skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Again, put yourself in the position of trying to ascertain if a person is coming to the US under false premises. You've determined they have. Now, at the border, under threat of deportation, you're going to say "OK, call this place and tell them no", and you're going to take that as an acceptable answer?

That idea just doesn't work. Worse, it creates more incentives for people to try to come under a false premise, as they can just backtrack at the border and still get in.

This case sounds mishandled, for sure.
Barter is taxable.

http://www.irs.gov/taxtopics/tc420.html
I think it's partly to do with the extreme flexibility of the language. When you have a large team programming in Java, you pretty much know that they're all going to be programming in roughly the same style. eg. They'll obviously be object oriented, they'll use the same major libraries, they'll be focusing on the design patterns, etc...

Whereas in the Lisp world, you have so much flexibility that you can end up with all sorts: some people doing pure functional code, some OO, some using tail recursion wherever possible vs. some preferring more explicit representations, some going heavy on the macros, some using LOOP, some preferring recursive mappings of anonymous functions, etc...

Ultimately, this can be fixed by using a decent style guide. Google has a good example since they acquired ITA:

http://google-styleguide.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/lispguide....

In other languages it isn't so much of a problem - eg. I'm thinking of Python as an example where you are strongly encouraged that there is "only one way to do it".

However, if you recognise from the beginning that you need to enforce a decent style guide, then I see no reason why large Lisp teams couldn't work.
Airships - In Focus
Looks like a good idea overall. Getting a format like this widely accepted would be tricky. Good tools that use it would certainly help.

A few comments/quibbles concerning the format itself:

(1) It think the realities of the modern world are such that you'll need to embrace Unicode a bit more warmly and deal robustly with files containing non-ASCII characters. (Some of those ordinary text editors you want to use will do UTF-8 transparently.)

I would suggest:

- Officially specifying UTF-8 as the default character encoding, to be used if no character encoding is specified with some other mechanism.

- Allowing specification of a different encoding within the file format. (You already have an HTTP-style header; you could use a Content-Type line to specify encoding in the same way HTTP does.)

(2) You want to be editable using a standard text editor, but you allow null-terminated data as a type. You can't do both of those.

(3) You're using "," as a separator with lower precedence than ";". That goes against common usage in both programming languages and English text. Also your header, following the HTTP convention, is "key: value".

Putting those together, doesn't it make more sense to do something like this:

Field_name:Type,Type; 2nd_field_name:Type

Etc.

(The above looks more natural to me, anyway.)

(4) Your escaping looks odd. The explanation about awk doesn't quite do it for me. Why the strings of "$" and "%"?

To put it differently, why not use escapes in a more traditional style, something like the following?

; %;
, %,
: %:
% %%
Sloppy UI: iOS7 (The URL John Gruber will never link to.)
Look, if one diversionary tactic doesn't work, that the TSA was just trying to make sure the IRS got its due (or whatever), that doesn't mean you move to another one in the form of a strawman, extrapolating to the most extreme case you can think of.
It's not competing with a mouse, it's competing with "a mouse and solitude in a man cave", since these are coupled together due to the fact a mouse can't be used in the living room practically. In other words, if this is close enough to the mousing experience to make the net experience of playing PC games in the living room better than the same experience with a mouse in solitude, it will be a hit.
Maybe he needs to use Windows but whether or not his single air-gap-ed computer runs Windows or not isn't going to determine whether he's going to be running Windows in general.

I don't know how maintaining a full off-Internet computer isn't much more extreme than switching OSes. If he is recommended an off-Internet machine, it seems clear he'd want to recommend the hard steps as well as the easy steps.

I mean, he says he's running open office so Linux should be able to work great for him.
| seems to work

My favorite message when committing.
You prefer 50/50 but you have no evidence to even suggest that this is the "best" distribution for CS let alone any other major.

Why can't you accept the possibility that females do not like CS as much as males do not like things like nursing or human resources?

If there is a social stigma, should we really force people who normally wouldn't choose it so we can have a 50/50 ratio just because that is the probability to be born as?

Who are you to say that they are happier doing CS instead of what they would've chosen without all this influence?
It depends: what color is their skin?
> Only launch when you have enough lead over the competition, and leave no glaring holes in your project which they can use to overtake you.

