skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Apple said that, but never enforced it. So that piece of policy was more a fallback (i.e., "something we can point at if an app happens to do something we didn't anticipate"). And it was eventually removed (hence my comment about Apple lessening some of their control over time).

Most of Apple's decisions are about the end user, often to the detriment of the developer. Mandatory app review, Apple deals entirely with customers, unified in-app purchase interface.

By the way, when that policy was put in place Apple had no "monopoly" to "enforce". So it simply makes no sense for you to say that.

It had everything to do with maintaining control over their platform. Cross-compilation was not encouraged because it almost always means that the frameworks which cross compile maintain feature parity with older versions of the platform SDK. It means that end users don't see apps taking advantage of new features and frameworks.

Look at where Apple is now and tell me that was a bad decision — developers scramble to update their apps to incorporate the newest OS features, this leads to huge competition in design and polish amongst the best apps on the App Store. Ultimately the decision benefited customers and developers.

The policy was overturned largely because games became unexpectedly popular. And games don't need to use the latest OS features to deliver a quality experience. The rising popularity of Unity 3D also drove the decision. (You will recall that when the policy was publicised, there were hundreds of Unity developed games on the App Store. None were pulled and the policy was instead changed.)
Real bad for a currency (if you are the FED), very good for an asset :-)
Correct. And your job as a freelancer is to do the same thing.

I'm sorry for you feel that way. You can opt-in in making a meaningful and fruitful business relations instead? Shame it's an opt-in, and not opt-out, though. I guess Bible's right on that one.
There is a lot of unwarranted 23andMe hate going on here. Not only do they offer at the end of sign up to delete/remove your genetic sample, you can also inform them you want to do this at any time.

DNA is extremely stable at low temperatures so they can periodically re-assay the sample and give you more information on SNPs they have found important or you can opt-out and just get the one sample.
> So you are fully ok with the phrase "optimize for asm.js-style code"?

I would say I am more OK with it as it highlights the fact that it's about spirit not about complete adherence to asm.js spec.

Unfortunately there is no compact and at the same time clear way to say what V8 does right now, e.g. saying "optimizing for type stable code" is most accurate but does not help to understand what V8 actually does and how it relates to improvements on Emscripten output.
What specifically did I misrepresent? Can you fit it into this format:

SilasX's post suggested this about rayiner's post: [ ]

But, upon reading the full context of rayiner's post, that would be a misrepresentation because: [ ]

As it stands, all I get out of your comment is, "Hey, you took my post out of context. [Reiterate the post]."

Please tell me it's something more than "you made my argument seem bad".
Shhh, nobody was supposed to know landing huge-ass contracts involves sucking dick. On a serious note, I guess bigiain's point was that freelancers that know better usually have no clue about bringing business value to the table.
They tried: http://www-archive.mozilla.org/projects/blackwood/dom/index....
Browse the support forums of carries and device makers and you'll find plenty of such testimonials. They would brick their devices and find themselves without warranty, which is not exactly an ideal situation.
Out of interest, do you know how standard it is for merchants to hold onto bitcoins after accepting them? I always figured they would be converted pretty much straight away, but with that risk/reward profile maybe others are doing something similar?
I see the point; but I don't think it has enough justification. Something evolutionary successful isn't always globally perfect - rather it's most probable along the path from there to here.

JavaScript may stay long with us. Or - as sometimes happens - it could be eclipsed in few years, as happened with technologies and paradigms before. Say, guessing correctly on technologies in use in 2000, sitting in 1990, would be quite hard.

Not that "more direct approach" of defining bytecode and standardizing should always be better. With ideas disruptive enough many bets are off.
Thank you Andy!
I rather think the point is startlingly profound.

Though at times it did read like a database dump (albeit a fascinating one), the intricacy of the background of theories and history is all in service to the ridiculousness of the plot. Without it, the profound stupidity of the formulation of the meta-conspiracy would not have been believable.
I believe it was also due to wanting developers to make use of the latest OS frameworks. Third party development frameworks often lagged behind in features (i.e, doesn't support new auto rotation features, doesn't support new camera features, and so on).

