less lights! ;-)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Retina_Display — we're talking in the order of 2880 x 1800 for a 15" screen and 2560 x 1600 for a 13" screen. Linux window managers react by making everything tiny, which is not ideal.

See http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=apple...
> Except that the notion of property ownership predates written records and organized government.

What people have in the absence of government is not property, but merely possession. No more or less binding on anyone else than a dog with a bone.
I don't believe those people have been cut from any particular bolt of cloth. I think those people all started out as cute babies and lively children. I think they all had hopes and dreams. I think they have been trained to not give a shit. Often, for years.

What people learn can be un-learned. Saying that "changing it is extremely difficult" is exactly how companies get into that situation. Gosh, it's difficult to give good service, and we can get away with giving people the brush-off, so we'll just give people a script to read.

The solution to laziness in the organization's past isn't to renew the organization's commitment to not doing hard work.
You probably know this, but I think the author is confusing a string literal with a lowercase string.

String a = "hello";

String b = "hello";

a == b will evaluate to true.

String a = new String("hello");

String b = new String("hello");

a == b will evaluate to false.

String literals in Java are put in to a string "heap" (might not be the correct word) and reused. Strings objects create a new instance for each string.
'Quantum information devices...'.

I just love that we live in a time when that statement is in a science article and not limited to a cool scifi story.
Also: Not having an actual conversation with your customers
Five stars, would prototype again.
Sure, you can be a cynical selfish asshole when promoting public policy. But it's not a very good argument when trying to convince others.
Not that anyone would care, but I have one of these illuminating my room right now. I think I am done with CFLs.
The correct move then is to return it.
Just as there is a difference between making guns in general, and making a specific gun for a friend who has indicated that he will use it for a specific crime, there is a difference between making programs which can be used in crimes in general and making specific programs to aid and abet specific future crimes.

Your point about computer crimes becoming more prevalent is certainly justification to alter legislation dealing with computer crimes so that minor infractions have minor penalties, but I never saw rayiner arguing to the contrary.
Epic "cnot" Writeup (highest value level from PlaidCTF)
There is another company that does this - I forget it's name, but they didn't explain what they did - just that they had a model to 'find quality followers'

Quickly I got sick of the number of favourites it did - it was really spammy. I am not a fan of this model.
> Given how the airlines have gotten the TSA to check ID on tickets to verify that there aren't people using other folks' tickets

It does nothing of the sort, despite the fact that the obvious loophole has been published in multiple venues over the past decade.
http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2006/11/forge_your_own...

Many airlines give you the boarding pass in HTML, which is even more convenient than editing a PDF. Select the text below and drag it to your bookmarks bar, then click it and edit your boarding pass before printing.

javascript:document.body.contentEditable ='true'; document.designMode ='on'; void 0
We have used every brand available including Phillips. The CFLs don't last; the incandescents work reliably. As for the quality of electrical power - that's in the hands of the power company.

We returned bulbs on warranty but, seriously, if you're spending money/time driving to/from Home Depot to get replacement CFL bulbs on a warranty instead of buying cheap incandescent bulbs that work, you are suboptimizing.
I had mine in the cart. Placed order. Confirmed order. Store Error. Was able to get back in two more times, all the way to confirm order. No dice. Sold out :|
Use a (Friendly) Gesture to Swipe Between iPad Apps
You mean the economy that attracted SeoxyS to move half across the world?
I was in a call with microsoft support once. The azure management portal was giving me a 500 error, and I had to get an alternate login or something to take some servers down and to put some up. Anyway, the conversation consisted of some Indian guy dispassionately reading and re-reading the same monologue about how sorry they were, and that my business is so important to them. Finally I snapped and told him that I'm not interested in apologies just give me a new account, get rid of the 500 error or do my bidding manually. That did a fat load of good, as he redoubled his efforts and reread everything again. With more dispassion and more emphasis on words, as if I was hard of hearing. The rage I was feeling at the time, can not be described with any words of man.
"we must be willing to destroy the value that the internet provides in the first place."

I don't see why that's necessarily so.

"Protecting money, even if only represented as information, does not require we lock down the internet."

I'm not sure I'm following you. Having rules and conventions about how information is treated on the internet doesn't mean that the internet is destroyed. We have rules of the road, but we still have roads.

"perhaps you're inadvertently arguing in favor of a gold backed dollar?"

How do you get here?
This isn't really anything new. Countless people and companies do follows, favorites, etc. just to send that notification and get some eyeballs. Props to him for automating it and monetizing it, though.
Furthermore, the company cannot just allow customer reps to 'bend a policy here,
[...] expedite an order there, [...] bubble an issue up to a manager'. If you
give them the freedom to bend policies, they can choose to draw their own lines
and that can result in adverse effects for the company overall. Bending of rules
is too risky for a large company to allow their customer reps to take. It's a
slippery slope, but honestly one that doesn't seem to have much of a solution.

That's not true. Zappos, for example, is famous for its excellent customer service. They can, and do give their CS reps a significant amount of autonomy (within guidelines, of course) and allow reps to make on-the-spot calls about sending replacement items or handling refunds. It's a matter of trust and customer focus. Is the company willing to trust the CS rep to make the right call? Is the company focused on doing what's right for the customer and keeping customer loyalty in the long term even when it creates costs in the short term? Both of those things are true for Zappos. I'd suspect that neither of those things are true for American Airlines.

So, why is that? It's not because Zappos is a small company nor is it because American Airlines is a huge one. It has to do with markets. Zappos is in a highly competitive market. Not only are they competing with other online retailers, but they're competing with brick-and-mortar stores as well. In order to sell shoes online, they know that they have to not only match the offline shopping experience, but exceed it, in order to make up for the inherent risk premium assigned to novel types of shopping. They edge they've chosen is customer service. Zappos has the generous return policy that it has because they know that you're already sacrificing some convenience in shopping with them. They know that it's easier to buy (and return) shoes at a brick-and-mortar store, so they want to remove as many other obstacles as they can.

American Airlines, on the other hand, is not in a competitive market. They've split the market with Delta, United, and Continental. They don't have to care about the customer. They know that as long as they're not significantly more or less terrible than the other three carriers, the average consumer isn't going to stick to his or her principles at the cost of a less convenient or more expensive flight. In addition, the airline business has sufficiently high barriers to entry that they don't have to worry about a competitor springing up and devouring their business overnight. That's the real reason American Airlines doesn't care about its customers. It's also the same reason that, e.g. Comcast and Verizon don't have great customer service either. Simply put, they're not forced to, so they don't.
You may be interested to know that the value restriction is not there to protect against unsafe programs. Rather, it is because polymorphic values get elaborated to functions after type inference, which produces some exceptionally unintuitive (but safe) behavior.

This is Karl Crary's explanation; here's the only online recording I've found: http://cstheory.stackexchange.com/questions/8892/type-infere...
The omission of "why?"
Character Encodings 101
There's "Making Software" by Oram and Wilson: http://shop.oreilly.com/product/9780596808303.do
The humans that they hire for the most part have empathy for other human beings. It's a part of their personality. It shows up consistently in what they do. Since they talk to people at their jobs, there's going to be empathy.
In journalism school, one of the first lessons our indepth journalism professor taught us was to never say "I understand" as a reaction to an interview subject telling you about something tragic...because you dont. What you're supposed to say in response to a lament...either there isn't a uniform response or I don't remember, but just getting to the point and asking questions seemed to work...people don't need to be insulted or patronized when they're feeing grief.