I agree that you shouldn't post to Reddit or other public site. But I don't agree you shouldn't "soft launch" and talk with others to quickly refine your idea. Just keep it offline.
Ask HN: reQall shutting down? alternatives
I received an email saying reQall was shutting down their app. Does anyone know of any other good location based voice transcription to do apps for iOS7?

reQall Product End Of Life
Dear reQall User,

It is with deep regret that we are writing to inform you that we will no longer be able to provide the product reQall after October 31, 2013. We terminated development on the product more than a year ago, but have been keeping the product available to our users, despite the fact that we have had to subsidize the costs. However, a couple of events have changed the situation:
The vendor who provides the platform on which our IVR (for Phone Access) is based has informed us that the platform will no longer be supported as of October 31.
iOS7 has broken reQall for iPhone so that users can no longer record tasks on it.
As these events break 2 of the 3 major components of reQall, we feel it is time to let it go. The product and our users hold a special place in our hearts, so this has been a difficult decision for us.
Here's what you need to know:

Before November 30, you can export your personal data. Click on "Download my backup" below. You will receive a csv file of your existing reQall items via email.

To download your back up, you need to have your email address saved in Settings (above).

reQall, the company, will continue. Our strategic focus continues to be on reQall Rover and The reQall Platform, which we use to create customized personal assistant applications for enterprises.

If you have any questions, please contact us at support@reqall.com. Meanwhile, remember to export your data before November 30th.

Thank you for your past support,
The reQall Team
This website is equivalent to those shitty ads with obvious questions like "Do you like ice cream?". It's all there to gather clicks and pageviews. The content is absolutely stupid.
For one thing, Windows has all these standard "auto-run" systems that enable infection through simply inserting media.
> I'm having trouble understanding what was so deplorable about this story besides the reprehensible treatment by the officials (which, again, seems exaggerated)?

"Other than that Mrs. Lincoln, how was the play?"
It could do without the snark, but it does have a ring of truth to it, doesn't it?
Online Profiles are not "Broken" as much as they are "embellished". By that, I mean that a big majority of users -- I would say as much as 95% amongst guys and 40% amongst girls -- embellish their profile in areas where they internally feel they are lacking / inadequate.

I have met 100s of guys from plentyoffish.com match.com and okcupid.com (before match.com acquihired them) and can say that most guys lie about their height, as well as their jobs. It's annoying for someone really attractive and intelligent like me because it wastes so much time!
There is caching of the newsgroup messages, but I don't know about the generated page.
as they can just backtrack at the border and still get in.

And that is bad, why?
I'm pretty sure that's the key difference in this case.
My impression, as someone who is not a lawyer, is that much of what gets posted to the volokh conspiracy is "pro-process."

I think it is entirely reasonable to analyze the situation from the perspective of the law, but it seems like underlying their analysis is that the law is more than just a tool, that it is itself not subject to question. I can understand that from a functional perspective. Challenging the law itself, especially long established law (even if it is being applied to new situations) is a very hard task. But too often (at least for my taste) the writers there seem to bleed that over into the law having some sort of unstated moral stature beyond its utilitarian nature.
That story is about the TSA and local police, not the CBP. Very different.

Also, a US Citizen returning to the US does not have to answer any questions (apart from the written customs declaration) and cannot be denied re-entry to the US. (Although, as always, agents may abuse people.)
The Chinese elite/the ones making the rules that you refer of, are the ones buying the houses. Who can buy a 10th house a 7,900 miles away that costs 2.5 million in cash? Mark Z Yes. If your argument were true, we would see relaxed immigration/TSA because of Obama. But, this article leads me to believe that it has gotten worse, not because of Obama, but because of the system. The birth factor might be considered a thank you in a simplistic sense. The Chinese are buying up houses that wouldn't be bought/proping up the market. The National Association of Realtors does happen to be the largest lobby group.

But, the point is, in such an extreme sense as mentioned above. Someone so visibly pregnant that a blind person could figure it out isn't given the slight of day. While a German dude with a guitar is practically thrown in prison. All I am pointing out is the irony/hypocrisy. And since it is so ridiculous and happens all the time there must be an explanation. Do you have one?
Of course, if you want lispyness while retaining the freedom to choose an imperative style or a functional style, Common Lisp is better.
Interesting how things change. 5-6 years ago I was working for an enterprise startup and our CEO reported that VCs were generally uninterested in enterprise products. Now they seem to be the higher probability bet. Does this reflect an increasing openness to new products among enterprises?
Easy SSL/TLS Configuration for Apache/mod_ssl
TextTeaser – An automatic summarization algorithm
>That's actually as much, or more, of an argument for better ads as it is for "worse" content.

That's certainly a healthy way to look at it, but google is still competing with itself internally, which I think is rather different from competing with an external company.

>Competition is generally considered good,

There are two ways of competing; making your product [appear] better, and making the other guy's product [appear] worse. The difference between external and internal competition is that with external competition, you have the option of trying to make your competitor's product appear to be worse, but it's pretty difficult to actually make it worse. With competition within a company? It's much easier to actually make the competing product worse. (Note, I'm not saying that google is doing that... just that competition between departments within a company is often not as beneficial as competition between companies with different ownership.)

>I see competition all around here.

