skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
What does a refund look like on AR, or any other recurring SaaS product, anyway? If somebody has been using it for, say, 6 months, then decides they don't want it anymore and asks for a refund, what do you refund? The most recent month? All 6 months?
I've never seen Bezos make a move that did not have at least both a short-term and a long-term effect, if not more. "Bezos did this to boost sales and get free publicity" is a statement underestimating Bezos. The narrative is simply too narrow of scope.
Also: flying cars, fusion power plants, manned interplanetary travel.
I have great respect for Mandela, but I have flagged this story because it's causing so much political flaming.

"Please avoid introducing classic flamewar topics unless you have something genuinely new to say about them."

"The worst thing to post or upvote is something that's intensely but shallowly interesting. Gossip about famous people, funny or cute pictures or videos, partisan political articles, etc. If you let that sort of thing onto a news site, it will push aside the deeply interesting stuff, which tends to be quieter."

(with reference to the comments here, not the story itself)
Bob Dylan's "The Hurricane": http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hr8Wn1Mwwwk
SaltStack for Google Compute Engine
His peaceful assumption of power and non-violent transition of government are his lasting legacies. His violent struggle which resulted in his imprisonment became his advocacy for peaceful transformation. As the movement became focused on peaceful resistance it gained moral weight against the brutal violence perpetrated by the South African government.

Emphasizing the non-peaceful roots, and the fact that there was much violence in the struggle against the oppression of apartheid is to ignore his own words on the topic and to only tell half a story.
Ask HN: Would you pay $79/month for a status page?
statuspage.io appears so expensive to me ($79 or $249 per month), what do you think ?
While this is true, the remarkable part about Mandela is that his greatest accomplishments came 27 years after leaving the path of violence. He left prison not seeking revenge when it was possible, but offering forgiveness and hope.
It is not impossible. There is no reason why closed source software can not be secure. Yes, you can not convince yourself in the same way you can with open source software but again secure software and the ability to convince yourself that a software is secure are different things.
Ask HN: By the metric revenue per SLOC, the most successful project you know
I wonder what are the most successful software projects if the metric used to mesure success is Revenue per Source Lines Of Code
Yours seems to be a common sentiment, but I think there are any number of plausible reasons for doing this including:

-Leverage in dealing with other forms of last mile delivery when it comes to negotiating costs and contracts.

-Kickstarting the necessary legislative framework which will likely take many years to finalize.

-Goading other sectors of industry to start developing and testing the tech needed. Remember, Amz, is not shy about simply buying up companies to acquire technology it needs.
Websites are the new books : way too many.
but it also hasn't been the bloodbath many who lived there expected it to become on the fall of apartheid - and Mandela bears a huge portion of the credit for this
Ha ha. Fair point.
An ideal for which I am prepared to die.
Getting people to actually act like adults can be frustrating at times.

One thing I've noticed doing consulting work for a lot of public sector clients, is that they LOVE signs. Signs, signs everywhere.

These include but are not limited to telling people:

* How to use the elevator

* How to use a sink

* How to use a garbage bin

* How to use a toilet

* How to use a dishwasher

The funny thing is, you go to the clients WITHOUT signs, and its so obvious why they need them. People seem to think 'I'm at work now, I don't need to clean up my shit'.
The lesson is that the difference between "terrorist" and "freedom fighter" is not as well defined as you might think. He was a great leader.
> THE OS IS STILL CRASHING WHEN I PRESS A KEY. This continues for 2 days.

In case you didn't read the article.
does anyone know of similar quality job boards that are focused more on turnkey projects and less on staff augmentation?

i've had the best experiences with clients who care more about the end product and results, rather than specific languages, frameworks, or even skillsets. nearly all of them have been inbound or referrals, so i'm not sure if a job board (maybe a reverse job board?) would be able to replicate that.
I am paying them for this so I expect more.
Ask HN: Do you wish you could keep track of your comments on blogs?
At Meddle (get.meddle.it) we’re trying to solve this problem.<p>Also, anyone with a blog can embed this widget on their site too, here -->http://get.meddle.it/meddle-button-publishers/<p>Thoughts?
I'm happier with moderation. Perhaps I'll dance more, and drink less - or perhaps the reverse. But I'm pretty happy with my life right now; no need for any drastic changes.
"Apartheid" (literally: "the state of being apart") was a forced doctrine of legal racial separation, nominally "equal" but in reality anything but, with the black majority being hugely opressed, lasting from 1948 to 1990 / 1994 (officially at the former date, popularly when universal national elections were held on the latter).

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

Mandela fought this system along with many others through the ANC, the African National Congress. Some of its actions were violent, and the organization and its members were labeled as terrorists, though Mandela later disavowed violence.

