skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> And anyway - the point the video is trying to make is that it is a "moral" theft. I think it's fair to say the copyright holder has the right to say they feel that morally a "pirate" is "stealing" from them :)

The actual problem being that they don't state it that way. They don't state that it's a 'moral' theft and not a legal theft. They just state it as 'theft.' It's a PR campaign, plain and simple. They want to influence people to see stealing a car, or stealing 'candy from a baby' as the exact same thing as downloading a movie without paying for it.
A lot of people are pretty skeptical about visual programming, because it's been tried often, and it seems like text is a natural way to express complicated programs; easy to see a lot at once, easy to create quickly with the keyboard, simple to share, simple to search, and easy to make changes in multiple places with things like regular expressions.

What do you think your visual environment has to offer over a textual language without a lot of cruft and with relatively "simple" syntax?
Isn't that why there is a business to serving subpoenas? Couldn't this be utilized in the same way?
I loaded it in less than a minute through the USB to my Kindle DX. It displays fine. In fact it looks very good!!
There needs to be a judgment call about the explicit rule to have. That said, I think we have made the wrong tradeoff.

The principle embodied in the US Constitution is that the purpose of intellectual property is to maximize the development of the common public domain that we can all benefit from. Therefore copyright should have a long enough horizon to provide a sufficient incentive to encourage innovation, but should not be longer than that.

What fraction of the economic value of the average copyrightable work is captured in the first 30 years of its term? Most of it. In the first 70 years of its work? I saw an estimate of over 99% of it in one of the amicus briefs in the Eldred case. Therefore the real difference between current copyright law and perpetual ownership is less than 1% of possible value. That extra 1% is not material to people's decisions about whether to create new works, and therefore increasing the term of copyright further should lose compared to the economic value of having more material enter the public domain. (After the case was lost I saw Lessig mention that one of his mistakes was not pushing this line of economic argument more strongly.)

Anyways, given how the court ruled, this is a moral argument regarding future copyright laws and not a legal argument based on which one could overturn further bad laws.
A program which is itself illegal...?
I worked on a program that ran large batch jobs, sometimes taking more than twenty-four hours. This was actually spectacular performance, since we used custom hardware to do most of the computation. I wrote the code that interfaced with the hardware. When the code timed out trying to talk to the hardware, the only sensible thing to do was report the error and abort the program.

Unfortunately, this seemed to happen quite often. Jobs would abort randomly, after about eight hours, sometimes much less and sometimes not at all. Overheating was the obvious first suspect, so that was investigated and ruled out. The hardware was running cool and was in perfect working order. The customer started splitting jobs into shorter batches and combining the results by hand. We wrote code to help them automate this workaround. But batches were still randomly aborting. And I couldn't replicate the bug, despite having identical hardware to the customer. Something in the customer's environment was essential.

Eventually, somebody at the customer figured out the problem. My boss called me up and said, "The customer suspects your code is not time-travel compliant." It was true. My code assumed that time always goes forwards. If time ever went backwards while my code was waiting for hardware, it would immediately time out and abort the batch. And our customer encountered a bug where time did appear to go backwards occasionally. I was too stressed out over other tasks to ask for details of the bug. I just sent them a fix and breathed a sigh of relief when they accepted it.

A Google search now reveals that there was an issue with time going backwards under Xen on dual-core Opterons, which is what the target platform was. They never told us they were using Xen. Maybe that's why they were much nicer to us after the problem was diagnosed!
Thanks for the feedback. We looked at scratch and Alice and a few other programs to get ideas about visual programming before we started building WizBang. I have done a few tests with people with no programming experience, but just wanted to let HN know about the project since I've seen lots of posts about "how do I teach programming to someone young?" and I think this is a great tool for that.
> Now how they can be continually discussing a sale of TPB if they don't own it?

So far as I know none of the people that are being charged here stand to gain any money from the sale of ThePirateBay. The company that owns it is the one that stands to profit. This was my impression ever since I heard about the possible sale.
funny. i definitely hear different allusions depending on the audience. i guess i'm not surprised no one here focused on "kart wheels"
While the interviewer/writer might seem a little flippant or lacking in eloquence with his description of the event, in the long run he would probably be making the best decision for the company.

It seems like when he interviews he likes to hire those with a higher level of dedication to (more love of) coding.

Perhaps as an interviewer his real concern here isn’t so much what someone does in their off-time, but rather he looks for a good fit with the rest of the team. If the current engineers are all about the never-ending love of coding and the new hire was not, the overall cohesion and possibly productivity of the group may suffer. “Ducks of a feather...”

There are complaints all over the web about new hires who are perceived as slackers, or a know nothings, being hired on in hardworking departments (at good companies) and sometimes even being promoted up and up the ladder to the chagrin of the current employees. It can cause deep animosity towards the company and increased turnover of good people. Perhaps you have worked somewhere where this has happened and experienced it first-hand, or know someone who has.
the biggest problem I have is very similar to a technology problem. The engineers love to do design and vetting (ie/ riding the prototype parts) but are not keen on the follow through aspect of finalizing design and going to production to enable sales. Much the same as a technologist who loves to tinker and refactor, but isn't interested in shipping product or doing support.
Since Windows 7 requires XP users to backup everything, reformat our disks, reinstall all our applications from CDs, and apply all patches, I think I'll pass. Maybe I should finally pass on MS completely.
Ask HN: logging into News.YC on android?
I can only remember two times that I've been able to log into HN from my android browser. Has anyone had more luck with this? Seems like cookies generally work in the android browser so I can't figure this out. Any pointers?
You've got a point, but the e-book market is vanishingly small compared to the regular paper-book market. Paper-books don't get pirated. You can pretty much write that off as advertising.

