skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Expect this argument to be repeated for other services and in other countries.

Google makes giant profits in AdWords and AdSense core -- where they enjoy a near-monopolistic market share.

They may then use that money to subsidize free offerings in many other markets. This could be construed by many antitrust enforcers as unfair competition, or even 'predatory pricing' if in fact it seems part of a long-term strategy to make money in the targeted markets after the competition has been driven away.

Google is concerned about such an argument; I just googled for [antitrust subsidize] and the top hit was:

"Google Public Policy Blog: Is free an antitrust issue?"

http://googlepublicpolicy.blogspot.com/2009/07/is-free-antit...
You're missing the two main points:

1. The developer is on the hook for refunding 100% of the sale price... but Apple takes a 30% cut of the sale price. So the developer is actually _losing_ money to make a refund to the customer.

2. Apple is the cause of the refunds.

Apple is in a win-win situation here (for them) because they are making their own decisions and shrugging off any responsibility or consequences for their actions on to the developers. Wouldn't it be nice to have someone else take the fall and/or answer for the consequences of any actions that you take?
Since we don't know what being "young" and healthy for 200 years is like, the assumption isn't false. I'd prefer to call it unverified.

I never said that it's bad to be stuck in your ways: what I said (or tried to say) was that not being stuck in your ways makes it easier for you to come up with novel solutions to problems.

Having a certain amount of momentum in society is definately a good thing, but having too much of it means that society will respond too slowly to a changing environment. In my opinion, our current momentum doesn't make us too volatile. That's just my opinion, though, but that might just be a reflection of me being fairly young.
Scalability and Performance Best Practices
The text that should be to the right of domain names that aren't available is below them instead.

Here is a screenshot: http://imgur.com/teHch.png
Imagine what humanity could accomplish if the standard life-span was just 200 instead of 70.

We might find that we can't accomplish much, as older, more set-in-their-ways voters choke off support for innovation in favor of being supported in their old age. (We could give the United States as a partial example of a country where this is already national policy.) Note that I am not grinding axes for young people here--I am probably already more than half-way through my lifespan, and definitely a good bit older than most HN participants.
<style>
label { display: table-row; }
span { display: table-cell; }
</style>
<label><span>Label:</span>
<span><input type=text></span></label>
<label><span>Longer label:</span>
<span><input type=checkbox></span></label>
Not as much as being forced to use Objective-C. On Andorid, I can easily use any JVM langauge, including Clojure and JRuby.
Moreover, your freedom is severely restricted by the scientific approach demanded by computer science. It is hard to fund/publish novel ideas that are not easy to evaluate.

What? That's the point -- science is hard. If it weren't hard it wouldn't be worth doing. I guess you could argue that academia is bad because you don't get to sit around and jerk off and collect a pay check, and you'd be right, but you would completely be missing the point.

For me, academia is about examining the limits of our knowledge in a field and then working to expand it.

The freedom you have is only an illusion. What good is this freedom if your grant proposals / papers get rejected?

Fantastic! It means you are not good enough! (or your idea isn't anyway) The scientific community does not accept substandard research or conclusions and rightly so. Academia is not fun and games but it can be rewarding in its own way.
Do you go to SMU? I haven't met anyone there that frequents HN
Ah, I didn't catch that. That makes the graphs even less informative.
And they dig deeper on their stupidity hole...
You are kidding right? I have seen NYT and WSJ break more "tech" stories than TechCrunch. Also when did TC move from covering startups to being tabloid central? I am surprised at some of the sensationalism of the headlines and the repeated bashing of the telcos gets old. Why dont you guys learn a thing or two from GigaOm?
I imagined something along an entirely different approach. Putting videos online is just doing it the same way over a new medium. I am thinking of a way to take advantage of what the web has to offer.

We'll see how it goes.
That statement would make sense with the addition of "at our current level of technology."
I think 200 years ago, the curve would have allowed him to say something like "the exponential is so sharp that I can say with 99.999999% certainty that no human will ever live to the age of 90."

