skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
>Does your JSON response at the root entry point to the API return something signifying what all possible operations are?

Why, no, it doesn't, because it takes 3 parameters, each of which can take 10,000 possible values, and I don't want to transmit a trillion options every time someone pings the root.

I mean, I considered documenting how to pass the parameters on a client's first entry but the HATEOAS crowd told me I was just re-creating RPC, and I agreed. So no HATEOAS.
My own experience with Jira is that it's easy to misconfigure when you start, then later on there's too much inertia in the userbase to fix it. I liked it, but you have to know it a little before you use it.
The US post office is amazing. They can deliver a letter cross country, door-to-door, for 46 cents! In my experience, USPS and Gmail's spam filter lose important mail at similar rates, < 1%. This is based on how frequently my credit card bills are lost.
> Also - it against the law, a federal offense even, to open mail addressed to someone else.

No, its only illegal to do so without authority [1].

[1] 18 USC § 1703: http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/1703

In relevant part: Whoever, without authority, opens, or destroys any mail or package of newspapers not directed to him, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than one year, or both.
I don't think your acquaintances are a good representation. Social games are still doing well. Maybe not the Zynga-style games, but check out http://www.appdata.com/. #1 is Candy Crush Saga, which is kinda like a social Bejeweled. I'm getting requests from people I didn't even knew played games. King seems to be doing well lately. But note that Zynga's games still reach 171 million users per month. That's huge.

Zynga may have too many games, employees, and expenses, but the category has plenty of life yet.
Etsy Recruiting Video
Maybe there are tools that will do that. My knowledge of the industry is about 5 years out of date, and I was no expert even then. But we had no such solution and, in fact, didn't use dynamic memory allocation at all nevermind newfangled gizmos like garbage collection.

In principle, yes I think it's possible... at least, I don't think it reduces to the halting problem. But it would be tricky. It would be relatively simple to reason statically about the rate of memory allocation (iterate through all paths leading to a 'new' operator), but for this purpose you care about cases where an object becomes garbage and can be deallocated. That occurs when the last reference to the object is overwritten or goes out of scope, which is not so easy to determine in the presence of aliasing.
There have been a lot of posts related to garbage collection lately but none of them touched upon what I see as a crucial issue: why is garbage collection needed to begin with?

Could you do without it? What is the key point that made it necessary?

I'm aware of it being introduced by McCarthy in the original Lisp paper in 1960 of course. But I suspect what McCarthy originally meant is not what garbage collection turned out to be. What I suspect he meant was that there needs to be a way for memory to be managed. malloc/free offer a way for memory to be managed, and presumably they weren't invented until C was nine years later. What McCarthy might have meant is what became malloc/free in C, which doesn't need garbage collection.

C isn't the only flag here. Was there any OS on the IBM 704 used to implement the original Lisp? Did the OS support multiprocessing? Because if it didn't (UNIX wasn't invented until 1969 either) it would make sense for memory to be available for a single process. And it would mean when people said garbage collection they were envisioning malloc/free.

(Also, databases and operating systems can live without whatever makes garbage collection necessary, since they don't use it, and those are pretty complex and fast pieces of software.)

So, what makes garbage collection different than malloc/free, and why is it necessary? I'd love to learn more about that.
This is a brilliant talk, and it gives excellent reasons for most design decisions — except making error handling "intentionally clumsy". Why not borrow what is arguably the most important Erlang feature, process linking and supervision?

However, this talk does not mention some questionable decisions, such as keeping null references in the language. Why would you do that, instead of using option types?

Can you comment on generics in ML-derived languages?
> It makes more 56 nucleon containing things than anything else (aside from the super light stuff in the star that is too light to fuse)

What is this "super light stuff" a reference to? Neutrinos?
Is there such a thing as an INTERNATIONAL mobile wireless provider?
In the comments in the OP's website, I found another theory:

Barns are painted red so they are seen from a distance, not only during snow storms but every day of the year. Livestock need to be able to recognize and return to it daily. Barns have to be visible from country roads and fields by humans as well as beasts. It would not be wise to paint your barn lets say white to blend into the snow, or green to blend into the summer crops. (Comment by Yvonne Wenz)

As you already noted from your searches on Google, there is a lot of speculation out there -- who knows if theory is correct or not. But I thought it was non-obvious and quite interesting.
Perhaps Russ Cox will respond here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5796206
We use JIRA with GreenHopper to support Agile at work. The users mostly just go to the Card / backlog views and I can say it's working pretty well. Not as smooth as Trello, but still good :)
I remember paytrust, I used them for a while (US expat in France at the time). Apparently they still exist and do the same thing I used them for back then.

At the time it was IIRC, $15/mo. Now it's like $10. Personally, I feel outbox's $5 is a sweet spot - it's well south of $100/yr, and is about what I pay for locally filtered bottled water per month.

