skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
If a middleman takes your code, compiles it, and then distributes it to the user, then that user has no access to the source code to the version installed on their system.

So? The user can get the original code from me. They can't get what the "hostile" middle man added to the code, but that's OK, because I didn't write that -- they did.

However, chances are good that the "hostile" middle man is providing a service that the user wants, and they don't consider him to be hostile at all. I'm quite happy that Apple takes BSD licensed code (some of which is my own) and produces an operating system that I find to be incredibly valuable in my day to day work.

I'm happy to disclaim access to source code, and provide Apple with some money for this service.
in my observation usually indicates a programmer who hasn't sought out better sources.

Those being?
I fear a Scheme to PHP code generator would turn out PHP code that's ugly beyond what any code beautifier could hope to fix. It's not make-up - it would be akin to major surgery.
We're considering a reciprocal barter system - coding for design.

Any interest to you?
Unfortunately, it's also legally questionable in a great number of jurisdictions, so you have to use the MIT license instead.
> The only place where you can discover search axes is by clicking on a label, which results in "label:foo" being shown in the search box (...)

That's how I found it, and I learned a little more about it by a need to get all mail to/from a specific client for a specific month and doing advanced searches.

Granted, that's also how I learned about "site:", by going to advanced search on Google and specifying a single site to search, the resulting page shows the "site:" in the search box.

> (...) but that's actually a lie, because the output if you dump that into the search field, versus if you click on a label name, don't match if you have more than about 30 messages in that label. Go try it.

Good point, though as far as I can tell the number of results is the only difference... but still, it's a bit misleading.
The other bit makes me think of little green men - is it a sign???
The correct term is quantization, iirc.
Forth has been pretty stable for the last - oh, 3 decades or so. Colorforth is a reasonably minor, but clever variation on the theme by the same guy that wrote the original.

By comparison 'ruby' is a spring chicken. Forth is being used to control just about everything you can think of on this planet, from cell phones to space shuttles.

Reference documentation ? Sure:

http://www.colorforth.com/forth.html

all of a language in one page

Sample applications & message boards ?

http://colorforth.net/
You're partly right. Fixnums don't have a metaclass (or virtualclass) because they're actually "immediate". So you can't say 123.extend(Something) because 123 isn't really a full Object.
I don't believe that blaming the victim is a healthy attitude to life. "The rape was her fault for wearing those clothes" is for banana republics and history books, not modern times.

I am not a victim. I am willfully and with full knowledge of the implications entering into an economic exchange that I believe to be of benefit to myself.
Except that neither double nor single precision IEEE floats behave the same way as whatever numbers Google is using.
Ah The Answer. BTW, it crashes my IRB (Ruby 1.9.1/Win)
A better link to the video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=srOgpXECblk
Desired theoretical answer: 1/2.

Your answer: bet on heads

"EXACTLY THE RIGHT ANSWER": Less than a one in a billion chance of heads.
That's just to say that there aren't multiple "2"s. But 2 itself is still an object, pointing at its Fixnum class, which has all the normal Class and Object semantics.
How To Walk In Circles Without Really Trying
The record is a bit more than 8 days:-)
"The point is to show its possible to write functional, good looking PHP"

If you say curly braces and type prefixes can ever be pretty... ;-)

Lisp is not just a collection of neat ideas - it's a cohesive whole more or less found around those neat ideas. It's damn hard to take out those ideas and to put them in a language that was not designed around them without corrupting them beyond recognition.

And mind you I label myself as a Python enthusiast, not a Lisper. But I know what my tools can and what my tools can't do.
It's a compelling idea - could you contact me at icey@icey.net so we can talk?
Update: As expected, The Pirate Bay site relocated and is back online (DNS still has to update for some people). A Pirate Bay insider told TorrentFreak that they “got a new connection to the net.” The tracker is still down and is expected to be fully operational tomorrow morning, we were told. Ever since their servers were raided back in 2006 they were prepared for takedown attempts like this.