The policy was changed and ultimately never enforced, but I always viewed it as a way to ensure that developers kept up-to-date.
I'm in the process of re-evaluating my approach to this.

If you waste a significant fraction of my time in unproductive activity and environment, I'm increasingly less inclined to give you more of my time in terms of compensating by completing work at other times.

Also, if you are paying my a "salary" but then expect me to clock in fixed time, that together with other demands causes me to exceed my ostensible commitment. E.g. I am there late in the evening or over the weekend to deploy, troubleshoot, etc., but then can't leave an hour early on a slow day because "my schedule is 8:30 - 5:00".

Well, these days: Fuck that.

P.S. I also resent having to ask/beg for that hour. If you're reasonable, I am willing to check that there's no pending or anticipated demand that I'm unaware of. I'm not asking whether I have permission; I'm just checking that nothing will go horribly wrong.

If this turns into your personal power trip...
Zedshaw, you win coolest guy on the Internet today. Your response may have made Thanksgiving bearable for me by reminding me that good does exist in this black-friday-world.

Thank you.
So the lawyers can now suck the money out?

Even if he blew most of the money he was making on lawyers, what then?

Now he puts everything he's ever owned into suing the company?
Me too. On the other hand, I like the variety and fast-pace of HN as compared to reddit. There is a lot more chance to see a wide variety of non-favorited stuff here. Spice is the nice of life :-)
I'm dissapointed. I thought I would find a comment about moot on this post or at least a reference to this image ("trolling is a art"):

http://i.imgur.com/iwmk2vn.jpg
Well then maybe you should point that out in your initial comment.

I'm just referring to the idea of deflation in general and the fear mongering that happens around it.

You'll have to do a little better to support your claim that deflation can result in economic growth. One data point from a rather unique point in history isn't enough.
Yes, my site with no ads which demonstrates how rankings work and how page construction influences search is spam. Because losing money on every search you do for the benefit of informing people how search both works, and could work is such an awful endeavor. What was I thinking?
> I think it is in substantial dispute. Can you cite a case of someone in the US being successfully prosecuted for downloading? Note that this precludes bittorrent, gnutella, etc situations where downloading means simultaneously uploading.

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

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

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

Note: Just because I don't have any cases offhand of my friends fined for jaywalking, doesn't mean it isn't against the law.

> Outside of the US there are plenty of countries where it has been made explicit in the law that downloading is OK. Some even going so far as to include the uploading portion of torrenting, etc as legal too.

I don't know much about the Dutch law, but it is supplemented by a 'piracy tax', ie, storage devices are more expensive to purchase among other things.
Taxes is not the big problem. Try buying a meal or filling up your gas tank or rent an apartment or paying an electricity bill with bitcoin. 99.(9)% of merchants you'll encounter in the course of your regular life accept local money and about the same do not accept bitcoin.
Do you have actual statistics? I'd truly like to see them.

Most of the reliability problems I've seen have been self-reported, so I'm not sure what biases are present in what I've seen. ;)

(I agree that many of their practices were bad, which likely lent to bad drives! This isn't trolling, just genuine curiosity if there were published stats)
Added to Mashape! https://www.mashape.com/community/love-as-a-service

(Disclosure: I work for Mashape) Let me know if you want me to transfer it to your account - chris@mashape.com
"Debt" really is good, especially if you disregard what he writes about >1950 where he messed up a few factual assertions.

It's not so much that "paying taxes in a currency helps a currency" - it's that forcing people to pay taxes in a particular currency or go to jail creates demand for that currency, which percolates through the economy (especially if they're concurrently giving it out when they're obliged to pay someone).