Also changing the mailing address has significant impacts for things like proving residence (for schools, etc), so that is a pain that Outbox users might avoid.
Allowing foreign investment into e-commerce can't come soon enough. The main reason the e-commerce space in India has not picked up fast enough is this.
Calculating Apple’s True U.S. Tax Rate
A reasonable sweet-spot pricing too, but someday I hope to see DIY tinker'ers get some real meat and potatoes wattage off a steampunk wood stove -without a dangerous and difficult DIY boiler.
What Is A User?
I may be wrong here but shouldn't graphs like the one showing the stock price of Apple start at 0.00?

Te graph starts at 300 on the y-axis.

If this is true the excel chart may be better in that specfic case.
Scrum definitely focuses on "What", but it is much more than the author claims. The difference between Scrum and "old school engineering" (aka waterfall) is primarily that Scrum actually measures the full production cycle; you can't do that with the long development cycles of waterfall. If you use Scrum to measure the full development cycle (which means you actually ship the Sprint product), you can then use velocity to forecast feature delivery in the future with some statistical justification.

If your engineers say that "agile doesn't forecast", they are giving you a snow-job. They are using agile as a weapon against naive Product Managers who don't understand Scrum and why it was created. Scrum was designed to replace the inaccuracies of waterfall "pseudo forecasting", which had resulted in many projects failing dramatically. Basically, waterfall "planning" is hypothesis without any verification. In contrast, Scrum verifies with shipped product every Sprint.

Astute product managers can use Scrum's verified velocity to forecast far into the future, with the usual tools of statistics (such as standard deviation, etc.). It isn't prescient, but it's the best we have. Waterfall is far worse.

Scrum done well is an experimental framework for measuring and improving feature production. It works when done well, but it is hard to do.

You can think of Scrum as a religion, but only in the way that atheism/agnosticism is a "religion". There's faith-based development and that includes waterfall; there's reality-based development and that includes Scrum (but could include any other technique where you measure and forecast using shipped product and velocity).

On the matter of Product Management, Scrum's short iterations buy you something cool: You can do Lean Product Management a la Eric Ries. This is the Product converse of Development's Scrum. Lean Product Management says "We don't know that much about the market, so let's run experiments to find out more, then let's adapt as we learn."

Scrum lets you experiment with production; Lean Product lets you experiment with markets. If you are certain that your production methods are sufficient (and you don't need truthful forecasting), then you don't need the experimentation of Scrum. If you are certain your market hypotheses are right, then you don't need the experimentation of Lean Product.
Absolutely. I've had to use Rally for two years (haven't used it in the last five months, though). When I started using it, they didn't use URLs; it was a stateful app. Even now (well, five months ago) that's still often true...

Also until recently, from Melbourne it took just under thirty seconds to load a page, any page, from scratch. Sending 2MB (for a while it was 4MB) of uncached JavaScript on every page load helped with that. Quite why one would use Ext 3, Ext 4, YUI and a couple of other libraries all on the same page, I don't know. Now, I think it's down to only about half a megabyte, and it's mostly cached.

And I can just keep going on and on about it...

JIRA is something where it can be configured well or poorly. Configured poorly, it's nasty. Configured well, it's enormously nicer than Rally can ever possibly be.
8 tips to turn your Big Data into Small Data
My fifty-something aunt plays that candy crush thing.
"Social" in the context of games basically means "multiplayer for everyone". This aspect of the game can be approached in many ways, just like "platformer" may mean Rayman, Mario, Sonic or even Temple Run. Some examples:

- spam your friends or pay

- asynchronous trade

- visiting each other

- multiplayer features introduced slowly over time

- promoting the creation of groups and structured relationships among players

- automatic interaction with other players

- any combination of these

It normally does mean avoiding things like these:

- synchronous play

- highly competitive or highly skilled play

The above should cover 90%+ of the social gaming spectrum without entering value judgements.
Full Page Ad in NYTimes for Turkish Democracy Successfully Crowdfunded
Our own experience with their Cloud offering is more recent and a bit different. We have been using cloud computing instances running Haproxy as load balancers to route millions of requests to multiple physical web servers for over a year now. Can't generalize - but we have had no problems so far.
The federal government decisions that prolonged slavery were animated by the interests of states that would without a strong central government still have slavery, and impacted mostly those states, so I'm not sure that helps your argument much.
And people complain about government waste...
Good to know. It makes me a little more paranoid that searching for the words 'authority' or 'permission' reveal 0 relevant results, regarding giving them such authority, in their FAQ.
The default tooling is either your cup of tea, or it isn't. There is great 3rd party tooling available if your tastes are different though, such as where Github and I assume Bitbucket are moving. I think those are probably the future of git (and/or mercurial) use for non-technical users.
"Take pictures using Google Glasses and share with other Tits & Glass users."