The Pirate Bay has gone offline before. The question is always how long it stays offline.
This is basically how ActiveSupport's "activesupport/ruby/shim" functionality works. It adds pure-ruby versions of features added in Ruby 1.9 only if they aren't already defined.
Why People Don’t Upgrade Firefox – Part II: The Awesomebar
Except that the number of digits in this case is only 14.
Open source russian vacuum fluorescent tube clock kit
Only if you own the copyright for the entire body of work. If you receive external contributions, you must request copyright assignment from contributors to allow you (and only you) to use the work for any purpose under any license.

Pro-GPL arguments are full of these silly caveats.

"You can still sell the software" -- so can anyone else, or they can just give it away for free. Now what?

"You can use it under any license you want" -- only if you acquire full copyright for every single contribution.

"You can sell services!" -- end users don't buy "services" for consumer software.

"Non-GPL software is immoral" -- guess who buys the "services" that cover your development costs? Companies that ... sell proprietary software.

.. and just to demonstrate the total rational disconnect of the primary GPL advocate, Mr. Stallman:

http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.gnu.mingw.devel/2963

http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.gnu.mingw.devel/2970
Not the same bug. Try chopping off a nine from each number, first in the above in Python, and then in the Google version.
Sadly it is the same in most western countries, however if you sue me because I wore a pink hat (frivolous lawsuit) I have the right to counter-sue you (which would be a non-frivolous lawsuit). Yours would be thrown-out and cost you money and probably a lot to get a lawyer to take it on, mine however would likely be taken on on a no-win-no-fee basis by basically any lawyer because it would be so easy to win. So your suit would cost you money, and mine would likely cost me nothing or make me money.

So yes the loophole is there, but the loophole itself is kind of self destructive for anyone dumb enough to try it.
An “in the trenches” interview on building a machine learning application with Rails & Hadoop. During the interview on FlightCaster, Brad describes some of the challenges of working with flight data, statistical approaches for flight prediction, false negatives in FlightCaster, Clojure, Hadoop & Amazon EC2, YCombinator, and more. Was pleasantly surprised at how open Brad was about the model internals and data crunching pitfalls.
the issue there is that you're looking at people with huge lump sums who spread their money around as much as possible. if you just throw your money around equally at everyone, you'll probably not come out in the black.

if you invest in a more targetted, calculated way, you'll be more likely to come out with a good return. there are plenty of accounts with 10%+ estimated ROI on that list. take a look at how they invest, there are some trends.

disclaimer: i've not invested any money in prosper, but i was considering trying it out right before they shut their doors. i've done some homework on it.
Interesting... if they can keep going under this pressure I'll be most impressed.
Asking Your Customers For Advice
Does anyone else get the feeling this is some kind of experiment like the 'Follow me on Twitter' tests?
True, they are all just methods, but it's basically just an altered version of Object#send, and the current Rails implementation only significantly differs from it in the specific situation it's intended for.

I realize there are a range of preferences regarding ways to tackle the problem this is intended to solve, and I'm relatively agnostic about the overall issue, but if the implementation is basically a #send that guards against nil, then it would be unexpected for it to deviate remarkably from #send when dealing with non-nil objects.
Stop Waiting for Gmail to Load on Your Mac with Fluid App
can't you do both? :)
You know they survived a raid back in 2006, right? When I was in high school they were my heroes for making being a computer geek so edgy.
The title says PHP as sexy as Scheme.

It's like comparing McDonald's to a Gordon Ramsay restaurant.
Anyone have any ideas for apps they want to share?
If you're stuck on Outlook 2003, Lookout is an add-on for '03 that adds blazing fast search. I find it works faster than Xobni.
I posted about Arboscultores for things like chairs, doors and houses about 2 weeks ago. Might be relevant to this discussion: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=761129
Lego robot solves Sudoku on paper
So the car manufacturer is responsible for the thief stealing the car? I don't think the comparison to the rape victim applies here. If somebody chooses to jump into an abyss, it seems fair to blame them for the consequences.