I am not saying that my generation will be able to live to 500, but I bet that someday people will.

(I am interested in seeing the graph of "maximum possible lifetime" throughout time.)
If we do triple our life expectancy, it's probably best if we do what you're implying and delay the time before we have kids by the same amount of time. Otherwise we'll have to get used to having eight generations living at the same time instead of the three we have now - and that'll mean that we more or less triple the population.

We're apparently struggling to feed six billion now, which problably means that we'd need to get rather creative to feed eighteen billion.
Many years ago, a family friend's child was "prescribed" a Sega Genesis and fast-moving video games to help improve his eyesight.
France has a law to "protect" booksellers, which means no-one is permitted to undercut the list price by more than 5%. The traditional booksellers complained that the free shipping was worth more than 5%, so Amazon were fined €1000 per day until they stopped... I don't think they stopped. Does anyone know if they are still paying the fines?
Agreed, and even worse is that this trash is from 2007.
Thanks for pointing this out.
Iceweasel browser made the font a little bigger than expected.
I will try to fix that.
Ugh... GPL.
I'm pretty sure that there's nothing prohibiting you from bundling the Ruby (or other) interpreter with your app, as long as the code that it executes is static (i.e. doesn't allow the user to execute arbitrary code). It would probably cost a lot with respect to the size and possibly speed of your application, but I thought that I'd note that it is at least possible to use some other languages.
Wow, this is a hugely improved interface over the version you posted a while back. Congrats!
Thanks for linking this, I was going through a previous edition. This has been an excellent resource for learning the Scheme language. It's been though learning scheme that I finally have come to understand recursion :)

I have been reading a lot about its power and ability to develop quickly in this language and am looking forward to learning it better :)
What's new and special about this edition?
When it comes to mobile development, I'm trying to sell software. If I can build an app and sell it on the iPhone then I will, because there is a huge market there right now. It's the best market to sell a simple mobile app.

If the restrictions of the iPhone or Apple's politics make it too risky to build and sell a product I have come up with, then I'll have to take it somewhere else. As it is, I think it still pays to develop simple consumer apps for the iPhone. I'll stick with FOSS on the desktop for my cutting-edge or experimental stuff. In the future Android is pretty clearly shaping up to be the platform to push the technological envelope on. The Android platform just isn't nice enough to put up with every day when I have to buy a phone and a plan to really play with it.
While there is some truth to what you say, I've seen a few startups fail because they lost focus. While there may be fewer people to oppose you if you want to experiment with truely novel ideas in a startup, you're still increasing your risk doing so. Startups should avoid experimenting until after they are profitable.
They've disabled every method of scrolling except the scroll bar on the right. Several of my extensions, such as Mouse Gestures, don't work on this site.

I usually don't mind Flash, but this is why you shouldn't use Flash for your entire site.
Wow, a boston.com story about git? Sounds unlikely on the face of it.

Oh, wait.
On a simmilar note, HAProxy can proxy http traffic or just tcp traffic, which you can use to cluster your service and provide a little redundancy.

http://haproxy.1wt.eu/
Yes, I got that, sorry for not being clearer. The videos are a simple starting point, there is no interaction and so on, it's just like watching TV (only worse quality...).

The subject of the discussion was basically a complete virtual education from grade school level all the way up to university level. Interactive lectures, web based self-study units the works.

We realized that this is a very complex undertaking and that it would require fairly massive funds to be executed properly as well as an enormous amount of expertise.
The third screenshot on the "how it works" page has a disturbing message:

"Free version. Images will display in GIF format."

That's a dealbreaker. I would have been livid if I'd gone through the whole process only to discover this on the last step, not to mention the homepage states the product is "Absolutely free".

