skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Bezos did this to boost sales and get free publicity. It still is plausible in a few cities in the US, but I'm sure there will be certain locations where it will be prohibited.

Why couldn't the drones used for delivery indoors, like in an arena for beer delivery? I could see it being adopted indoors first.

For me, it's not a silly idea. Without ideas like this, we won't be pushing the envelope and eventually adopting a similar technology at some point.
you want an app server for that :)
Looks like a more enhanced, professional version of one of my side projects, TuneCrawl. Hopefully it does well!
It's a commonly suggested thought from people that like both companies. In a happy-go-lucky sort of way it is a fun thought experiment, but I've never heard anyone seriously suggest it.
The FBI during the 1950's and almost certainly Britain's intelligence agencies post WWII.

Remember, the FISA mechanism that attracts so much flak these days was put into place because in the past the NSA had no restrictions or oversight, effective or ineffective.
One minor, but important point. Apple has already made 2 very successful "game consoles" - the iPhone/iPod Touch and the iPad.

Pretty much everything a game console has going for it Apple has - standardized hardware and software, reasonably powerful hardware, and a large audience hungry to play games. That is in fact why a lot of large companies make mobile games - because iOS and Android have a lot in common with game consoles. Heck, with Airplay + controllers or devices like OUYA, iOS and Android are nearly indistinguishable from other game platforms.

I am a gamer so I understand how gamers might bristle at the notion of this, but Neil Young, former exec at EA and founder of ngmoco started ngmoco based on the premise that the iPhone was a game console and he went to build a very successful game company doing it.

Apple could very much make the Apple TV into a game console if they wanted, but I'm not so much sure that the product designers care that much about games as part of the core product concept.
Sometimes reading the comments helps me decide whether or not to read the article. I wasn't going to read this one, but your comment made me think I should - I fully expected to "+1" your comment, because on the whole, I agree with your statement.

Then I read the article, upvoted the OP, and decided to write this.

A better headline would have been "We don't negotiate with blackmailing, SOB bullies who string us along with songs of high praise only to demand - DEMAND - their money back for no reason after days/weeks of a fully supported free trial, and who threaten us with all the fury of god's own social network".

Well, that would have been a more accurate headline, perhaps not a better one.

Given the article, whose veracity I will for now take at face value, the headline used works for me. I have no problem with this particular bit of hyperbole.

It's certainly more SFW than "We don't negotiate with fuck-stick time-wasting rave-rave-rave-then-bail bullies".

Though I would have read that article before coming to the HN comments. :->
The author's point is weakened by the fact that the Converge VM is now (5 years after this article) written in python: https://github.com/ltratt/converge/search?l=c (as of https://github.com/ltratt/converge/tree/08dadda29b/vm). Compare https://github.com/ltratt/converge/tree/converge-1.x/vm.

"there are some obvious reasons as to why it might be so reliable: it's used by (relatively) large numbers of people, who help shake out bugs; the software has been developed over a long period of time, so previous generations bore the brunt of the bugs; and, if we're being brutally honest, only fairly competent programmers tend to use C in the first place. But still, the fundamental question remained: why is so much of the software I use in C so reliable?"

Why could the fundamental question not be explained by all the points he just mentioned?

I'm a C programmer, and this guy is hitting all my biases, but this isn't very well thought-out.
I can't possibly imagine the time and energy wasted on this blog post and back and forth with the customer is worth $300. Not to mention the PR implications... you're calling your customers terrorists! Good god. You have an unhappy customer, give him his money back and move on.
Those effects were not present in the RCT. Even after reducing the p-value cutoff to 10% (rather than the standard 5%), only a few of the expected measures showed a statistically significant effect (some positive, some negative), and virtually nothing persisted as far as 1st grade.

http://www.acf.hhs.gov/sites/default/files/opre/executive_su...

(See also this comic if you want to point to a few blue and yellow cells in their charts. http://xkcd.com/882/ )
By taking the inverse of anything they say, you're implying that they have perfect prediction power (even if it's inverted).

If you don't trust their predictions at all, then you should treat anything they say the same you would a random number generator.
Which bad actor would it take to put us into an authoritarian state? The president? No, congress would impeach him. Congressional leaders? No, the supreme court would overrule them. The chief justice? No, congress would constitutionalize a law if it's important enough. Checks and balances still exist.

I don't see any position of power that could act in such a way so as to gain unilateral control of the US government.
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dragonwriter>Its both, and "circular" is another word for tautological.

wikipedia>"Circular reasoning differs from tautologies in that the premise is restated as the conclusion in an argument, instead of deriving the conclusion from the premise with arguments, while tautologies states the same thing twice."

dragonwriter>Your argument in support of government healthcare plans being inconsistent with liberty was that they destroyed private healthcare, a claims which, when questioned, required redefining "destroy private healthcare" to just mean that government remains involved in healthcare at the same or greater level.

