skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
If your "business" is dependent on publishing an application on Apple's App Store then, is it really a surprise that it gets shut down? :)

It's tongue-in-cheek, but it's true: this isn't a free marketplace, it's Apple's playground, and only the business models and application domains that Apple approves of will be permitted. I don't like this guy any more than anyone else here, but a single decision by Apple effectively killed that aspect of his business.

Similarly, if you were to build a business around, say, a Google Voice application for the iPhone, you'd be in the same situation.
Heinlein was a big enthusiast of violence.
PayFail: PayPal And Its APIs Go Down
When I argued ideas with my brother, it forced me to think them through.
A Business Associate Agreement nothing to address the SOX requirements, which apply to more companies. "Google ate our documents" is not a defense to SOX filing and reporting requirements.
From the article it seems like Brighthouse Labs is one of those top 2. I didn't finish reading the article so it's possible the other might also be mentioned.
So getting back home is very easy...

Unless you're Maher Arar or one of an unknown number of other people who shared his fate but couldn't fire off a text first to inform their family.
I agree that this model works for web software and tech in general because the nature of the industry nowadays allows for lower startup costs. A lot of industries are still capital intensive.

A similar model that specifically selected companies in non-tech industries whose competitive advantage/business model centered around some low-cost, innovative solution to a formerly capital intensive problem could be successful if you could find a number of startups with that focus.
What do you think the firmware implements? Exactly, that USB HID standard. The fact that it is flashable makes it easy to fix bugs. All software has bugs.

It is a great hack. But as someone else already posted here: physical access to hardware ... game over.
I assume you mean interning at Cloudera?
Why is it that so few Europeans believe that diabetes can be cured via prayer?

People whose religion is sincere will inevitably come into conflict with religious and secular authorities from time to time. Over several centuries, most of them left Europe and went to the US, where there were no religious authorities, and the secular authorities were much more hands-off. It's not particularly surprising that their descendants still take religion seriously.
How many "X will be the year of Y" have actually turned out to be true?
I Do Not Hate VCs
I would be more worried if they had found a way to broadcast keystrokes over bluetooth on the nice wireless keyboard that I am using now :-)

Just place a rogue receiver somewhere near.
I am. And I did that too :-)

(Man, girls really like to write, for whatever reason)
Happy Cog merges with Airbag Industries
I can at least log in again now, the last payment we got was at 10:03 AM PDT.

Their Web UI has changed, this looks like it was an iteration that turned into a cascading failure...
"Personally, I'm unconvinced the "location memorization" is of such great value we need to contort the rest of the interface in order to not throw it away."

I might agree for general-purpose computing however professional operators with traditionally "workstation" tasks (CAD/CAM, video editing, forms processing, etc.) would strongly disagree. For these individuals, much time has been invested in the physical memorization of commands, allowing them to issue the commands as if they were any other trained function of the body (catching a ball, for example). Having to stop and think about operating the software causes a mental "page fault", removing their focus from the work and wasting time.

I don't want to get off-topic, but many professionals have expressed dismay with the move from workstation computers to PC's for this reason.
This must be some huge corner case failure because I can't imagine that Paypal doesn't have some serious failover/high-availability setup.

Or some interesting human error of course :-)
My guess is that the App Store reviewers don't look at where the content is from, and instead look at what the content actually is. In this case, the content was OK. The content source was questionable.

The reviewers at Apple decided to OK the apps. And they then received enough reports that it was pulled. If the reviewers didn't approve the apps initially, we would be seeing a different story: "Apple rejects harmless application from developer".

The App Store has problems. But this decision fixed one small problem that existed, not created another problem.

//Edit: And from the article, Apple did try less lethal options. It sounds like they contacted Khalid and told him their concerns. And he chose to ignore Apple.
I'm not saying that there isn't anything wrong with Prop. 13, but the argument that everything would be ok in California if only we had higher taxes isn't one I'd agree with.
In a small company I worked for, we decided to put most of the internal writing into our MediaWiki. Project plans, memos, design whitepapers, meeting minutes, vacation plan, internal encyclopedia, FAQs for locally installed tools etc.

Earlier, the company had installed a TWiki, which quickly filled up with poorly-named pages. With a mandatory naming convention and readily available copy-paste templates (I wish MediaWiki had MoinMoin-like templates), this was no longer a problem.

It worked well for most of those things except for project plans (no way of summing up those table cells). For external documentation however (we offered consulting and engineering for safety-critical software), we used DocBook.
Well, the issue is that words are much more memorable than the random letters at the end of a shortened URL, and fewer words are generally easier to remember than many words.