Consider what would happen if the US declared "you can pay your taxes in BTC, and only in BTC". There being ~21M bitcoins, and ~$2.5trillion of federal taxes, the price of BTC massively spikes. It's also suddenly much easier to pay people in BTC and not futz with an effective forex trade every paycheck (especially since that's what the government is paying all of its contractors and pensioners in).
>That had literally nothing to do with the end user, and everything to do with trying to enforce a monopoly.

That word, monopoly. I don't think it means what you think it means.

What they were trying to enforce was a common programming language for all apps that they could improve in tandem with the OS, so they wouldn't be held hostage in the future to be backwards compatible to some popular runtime (like Flash once threatened to be for the Web).

P.S And "crappy language", really? As far as pragmatic languages lean on resources for native coding go, Objective-C is up there with the best of them. Not to mention the breadth and the maturity of the Cocoa libs.
If only economics were so simple[1]. Nobody disputes that some people will end up richer, and that people who have no income of any sort (generally those who are not employed, not disabled and not looking for work) will indisputably benefit. The rest of the winners and losers depend very heavily on the amount in question, who pays most of the increased burden, what happens to people who were previously entitled to more than the Basic Income; you can nevertheless guarantee that some of the losers will be relatively poor workers, some rich people will end up richer (including some pretty unproductive rich people, like slum landlords) and some rich people will end up broke (especially people providing jobs to relatively-unskilled US workers in competitive international markets).

That said, you can make one pretty uncontroversial prediction: if you try to set the Basic Income high enough to ensure people can actually indefinitely live "in respectable conditions" with it as their main source of income, then there will be a lot less wealth being produced in the US.

And I can't see why only people actually applying for work should be subjected to moral judgements and restrictions on their lifestyle?

[1]I'm not sure who's paying for the stipend in your example. Or why Guy 2 wouldn't push for a pay rise when faced with a 50% reduction in his real wage (presumably he has some bargaining power if he's worth 3x a Walmart worker)
I don't think that just because a site makes money it is a bad result. If you searched for "Used Jeep Grand Cherokee" Craigslist would be a good result. So would AutoTrader. Both break your rule.
In the early SSD days, I only heard two adjectives to describe OCZ drives - "fastest" and "unstable". It was inevitable the latter would catch up to them.
It's assembly language the same way LLVM bitcode is assembly langauge, which means IT ISN'T. It is also represented in text, which means that it is several times larger than it needs to be.

Another problem with Asm.js in practice is that it's used with Emscripten which doesn't define the syscalls you talk about. All the DOM/WebAudio/WebRTC/etc API's have to be redone in Emscripten's headers. GL was easy, because WebGL is so close to EGL and friends. But what about DOM manipulation? Emscripten can't really do this yet.

These two disadvantages happen to be problems solved in PNaCl, which has a compact bitcode (which doesn't pretend to be JavaScript) and a proper API (Pepper).
It isn't a stock however, and never will be. The reason why people invest in companies is to make more money. Companies may not offer dividends today, but eventually they will. (IE: Even Apple, once allergic to the idea of dividends, offers a regular one to its investors). Any company that churns a profit will eventually share those profits with its investors.

"Owning" BTCs is not about churning profits eventually, its 100% about speculating about its future value. Building BTC Mining equipment is where the real "value" of owning BTCs is in, since that puts you in control over a number of BTC transactions.

The BTCs themselves can NOT be compared to stocks. Stocks mean you actually own the company, you eventually partake in that company's profits... and even partake in choosing the board of directors. (who then in turn... choose the CEO).

A BTC on the other hand, is like speculating on Oil, Gold, or Timber. Its a commodity, not a "share".
I think the "deflation can't work" people are making the same mistake as the "interest can't work because one penny will eventually be worth as much as the weight of the earth in gold" crowd ("Joseph's Pfenning"). They interpolate incorrectly.

In the case of interest, some borrowers go bankrupt (which is fine, because the world needs risk taking). In the case of deflation, presumably at some point people will want to buy things. They can not hold on spending forever because they might starve.