Earlier on, you stated :
dragonwriter> You seem to be using a strange definition of "usually" -- every OECD country has "some degree of public healthcare" (what the grandparent post suggested support for), and yet most of them have some degree of a private system.

I have been trying to argue (with no apparent success) that the "some degree of private system" is gradually becoming little private or no private system, through a ratcheting up of government intervention, hence the statement that all have increased or kept constant their levels of participation in the healthcare system, and they rarely (if ever) decrease it. If the amount of state participation only ever increases or stays the same, and it increases often, then the government is 'taking over' healthcare.
a plug for an LMS project of of mine appynotebook.com ... is there still a market for LMSes?
Nah, if they close down gmail they're going to lose a lot of people. They still have not brainwashed enough with G+.

I do suspect though that gmail's pop3/imap will go the way of the xmpp.
If you are coming from mathematics and want to learn programming, you should pick a language first and learn to compile, run, and debug it. Then just about any introductory programming text would serve you fine.

But learning computer science can be much different than learning software engineering. If you want to learn algorithms analysis, I would suggest you read, in order, Sipser and then pick and choose parts of CLR+S. This will give you a good overview of what is important and how proofs of correctness and complexity analysis are done.
Why not? Both Apple and Nintendo have shown puritanism and obsession with content control.
"Spotify Was Designed from the Ground Up to Combat Piracy"
Also there are bugs in my Go-version test, I know about them but I hate Go so, pfff, who cares.
What? No. Terrorism is the incitement of terror within a population. Waging general, all-out war does not accomplish that goal very well - the certain risk of an invading standing army is much less terrifying than the uncertain risk of unseen agents with random but deadly agendas. The goal of war is to conquer or destroy. The goal of a terrorist is to leave a social structure intact as-is, but to spread fear and uncertainty within its ranks. These are totally different purposes.
It depends on the problem you're trying to solve, I think.

Let's consider a command line application that fetches a URL, like wget. Without exceptions, you would check the return code of all the system functions you call (dns, sockets, etc), and if any of them fail you can't really recover. You just write out an error message and exit. With exceptions, you could wrap the whole thing and if any system function throws an exception, you print out the exception and exit. So it's much the same in this case.

Now put the url fetch code into a larger application. With exceptions this is pretty easy - you can catch any exception thrown by your url fetch code and then retry it a few times until it succeeds, or you inform the user of the app. Without exceptions this is tougher as you need to unroll everything manually in order to retry.

Finally we have something complicated like running a simulation. If something gives an error, we probably don't want to stop the whole simulation. We'd want to check the specific error result and then fix the simulation and continue. In this case exceptions would add a lot of boiler plate code and would need to be handled just as carefully as error results (eg, wrapping each call in its own try and handling each error).

So it's pretty clear that it depends is very applicable to when you'd rather use exceptions or error results. In general I think exceptions are better as long as they're only used for actual error cases as it gives the user of the functions more control over where and at what level to handle exceptions.
It seems like the response glosses over what Microsoft is actually doing and instead just attacks them for something unrelated (Widows is closed source). In the FSF eyes, Microsoft can do nothing to improve security until Windows is open sourced.
Ridiculous. First Ryan Dahl, now Ben.

Why does the guy who wrote the blog post still have a job? That is the most unprofessional post I've read on a company blog.
not sure why this deserves a downvote - was showing agreement with previous comment w/ some proof of pedigree/perspective to the view.
Research on this very subject was cited on a Norwegian show called Pulse, but it's too long since I saw it that I'd be able to find it again. There apparently is a correlation between wheat and sleepiness, for some.
Your whataboutism ends up defending NK, but at least you get a lot of up votes.
>Things have value because other people want them. That's it. People want bitcoin, then it has value.

No, things have intrinsic value for an underlying reason. People don't just want random stuff out of the blue, there's always a reason. Look at it from first principles:

Gold: Rare, soft, lustrous metal that interacts with our genetic programming in some strange, emergent way that creates a strong desire for it most humans' psyche. No rational reason, a reason nonetheless - people covet it, and as a result of that demand plus sparse supply, it has become a status symbol throughout most of human history and across all cultures that had access to it (Western, Mid Eastern, Far Eastern, South American). Also, better conductor than copper for some industrial uses.

Money: Utility + Fiat. It's much easier to store your wealth in coins, bills, or bits in a bank computer than in cows, lumber, corn, or iron. Also much easier to transact exact amounts than in cows, lumber, corn, iron. And, doesn't die, rot, or go bad over time (inflation jokes notwithstanding). That convenience is desired, hence has value, which drives demand for it. There are also some things that only money can buy, or pay for - taxes, oil, etc. Everyone is required to have money for such things, hence demand for money is increased.

