skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The problem here is that the CFAA was invoked only because a [separate] crime was committed. We might as well have a law that requires everyone to follow all laws, so that prosecutors have unlimited power to tack on charges.
Tinymce website has something wrong
I've hated iTunes for over a decade now, and that's not just because it's horrible, bloated software with a terrible interface. Almost any other method of buying an album will send more money to the artist than iTunes does. If you like a band enough to buy their music, why not put a little effort into supporting them? (e.g. If they sell their album through their own website, use it!)
Extracting Configuration in Ruby Applications
Listen to the world's first voicemail of Alexander Graham Bell
Yelp killed off featured reviews a while ago, specifically because they were controversial. It'd be useful if people didn't keep harping on things that aren't even valid anymore.
Thoughts on Finding Your Real Beauty (Value) & Startups
Charging people money for goods and services is everyone's core business.
Agreed. The idea is not articulated.

But let's leave aside the way it's crafted, and look at the core proposal : the article seems to suggest that growing too fast reduce how well the company is perceived, or how efficient it may be.

But as you said, no evidence is provided. It could just be a survivor bias.

Also, considering how people keep talking about "the next big thing" and companies with double digits growth rate, there could even be counter evidence to this claim.

Is it necessary for posters to submit messages containing wild speculations not backed with evidence, or even with some counter evidence ?

I wish it was possible to downvote some articles to reclaim the (collectively) lost time - 10 seconds by thousands of people - or to avoid starting a reasoning on false premises.

I for one enjoy it when I'm told how and why some idea is wrong, and where deadends are. Too bad this can't be done yet on HN.
So one interesting thing is that the "two disparate events, one conference" problem goes a little deeper. There seem to be four "things" you get out of WWDC:

1. Meeting with people (can be achieved without a ticket and just going to SF that week)

2. The sessions (many of which are recorded and thus largely don't require a ticket, but some are not I think?)

3. The keynote (not actually important for developers)

4. 1-on-1 with engineers. As far as I can tell the only truly unique and universally considered valuable aspect of the conference that absolutely requires a ticket.

So it seems that (4) is the real value here, probably more to do with the fact that its so hard to get developer help from Apple any other time of the year. Since you mention radical changes, I wonder if it would be worth it for Apple to just prerecord ALL sessions, make them all available after a Keynote that has nothing to do with the conference, and then offer a WWDC week that just focused on direct contact with engineers. This would actually be better for the sessions too: many times I've had a question about a session, and either there wasn't time to answer it then, or I didn't think of it until much later. By having a conference full of people that had plenty of time to review content beforehand, you'd probably get more questions answered.
It's naive to think that you won't be help accountable for what the people you pay to represent you are saying, too.
Introducing Loadjs - Page specific javascript code for Rails apps
this list is literally everything. I just spent $4000 at ThinkGeek as that was the only thing I am missing from all of these.

finally. someone gets it.
Comparison of the best search options for web apps.
I'm sure that's why half the people involved, including the external auditor are only speaking on the matter through their attorneys.
Still needs some sort of syncing of read positions.
Hiring High Quality Developers on a Bootstrapper’s Budget
Yelp is an extortion racket.

This is a recurring story that does not go away. Once is an accident, twice is coincidence, third time is enemy action.

Further, I judge people by their actions, not their intent. "Oh, you didn't mean to shoot me in the face? No problem!"

My two heresy anecdotes...

My buddy has a restaurant. He's always playing cat and mouse with the Yelp reviews. He claims Yelp buries the positive reviews and that he's been told they would reorder the reviews, for a price.

More worrisome is my doctor's story. I checked my doctor's Yelp review. Doctor is trashed. Which surprised me, because this doctor is great. So I ask about it. Doctor claims reviewer was a disgruntled patient looking for pain medication for migraines, which is something this doctor (a neurologist) does not do. So doctor contacts Yelp. Sorry, sir, there's nothing we can do. Perhaps you'd like to buy some advertising, we can adjust the results.

Straight up extortion.
Getting thrown into the deep end is the best part about programming, IMO. It keeps me on my toes and constantly learning new things.
Apple’s tickets sold out 95 percent faster than Google’s tickets

Wow! Apple is totally kicking Google's ASS!

WTF kind of statistic is this? The measure of two tech giants is how ludicrously quickly they sell out tickets to their conferences?
Even if all business->individual interactions are marketing, that doesn't mean that all marketing is spam. Marketing and customer engagement is fine. Spam isn't.

The distinction for me isn't between marketing/non-marketing but between humans and robots. If a human representing some business favorites my tweet because they feel that it's worth favoriting, that's great. In fact, it makes me feel good that some human at an organization is reading and caring about what I have to say. Wonderful, I write things so people can read them.