He was freed in 1990, elected president of South Africa in 1994, and served until 1999. A man who went from spending 28 years in jail to leading the peaceful transition of his nation. His is one of the greatest stories of the 2nd half of the 20th century.

Listening to Obama speakin right now. "I'm not a saint, unless you consider a saint to be a sinner who keeps on trying."

NB: Obama himself was hugely guided and influenced by Nelson Mandela.
There are very few notifications that I want pushed to me. Probably nothing from YC, that's what Twitter does for me (unless I was in the YC program). I might be missing something here or I might not be in the target for 'broadcasts'. If you 'get' this then please let me know as I'm genuinely curious what the use case is.

The more push notifications I receive the less I notice the important ones like when my wife sends me an SMS that she's going to sell our kids on Craigslist.
http://get.meddle.it/meddle-button-publishers/
Yes, she was so unpopular she won three elections on the bounce.

Yeah, yeah, popular vote blah blah blah.
He's one of the most important world figures of the second half of the 20th century. Pretty legitimate news topic given the other non-tech topics that get plugged into this feed nowadays.
You are old ;-)
Mandela's address after being released from prison emphasises the need for continuing struggle against oppression and is completely devoid of pacifist white washing: http://www.anc.org.za/show.php?id=4520
I've been using gmail exclusively on my iphone for years with no ads. They've lost whole dollars providing this service to me.

But they want to make money off me, not lose me as a potential revenue.

So my bet is this is in preparation for showing 'sponsored' emails in your imap/pop3. "If you don't like it, just download all your emails and use another service" will be a talking point to suppress outrage, knowing that few people will actually go to the trouble of changing their email address. Fanboys will lap it up.
Totally agreed :)
> 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.

Unless you have something like goroutines - or Erlang-style processes - and perhaps employ a moderately disciplined coding style. Retrying those is just a matter of relaunching them, isn't it?

Also, Common Lisp got exceptions mostly right. Many other languages...not so much, I guess.
> The author's point is weakened by the fact that the Converge VM is now (5 years after this article) written in python

Kinda, it's written in RPython, a restricted and statically inferable subset of python built specifically to write VMs.
because typically they were coming here to raise money spent on placing bombs in parades of WWII veterans and in hospitals
This sounds more like "We don't negotiate with customers." because even if the customer had been professional and polite about it, their policy is no refunds. Even considering the behavior of the customer, IgnitionDeck is getting some really bad PR for the sake of saving $300.
this is such a silly and dummy example.
How do these services differ from the UPS store where I get mail delivered to and packages signed for?
U.S. GOP strategy summed up right there.
Can you please elaborate on this? The ANC (Mandela's political party) including Mandela himself certainly committed a wide range of violent acts in response to a vast display of vile force from the ruling South African government. However the respect that Mandela receives is for his actions after he was released from prison. After winning political power democratically, he was in a strong position to take retribution on those that had imprisoned him and caused such misery and hardship to his people.

But he didn't. He tried to bridge the huge divide. At the time, and I speak as someone who was living through it, there was a real fear that the country would erupt into a civil war. There was so much hate on both sides. It is widely believed by people from all South African political views that Mandela was responsible for reconciling the opposing sides and beginning a path of building a new country.

Was he perfect? Of course not. But he achieved what so many deemed impossible in a noble manner and this is extremely rare in political leaders anywhere in the world.
The US government was not at all opposing apartheid, but had to react to pressures. They could easily have imposed a boycott and collapsed the regime way before it did. Instead they send military support to the oppressors.

And sure Mandela was a terrorist, to some... He terrorized the dictators.

Now seriously, Who is a Nelson Mandela today and do you support him/her?
i'd like to not get so angry so often.
You must be one of those poor oppressed middle class white males from America. It's so rough that people call your racist comments racist. How dare they.
I think something that's often overlooked in this discussion is the language semantics differences. So we're not just comparing AOT with JIT (or why not JIT an AOT compiled app...) We're almost always also comparing C++ to the JVM/CLR worlds.

And then the point is that most optimizations a JIT can do that an AOT cannot are particulaly important where the language semantics are "too" flexible. If your code has lots and lot of virtual calls; lots of exceptions with unpredictable code flow - well, sure, it's really important to elide that flexibility where it's not actually used. That's kind of like JS Vm's nowadays speculatively type their untyped objects - it's a huge win, and not possible statically.

But the point is - these optimizations are critical because the languages don't allow (or encourage) code to disable these dynamic features. In C++ this can be helpful; but how often is dynamic devirtualization really going to matter? I mean, you can statically devirtualize certain instances (e.g. whole-program optimization reveals only two implementations and replaces a virtual call with an if), but the real code-could by any subtype but actually isn't scenario just isn't one that comes up often.