Bitcoin: Solved the problem of trust in unregulated, no-central-authority, P2P transactions, eliminating the middle man, enabling people to save money on direct transactions while sufficiently mitigating the fear of fraud that would otherwise sink the whole endeavor (and has in past attempts). That utility = value = demand.

Things that have value and demand, have it for a reason. It's not just b/c people randomly decide it does.

That Greenspan can't see this merely suggests he hasn't spent much time trying to grok bitcoin. Didn't read the source code, didn't install it and play with it to learn how it works, doesn't read any discussion of it at bitcointalk or the btc blogs or anything. He's applying old world thinking to a new world of cryptocurrency, and hasn't adjusted yet.
While true, one reason the U.S. doesn't need Gitmo so much anymore is we're still going after and finding the same people, but now they are executed with drones, rather than captured.
Concepts & tools needed to be a competent RoR dev
>For many years I've resisted temptations to put out a hasty electronic version of The Art of Computer Programming, because the samples sent to me were not well made

Not well made? It's a book that is a PDF at some point before it hits printing presses. What is there to make at all? The kindle has been out for how many years? how is the book so different when reading it on an e-ink display? He mentions that shortcuts were added, but still - how is it worse than a printed book (there are no links there either).

This seems disingenuous.
To stick with the oil analogy. Yes, but all of sudden now the world at large has soured on gasoline so Palantir has built this massive refinery that has no demand because the people no longer trust how folks are a. refining the oil and b. what they are doing with the gasoline.
While threatening to SEO negative reviews immediately voids, in my book, any sympathy the buyer might have generated, I'm curious why they can't attempt a chargeback.
UBM eliminating key employees, shutting down Blackhat security conference
Google Search for Android and iOS gets French, German, Japanese voice support
Urgh. That $300 is not worth the aggravation and all the potential negative (and somewhat justified) PR. Not to mention they may pull the nuclear option and simply do a credit card charge-back. Just give them their money back. You're not looking like winners here.

//

On a separate note, with no try-before-buy and no refunds, what do you expect?
Out of curiosity, are you using a home-grown, in-house billing system to do this kind of stuff?
Is The Apple App Store Only Showing Top 200 Apps by Category Now?
There are idioms and methods for writing reliable C programs, which you learn with experience and reading better code than yours. If you learned languages in the order higher-to-lower, you eventually understand that you cannot write a program in C at the same pace as in a higher level language.

What has worked for me is: always have a second terminal open for the manual pages and the standards; and to regularly read quality C source code. Opengroup.org has thorough references for the standard C library, including its relationship to POSIX and the SUS; and the various kernels and core Unix utilities are always a good read.
SolarCity Introduces Energy Storage for Businesses
Heard about Ramen for the first time after they won the Launch Hackathon and couldn't wait to use it. The idea of having customers lined up before building my next app makes my giblets all tingly.
Your experience with languages with exceptions seem to come from people who misuse them. Randomly placing catch clauses around in the code is not good practice, even if perhaps a majority of all programmers in safe languages code that way. That causes latent bugs that are incredibly hard to debug.

The trick is to almost never ever catch exceptions. For example, in his post he describes a bug caused by accessing beyond allocated memory. That would in a safe language immediately have caused an ArrayIndexOutOfBoundsException (or equivalent) which the programmer would have fixed. In C, errors are often "silent" because you can't be bothered to check the return value of every call to printf. In a correctly coded program in a safe language errors are never ever silent.
I think in this case it may be worth refunding their money and moving on. These blog posts make both companies look bad.
this is exactly the point. This is only perpetuating the propriety and just changing the hurdles for vendors and schools to pass data. SIF was great in its time...it was expensive and cumbersome because it required specific knowledge which many district admins don't possess. The new SIF 3 using the CEDS should hope to alleviate many of these issues. As some one who has looked into data integration with Clever, the costs were prohibitive on a large scale, especially when you consider they are continual. While development may be expensive, we aren't paying for it after it is developed...
I'm not confident that we are in such a position, but I think we're closer than I am comfortable with. Imagine J. Edgar Hoover heading the NSA, "under" a weak president.

http://www.salon.com/2013/06/17/turnkey_totalitarianism
They would have to employ some sort of currency risk hedge. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreign_exchange_hedge
But poor people live in rent regulated apartments.
How difficult would it be for someone to work around these restrictions? If I have an unlocked Android phone, would I be able comment out the range check and recompile the gps software?
Wall Street is Buying Homes - Will Main Street Follow?
Bitcoin Hardware Arms Race Boosting Interest in Immersion Cooling
Ya, Erlang doesn't do well on the Benchmarks Game because the Benchmarks Game doesn't measure communication, which is Erlang's strong point. No-one writes algorithms like those in the Game in Erlang; you code them as a server in C or Java or anything and farm work out to them from Erlang.
I'm also having hard time to believe you have no idea about the starving people in neighbourhoods like tenderloin.
This really does depend on how "reliable" is defined. At the code level, reliable is dependent on the actual programmer. This code must then be compiled/interpreted in order to to actually function. At this stage the programmer has lost control unless they are also in direct control of the interpreter/compiler - which is, of course, impractical and extremely unlikely.