Robots just going out and marking things as favorites just to get attention and followers? That's the kind of spam actively undermines the value of the example above.
You only need more context in order to know where to look to understand the code. If you don't know what foo does, you have to go look at the definition of foo. If foo is obvious or common, then you don't care which instance's version of foo is being called. To a person reading the code, + is + regardless of whether it is adding ints or floats. If you are looking at a patch and don't know what a function does, then you need to go look at the actual code. In which case, the types are now obvious (or can be given to you by the compiler if they are not obvious).

Are there alternative approaches I am not aware of? All I can see is encode the type in the name of the function (fmapList, fmapMaybe, fMapVector, etc), or forcing the functions to all be in separate namespaces and have to qualify them (List.fmap, Maybe.fmap, etc). Both seem much worse than typeclasses.
Where do you live, and what's the square footage of the house? My monthly bill is hundreds per month, but the significant majority of that is AC - I live in Arizona, and cooling in the summer here takes a crazy amount of juice.

Lighting is all CFL, though - the bulbs are about $1.40 apiece and consume 13w of juice, which works out to around $11/year to run 24/7. A 60w incandescent would cost around $52/year to run 24/7. We obviously don't run them constantly, but even if the incandescents were free, the CFLs are a better deal over the bulb's lifetime.
Immigrants Boost the Wages, Income and Economic Output of Cities
It's a funny "balancing" that means that 2/3 of the population does not have the right to be secure in their persons or papers, freedom of movement, the requirement of due process, warrants, and probable cause before being handcuffed or cavity-searched, and so on.
Yes yes, of course. I forgot the "up to" part :).
I had a ticket in my cart and then got an error when I tried to actually buy it. I hope you're right!
I couldn't agree more. I would almost rather have Google's policy of essentially no support, at least they are clear about and do not add a false sense of help.
I'm the current president of the LVL1 hackerspace (http://www.lvl1.org) here in town. Our presence and our members have played a part in retooling this award. This is neat for a few reasons:

* The Vogt Award has existed since 1999, and is funded from an endowment. Unlike many accelerators, they take no equity.

* You get access to the University of Louisville's Rapid Prototyping Center for your product development needs. This means you can do things like 3D print 20 micron layer objects in stainless steel, cobalt chromium and titanium. The website design isn't impressive, but there's a list of equipment and facilities here: http://louisville.edu/speed/rpc/equipment-and-facilities

* Louisville is home to UPS Worldport (the reason companies like Amazon, Zappos, and Cafe Press have moved to town). You can ship and receive items globally faster and cheaper here than from anywhere else in the US.
I use the favorites to mark something to read later, it means that I'm interested in some link that was posted but I wasn't in conditions to read at that time.
The OP service is spammy but no one told me that the favorites should only be used in the way you describe.
That'd be one horrible manager. I know they exist, but that's a problem I can't fix :).
I had a phone support rep yesterday admit that she did nothing to help my problem, and then in the same breath asked if I was satisfied with her help during the call - clearly for some sort of performance metric.

That's infuriating bureaucracy at it's finest.
Given all the fees airlines are happy to take for checked bags, you'd think they would at least give a check at the baggage claim exit that the bag you picked up is, indeed, your bag.

Every now and then at LGA I'll get someone at the exit of the baggage carousel ask me to cross-check my claim ticket with the one on the bag, but it's very rare.

Given how the airlines have gotten the TSA to check ID on tickets to verify that there aren't people using other folks' tickets, how expensive would it be to get someone to consistently check bags on the way out?

I know, I know - preaching to the choir and all that - but it's still frustrating that this is a solvable problem.
Write a doubly linked list in C#.
(I shit you not, I had a large consultancy interview me for an IOS position and this was the one interview question that they asked).
I had to write a compiler for a subset of Oberon in second year. I wasn't terribly impressed with the language itself.
And seeing as how well the EU has been to the PIIGS, i would say that most Icelanders are being rational.
I was reasonable. If it's easy to demonstrate that DRM still means people can copy it (the moment DRM is broken, which usually happens pretty fast), it means DRM has no effect on preventing piracy. That's a solid logic and you can put nothing against it.

In essence though it's simply irrelevant, since even if DRM slightly hinders some casual copying as you assumed, it doesn't make its existence justified in the least, and it can't serve as a reason behind pushing such horrible preemptive policing practices on consumers. The bottom line and the practical lesson that we can take out of this discussion was already expressed above. Those who push for DRM must be doing it for other reasons than piracy. And it should be strongly opposed, since DRM has no justification and it's an unethical practice.
This list is highly speculative containing dangerous and self serving advice. I think the author lacks both the sources, data, and experience to make such blanket statements.