I thought about it before your response, and I admit, there is that one way by which I might help people receiving bad software: by not using GPL I support a world in which unfree software could possibly exist.

However, for myself it seems sufficient to work towards a world in which everybody has the opportunity to use free software if they want to. Suppose I would be giving away free cars - a thief could still steal a car, but since he could just get one for free anyway, his incentives for stealing a car would be far less. Creating a world in which nobody would even be allowed to create unfree software seems unnecessarily restrictive to me, and in fact, undesirable. By consequence other possibly dangerous things would have to be made illegal, too. Eventually the whole world would be Disneyland - not something I would want.

Edit: to clarify, I agree that some of these things are personal preferences, so I understand how choosing MIT license is a political decision, too.
I could have, yes. I didn't for reasons unrelated. :D
If only Kafka were still alive.
Hi, I'm one of the organizers. Any Rack-based framework was allowed this year (keeping it Ruby-specific). We're looking to do a more framework/language-agnostic event in the very near future, leveraging a lot of the infrastructure / services we've already built. Stay tuned :). Of course, we'll keep doing Ruby/Rails Rumbles too. <3 community.
Actually, Google basically fought its way to the first hurdle (the point that the court told them to release personal information) and then said 'yeah, sure, whatever' and coughed up the dough. If they were really concerned about privacy, they would have fought it a long way further, or applied for an appeal before releasing the information, however they didn't. I'm sure this could be grounds for a suit.

Their users have a reasonable expectation of privacy and it'll take a court to decide if Google actually made a reasonable attempt to protect her privacy. Google should have offered to delete the blog and ban the user, but apparently they did neither and went through the motions.

I'm not saying this suit is right, but I'm sure there's definitely grounds for this woman's suit. It wouldn't be one court commenting on another courts decision, it would be one court ruling on Google's inaction on taking it further. The whole reason there are appeals and the supreme court is that a just decision can't necessarily be made by just one judge or jury.
There are zillions, obviously. What do you want, a list? I don't know, SICP, CLRS, Knuth? Non-mainstream languages? Functional programming? For that matter, a single classic CS paper that wasn't assigned as homework? Code Complete, its grounding in software-engineering literature notwithstanding, isn't very deep.
> _IF_ the draws are independent

That's a big IF.

Let's do an experiment with people: we ask them to stand in a road, then we tell them that in a moment a hologram of a fire truck will come at them. They are requested to stand in the road. 30 seconds later a massive firetruck appears to race at them, lights going, siren blaring. Sunlight reflects off of the chrome. The guy in the driver seat is wearing a helmet and a black jacket, and scowling. The license plate is "113 GHR".

The experimental subject steps out of the road.

"Dummy!" we yell... we TOLD YOU that it was a hologram.

The candidate isn't a dummy. He just trusted his experience and his own sense a lot more than he trusts one word from you.
Diet Soda: The Brain Knows Better
Agreed, Google could probably do it better. But imagine maintaining separate indexes for each and every gmail acct and constantly updating those indexes. reMail used to do something similar to that.
http://bing-vs-google.com/?q=999999999999999+-+9999999999999...
What? No ZenVDN? http://zenvdn.com
Do you have a source for WSJ being Chomsky's favorite newspaper?

And I don't know if there's that much difference between them and the Times (except Editorials, of course) anymore. Both have very few real "reporters" who do even the basics of journalism, such as checking facts and assertions for correctness and not just "he said, she said"...
The difference you're seeing is design that's driven by an individual with a single strong voice versus a committee. For clarification, I'm saying that Steve Jobs designed this web page, but whoever did was someone with the authority and the balls to say, "no" over and over to many different people. Those Windows 7 pages reek of too many cooks in the kitchen and/or lack of leadership.
The europlugs have some pretty solid pins and don't seem to fall out of sockets, but they don't have an earth pin or fuses.
Stay tuned throughout the week, peoples. Our expert panel has just started qualifying applications and the homepage will soon be updated to reflect the apps that are in-the-running for the top spots.