I'm mortified.
I think a lot of these things are whether you want to. It's just like people do the impossible with strong will and when there is a complete lack of will they simply never will. And building weapons and military infrastructure was something the US always wanted - something they learned, because they learned war, weapons and military brings money, power and a form of social infrastructure, while still being able to call it non-socialist. Those are all benefits. Hope that doesn't sound negative, but as a matter of fact the US has really much power, especially with their agencies and real problems with preventing enemy nations from building atomic bombs.

On the other hands smaller countries, like Lichtenstein, Luxembourg, Monaco, Austria, ... probably have the resources, monetary and scientifically (else they could buy them), but have a complete lack of interest, just like the ordinary physics student has a complete lack of interest. In fact I even know someone with a startup who is really scared of their technology being used for weapons and he does everything to prevent this (they make amazing drones and Hollywood and stuff are already really interested, cause it has a camera that allows to make pictures/films that could not be done before). He also lost friends because they got into military stuff - like they were killed.

Anyway, this article states that these were people who studied physics and were not into weapons and did only use public information, but that's really far from reality of someone who would target and have the real will to create a nuclear weapon. Many circumstances would most likely be way better for someone who really wants to.

Now one can do some research on this topic, but the US, kinda as part of their military system also has a huge army when it comes to agencies and invests like an unlimited amount of money into them, so it can pretty much flood Iranian science institutions with agents. I mean, they often had agents that got into way higher political positions than they intended and stuff like that. And military spending is just extreme in the US (look it up on Wikipedia if you haven't seen the figures yet).

So basically nuclear weapons are a lot about will, but also fear. I mean looking at the world and how the official US tends to act a lot of states that could have interests in such weapons doesn't want to, cause it would result into a nearly automatic invasion, be it by agents or military from the US.

Okay, I don't know how hard it really is. I mean according to the US the Iran was really close (weeks/months away) from the atomic bomb since the eighties or so. I don't know what stopped them, whether it really just were agents or whether there were other reasons, but given these facts and how much the Iran (according to the US! (not saying you can trust the other side more though)) wants this weapons there has to be more than a bit of cyber war, which really was more like public "look how cool we are" thing. I mean they put in agents there to place that worm and I am pretty sure he could have done many things and they just did it for the public.
Formal theory of creativity
Facebook also re-tooled how they display in-game sharing and such in response to Zynga and many other app companies that constantly spammed Facebook's user base. My suspicion is that this led to a precipitous decrease in Zynga's ability to acquire new customers.
Async I/O and Python
I hope they could enable the Kindle store soon for amazon.in
The astrophysics here is not quite right. Stars actually do make elements heavier than iron (where else would they come from?), they just don't get any energy out of them.

Also, it's a misconception that the iron on Earth is made in the cores of stars. That iron is almost all trapped in the resulting neutron star or black hole. The iron released to the rest of the universe is formed from the decay of nickel and cobalt in the supernova explosion.
Cows are red/green colour blind, so a red shed against green fields and trees wouldn't be so visible to them.

(http://academic.research.microsoft.com/Paper/5494786)

(Google - your internet-enabled spell checker grey-underlined "Colour blind" and a right click suggested "colorblind" even though my settings are for a UK dictionary. I wonder if we'll see language drift as more and more people spell check with crowd-sourced dictionaries?)
What kind of "rudimentary research" would you do to discover that the game wouldn't have the staying power of Words with Friends?
Corrected, 88% of the patents grant made by PTO that has been tested through an ex parte reexamination has been found to been incorrectly issued by the PTO.

The data is PTO's own yearly statistics, and is under the heading of issued certificate of reexamination, and one need to compare the period of 2011/09/30 -> 2012/09/30 to get the latest data. A certificate is the concluded decision after all the appeals are done. The statistics cover all types of patents, and all types of industries. Statistics for specific markets (say software) doesn't seem to exist.

The reason I don't bring up unchallenged patents, is that they are of indeterminate quality. The market values them less, and they shares many of the attributes of untested code. It might be good, it might be bad, but until the code is actually run and tested, nothing much can be said. Discussing the quality of untested code seems to me at least as exercise in futility. If we were to try asses the average quality of developed code, would we include untested code too, and if so, how?

On the positive side, patents that are used by entities that try to extract money from patent licensing do tend to get their patent contested. So the patents that are challenged, are also the patents that are in-use at patent suits and patent agreements.
Didn't realize you became a sushi chef for Kim Jong-il and had the exact same life experiences.
U.S. trade agency rules for Samsung, bans iPhone 4 imports
Is it possible to take unpaid vacation? Is that generally looked down upon?

