skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I understand the frustration of the developers of Ninja Words, but I do not understand why we keep having these Apple Store rejected app stories on HN.

If Apple is behaving like a jerk, why invest any energy in them? AFAIK there are other interesting developing platforms with interesting hardware. The iPhone might have a nice userbase, but I presume this will not matter in the end since most phones seem to head into the direction of being complete pc's anyway, why bother with a mobile 'desktop' application as new mobile browsers are going to be supporting more and more of the common desktop pc browsers features?

I mean - excuse my ignorance - , but why would a developer voluntarily deal with the ongoing Apple App store dictatorship? Without a healthy ecosystem of applications the iPhone is dead in the water. As is the current silo approach embraced by Apple. Why would a developer invest any energy into their doomed silo scheme?

IMHO let Apple reject applications as much as they want, history has learned us that the most open system will prevail (Video2000 Vs VHS for example) and my bet is on the Web and open OSses like Android, Linux and perhaps Symbian (if the ever get serious about going FLOSS).
Is it really important in this case? Just so a bunch of different companies can fawn all over him because he said "I'm looking for work, contact me"?

If you have the skills (he does), finding a job should not be too difficult. No need to blog about it.
Thanks for the link.
Yes, it is true that accidents happen, I'll give you that. The same can be said for cars, which kill far more people each year than handguns. I'm not arguing one way or the other here, just saying it is a difficult issue.
Complete computer designed and built from logic gates
I guess the Viaweb polo is pretty rare too :)

http://www.listia.com/auction/209
all those totally pissed off by iPhone's AppStore

All those developers.

I wonder what it's like having a day NOT seeing anyone blog a rant about Apple and AppStore.

It's like spending a day not reading blogs about software development.
You're not the only person. I'm the author of this post and I'm not even sure I like returning() :)

I'm mostly pointing out the similarity for the sake of discussion, and as it seems to be playing out in the comments, using this approach is a bad idea.

Maybe that'll serve as a lesson to those who are tempted to think as I did.
That reminds me of a three year old blog posting of mine: http://www.jgc.org/blog/2006/07/open-source-elephant-in-room...
Vista was only released at the end of 2006 - less than three years ago.

Already people are going to switch that out for Windows 7.

Three years is an eternity.

The reason people are still using IE6 is because it works. The reason it works is because people are going to great lengths to make sure it does.

The sooner it stops working, the sooner people will abandon it.
The obvious youtube application aside, I wonder if they are looking forward to the need for video support for chrome OS?
Apple are treating their developers the same way they treated the music labels and media companies. It worked marvelously for them, why would they change anything?

As far as Apple are concerned, App developers should be thankful they even had a choice in pricing.
However, the relation between how much is there to know (increasing) and how much fits in a head (constant) is growing, which is sad, and whether it has ever been 1 seems rather unimportant to me.
We're turning retarded obviously. As we age on the Internet, our brains turn to mush because of all the lolcats and other stuff that creeps out of 4chan and into our eyes. Thus we are more accepting of browser "improvements" when even an Amiga can do better!
Tell that to the people at ARM who ship 10 RISC cpus for every Intel desktop chip out there.
WTF are you talking about? Go have a coffee and explain yourself. There is no MS API monopoly, almost all of the games I've seen use OpenGL and maybe some magic with the help of the video card instructions (shader languages, GPUs blah blah blah).
A third of Europeans have never used the Internet
Right-, left-handedness affects judgment
I'm in the middle of a project that uses their FlixCloud service for on-demand transcoding ... I hope that doesn't die.
Via self-fulfilling pessimism.
I have reposted it here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=743583
Ancestry isn't an absolute categorization.

But it's a worse fallacy to say that broad racial groups don't exist. Beyond your lying eyes, a single glance at an SNP map will inform you of how genetic variance tends to clump.

Risky policy is relying on blank slate thinking to imagine that we can import the third world without, well, importing the third world. It's a consequence of living in a country where neither the left nor the right believe that evolutionary theory really applies to humans.
Here Come The Twitter Patent Lawsuits. TechRadium Files The First One.
Tumblr Takes Over World: 255,000,000 Pageviews in July
That was my first thought too when I read the title. Chuck Moore's site is a good place to start - http://colorforth.org/
It's a good way to prevent you from using the personal computer to its fullest potential.
You'd get an old PC from your closet, install Linux (text only) and gcc and get the whole thing working in less time and for less cost, probably.

...at least that's what I'd do :-)
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Who cares? I mean really, what's the point of trying to define it, or figure out what companies fit or don't fit under that label?

I have a small company I founded with a couple of partners. Based on discussions here some people would consider it a startup, others wouldn't. That doesn't change how I run the business, how I make money, or how I picture myself and my company. Some labels are important for communicating clearly. I don't think "startup" is one of them, especially since everyone has a slightly different definition in mind.
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Good Alan Kay quotes
I am appalled ... Current federal policies are not helping us regard our neighbor Henry as Henry.