If this product worked it would save me boatloads of time. I'm hoping someone gets this right soon.

made a whole site
Where Mathematics meets the Internet (1998)
I'm on WiMAX right now with Clearwire, in Redmond WA. Works like a charm. The box could use a built-in 802.11 AP (or maybe it has one?) but that's easy enough to fix.

speedtest.net says 42ms ping, 1.19MB/sec download, 0.19MB/sec upload to their test server in Seattle:
http://www.speedtest.net/result/530971228.png
I had really great eyesight up until about 7th grade. This happened to be about the time I stopped playing games daily, but I can't believe it was because I no longer played video games. I think it had more to do with my reading.
How Learning a Second Language Changed My Life
When I go to the next page of results, I see a loading graphic for the last ten results on the new page. However, you're loading 15 new results each time. The user should always see the first new result when loading a new page. Scroll me back up to the top of the results, or just add the new results to the existing page instead of replacing them.
In that case, you should look more closely to elite schools in the US (I have no idea how Cambridge and Oxford changed in the UK). Most of the top 15-20 schools in the United States have succeeded in continuing to graduate competent students.
From a two second skim of the preface my guess is that it covers Revised^6.
I agree with this statement. Other schools (perhaps not as highly regarded as the ones you mentioned) such as Texas A&M do hardcore, low-level C++ courses, compiler stuff, etc. for both CS and CE students as core requirements. They lightened the requirements several years back to compete with other schools, but changed back to them when they realized how soft their students had become. Of course, Bjarne Stroustrup is the chair of the CoE CS program at TAMU... so that may have a lot to do with it.
It covers R6RS.

Edit: More specifically, quoting from the book's site at MIT Press (http://mitpress.mit.edu/catalog/item/default.asp?ttype=2&...):

The fourth edition has been substantially revised and expanded to bring the content up to date with the current Scheme standard, the Revised6 Report on Scheme. All parts of the book were updated and three new chapters were added, covering the language's new library, exception handling, and record-definition features.
This book is a bit of a reference. If you want to learn from more entertaining books you should check out three books from another IU professor the Little Schemer, Seasoned Schemer, and when you want to move to logic programming the Reasoned Schemer.
A new kind of business plan:

- start a company in France providing a service that Google provides for free.

- sue Google for predatory pricing. Bonus points for added drama: make sure you point out that Google is out to destroy French jobs and undermine French culture and language.

- make money off the lawsuits, not the services the company is supposed to provide.

Do you think it could work?
I think my eyes got worst from playing the gameboy pocket too much
Sadly Mr. Kay's culture comment distracts from the best part of his response where he writes:

These seven influences got me to thinking about one abstraction that was indeed like a biological cell on the one hand and an entire computer on the other which could be universally used at all levels of scales in both software and hardware to "model anything" (including all the old inconvenient things computing was using).

That's perhaps the most enlightening statement about the history of Smalltalk I've ever seen.
How about the ability to limit results to only contain names that are of a certain length? Would be great if I was searching for a short domain name.
(Ignoring, of course, the upward shift in the lifetime distribution that will result from future medical advances)

...
I am certainly not ruling out a startup at some point. I was an early yc interviewee (and rejectee :-)) and afterwards just figured I'd enjoy my work for a while instead of worrying about the dollars and other minutiae. In reality, I'm just waiting for the right opportunity. "Life'a a marathon, not a sprint." An extremely successful local entrepreneur once told me that and it has stuck with me since.
It's also predicated on the assumption that it's actually bad for long-lived people to get a little stuck in their ways. This may not be true either; society is unstable, in the physics sense of the term, what with the constant influx of new naive people. Adding some more "momentum" into the system may be safer and better. Again, I'm not saying this is true or false, only that the casual assumption of the truth is unjustified.

With a 200 year lifespan, we would have people trying to enforce cultural norms from 180 years ago. In 1829, women couldn't vote, slavery was common, imperialism was considered good foreign policy, it was common sense that women and blacks were incapable of complex tasks or higher level reasoning, and forcible relocation of American Indians was being practiced. Meanwhile, the steam engine was considered pretty hot shit.

To ask someone who grew up in that era to accept the son of an African immigrant as president, gay marriage, streaming pornography, the fall of the European empires, globalization, and software startups as facts of life is absurd. Likewise, if we lived long enough to build the world of 2189, it would have the same petty biases and taboos that we have today.