Not sure I can go without 32 days a year, I'd go nuts I think.
Phabricator is a nice fully integrated alterative.
Stop being a founder, start being a CEO
Canadian cell phone service providers must unlock upon request
I guess I'll have to get to work on the Draw My Thing-type browser game I'd been working on a while ago now if OMGPop's going. Me and some friends liked that game a lot.

My implementation used javascript, php, and canvas, but I'm considering learning ASP.NET by making this with it. Any thoughts?
> Considering that I'm a junior in high school, I receive a substantial amount of college-related junk mail (between five and ten pieces per day), in addition to perhaps three other items. I don't understand why it is preferable to sort though my mail digitally.

Well, wait until you have a power bill, water bill, gas bill, garbage bill, phone bill, cable bill, mortgage, credit card bills, car note, doctor's bills, lab results, dentist's bills, vet bills, student loan bills, newsletters from your kids' schools, bank statements, ...

Some of those need a response, some don't because you've already set up automatic bill payment, some are information you want and can then discard, some are things you need to keep for your records.
documentary series about EarthClassMail: http://www.hulu.com/start-up-junkies
Why do you feel that foreign investment into e-commerce is the solution?
Also, cancellation fees must be reduced to $0 after 24 months.
How can a site with almost no income afford to run 80 instances as well as petabytes of traffic/storage on a pricey platform like AWS?
There's also the fact that when Amazon and Google have failures, those failures are public. They affect a large number of consumers and they're widely reported. If a Merril Lynch internal system goes down and costs the company $10 million, is it going to get reported? Will there be a public post-mortem that you can cite? Probably not. Companies of all sorts, especially financial companies, don't like airing their dirty laundry in public and will only do so when there is significant market or regulatory pressure to do so.

So who knows if Merrill Lynch, Morgan Stanley or Goldman Sachs' networks are as reliable as Amazon's or Google's? I don't see any of the former companies admitting to serious network events, much less posting public post-mortems that detail what, exactly, went wrong.
I've been using EarthClassMail since 2007. Never had any problems, except when they booted the CEO/Founder for a "professional" CEO installed by the board, jacked prices, and didn't grandfather old customers.

But otherwise, had all kinds of sensitive mail flow through there and never had any problems.
> Of course not - it is called HYPERMEDIA as the engine of application state (not JSON.)

If the answer to those questions is no (whether the format of the response is JSON or anything else), then you aren't using hypermedia as the engine of application state.
Say it with Bacon
Our mail system is already a travesty.

Elaborate?
I still use it (was originally called paymybills.com) before the Paytrust/Intuit absorption. It's a great service, and well worth the fee of $11/month.

Honestly, I'm surprised we haven't seen more a modern mobile/tablet version of Paytrust come around.
Still the best article I have ever read on Product Development
http://uxmag.com/articles/why-we-need-storytellers-at-the-heart-of-product-development
I was under the impression that the books sold in India (and some other Asian countries) are low-priced international editions of those books. This is specially true for college textbooks with foreign authors.
>It would be relatively simple to reason statically about the rate of memory allocation (iterate through all paths leading to a 'new' operator), but for this purpose you care about cases where an object becomes garbage and can be deallocated.

No I don't. All I care about is having enough free memory to make new allocations. I don't care how much garbage there is, I just care that when there's garbage it's being freed fast enough to support my allocations.
I would imagine that if 50 people got the same junk mail flyer they have a system that only scans the flyer once as there would be no need to have a scan of the specific piece of junk you received. Otherwise yes it seems weirdly cheap.
They didn't really specify how this is being spread. If I have flashblock and a modern browser, I'm assuming it's pretty hard for a site to randomly install junk on my machine. Are people on Facebook downloading exe files or something?
A couple things I've noticed with most app teams/indie developers:

1) Get it in early. Either on new apis, or new hardware. Apple tends to feature apps that feature their new apis nicely. One of the reasons Instagram was promoted to heavily was that it was released at the perfect time -- the iPhone 4 came out and had a fantastic camera. Instagram drove iPhone sales, so Apple did what they could to promote it even more. I also know someone who made a good, solid iPad app at release and now they make a lot of money off it without needing any real support.

2) Know someone at Apple Developer Relations and help get your app noticed. I've heard stories of seed funds and VCs having connections with the developer relations team at Apple. They can help put it on the front page, which will bring you a lot of downloads. It won't make you a king, but it's a big deal.
I used to work for a company that did a similar thing to outbox, but differently. They took a picture of every piece of mail and then stored everything until customers placed shipping/scanning request via the web.

I was still there when Outbox first launched. It was deduced that Outbox would have it rough due to privacy/security problems. It was for that reason my former employer never launched an auto-scan product to compete.

It looks like a smart move, even today.