Well, first, I am glad that you (as a googler) see competition, but my view, as an outsider? you don't have serious competition. I mean, as a business owner (and someone who buys ads) your competition is... meat-space ads, mostly. And relationships with sites your customers care about. (Sponsorship and the like, which is higher labor, but I think often gives higher value to the advertiser than display ads. I'm not sure it's an approach that scales.)

As a consumer, I don't see serious competition for low-cost email. I don't see serious competition for search. You have a big lead, in most of your consumer products.

Obviously, Google doesn't have a lead at all in social networking, and, I think, google shifting so much of their emphasis to that market is a symptom of not having serious competition in other markets. (I believe, well... I hope that the social networking market is not as big or as important as the market right now thinks it is.)

>If Google can make search results 10x better, I'm sure they can figure out how to monetize it.

There's a difference between "oh, that would be nice" and "we must do this or we will no longer exist as a company (or lose significant market share.)"

I can tell you this from recent personal experience. Two years ago, increasing ram and disk allocations for my customers "would be nice" - and I started moving on it. some customers got upgraded, but not many.

Today? it's an existential problem. I've lost 15% of my customers in just a few months. If I don't get users upgraded (and open new signups) with dramatically more resources per dollar soon...

So yeah; Consider me motivated. Between my previous post and this post, I caused nearly a terabyte in ram (and servers to put said ram in) to appear in my van.

(I know that the motivations of public companies are... different. But generally, this is the narrative that is used to explain why competition is good, even if this narrative does not always fit the data.)
This sort of thing has happened a number of times recently to people I know. I'm a musician and have lots friends who play in bands and book shows, so this hits close to home.

Last month a band from Canada I was scheduled to play with was stopped at the border and told to turn around because they didn't have work visas. This group of four women in their late teens and early twenties -- day jobs at bars and restaurants, driving a shitty 1980s chevy van -- might get some gas money at the gig -- which is basically a party in a warehouse -- and free PBRs from a cooler that the bands all share. This is not the sort of commerce that threatens jobs or the US economy.

A musician I know just tried to go the legit route but failed to meet the artistic reputation standards of the Artist (o-1) Visa. US Immigration wanted newspaper and magazine reviews and proof of past shows at recognizable venues. If you're a small artist on a small label, you're not going to have those. You'll have chatter about you on blogs and twitter and facebook, you will have played at house parties, warehouses and bars, and you're on a small label website which, honestly, anyone could spoof to look legit. Nevertheless this guy is a real artist with a great record that a thousand people have bought. The shows he was going to play probably would have drawn capacity crowds at a handful of punk rock venues in the SF Bay and elsewhere. But he can't play or even come to the US because he's not "exceptional" enough.

I have a friend who is on a student visa from a middle eastern country and presently doing the exact same thing as the OP: traveling around the US with a guitar and making friends. I sent this to him immediately with the instructions: "do not ever say you are playing a show. do not ever say you are a musician. if they ask you about the guitar, tell them you're learning how to play."

As for the OP, he's just a student. He's not getting paid. Someone's cooking him dinner and giving him tips because that's what hospitable people do.

Our immigration policies treat harmless people harshly and are absurd.
Two and a half years into my bachelor's, Sipser's Introduction to the Theory of Computation is the only computer science textbook I've had so far that I'd say I really found useful for anything beyond the homework problems, besides K.N. King's C Programming: A Modern Approach.

(To keep this on topic, my assembly instructor -- the legendary [to NC State students] Dana Lasher -- posts his course pack online. [1] It's a comprehensive introduction to computer architecture topics and original 8086 assembly programming.)

[1] http://courses.ncsu.edu/csc236/lec/001/cops.htm
If you came to me with a really great idea, and you are actually somehow useful to its implementation, and I think your idea is so damn good as to drop what I am doing and work on it, I am for sure going to want to be on your team. If on the other hand, you are unnecessary to the execution of the idea, then you just fucked me by making me sign this NDA. So signing an NDA often means you are getting screwed over by a scrub.
How To Opt-Out of Google+ Shared Endorsements or Ads? • vlogg.com
Yes. And the guy should have been deported for not having the correct VISA. End of story. The abusive behavior is not excusable.

Now, imagine that happened with his gf. Imagine its your gf being strip searched, having done nothing to warrant that.

For a country that's worried sick about 'terrorism', some agencies sure like to piss off people. Somehow, I don't think that's the correct approach.
I am sorry, you are totally right. I got the two designers mixed up. Thanks.
If I may make an observation, you're making a reductio ad absurdum (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reductio_ad_absurdum) argument.
I assumed WinForms or ASP, both of which are mostly supported by Mono now, but you make a good point.
Show HN: Your First iOS 7 App
No, the ultra paranoid would buy two computers, perform install 1 from friend 1s internet connection, downloading everything keeping a copy and check-sums, then perform install 2 on a friend of a friends connection, then compare the results of both the downloaded check-sums and the installation. (For certain flavors of Linux it should be the same).