C. Lawrence Wenham was the lead architect, developer and Director of IT at FragranceNet.com and is currently developing a new personal finance app for the iPhone.
Here's a video teardown of one of these: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dlyYjcXgz1s
The Misnamed Marketplace Fairness Act
Its really hard to get any idea of what this platform actually is. I had to read the whole blog post to even get a hint of what the platform is supposed to do for me, and was left with more questions than answers:

1) Is this a centralized platform hosted in your 'cloud'?
2) Is this a decentralized set of libraries/framework/libraries that I deploy myself?
3) Am I still in the situation of building my business on your platform and when your business goals change I have to worry about you disabling my application?

I really should be clear on at least these main points after reading the blog but I am not, I am guessing that all three are true, but I really am not 100% sure.
Is the world becoming a smaller place? Google I/O has been impossible to get into the last couple years selling out in minutes, now WWDC too.

But it is not just dev conferences. As an avid runner I've run a number of races every year. Recently a number of them have gone from selling out 12K slots in months to hours. In grad school classes filled up in seconds as well when registration opened.

This is a manifestation of our JIT culture. No longer do you mark the registration date in your calendar. No, now your call family and friends and have everyone raring to go at 11:59 PM before registration opens. If you're keen, you might probe their API and reverse engineer the site to get a jump on others.

Now that everything is in the ether, there is no concrete queue. You can't get there early if you're diehard. It is simply the roulette wheel of HTTP errors that determines who gets what today.
Only if the loop moves, which actually experiences changes in magnetic field
Thanks! We'll be following up soon with an analysis of our eye-tracking data. I'm getting permission to post the data, so I hope to have the complete data set and videos up when the paper comes out.
Two small points. First, you can't define anything as anything, stick with your gut on that one. If you could, the word define could have no definition, and the entire concept of definitions would be invalid. Someone getting sloppy with their definitions doesn't change the generally agreed upon meaning of concepts. I can call a rock a bird, but that doesn't actually make it so. There's a pretty reasonable definition of spam at this point.

Second, the advertising on Gmail (or Yahoo mail etc) isn't an indirect benefit, it's an exceptionally direct benefit. I've gotten to use a truly great, fast, reliable email service - Gmail - for a decade, with gigabytes of storage, and all they've done is run ads on the right side that I've never once clicked on and they never get in my way. Talk about a helluva deal. You're completely correct in the fact that Gmail ads are nothing like spam.
Citicards does this. I don't pay an annual fee for my card so it might be worth taking a look at
Dominance games.
Potent DDoS attacks on Mt. Gox delay rollout of new virtual currency
I actually like Rust's compartmentalized approach to memory allocation. Having task/thread specific heap is very concurrent friendly, great for running programs in multi-processor system.
Show HN: Finding the colours of the web
I think that #1 is still enormously enhanced by the conference itself. You don't get the same experience if you just hang out in the area that week. (Or I assume you don't, I've not tried it.) The serendipitous socialization aspects are a big deal, even only looking at doing it with people who don't work at Apple.

I agree that #2 isn't all that important (although there are probably some people who learn better in that sort of environment) and #3 is basically just a free show that you get with your ticket and could easily be made completely separate.

I like the idea of a week that's just focused on direct contact with engineers, but I fear that it would end up in very inefficient uses of their time due to being flooded with people asking basics because they couldn't be bothered to watch the intro sessions. In general, I fear what would happen without enough structure. But perhaps it could be made to work, and it certainly seems worth considering.

The obvious first step seems like a bigger venue, though. Apple keeps saying they can't... but other companies pull it off, so I have to wonder why Apple can't.
Arent you the guy who deleted some production database at work?
The benchmark here is crazy subjective.

The Retina screens are probably going to get lower scores due to the way Windows handles them. It'd be nice if they give a more detailed breakdown of how those seemingly random numbers were calculated.
I think knowing you're a douche makes you less of a douche. You know, or not.
Same idea:

"Service is not something that happens according to a script. It is an intuitive interaction between a rep and a customer that has a different outcome every time. A company that encourages its reps to handle the situation the way the rep would want to have it handled if he were a customer is the company that wins repeat business--in spite of the problem that required the service in the first place."
http://www.inc.com/vanessa-merit-nornberg/how-to-empower-you...

As far as the customer is concerned, the employee represents the whole company. That employee is a fractal of the CEO. They have the authority, the autonomy, the trust and the expectation that when they talk to the customer, they’re going to solve the customer’s problem.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/oreillymedia/2012/09/12/connecte...
This is nothing more than having to put up with a system that is tested and optimized for the average reaction from consumers who use these services. Most people don't "realize that their only job is to get you off the line". They walk away happy.