I guess since most people see URLs through links rather than ever actually having to remember, it's not such a big deal. Long URLs just don't look pretty, and neither do shortened ones.
Just a guess, but since we've always disallowed a state endorsed church, we have never been subject to a totally perverted church which is as powerful as the government or inseparable from the government. In fact, many churches here paint themselves as oppressed by government. Churches simply don't have long powerful tentacles here, like they had through much of European history.
I'm a big fan of the idea of a larger-screen ipod touch.
However, even I acknowledge the likeliest outcome in 2010 is:

1. Apple doesn't release a tablet.
2. The Crunchpad goes over like the n800. Capable, but ignored by almost everyone.
3. The Dell/Intel collaboration produces no actual product. (like their much-rumored phone and then their more recently-rumored non-phone.)
4. A few vendors put out Windows 7 tablets that continue to be stylus-centric and fail to expand the limited windows tablet market.

If anything, Wired putting out this piece tempts me to bet on a disappointing 2010 for tablets.
Their prognostication track-record is just awful.
The existence of store-front churches supports your assertion.
California's minority-rule budget rules and ridiculous ballot initiative process have made crafting a reasonable budget impossible. Combine that with the slow fuse of the Prop 13 tax time bomb and you've got a disaster on your hands, and there's not much the legislature can do about it.

California needs a new constitution.
IPhone ARKit: a toolkit for Augmented Reality (AR) applications on the iPhone
I sometimes joke that we (the British) sent all our criminals to Australia and all our puritans to America, and of course there's some amount of historical truth to this. So if the Americans remain fervently religious, why isn't Australia really a nation of criminals today?
Apple should have used Google's Courgette software update mechanism
The last iPhone 3.0.1 update that fixes that (over-hyped) SMS bug is again 297MB large. So it is a full OS image for something that is probably just a small fix in the SMS subsystem of the iPhone.

This is just so silly. With 40 million (or so) iPhones sold this adds up to an insane amount of wasted bandwidth.

If Apple and Google were still friends then maybe they could have used http://dev.chromium.org/developers/design-documents/software-updates-courgette instead.

I'm sure that would have turned that 297MB into something of at most a couple hundred KB instead.
Maybe Apple shouldn't revoke apps for copyright infringement, nor should they personally validate the copyright status of all apps they post. After all, we already have a legal system to use for enforcing copyright, and in the US, it currently includes a well-defined process for handling accusations of copyright infringement (even though it is badly biased against the accused infringer), with infringement takedown notice and counternotice provisions. Apple could just use the DMCA safe harbor and remove apps when it receives accusations of infringement.
The US is overall a more religious country. Part of it is historical--Europe shipped all their religious fanatics over here, so they were left with the boring state-sponsored churches like the Catholics and Anglicans. America also has a long history of cyclical religious revivals.
I can't see this being very accurate. If that Was the case, why not just lay down and give up?
PythonTurtle strives to provide the lowest-threshold way to learn Python.
http://www.hmcourts-service.gov.uk/infoabout/enforcement/ind... is a good source for England in general. Enforcing elsewhere within the UK is even difficult, never mind the EU at large, although it can be done. The normal approach against an individual is an attachment of earnings order, where the employer withholds money from salary to pay off the judgment (or if unemployed, the same thing happens from the person's benefits), but if the person has no income or assets (or, at least, no assets within the jurisdiction), there's really not very much anyone can do.
When I've been to USA I was surprised how much religion is used as a business (not that they say that themselves), "free market" churches are much more radical and aggressive in nature and marketing. Also, "churches" in Europe are hardly that active and much more tolerant and unintrusive.
The idea behind salting is that you expand the possible options to the point where rainbow tables can't be precomputed. The characters comprising your users usernames would likely be a smaller set than the characters you would use for a random string. As such it would be easier to backtrack to the password from the username salt than a random salt. It's a trade off between storage capacity/simplicity and security.

Previously I've used a hash of site-wide random string - password - user specific random string. For my latest project I've moved to phpass which is an implementation of bcrypt. My understanding is that in terms of security:

bcrypt > stretched salted hash > hashed salted hash > salted hash > hash > plaintext
Not disagreeing that it's doing better. Just pointing out why.
Good point. I think a lot of a culture's attitude is based on cultural memory, which comes from lessons learned (or not) from history.

Americans abroad are often elbowed about how young their country is (ugh, I lived in Beijing and they always trot out 4000 years of Chinese civilization. Nevermind the CCP is only 80 years old), but what this means is relatively less cultural baggage. Americans have less cultural memory to look backwards at and reference (and a lot we see back there like destruction of Native Americans, black slavery, etc is painful to examine), so as a result Americans have no choice but to look forwards.
Hey, Apple actually leveraged their "we run this market" position in a positive way. Props.

So can we get Google Voice now?
Good thinking on both counts. Multiple returns are another limited form of exceptions, and you don't need to go back in time to ask the Dijkstra from that period if he disliked them. They too escaped theoretical treatment as it was formulated at that time :)

I have put some example rules to introduce exceptions in Hoare logic at http://snipt.org/lWg (I needed monospaced fonts, sorry for the inconvenience)
Oh I agree. I would describe Houston as smiling, happy people with shopping bags. That doesn't change my material point.