Later this week, Thursday if all goes well, we'll use the expert panel advice to whittle the list down to a top tier and open up public judging to decide the winner. I hope everyone here will want to participate!

Winners will be announced next weekend.
Your complaint with Google is:

( ) Their uneasy relationship with a country's government
(x) You just realized they control all your data
( ) You just realized they control all your business
(x) You just realized they have terrible customer support
( ) They're innovating too slowly
( ) They're innovating too quickly

Your response is:

( ) Grudgingly accept it, writing about it
(x) Grudgingly quit, writing about it
( ) Litigation, writing about it

This will fail because:

( ) You don't really want to accept it
(x) You don't really want to quit
(x) They control all your data
( ) They control all your business
Ask HN: Is it "dirty" to have an "Import from [competitor]" feature?
Considering a feature in one of our products that would ease migration from a competitor's product. After reading the Loic Le Meur post on here recently, I'm wondering if such a feature is unethical, dirty, low, or un-nice.

Thoughts?
Yeah, that sounds about right. It's a thread API that relies on applications providing "blocks" of work to the OS, and transferring their arguments and results around in message queues. So if you have five applications running, each of which has 8 threads to handle the needed parallelism on a Nehalem box, you don't need 40 separate threads and their stacks. The OS just spawns 8 threads.

That sounds OK, if kinda unexciting. I'd like to see some benchmarks vs. traditional threading before I commit to liking it. History is littered with cute new IPC mechanisms that didn't turn out to have the benefits promised. This sounds a lot like a combination of sysv message queues and solaris doors, neither of which managed to drive much real innovation.
David Foster Wallace on Life and Work (unabridged)
there's a real problem associated with using create_function:

It's not much more than a glorified eval(). Evaluation takes place at runtime, so you don't notice syntax errors until it's too late. Bytecode-Caches can't cache your function and as the function body is a string, you won't get syntax highlighting in most editors.

Also, create_function really creates a named (with a random name in the form lambda_number) function in the global scope. Functions in general are all globally scoped and come to life once the execution reaches the function declaration. So this actually works:

function a(){
function b(){ echo "gnegg\n"; }
}
a();
b();

Whereas

function a(){
function b(){ echo "gnegg\n"; }
}
b();

wouldn't.

This also implies that no scope is captured and you can't access any variables of the outside body of code.

5.3 brings real anonymous functions and provides a way to conserve the enclosing scope (thus allowing you to create closures), though the syntax is a bit awkward and variables of the outer scope you want to access need to be declared one by one.
Wait, is that sarcasm, or does it really load slowly for people?
I remember a programmer once griping that you still need to be careful with floats, and that double-precision still did not have neough significant digits to store the dollar to turkish lira conversion rate..
Really? You'd pay WoW less if you were paid (and there were no other difference)? That makes no sense.

Saying "I like to hack for free" is not the same as saying "I like to hack twilio apps on a deadline for free." If twilio were saying, "sign up, do whatever hacking you'd be doing otherwise, and we'll pay you some", it's just stupid not to. But that's not what they're asking. They're asking you to write demo apps for them on spec. That's why it's a little insulting.
The UK is traditionally 240V, but I believe it's 230V now, so as to be in line with the rest of the EU.
I hope they're buying carbon offsets so they won't feel bad. I also hope someone will now explain why carbon offsets don't actually make it up, so then they will feel bad twice.
If you need floats you don't understand your problem ;)
Uhm... no? Why would it be "dirty" to do that? As long as you have a valid way to access the data you're just doing your customer a favor.