The consequence is that C++ gets most of the benefits of a JIT simply because the JIT is solving problems C++ compilers don't need to solve. The cost is that the compiler wastes inordinate amounts of time compiling your entire program as optimally as it can, even though it only has a few hotspots.
Those professional tools and iWorks only exist to persuasively fill a gap which others are not adequately filling. Final Cut etc are quality gutsy products needed because nobody else is going to put that much effort into selling at that low a price on a platform otherwise not attractive enough to make enough money to fund the venture; those are loss leaders for showing "this hardware is AWESOME, the kind of thing you need as the centerpiece of your studio/whatever". iWorks is cheap enough and good enough to provide basic tools most people need without putting in the effort & cost to match MS Office, which is available and which most people willing to pay that much will buy anyway.

There's enough games available to make iOS a leading gaming platform, with no need for Apple to jump in. Apple does as little software production as possible, done only to sell more hardware when necessary. Prime apps like Remote and Apple Store are obvious focus, yet Apple has been amazingly negligent; Apple really has very few application developers and has little interest in expanding their number.
There’s a lot of ways this can go. Meddle can be simply a a place where users can display their insights about on particular articles

AND/OR

It can learn towards a widget that bloggers can embed to allow readers to mark up text, comment and share throughout their networks, which in turn, would increase visibility.
New company (farther along startup, funded, and doing great work) is a lot less stressful. I basically view it like a paid vacation where I can focus on engineering and tech instead of the howling vortex of crazy that is business and sales. :)
It's the name of many things:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Houston_(disambiguation)

https://github.com/search?q=houston&source=cc
Let it not be forgotten, Mandela prevented 2 wars! The first war of whites against blacks and a second war amongst blacks as there was a power struggle amongst the different black parties, most notably the IFP. Either of those wars would have been catastrophic.
Bitcoin endorsed by Wall Street strategist
Are you kidding me? We have this for over 5 years in Germany... Normal service of Deutsche Post.
I don't think Obama can even be mentioned in the same breath as Mandela, tbh.
I had a similar idea since I wanna create playlists from tracks in multiple resources and made this library; http://github.com/azer/play-url

Which takes a url (Mp3, Rdio, Soundcloud and Youtube) and gives you a unified API to play it. www.7min.io/customize is based on this.
Terrorist is a loaded term.

http://blogs.reuters.com/reuters-editors/2007/06/13/when-doe...
> At some point you have to trust someone, and I doubt with all the eyes on windows, both within and without, that any extant backdoor would have remained hidden until now.

Right, but A) I like to choose who I trust. Get a second opinion. Verify a few things myself, if I feel I'm up to the task. I get none of these options with Windows.

B) If you doubt, with all the eyes on Windows, that a backdoor would have persisted, why do you act as if more eyes is not better? Or, perhaps more importantly, a greater variety of eyes?

Microsoft gets to pick who studies their code, and may or may not prevent them from revealing vulnerabilities and bugs anyway. Popular open source projects may get actively hostile researchers studying their code specifically to shout any bugs they find from the rooftops. Or they may get the world's foremost expert in some aspect of their code to study it for fun. And nobody can stop them from revealing anything the find.

If MS giving a few hand-picked organizations their source code under strict terms, who may or may not be allowed to report what they find honestly, is good, why wouldn't fully open software be better?

Nobody is saying that giving governments and a few organizations a look at the Windows source isn't better than having it completely locked down. But it just doesn't go far enough.
Officially, any payments you made in the last 30 days. Unofficially, if you tell me "Gadzooks I got billed for this for 6 months because I never canceled my free trial and missed the 6 invoices you sent me", I'll reverse 2-3 charges (I lose the capability to do so something like 60 days after the transaction) and then tell you that you have options for the remaining months: a) I write a check to charity, b) I write a check to you, c) you let me keep it. Pick whichever sounds fair.

$174 is, literally, less than rounding error.

I am aware of other companies which hew more closely to "Just your last payment", and even one prominent SaaS company with a declared no-refunds policy, but they don't strike me as being material improvements.
Seems like a case of - 'First they ignore you, then they ridicule you, then they fight you, and then you win.'
Also depending on the JVM and JIT settings over time those virtual methods get treated as non-virtual.
If Nintendo releases the games for iOS, Apple gets a cut anyhow.

Killer argument. Apple doesn't need to buy Nintendo. Nintendo needs to choose to do just what Apple would make 'em do anyway: create/port games for iOS. If Nintendo goes there either way, they win ... and Apple gets 30% with zero effort.
compare with pingdom ? $6.96

https://www.pingdom.com/pricing/

Disclose: I Do Not work for pingdom
I'm not sure that being called a terrorist by PW Botha is all that meaningful.
How can I be sure you source from local markets? This doesn't scale easily either. How do you plan to combat carelessness when demand goes up and you all of sudden need to push out 1000 or 10,000 meals at lunch time?
The key thing I noted when I visited the home page of DropBox is that I instantly understood what they do.