I'm not sure exactly why you're appalled. You seem to think that the "Civil Rights" movement was about bringing-us-all-together, so that we could be judged as individuals, etc, etc. I guess that was the rhetoric.

The reason that institutions such as colleges categorize people is that it's a necessary condition to satisfy the racial spoils system (affirmative action, implicit quotas, etc). That spoils system is the natural result of the "civil rights" movement. "Who, whom" is the only question in politics. No one...and I mean no one except the truly brainwashed...wants equality when superiority is available.

Back in 1965, it may have been possible for a large portion of the population to subsidize a small portion in this manner. The mathematics allow the bottom 10 percent of whites to give up lawyer jobs, doctor jobs, academic jobs, etc, so that marginal black people could have those positions. It's a despicable crime, but not socially calamitous. But as that large majority becomes a minority, you have the following certain events:

1. It is increasingly difficult to supply a majority population of blacks and hispanics with the affirmative action benefits which a portion of their livelihood has become dependent on.

2. The remaining whites are not only fewer in number, but much older. The old ones themselves become tax-eaters.

3. Via #1 and #2, the remaining young white people (and Asians) simply will not be able to pay everyone who has their hand out.

This isn't prophecy but mathematics. The prophecy is, "Who will suffer from this?"
Well, I removed the link becouse actually is the only one that I have used so I can't compare it with another one.
When Doesn't Reputation Work Well?
Turing's work on B-type unorganized machines in 1948 could definitely be considered machine learning:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unorganized_machine
The fun was doing that without using this.
Because people like Zed Shaw move there?
I'd hire Zed just for his online presence. I'd put him in the Technology Evangelist role he mentioned. Just having Zed on staff would mean instant publicity for a small startup. Even if he doesn't play nice (although he seems like a reasonable guy if you watch his talks), you could keep him relatively isolated in that type of role. Let him work on Lamson while he pimps your product all over the web and at conferences.
Coincidence... I'm looking for some simple caching layer right now. But what I need is that data is distributed to all server nodes. I don't care about insert time that much. And the only thing I need to store is a 'unique string -> string' map. (very short strings)

Can someone recommend any solution? I'd be perfectly happy with a "replicating memcached"...
Worked fine for me in FF3.5.1
I went through the same thing with my Japanese dictionary app (http://banrai.com/nihongo.html).

For the initial rating, I said it had no bad language, sex, or violence.

It got rejected for language (apparently, the first the reviewers do is try to use four-letter words).

So I changed the rating to "mild/infrequent" and it got rejected again.

Here's part of what I wrote to them after the second rejection:

"I'm not sure how to respond to your comment that the rating is inappropriate.

"Nihongo" is a Japanese dictionary.

As such, it contains some profanity, sexual content, etc. but the bulk of the content is not in that category."

That got no reply from Apple, so I went back, used the strongest possible rating (like Ninja Words, it's now rated 17+).

More than a month after it was first posted, it was approved for sale.
The comment doesn't make any sense in the first place. If "Hispanics" are a group and a majority then that would be reflected in the political and socio-economic system.
I wonder how the Gödel's Incompleteness Theorems apply here.
By electing George Double You Bush.

... 3 times.
Anyone else see a credit card ad ("Approval in 60 seconds!") on the top right corner of the article? Ironic?
I am continuously appalled by GS, but I don't guess it's specifically hacker news,

Regulatory capture anyone?
Online retailers point to new phase for Facebook
The fact that a single person can understand a smaller percentage of the whole of a computer system indicates progress.

There was a time when any given physicist probably had a good grasp on most of their field. I doubt that's still the case. I do sympathize with the romantic notion of knowing it all, but let's not confuse this notion with a call to action.
This extraordinary performance was not limited to Goldman - many of the high speed trading outfits managed to earn similarly impressive numbers (albeit on a smaller absolute scale)

As you can imagine, the market conditions in a period of such volatility were ripe for statistical arbitrage and other high speed strategies.
50 Eritreans in Calais try daily to cross the Channel seeking asylum in Britain
He's a hacker (well known) and this is news.
Undeniably impressive, but saddening nevertheless. The man insisted on replicating the mistakes of the past: Von Neumann bottleneck, C, Unix. This creation is a "model airplane" - a world-class one, to be sure, but a model airplane still.
"If this did happen, it would be the result of suicidal national policies that increase the degree of race-consciousness"

I can see how policies can make things worse. So how would you recommend doing it different? My best guess is that not doing anything ensures problems get worse or stay the same.