It's important sometimes for generations to forget bygone eras and move on.
No. You are wrong. Anecdotally, my older father is a way heavier user of apps than me. He listens to a lot of radio (NPR and even Pandora!) and loves the tip calculator and about a million other apps.

Kids loving playing games so much on their parents phones that Nintendo actually acknowledged the iPhone as a competitive threat on their earnings call.

Statistically, 75% of iPhone users use apps, which is 5x more than other phone users. Nielsen: http://blog.nielsen.com/nielsenwire/online_mobile/iphone-use... .

Be careful about assuming things. Apple's iPhone is important because for the first time ever there is an incredibly simple, usable interface to a full-powered computer.
All of the elite universities in the UK are under sustained attack by the government in the name of "equality". Oxford and Cambridge in particular are under intense pressure to take substandard students from failing State comprehensive schools.

The Russell Group should take the plunge and break away from government control altogether.
You're welcome. Konqueror's a pretty marginal browser, but I use it for about 95% of my home browsing (and Firefox for the rest, which copes happily with your site).
This feature is going be implemented soon. Stay tuned!
The same applies to programming. (And I don't mean learning C# if you already know Java.)
Just today there was this call from the guy behind 'wordoid', textbook case of tight coupling with the customer base. Very interesting to watch, that was his second iteration and he does a fantastic job of it.

EDIT: found the link: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=737282

(the 'new' page is currently under attack...).
Those are too many unwarranted assertions and plain non-sequiturs in a single paragraph. At this point it seems clear that I won't convince you, no matter what arguments I employ; and that of course you won't convince me with those theoretical unwarranted assertions and obvious non-sequiturs, as I know from experience that Esperanto is clearly easier than English.

So, at this point, it is better that people interested in getting objective information take some basic course and decide for themselves. Fortunately, there are very good basic courses that can be easily completed in 2-3 weeks.

There is a very good downloadable course at:

http://ikurso.net

Also there are plenty of online courses at:

http://lernu.net
>since the brain doesn't have hard physical limitations, ...

That's a pretty extraordinary claim.
About pointers being difficult...I don't think that pointers are difficult to understand. To me it was more the syntax C uses that got in the way.
We're in Los Angeles. Getting started by filling vacancies in a few key markets in the general LA area. Website is still under development; I still have a day-job, So we're using Postlets right now.
"Also when did TC move from covering startups to being tabloid central? "

When advertising revenues started falling, I suspect.
I actually did read the help text, but it only left me confused, because the lines don't clearly match up to the text boxes. I had a moment of "oh, where do I adjust the quality?" before I realized that it was just referring to the first text box. I'd do away with it.
Creative Google Logos
Google does some of most interesting things online and changing their logo from time to time to reflect current events is one of them. Outlined here are over 300 of some of the most creatively designed logos.
It's PGI (The Portland Group):

http://www.nvidia.com/object/fortran.html
Conclusion: think about how your startup helps people with their work.
I've tried lisp; but for one-time hacks where I'm not aiming for performance or robustness I usually go to the extreme and use Maple.
Barron’s Makes Waves With Vague Tapplet Rumors
There you go :)

#include <string.h>
#include <stdio.h>
#include <unistd.h>
#include <netdb.h>

int main(int argc, char ** argv)
{
struct hostent * he;
struct sockaddr_in sa = { AF_INET };
unsigned int port;
int foo, sk;

if (argc != 3)
return 1; /* Syntax error */

if (sscanf(argv[2], "%u%n", &port, &foo) != 1 ||
strlen(argv[2]) != foo ||
port > 65535)
return 1; /* Syntax error */

he = gethostbyname(argv[1]);
if (! he)
return 2; /* DNS error,OS error or syntax error */

sa.sin_addr.s_addr = *(unsigned long*)he->h_addr;
sa.sin_port = htons(port);

sk = socket(AF_INET, SOCK_STREAM, 0);
if (sk < 0)
return 3; /* OS error */

if (connect(sk, (void*)&sa, sizeof sa) < 0)
return 4; /* TCP error */

return 0;
}

To build:

gcc tcp-check.c -o tcp-check

To use:

./tcp-check yahoo.com 80; echo $?