I think it's only dirty if you're not upfront with the customer about what you are going to bring in from your competitor and/or what you're going to do with the data.
Previous submission here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=782985
Yeah, it takes a few seconds on the screen, which adds up over time. I talked to somebody at Google and they said that man years are wasted each day by people waiting for Gmail to load. That's why Google is developing Google Gears, to cache all of the scripts/etc needed to get Gmail running. The problem is, at least for Safari users, is that Gears is still really buggy.
Yes, but this time it is different. With a pretty solid judgement in hand *aa gets to go after any provider in the western hemisphere that hosts them. So I really wonder how they'll solve that.
Alternatively, this proves the existence of the perfect hamburger. Now I'm hungry.
I don't know. Wolfram might have sued you for writing "110 proved Turing Complete!" a few years ago.
Google's Calculator Muffs Some Math Problems (2008)
I think it's a shame that this article shortsells the importance of promotion and sales. I wonder if it was perhaps a backlash from Joel to the sales driven culture of Microsoft.

Promoting and selling your product is a discipline that forces you to answer some critical questions about what it actually is:

1. Who is going to buy your product - is it SMEs or individuals. If it's SMEs which ones in particular, how do you phrase things like your website copy to be meaningful for them

2. What do they want the product to do (e.g. Wufoo was online forms which was totally disruptive to administrative areas but actually ended up doing a lot of tailoring to online surveys which (I'm guessing) is where the market actually spends money)

3. How are you going to get customers - not everything is word of mouth. Some things are simply about distribution and good sales (what makes you buy the tin foil you choose - word of mouth?!)

Developers always seem to hate the idea of actually promoting anything. There is a feeling that if you build it they will come. In general though they seldom do.

Try to sell it and you'll find out what people actually do want.

I wonder if developers hate promotion because it's hard. Whilst writing code is fun and engaging, cold calling to do some market research or to sell your product makes you feel uncomfortable and risks personal rejection.

Sales is super-important and every company you admire does it Apple markets the life out of all of its products, Google has massive Adwords sales teams and Virgin America might be the best domestic airline but you can be sure their growth would not been have as great without the massive marketing campaign that went with it.

I wish the many awesome software teams out there would stop spending so much time on product they think people want and start spending more time on selling it to people and discovering what they do want. The process isn't always fun but it is very, very informative.
The top 10 I mentioned had a wide variability of strategies, and I can assure you that they all thought they had a plan.

If you only look at lenders with a sufficiently large (20 loans) and aged (365 days) portfolio to make an evaluation plausible, only 167 lenders of more than 19000 lenders in that category had an estimated ROI of >10%.

Of the 1161 lenders with more than $10K invested and a portfolio older than 365 days, exactly 3 had an estimated ROI of >10%.

The http://prospers.org discussion boards are full of guys who've done their homework. The test is how their loans fared, and generally they haven't fared well.

disclaimer, which I should have stated above: I've invested $1K a few years ago, and am more or less breaking even at the moment.
The jokes and gestures seemed studied to make an impression. It didn't come across so natural. But it did not bother me too much - I don't like being manipulated, but his words were entertaining enough, therefore the "OK" verdict.
Yes. Flying is very different in this respect from cars/trains:

> "Half of the
work done by a plane goes into staying up; the other half goes into keeping
going."

therefore:

> "The plane was going anyway, so my flying was energy-neutral."

> This is false for two reasons. First, your extra weight on the plane
requires extra energy to be consumed in keeping you up. Second, airlines
respond to demand by flying more planes.

Quotes taken from "Sustainable Energy - without the hot air." by David McKay - University of Cambridge.
The book is available free here:
http://www.withouthotair.com/Contents.html
the chapter about plane physics is here:
http://www.inference.phy.cam.ac.uk/withouthotair/cC/page_269...
As John Stuart Mill famously wrote, "it is better to be a human dissatisfied than a pig satisfied; better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied".

http://www.gutenberg.org/files/11224/11224-h/11224-h.htm
You should check out the following longitudinal studies:

* Terman's Gifted Kids: http://www.amazon.com/Termans-Kids-Groundbreaking-Study-Gift...

* Harvard : http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200906/happiness
I'm not going to argue that it makes sense, exactly, but it's a feature of how my preferences work. If I get paid to do something, it short-circuits the "is this fun" logic in favor of "is this worth doing monetarily". They're not really additive.