I compared DropBox to the Box website. After wandering around several pages, I left without being 100% sure if they could do what I wanted.

The ability to offer a clear, concise message should not be undervalued.
It is very much related: closed source software isn't audited in the open. Core principle of building secure software is one must assume that their adversary has the source code and is actively building newer and newer attacks based on it (corporate leaks happen all the time). It's not impossible to follow through with this principle when building closed source software, but it is a lot easier to handwave it.

I am not a fan of FSF's tone here, they could be more diplomatic -- but saying "we appreciate your effort, but you fail" would have been more insulting. I think there are many places for closed source software, but core privacy software is not one of those places.

The encryption core (the critical pieces that either input or output plain text -- the places where the attack is more likely to succeed as opposed to the core of the algorithms), as well and the general platform should have the source code available (even if at a fee). That's not quite the FSF vision, but perhaps the powerful vision is needed (one can think of FSF's goals as a captivating utopian story that leads to more incremental improvements).
Popular C software is so reliable because of enormous amount of effort spent developing, testing, and polishing it over many years - not because error handling in C is superior to that in higher-level languages.

If your python script sticks around for 30 years constantly being used by millions of people - I bet it will be rock solid as well. All other things [1] being equal [2], a program written in a higher-level language will likely be more reliable - simply because it will likely be shorter. C has many properties conductive to great longevity of software written in it, but error handling is not one of them.

Now, to the rant about not knowing the exact number of exceptions a function can throw. Most sane languages [3] give you exception hierarchy. You know that every function can throw an Exception (or Throwable, or whatever the root of all things evil is called in your language), and you either handle it or let in propagate. The important bit is you catch exceptions based on what you can handle in a current context, not on what the functions you call can throw [4]. As long as you realize that every call can potentially throw, it is not important what exactly is thrown - letting you abstract away the exact nature of an error is a feature, not a bug, that's what exceptions are there for! Let's say some function deep below changed and now throws a new exception type. So what? It didn't change what you can handle, so there's no reason to modify calling function - just let the exception propagate. What if nothing in your program can handle that exception? You let it crash (hopefully to the debugger, and no, it's not ironic that I suggest it in a topic about reliable programs - crashing is a reliability feature invented to expose problems that would be hidden and hard to debug otherwise). Of course you may also put a few catch-all clauses in a very limited number of strategic places.

If you approach exceptions this way they are vastly superior to error codes.

[1] Scope of the problem, amount of effort spent on development, programmer skills

[2] Or at least on the same order of magnitude

[3] With a notable exception of C++ - I'm not sure what they were smoking when they decided that throwing arbitrary values is a good idea

[4] And this, by the way, is what's wrong with checked exceptions in Java

PS. Didn't mean that having no exceptions is insane - but that if a language has exceptions, the sane thing to do is to organize them in a hierarchy with a single root.
If your server's running Limux, it's going to kill your process with no questions asked if you run out of memory. You're better off practicing crash-only error recovery and having robust clients that can handle a reconnect.

HTTP is stateless already, so crash and restart all you want!
I read Long Walk to Freedom, his autobiography, in college and thought it was really good. The film adaptation was released just last week if you're interested in that (though it sounds mediocre). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_Walk_to_Freedom
Thank you, Young Conservatives!
I'm not an expert on the topic, but JIT is not allowed in certain places - like game consoles, ios, etc, to the point where even simpler trampoline (ffcall, libffi) are not allowed too. As such AOT helps there where JIT can't be used, but does not support absolutely everything (C# templates when comes to types that are not yet loaded I guess?).
I think you are right. If microsoft comes out with some sort of license that ensure that they will protect our privacy (or allow us tu sue the hell out of them if they fail to do so) that would be a way to achieve this.
What? This is an insane idea to begin with. It's right up there with Compaq buying Digital and HP buying Compaq. Companies with too much money and no clue do things like this. Apple has too much money but absolutely no lack of critical thinkers who would realise this is a dumb idea.

Right now Apple makes platforms. Developers develop for those platforms and make lots of money. No shortage of good games on iOS, in case you haven't looked. And while I haven't seen anyone playing a Nintendo portable in a year or so, I see Android/iOS games everywhere. Nintendo haven't even got a worthy console in this generation. What does Nintendo even have that Apple would want?

Should Apple want Nintendo's IP (characters etc. - and I don't think that is Apple's style at all, just the only vaguely valuable thing there) they just have to wait a bit longer. If they did want Nintendo, the only risk to waiting would be that some other company would snap them up first. Nintendo certainly isn't going to worth _more_ in a year.
If you have the income to support a $3k/mo housing cost you should be saving enough to afford a $100k downpayment in a few years. Also, as another poster pointed out, it probably qualifies for an FHA loan with much lower down payment.