I think solution might come in following forms: 1) staggered levels of customer service, 2) gradual education of consumers on how to protect their rights and deal with larger services, 3) regulation that corrects for the imbalance of info between businesses and consumers.
lol, and at the end of your life you will have made the perfect app?
I was a great fan of Twitter for Mac, but their stewardship of it was terrible. It was left in a prolonged state of abandonware, not even supporting Twitter's new picture hosting service for over a year after it was available.

So no matter how cool or good it may be, they have some credibility to earn back before I let myself get attached.

Meanwhile, I have cheerfully paid $20 for TweetBot, which has enjoyed ongoing development since its introduction. It's a terrifically designed app with a solid, easy-to-use UI and powerful multi-account features. I understand TapBots incentives better than Twitter's, so I'll be sticking with TweetBot for now.
Gaslight much?
I'm going to leave the answer to others (and your personal risk tolerance vis a vis newer encryption methods). But what is clear is that this article doesn't even mention scrypt - so if you want to get into that question you'll definitely want to skip it.
It was a pleasant beating, and it hit all the marks...
So your Mac's "delete" key now performs forward delete? How do you backspace?
Lack of exercises in technical books
In a system that purports to consider suspects innocent until proven guilty, why is there stigma when the suspect is not proven guilty? The suspicion that they are actually guilty supersedes the idea that law enforcement (incl. the prosecutor) is fallible. The stigma derives from an authoritarian mindset in this way.
I haven't used it in a long time so I thought the AIR version was their desktop version. I didn't realise they'd gone native.
Zenpayroll was W'12
"You bend a policy here, you expedite an order there, you bubble an issue up to a manager. A natural, caring organization designed to create passionate customers stretches and bends."

While it is possible it is also extremely difficult when you have a large legacy workforce.

For whatever reason the people who work in those jobs are cut from a particular bolt of cloth.

Changing that is extremely difficult and assuming they have the requisite intelligence and skills to operate differently is a stretch. Examples that you could point to that have successfully done this are most likely limited to a) companies formed from the start with a certain attitude (say zappos) or b) companies who have enough profit margin in their products to pay and motivate people better and take the hit for wrong decisions (say Neiman Marcus, Coach or name your luxury brand).
And a lot less useful. For the "talk to Apple's engineers" part, the current head count already is stretching it, if not overstretching it.
I don’t want email, I want me-mail.
The scenario you described sounds like exactly what I said, with different words. You, a living, breathing person, saw the tweet, enjoyed it to the point where you said you want to check it out later, enough such that you decided to favorite it.

edit: The main point being that the intended purpose is to communicate that an actual person actively read the tweet, and for whatever their reasons, actively decided to favorite the tweet.
Thanks, that was an incredibly helpful link.
Wow, what did you learn?
Twitter is Not a Production Manager – Monitor Your Own APIs for Free
All they need to do is scale this up a bit, put it in orbit and they've got Star Trek sensor arrays.
> First of all, Watt did not have any malicious intent -- he wrote a packet sniffing program and gave it to a friend, and did not participate in nor benefit from his friend's crime.

The jury concluded based on the evidence that he knew that his friend intended to use it to commit a crime. Knowledge and concious disregard for the fact that your work is being used to commit a crime is indeed malicious intent.

> Really, I am not seeing what your issue is with the comparison between the three cases. In all three cases, men faced charges of CFAA violations that were completely inappropriate.

In two of the cases, the men were directly involved in the commission of a computer-related crime and acted maliciously. If you're trying to show the injustices of a law, it's generally a good idea to find sympathetic defendants rather than criminals or their accomplices.
Body of student falsely accused of Boston attacks possibly found
No, it's not actually. You could maybe make the argument that it should be, but it isn't.
he's saying that's it's ok to LINK to them (which is what TPB is doing)
I'm calling it hax.css
This is exactly why customer service in startups far exceeds that of large businesses. But it also makes sense. In a startup with <50 employees, it's pretty easy to reach one another so if there is a true customer issue, it can be taken to the founders if necessary. But once a company gets big, there is a communication barrier and hierarchy exists--so a customer service rep cannot contact somebody internally to help as easily, hence the cliche, “'we apologize for any inconvenience you may have experienced'”.

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.
> They need a vastly bigger space, or multiple conferences throughout the year, or a higher price, or something to manage the insane demand, if they actually want to improve this stuff.

Regarding multiple conferences, Apple decided not to do the Tech Talks for 2012. I hope they'll reconsider for 2013. That really was a great resource to have, and the 1:1 with the evangelists and DTS was excellent.

For higher prices, I keep on hearing this rumor and it never happens. There was a bump in the prices around 2010, and it never went further up from there. Maybe they're afraid of pricing out the indie developers? I have no idea.