My perspective is from growing up in a small town in south Georgia. I left in '87 and am visiting here at the moment. 22 years after I left, the racial divide is exactly like it was. What will happen in 2050 if that "Hispanic" population still has things then just like they are now? I can certainly see a tipping point towards violence.

Your anecdote as seeing Henry as Henry is spot on the way it should be. But how do we get there? Its not that way today with the policies implemented. It wasn't that way prior to the policies being implemented. So I'm guessing it won't get there by doing nothing or removing the policies.
Safari's blacklisted it too, but I think both it and Firefox use the same Google phishing sites list.
And it's available on their website: http://www.netflix.com/Jobs

(Yeah, I was inspired to investigate.)
rotary engines are pretty cool.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6BCgl2uumlI

each time each piston reverses direction you're losing energy in a standard piston engine.
It's a reasonably informative article. But...

Does a 25 second process on a 32 node cluster really count as a "supercomputer" task? By definition, you can run that on your desktop in 15 minutes. If that's really your task, and these are your numbers, and latency-to-answer is your only metric (as opposed to other stuff, like "cost" that people in the real world worry about) then sure: EC2 makes sense. But these look like some terribly cooked numbers to me. I mean, how much time are you really going to spend optimizing something you can run while you trot to Starbucks for coffee?

I'd be curious what the answers (including cost) are when you scale the problem to days of runtime on hundreds of nodes. I rather suspect the answers would be strongly tilted in favor of the institutional supercomputer facilities, who after all have made a "business" out of optimizing this process. EC2 has other goals.
The 10 Worst Video Game Systems of All Time
I agree with most of his points, but let's be honest people, writing good documentation is no easy task. And not many programmers are good communicators either.
a repost of:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=741639

By popular request...

What I find extremely impressive is that he not only designed a computer from the ground up using nothing but TTL, he also designed the cpu and instruction set.

Most people would be tempted to re-create an existing design, this guy basically did on his own what would have taken a whole corporation consisting of lots of people 30 years ago.

It's not like a re-enactment, it is a completely original design.
I don't knwo if he is the best fit because he was more of an inventor but I would think Tesla would have a place on this list.
I knew if I read this article, my blood would boil like it does with every other App Store article that's been coming out lately. Yet I read it anyway, and I can only ask:

How long will Apple get away with this?
Which would be kinda impossible because no two tweets can have the same id.
This article and the blog zerohedge is sensationalist and often wrong.

To me this is hacker news as what the high-frequency traders is pretty serious technology.
All that this really doing is diluting their own censorship rules until they're meaningless. It's as if every movie featuring actors showing their legs above the knees was rated R.
At least he proposes a hypothesis about the issue. The only hypothesis you advance is basically: I don't believe you, so I don't have to provide evidence either, and besides, you sound like a crazy.
I haven't had time to look it over in full yet, but I will respond when I can.
Then it sounds like Apple should review some of their own apps, like text messaging.
Exactly. This is a total misapplication of the power of EC2.

EC2 comes into its own when you have a compute bound task that would normally run for days or weeks on a single computer or small cluster. You want your answer significantly sooner and you want to pay for that.

15 minutes ? Go for a coffee break. If you run 100's of those every day then it starts to make sense again.

Another (very) valid reason to use EC2 is to avoid going through 'purchasing', if it is just a service you'll probably be able to slip it in under the radar.

Much quicker that way :)
I'm no expert in such matters, but from the tone of his article (and those of the comments) I think the author is implying that this is due to a large amount of book-cooking, rather than any genuine HFT activities.
No, I'd welcome it.
This ongoing concentration of wealth is going to turn into a huge problem.

4.2 billion in profit in 42 days is just nuts.
That sum could keep 100.000 "regular" people afloat for a full year.
I could be the one to email it to him!
Critical Windows 7 bug risks derailing product launch
zerohedge is arguing that GS makes their profits from front-running clients rather than "true" high frequency trading or stat arb. I don't know if that is true or not.
The author says (and I agree) that the process of judging cannot be easily performed completely by a computer, and goes on arguing for better retrieval systems for legal texts -- so Gödel would probably just shrug.

Actually, I think laws (at least in the Civil Law sense; I'm not too familiar with Case Law) could be adequately represented in some formal logic language if the value judgements are made explicit so that the semantics of the law language specifies the meaning of most operators explicitly but leaves the judging-operator up to human judgment.

Then, laws could be model-checked for loop-holes.
Your points on the "mathematics" point out problems with the structure of this "spoils" system. The system requires constants readjustment, complete replacement, or removal to satisfy the changing numbers.

In regards to:
"No one...and I mean no one except the truly brainwashed...wants equality when superiority is available."