Inevitably writing in high level languages sacrifices control for how the program looks at the machine level simply because you must depend on existing structures. The higher up you go, the less control you have of the final product. Writing in Python vs. C means that you have to think less about lower level issues and consequently are subject to problems that arise outside the scope of what you could have originally controlled - simply because you didn't have to think about a subclass of issues that you assumed were inherently solved for you.

So yes - if you take a Python program and rewrite it in C, you can get a more reliable program IF you properly solved the set of things that Python took care of for you in relation to your specific problem.

But this relies on the fact that you succeeded in rewriting what Python took care of for you. So we're back to where we started - it all depends on the programmer.

The article implies this in the final sentence:

All that said, I don't recommend using C unless much thought has been given to the decision - the resulting software might be reliable, but it will have taken a significant human effort to produce it.

And this basically negates that C is any more reliable than whatever other programming language. Despite the fact that I think a discussion of reliability of a language is effectively useless (at least the way I've framed it here, I'm open to other interpretations), I enjoyed the article - thanks for sharing!
This really isn't about how to hire a head of customer success so much as why you need one, which you absolutely to. Not necessarily in name, but in practice. Churn is a killer, a first silent (because at small revenue, new growth masks it) then very noisy.
I think the author agrees with you about language (see [1] for example), but it seems to work pedagogically in this case.

[1]http://lesswrong.com/lw/nn/neural_categories/
> We already have indefinite detentions, torture, secret laws with secret interpretations, and state-sanctioned kidnappings.

And have had them for many many years. Nothing new. We committed a genocide against a people in the 1900s, and enslaved another people in the 1800s, both of which I think are much worse things to do to people than where we are now. If you chart the kinds of freedoms people living in the US have throughout the US's existence, would you really try to say the average person is less free today? Obviously we're not done working on being better at that, and absolutely we slip, but I'm so sick and tired of this attitude that we're moving into a totalitarian state, when we only in the last 100ish years LEFT what amounted to one.

And a small point of order but obviously no, my perception isn't any more valid than yours, but there is an objective perception, and if your perception is not aligned with that objective flagpost, then yes, your perception is a lie.
Watch out, mbsync reacts very poorly when Gmail decides to change UID schemes (UIDVALIDITY), which happens any time a label is created or removed.
I think gnu was being facetious, maaku. As in "only the government gets to redefine 'terrorism' any way they want".
There are a few things other than Celiac disease that cause problems with wheat; I've never been able to get a solid diagnosis other than ruling out Celiacs but I know if I have too much wheat, especially in the form of light fluffy baked goods, I get very tired and cranky as well as having digestive issues.

It could be an additive used in commercial baking because I seem to be fine with no-wheat gluten and some forms of wheat,but pragmatically avoiding wheat helps me.
Related: discussion of Zookal's plans to deliver college textbooks via drone.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6550765
"Discipline" is indeed the right word.

I was taught C at Epitech. A single segfault, no matter insidious, was a valid reason to render a whole project NULL. We often had evaluations ran with LD_LIBRATY_PATH=malloc_that_fails.so or just piping /dev/urandom to stdin...

Needless to say, calling exit() when a call to malloc() failed wasn't an acceptable recover routine.
But there are many other factors other than people's propensity to consume that you need to account for. And I'm not sure if this degree of raise in income practically changes marginal propensity to consume that much.
No, I think in the FSF's eyes -- rightfully -- it can't be proven that security has improved.

I also can't agree that it isn't related. If I tell you I'm wearing a green shirt, how can you know for sure if you or someone you trust hasn't verified it? You can't. It's the same with MSFT. But in the case of MSFT, it has been proven that they wear a lot of Hypercolor[1] stuff.

Is it good that MSFT is doing stuff to make things more secure? Sure. Do we still have to take it on faith that they are doing everything they can to protect their users? Yup.

[1]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypercolor
I never read the Arc source but I bet what he means is how comments are laid out in memory which you can see is reflected with direct links:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6857138

I'm not sure why that would be impossible in a none-lisp, just less elegant.
Why would you place any amount of trust in a closed source privacy solution from a company with a history such as Microsoft's?