0 is OK, 1 - syntax error, 2 - DNS error, 3 - OS error, 4 - TCP error. Call it from a shell script, look at the return value and, if it's non-zero, dispatch your message. Then stick the script itself into a cron schedule, and you are done.
How wars, plagues, and urban disease propelled Europe’s rise to riches
That is a dream I share, as a disillusioned graduate student in the US. I'm sure a lot of people, students and junior faculty especially, have the same dream.
You have to remember this is BoingBoing. They were never ones to let facts and logic get in the way of a good rant or questionable puff piece. They are basically the Fox news of the digerati...
The light that burns...
Various statistics on why companies contribute to the opensource community.
Refer to the Appendix on this paper for various informative statistics on what kind of code is shared, and the percentage of code that is shared etc. (The article is dated 2004.)
Kannada has a rep of being one of the hardest languages in India.

I love the secret language bit. I always speak Japanese in public and it is great fun. Once, though, I met a couple at an event and I recognized them from a time I was at a starbucks speaking about very personal affairs in Japanese. It turns out they were from Japan. Embarrassing.
spam. there are lots more, can somone with kill power clean up the new page please ?
Refer to the Appendix on this paper for various informative statistics on what kind of code is shared, and the percentage of code that is shared etc. (The article is dated 2004.)
I've worked with CUDA a pretty good amount, so I feel obliged to point out that most of initial effort put into porting an algorithm to CUDA is not spent learning the architecture, but parallelizing the algorithm (which is something you would have to deal with even if just porting your code to multi-core CPU). Once you have figured out how to parallelize the algorithm, then you need to worry about the architecture, but only if you need to eek out every last bit of performance. In most viable cases, you should be able to get a pretty decent speedup without tearing your hair out.

In any case, OpenCL is based on CUDA (the driver API), and they are practically the same (compare the reference manuals and you'll see what I mean).

Also, GPU computing is much, much more efficient than CPU computing (in terms of FLOPS/Watt). A high-end GPU (say, a Tesla C1060) can probably pull between 200-300 watts (~2x what a high-end Xeon uses), but can do over 1TFLOP with sufficiently optimized code.
This article almost reads like a synopsis of 'guns, germs and steel' by Jared Diamond.
I wouldn't agree that the iPhone is a phone first. How many people bought an iPhone so that they could call or text others? The value proposition of the iPhone is not in its phone features, it's in the smartphone features. The only reason that it doesn't seem to matter is because there is no real rival to the iPhone platform. I do agree that the smartphone market needs more real rivals to the iPhone (I'm kinda wondering how Nokia is fumbling so badly here). If the HTC Hero is as good as it is claimed to be, then maybe the iPhone will see a hit in the hardware division, and Apple will be forced to behave more like a democracy.
The back button is currently broken; searching for a new wordoid doesn't add anything to the history. When I visited the site, I first searched for wordoids containing something, and then I wanted to go back to the completely random wordoids. I clicked the back button, but I found it didn't work. A clear button for the search box would also work instead, but I think people would want to go to previous searches more than they would want to clear the fragment box.

I also didn't read the help text below the form until I read a comment about it, so I didn't need it, but it wasn't distracting. The quality help text doesn't tell me anything more than the form tells me, but it was helpful to find out about the 10 character fragment limit and the blending languages strategy. Perhaps you could replace it with a "tips" section, or put it under a link that says " > Help" with a right arrow that drops down the help when you click on it.
http://www.eye.fi/ and a flickr.com account. The card connects to any open wi-fi access point and just uploads everything to flickr.com or other online photo site. When you get back, go through all of your photos and delete the ones you don't need. Better than lugging around a USB harddrive.
$12.50 to quote 5 words of an AP story