Because the NSA would have no idea who your friends are, and wouldn't dream of monitoring their internet connections.

He forgot to say that you must encrypt the entire usb-stick as well

Rule-10 says to consider encrypting everything you transfer. (How do you "write an encrypted blob" to a USB disk without using a filesystem, on a normal computer that you aren't writing your own fake-filsystem driver on, than you can also read on an internet connected computer, e.g. one at your friend's house?).
This is why I hate all sports.
How do you define a socialized country?

If your going to talk about a socialist country you may have a point. But unfortunately I think your going to find you dont have as much evidence as you thought you did, should you do some research.

The most productive level of intellectual growth in the history of mankind has consistently come out of groups of people who have been 'freed' from the burden of worrying about their 'next meal' so to speak. From renaissance era patronage through to the modern trends you see with the flow of capital in California.

Socialized != Socialist.

A centrally planed socialist economy has no place for entrepreneurship at all, ergo it will be suppressed and not flourish. A socialized economy is one where all citizens are invested into the social fabric of society, for instance I have a level of free health care here in Australia, but I choose to work and pay for a higher level of medical care and I am free to do so. This is a socialized system, a socialist one would deny my right to chose a higher standard via some logical argument about the higher standard I want to pay for being excess capacity that should be redistributed to all.

I hope this brief illustration helps clarify some things to anyone else that might be having trouble seeing a clear difference between socialist and socialized.
Sunday Spotlight: Reddit Co-Founder Alexis Ohanian
That's why no real systems use obscure strings of characters as authentication tokens.

Right?
The extent of collaboration between Mark & Winklevoss twins was far more than any single discussion for advice...
Wild stuff!

http://lasecwww.epfl.ch/keyboard/
Why I Now Believe the Glass Ceiling Is Real
>But since there's no specification for the format to use, cross-browser date parsing is a mess

Wrong! Since ECMAScript 5 there is a single, standard format that all browsers will try to parse first and can predictably output: ISO 8601.

--
[02:49:29.621] (new Date()).toISOString()
[02:49:29.623] "2013-10-12T01:49:29.623Z"
--
[02:49:40.233] JSON.stringify(new Date())
[02:49:40.245] ""2013-10-12T01:49:40.246Z""
Higher Order Perl is the book that actually got me excited about Perl again after using it for ten years and then not needing to touch it for five. As usual MJD is clear, absorbing, and has great taste in what to write about. So many techniques are a great fit for Perl/Ruby/Python and yet are completely absent from books on those languages.
but we need buttons. We forget the luxury of having buttons with all those new tactile screens because we want more tactile surface, but for a controller we hold in our hands, we need some feedbacks bellow our fingers. This is really a bad idea...

Until I actually have the controller in my hand, I can't make that assumption at all.
"wouldn't it be easier to inform him before he enters the plane?"

Do you mean, the US should open border offices in all international airports? :)
Cool! Are you using remote debugging for that? I wrote one recently that watches the file system for changes and keeps it in sync with chrome. It's really useful because you can change your js without reloading or losing existing objects. I have an angular project that takes a long time to go through the refresh cycle so it's a life saver on there. Also, because it just runs on the file system events it's text editor unaware.

https://github.com/aidos/chromesync
I think there are gray areas here.

I wouldn't say this guy was here "for work" and I don't think he thought he was either. Hell, a different agent on a different day probably would have let him through.

There are better ways this could have been handled that wouldn't have led to deporting him.
Right, but Abraham Lincoln did nothing wrong by going to the play and the author did something wrong (I don't mean in a moral sense, but in a sense of 'incorrect') by going to the United States without the proper visa.
They could have instant access if they duplicate the key and raid all apartments simultaneously.

Also the legal speak above states I believe that even that the FBI clould technically access other user data, this does not somehow disallow this from happening because is not ideal. It is more a fault of Lava it than anything else.
Yeah, some products lend themselves to an obvious upgrade path (like my own where increased usage brings charges). When you find yourself in this situation it makes sense to offer a free tier as a gateway. We also get some (small) promotional value from our free users as well. But for your product it's not obvious that having free users will provide you with much value and if they don't transition to paid, then they are very much a dead weight.

That said, having people as free users and then cutting them off without warning could have a negative PR effect.

I think the easiest course of action is to put some wording in a prominent place on the site to the effect of "this is a free beta, but we will be moving to a paid model when we feel we are providing enough value". Then when the time comes, it won't come as a surprise. Then you put them on the 30/60/X day free trial (which you have anyway for new paid users) and they can transition.

Sure, you will lose some of those free users along the way, but unless they are providing value to you, free users are just going to be a drain on your limited resources.