I guess you will have to classify me as brainwashed. The desire for superiority is an ill that should be "brainwashed" out of those that suffer from it.
Most sysadmins need to know lots of different config file syntaxes, protocols, security etc. As a result they are unlikely to be that familiar with C, also there is a massive learning curve with knowing how the kernel works and how to fix it (I've tried). People who know much about the linux kernels and the low level in gerernal are in increasing short supply as more and more students gradate only knowing high level languages and concepts and then following careers in that direction. Also when your employed to run 100 or 1000s of servers it's probably for something business critical, so the employeer pays lots to RedHat and other for support, which in turn pays for kernel devs.

In contrast, for example, a PHP programmer who probably does PHP day-in-day out and not much else is going to find it pretty easy to fix a bug in a PHP framework him/herself and therefore his/her employer doesn't need to pay a big support contract. If problems are found they are probably in the development phase and if the team can't work around them, I would expect any number of freelancers could pick up the problem and fix it.

Basically I'm saying it's supply and demand.
3.) should be 'The organization needs to be structured as a corporation or there have to be solid plans to do so.'.

Plenty of start-ups postpone the incorporation step until they have sufficient traction. There are good reasons to do so, for one during the initial phase the 'founders roster' is subject to change and once someone is on board it can be very hard to remove them again if they have stock. So it's better to wait for a bit until the 'shake-out' has taken place.

That way you have a much better idea about the amount of weight each of the founders is going to pull and the stock issued can reflect that.

Before the real work starts everybody is always available, once it starts you know how solid those commitments are.
Hackernewz.com [forwards to] News.YCombinator.com
Writing good code is both difficult and all about communication. If you can write good code, you're probably capable of writing good documentation (low level technical documentation in your native language, at any rate) if you really want to.
Any statisticians care to estimate the probability a firm could do this without gaming the system?

If you ask a startup to create a simple computer-based trading system that allow the buying and selling of stocks, how much would capital would they need? Not much. Trading systems should be operated by a non-profit, this sounds like a hefty and unnecessary trading tax.
Once the user has filled in anything then the label is completely lost. How is that better then having the label above or to the right where it is always viewable?
I may be missing something, but can't you create reasonably performant KV stores in relational databases? I'm thinking, for example, of IOT tables (indexed by key) in Oracle, or possibly pl/sql function caching in 11g.
Building the hardware is an amazing project. You are suggesting that he should have designed a new architecture, core language, and operating system as well?

Maybe he should just cure cancer too.
I kind of disagree. While I agree with your first statement somewhat, I know many programmers who can express themselves pretty well in their language of choice, but when it comes to human communication, well... ;-)
Google's press release: http://www.google.com/intl/en/press/pressrel/ir_20090805.htm...
because i found myself typing "hacker news" into google instead of typing all 20 characters into the url bar.
"but has there been mass violence in response or whatnot? No, life has gone on as normal."

There has been quite a bit of mass violence. How many have we killed in Iraq and Afghanistan these last 8 years? Depending on who's numbers you believe its in the several hundred thousand to well over a million range. Just because we have sanitized the killing so we don't see the dead bodies on TV doesn't mean its not happening. This violence is a direct result of our energy policies. I classify those policies and the general American's attitude as "radical" (assuming I can bend the term radical to apply to what is the majority).
Wall Street must be a huge export product. The financial institutions that have the knowledge and control over the market can create dips to force out unknowing foreign investors and bring back their wealth. It's a brilliant scheme.
I wish I knew how to get started on something like that...
At the risk of starting a language riot: both of these techniques seem awfully clunky. Python's dictionary comprehension syntax solves the same problem in a single expression.

Whether it's a problem worth solving in syntax is left as an exercise for the reader. I mean seriously: create and fill a hash. Is that really something we want to be worried about?
You could start by building a ALU and work up from there.
The jQuery example plugin does this a tad better, but with out the special fade out a bit on click effect, which I actually prefer.

http://mucur.name/system/jquery_example/
Even better, Google can now open up VP6.

Vendors have reservations about submarine patents on Theora/VP3 - the possibility that that even though On2 has disclaimed patent rights, other patent holders are lurking about, waiting for Theora/VP3 to become popular enough to sue over.

I think VP6 doesn't have this problem. If a patent troll had a potential claim over VP6, they'd have gone after On2 or Adobe or Youtube by this point.

EDIT: Someone else has posted that Youtube never used VP6. Anyone know if Flash+VP6 was common enough to obviate the "we're nervous about patents because nobody ever used this" argument against Theora/VP3?
Not really. People have all sorts of biases that will come out when self-reporting. Things which carry a positive connotation, or that a person is proud of, will be over-reported. Things that are viewed negatively will be under-reported. Things which are embarrassing or controversial will be skewed as well.

If if was random, normally distributed error, then the errors would cancel out. However, many questions will be biased in one direction, not randomly around a true median.
if (plaintiff.type == LARGE_CORP) { punitiveDamagesRatio = INT_MAX; }
... why not just make a bookmark?