That the economy is based on a precarious foundation.

Watch this Money Geyser series of People & Power videos:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JjglR2KYz5o

You will note that the people in Iceland are supremely confident in the validity of their economy. We know that this ended badly.

Your post is reminiscent of the comments of the Icelandic people in this series of videos.

PS - The videos offer a very good explanation of something called the "Carry Trade". Pretty interesting in its own right, so I would recommend people view them. They are pretty educational. Especially, now that we know how the story ends. The videos were made about a year prior to the late financial system unpleasantness.
Acid-spitting and lightning-throwing Mongolian death worm
The implication that it's somehow wrong to base a business on the App Store is goofy. It's not much different from basing one on a single OS or a mobile platform or even a particular line of automobile or type of entertainment.

It's not a requirement that Apple (or any other company) protect your business model at the expense of their own.
Don't forget to publicly demonstrate your willingness.

The willingness just makes the demonstration more believable.
Exactly. This is why it is a bad idea to become gatekeeper to a platform, you end up being judge, jury and executioner.

It also raises the expectations of what you are liable for, after all if you've approved something you associate yourself with it. An open platform would never have those issues.
It's not healing if it can't heal indefinitely. If you have one set of 'capsules', you can only heal once.
Parents negligently killing their children is great for society?

There are plenty of things to quote in the world, why you would chose that one in this place is beyond comprehension by a sane individual.
Anything that was worth writing will grow and change.

It only grows into a monster if you allow yourself to write duct tape code.
Apple creates App store. Developers apply and agree to Apple's terms. They get accepted.

Apple does something 100% within their power and terms of use.

People cry "unfair".

Nothing to see here, move along.
Dijkstra was known for his habit of carefully composing manuscripts with his fountain pen. The manuscripts are called EWDs, since Dijkstra numbered them with EWD as prefix. Dijkstra would distribute photocopies of a new EWD among his colleagues; as many recipients photocopied and forwarded their copy, the EWDs spread throughout the international computer science community. The topics were computer science and mathematics, and included trip reports, letters, and speeches. More than 1300 EWDs have since been scanned, with a growing number transcribed to facilitate search, and are available online at the Dijkstra archive of the University of Texas.

[ from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edsger_W._Dijkstra#EWDs_and_wri... ]
True. But you could at least expect:

- consistency

- open rules

- an appeal process

The way it is it is more like a gamble.
I agree with the sentiment, but there are a lot of more complicated scenarios in real-world applications. For example, most calendar apps need the concept of a "floating timezone":

I may have one item on my schedule called "nap time" with a time of 15:00 (no time zone). I want my computer to tell me to take a nap at 15:00 local time, no matter where in the world I am today. But I have another item on my schedule called "conference call with CEO" with a time of 13:30 PDT. I want that call to happen at a specific absolute time (not local time).
At the end of the article, before the comments, there are two emails. One from Apple to Khalid, and the other from Khalid's company to anyone who applies to be a developer there. I'm assuming that TC is in contact with Khalid, since they have a quote from a phone conversation with him. So him forwarding the email to them isn't surprising.
We'd only have to write parsers for the hypertext, not N different parsers for the various languages.

Think about what happens. Your IDE parses your source code so that it can do things like highlighting, identifying senders, code folding, etc. It does this so that you as a programmer can use those tools to more easily parse it in your head to understand it. Eventually, your code is interpreted or compiled, which involves another parsing.

Why not just have a direct representation of the program and its interrelationships? Languages where the compiler/interpreter make the AST available go a part of the way there. But too many of the interrelationships are implicit, requiring a program to do some sort of searching/indexing/parsing to make available. Why not just represent those directly, and have source code be a representation?

If we could make such a representation, we might even be able to transcend the tyranny of particular languages. (Multi language VMs are somehow related here.)
On the other hand, I wish I could be a fly on the wall during some of these infamous YC dinner talks.
Your dad is absolutely right. I've been in court 4 times to date, all of those business related. Each time we were prepared to the hilt. One party didn't show, we won that one by default. The second had his case fall apart on the first day because of our evidence. #3 and #4 (both in Germany) took a little longer but we also won those.

For every one of those cases except for the 1st I'm pretty sure that it was our preparation that won the case, that plus the determination to see it through to the end. It helped that we were 'in the right' but that is definitely not always enough, you have to show that and you have to show it convincingly.
I completely disagreed with you, but that didn't mean I voted you down...