In any case it seems obvious that the price of one Bitcoin can not go to infinity, because there is nothing of value "infinity" on earth. From that it follows that the deflationary dread scenario has to come to an end at some point, just like Joseph's penny can not accumulate interest long enough to be worth the earth in gold because all his lenders will go bankrupt before that.
"list of conditions for both sides ... predetermined amount of money" - that is what contract is.
If they had it - no need for escrow.
Fair enough, calling Google hypocritical was reactionary on my part.

In my memories of Google's introduction of the Android Market, they seemed to play-up the "no review period" as an advantage over the App Store. I think there has been some mixed messaging from Google over the years — they extol openness and developer freedoms, but clearly enforce terms of service where it counts.

Perhaps it's not hypocritical, but at times it feels like there are two Googles.
If Google knowingly allowed their app store to host software that harms carrier-supported devices, they might easily be in breach of contract with those carriers. This is a defensive move.
First comment from the first thread you linked to:

Aaaaand this is why making root and roms easy access is a terrible idea. I miss the days where knowledge of at least adb and fastboot were required.

It's not politically correct to say, but it's true.
But it seems to me that "evolving into" the use of other languages through Javascript, will allow us to start ignoring the fact that it's Javascript in particular that we're targeting--such that, one day soon, the browser-makers will just give us a "shortcut" to doing the things that have already evolved, without all the Javascript-y mess in-between.

But something has to get popular first as a new "open web-scripting language", before the browser-makers will be willing to all go in on supporting it. (Otherwise you get the reactions you see by, e.g., Mozilla to Google's NaCl.)

And that was a chicken-and-egg problem until now, because you can't really create and force universal adoption of an "open web-scripting language" (or framework, or platform, or bytecode, etc.) if you're just one company. But now, with asm.js, you can--and the rest of the steps will follow soon after.
Might be useful if we address color-blindness issue too.
Bout time books really start coming into the digital world...
With all the news about the meteoric rise in the value of BTC and many folks presumably sitting on a huge paper profit, I haven't seen (or just haven't be looking hard enough) for stories along the lines of: 'I sold my modest holdings of BTC and was able to repay my mortgage; I don't have enough money to stop working but at least I fully own my home and can work four days a week instead of five and spend a bit more time with the kids, etc, etc, etc'.

Or is the unreported reality of BTC is that it is just too difficult to cashout in a big way due to liquidity/transaction fees/general sketchyness of exchanges that will transfer BTC to hard currency?
You realize this list proves the parent's point, not yours? Many categories there have a single provider and none would even breach 1% of providers in your vicinity. I would estimate the probability of not hearing "err... what?" after asking your favorite provider of anything about paying in bitcoins about 1/1000.
Bitcoin very well could fail...I think Bitcoin's major threat is a better cryptocurrency that could replace it.
Seems to me the problem pointed out only exists if you view the transactions without taking their larger context into account.

Take his "100 Widget @ 1BTC each to produce, sell them later at a different value of BTC." scenario, which he characterises as an 80% loss. Now consider where the widget maker would have got his initial 100BTC from, and what he'll do with the BTC he sold the widgets for. Using his numbers, lets say you sold 50lb of butter to get your initial 100BTC. Several months later, when you've sold all your widgets (for the deflated 0.2BTC price) and you've got 20BTC in your wallet, you convert that back into your original resources, and get 100lbs of butter at the new 0.2/lb rate. All of a sudden the exact same scenario now looks like a 100% profit (50lb of butter becomes 100lb) instead of an 80% loss (100BTC becomes 20BTC). Admittedly, hanging on to the original 100BTC would have allowed the widget maker to sit on his hands for a few months and then buy 500lbs of butter, but looking at just the BTC deflation without the outside context makes things look very much worse than they really are. And ultimately, it's butter (or opamps or widgets) that you need to eat/live and that have "real value" in some sense - those 100BTC could just as easily have turned out to be worthless at the end of the widget production run - and the widgets could still have been sold for USD or traded for butter. The guy with a private key to a magic number proclaiming "100 BTC" might have had _nothing_ Not a problem if you can afford the gamble - not such a great idea if you _need_ that butter to feed yoru family.
With many books and journal articles I have both the paper and the Kindle/pdf version. The hard copy is useful for initial comprehension of the material with underlining and notation and the electronic copy for lightweight, quick reference of that material once I basically understand it.
It is a double edge sword. I think this is too early to tell, wait to see if Google will reinstate the app after big warnings in the description.
They are using his work to aid in selling their product. He should get a cut of that. It's not much related to Little Bobby downloading a movie.
Deconstructing the Azure Point-to-Site VPN for Command Line usage
Yes. Downloading an album or movie without paying for it is illegal. This isn't in dispute.