What's going on here, people? Can we protect a variety of differing opinions on things, or are we going to be passive-aggressive about people who don't share our worldview?
http://bit.ly/yellowbird seems pretty easy to remember.
Pulse: a new urban bike concept from Teague
I really liked the original idea of Windows 3.1's desktop; it was simply ahead of its time. Under 3.1, an icon is a window, and vice-versa. Instead of "minimizing" a window, you "iconify" it. In a zoomable interface, the icon would simply be a mipmap—that is, at a small resolution (16x16) it would be artwork, but at a large enough scale it would be the window itself, fully manipulable. Every representation of a saved file would simply be the window displaying the file as it was when it was open. In that way, it would be a lot more like a Squeak image, or an emulator save-state. Actually, since there would be no difference between "minimizing" and "closing" a document (both "sleep" the document image, and then suspend/serialize it to disk, and both create an icon), it has distinct similarities to the iPhone OS.
We also don't have all that old stuff. Over in Europe they still have castles and palaces from medieval times. Buildings that are centuries old. With rare exceptions, Americans knock down old buildings and build new ones.
The problem with the metaphor, is that WYSIWYG word processing is really only arranging dark rectangles on a bigger white rectangle. Programming is much more complex -- it is as complex as writing. Word processors don't have to deal with writing. Instead, they deal with typography, and large-scale structure. Semantic interrelationships are still left up to the human tool user.
Just speculation without any data to back it up:
* A selling point of America in the beginning was freedom of religion.
* A lot of people were killed off in WW2 because of their religion, and I wouldn't be surprised if many lost their faith because of the deeds committed under these times. (made it hard to believe in a benevolent God with a plan)
* A big catchphrase of the socialist movement was "Religion is the opiate of the people".
If your writing little functions in a REPL you get to see the results of that code immediately, in a sense, that is test-driven -- the verification aspect is present. What isn't present is the test-first aspect that ensures your code is easily testable, which is valuable. And you don't have the test code to keep in a suite to run whenever to check for harmful synergies.

You could probably write a REPL with the appropriate commands that would build rudimentary test code from lines you executed that did what you wanted them to.
Cool physics app and 3d modeling optimizations in Scheme on the iPhone
A lion can eat and digest a large amount of calories and nutrition from a single meal. Apes have to forage for suitable and enough vegetables for a longer period of the day. I would rather infer humans natural digestion design from that of the apes.
Well, I'm Romanian. Go figure.
Farewell to Slurp and Yahoo/Inktomi Search
I suspect that much of America's advantages come from not just having choice, but the understanding that just because people will frequently make bad ones, doesn't mean it's a win to get rid of the ability to choose. Painful to lose people in stupid ways, but some of those stupid choices turn out to not be so stupid, in the end.
Tell HN: Paypal APIs are Down
It was scary doing research on technologies for my thesis, and finding articles about each from years back.

"2000 will be the year of Bluetooth"

"1996 will be the year of speech recognition"

"1998 will be the year of gesture recognition"

(not actual years from articles, just approximates from memory)
Yes Apple could save a lot of bandwidth by distributing the diffs or using courgette anything. I agree that its wasted bandwidth, but it would be a negligible percentage compared to the bandwidth used by P2P applications, video applications, or search engine spiders which parse a large portion of the web every few hours or so.
You know, when I write down the times of meetings or flights in my paper notebook with a pencil, it doesn't give me error messages because it doesn't know what timezone they're in. Sometimes they're in Argentine time, sometimes they're in California time, sometimes they're somewhere else. Sometimes I do write down a timezone because there's the potential for confusion, and other times I don't.

Your comment is a recipe for writing software that is worse than my paper notebook, in the sense that I would prefer to use the paper notebook.
Hot Waitress Economic Index
Celebrate Blog Commenters
Reasons to Choose Symbian, answering key questions about it's future
Don't know why you're getting downvoted. I guess HN doesn't have many Eagles fans and they're taking your quote as some sort of political statement.
A Functional I/O System (or Fun for Freshman Kids)
Yup, Calais & Zemanta have similar APIs. Input text and get back tags.
I'll second that. When I was 12 the local factory that produces polystyrene caught fire in the middle of the night. It burned to the ground and the police and fire department evacuated the whole town, all 10.000 people, because of the toxic fumes. Luckily nobody got hurt.
Feels pretty good over here.
I have had similar experiences, but only when I didn't have enough to do. The more I have to do, the more crammed my time feels. The more crammed my time feels, the more important tasks seem to me, and therefore the more likely I am to do them.

Taking only one or two classes at a time kills me, because I have so much free time I always think "Oh I can just do that later" and then never actually do it. With a full load of classes I think "Geez, I better do that now so I have time for the work I know I'm going to be getting later."

Lastly, I've heard that meditation is supposed to quiet the noise in one's head. It hasn't worked for me yet, though I probably haven't been practicing it as regularly as I ought to.
Government fishing expeditions depress me. Great story, though.

If we could track change in assessed value over time, we could build up evidence for abuse...