Actually, not where I live. But the point is that the situations are different, because I don't have an agreement with any artist. Whether that makes it illegal to use copyright works was not the issue in discussion. What was being discussed was the supposed hypocrisy of anti-copyright people.

there wasn't any contract.

There's was an implied agreement. Whether he has a legal foot to stand on is irrelevant to this discussion, because we weren't talking about the legality of the situation, but what it should be.
What about credit cards? Chargebacks are quite common.
Yesss - that worked. Tip of the day - thanks a ton !!
How'd you get the crypto_scrypt() call to go so fast?

one call to crypto_scrypt takes about a second on my machine. The pbkdf2 is the fast part. I'm using the crypto_scrypt from here: https://github.com/keybase/triplesec/tree/master/contrib/scr...
let me see... google and the open handset aliance advertise an open source OS, that you cant install without voiding warranties and bending to proprietary radio and firmware code. just like pc manufacturers of the 80/90s (bios was reverse engineered from IBM and then tightly controled by ami. it only looked slighly open because IBM was much more closed. same with android standing next to apple.
DNS load balancing isn't all bad. Google uses it to host www.google.com for example ;)
Yet another motion from a useless organisation.
> Well then maybe you should point that out in your initial comment.

Okay I will next time!

> You'll have to do a little better to support your claim that deflation can result in economic growth. One data point from a rather unique point in history isn't enough.

This isn't my claim.

My claim is that economic growth comes from increased productive capacity and not from manipulation of the money supply (neither inflationary nor deflationary).

See my simple economic example elsewhere in the thread.
The opportunity cost of not showing up
Oh no! The New York Times says a new technology is doomed! Quick, do the opposite of whatever they say!
This one is even better, though it takes a sharp eye to see what's happening without narration:

http://vimeo.com/groups/82430/videos/70016164

That's two players side by side: Andrew Sorensen, and Ben Swift. It is a thoroughly entertaining 20 minute set. Plus reading how they are modifying the code is really neat. I only have a passing familiarity with scheme so I only get the gist of what's happening.
Note: Just because I don't have any cases offhand of my friends fined for jaywalking, doesn't mean it isn't against the law.

That's putting your arguments into the realm of faith. If those three citations are any indication, your faith is misplaced. All of those were for people doing distribution (e.g. uploading). None of them were for downloading.

I don't think it is much to ask for you to have just one definite case to back up your claim that the legality of downloading is not in dispute. Just one.

Here's one for jaywalking: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/radley-balko/raquel-nelson-jai...
We had about 40 OCZ drives (Vertex 2/3/3 Max IOPS) and 6 of them failed. Our 8 Vertex 3 Max IOPS were in RAID 5 for a huge calculations which didn't require reliability but wrote a lot of data and therfore we tried to save time with this experimental RAID. The RAID was fine for about a couple of month and seeing almost 3 GB/s throughput was mindblowing. But suddenly we we saw drives randomly failing. But the drives did not completly fail, we were able to rebuild the RAID with the same hard drive. We did that a couple of times until we thought it was too much hassle and used the drives somewhere else. Now we are buying Crucial M4s and they are totally fine. In the first place a hard drive must be reliable.