Of course, their market will implode once we get thin and light screens that can deliver the crisp of type printed on paper.
Impressive - list of sites already running on Stack Exchange
How does passenger handle restarts? Does it also allow a zero downtime restart ?
We are focusing purely on mobile. For us, iPhone is an excellent spearhead platform, which has solved distribution and payment problems well enough so that you can test out ideas, but we are following e.g. Nokia closely. App/service development technology in mobile will quite likely go towards HTML5 too, but it ain't there yet, so that's why we are still putting effort to native implementation.

In my opinion, the key insight from the business perspective is that the most mid-range to high-end mobile handset models will have user-friendly, App Store like payment procedures in three years time. And, at least in Europe, people are more used to paying for content in mobile compared to standard web.
It is much slower for me to build a WizBang program than to fire up vim and write some code. I'm not sure if visual programming could ever be faster than a text editor, as a visual block (in WizBang anyway) usually corresponds to one or two lines of actual code.

But speed is not the point at all in WizBang. The point is to present a clean and simple environment in which beginners can build real programs without having to type more than variable names. I feel it is a much easier way to introduce programming than having someone install Visual Studio and writing a hello world program.
My first webpage was on GeoCities. I learned HTML and made my own bullet graphics. I scanned a tablecloth and made a tiling background with Paint Shop Pro. This was all on Windows 3.1 and IE2, if I remember correctly.

Those were the days. :)
I actually found it hard
Privacy policy for Web sites - sample language
You don't have to own something to discuss a sale of it.
Books are horrible about copyright. There are many books tied up in copyright that are completely out of print, and if I wanted to buy a copy I would have to buy a used copy at an exorbitant price (due to scarcity).

At this point the author (or the publisher) is seeing NO money. Is there a real reason why I can't just take a copy of the book, put it to PDF and distribute it for free? The people that were involved in the production of the book have essentially abandoned it, but they will definitely jump out of the woodwork to try and cash in on it if someone were to 'make it profitable again' (which includes suing a person for distributing it).

I see these as the moral equivalent of submarine patents. (Patents where you wait until something becomes popular, and then pop out of the woodwork to sue the biggest companies that you can find for millions or billions of dollars)
Which, I hope, will allow more students to get excited about programming, instead of being scared away by compiler errors.

I applaud you for your concern and effort, but I wonder about the unintended consequences of this. Do you really want to encourage someone who would be "scared away by compiler errors"? Compiling is easy, deploying is much harder.

If someone is scared away by the easy stuff, how will they respond to the real difficulties that await?

Maybe I'm a little old fashioned, but I think the battle scars earned conquering the little things like syntax help build a better programmer for everything else. I wouldn't want to take that building block away.
Me too. The back of my brain is telling me it was for some sort of plane control software? Maybe? An interesting tidbit that I recall was that they used different manufacturers to hedge their bets against bugs.
Technically you don't need multiple Gods, you need a God that's an economist. If rabbits can't run, the foxes will kill themselves off because there's a near infinite demand but extremely limited supply.

I suppose if the 'one true god' was an economist, all religion got it wrong and our ancestors have been worshipping pure evil for the past few millennia.
since your comments in this thread indicate that you are insistent this is for beginners, maybe you should go ask beginners.

get out of my building...http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=869827
When the Unicorn master starts, it loads our app into memory. As soon as it’s ready to serve requests it forks 16 workers. Those workers then select() on the socket, only serving requests they’re capable of handling. In this way the kernel handles the load balancing for us.

Wasn't there a heated debate here just the other day about the prefork model?

Guess it's at least back en vogue @github.
I have never been able to log into HN from my G1, so I'm interested in the answer.
WizBang is designed to teach the most basic programming fundamentals: loops, conditional branches, numeric operations, and how these blocks interact with eachother.

I am in no way trying to get any current developer to switch over to building programs in WizBang. This was never an intention. The goal is to present a simple, minimal, visual environment in which to build simple programs.

After the beginner learns the basics, WizBang eases them into the next step of learning a real language, such as C++, Java, or Python, by allowing them to compile their WizBang programs into valid code in any language that's supported.

To answer your final question: the only advantage WizBang has over a textual language is that I think there are more grade school (and even high school) students that would experiment building programs with colorful shapes than typing commands into a text editor, then running a compiler or interpreter to see what they get.
I think it was downvoted for its tone -- it's very easy to interpret as name-calling.

There is a rational basis for opposing copyright controls without simultaneously supporting piracy, but sadly, most people seem to advocate from the latter camp.
It is definitely intended for beginners, but I wanted to let HN know about it since I've seen a lot of posts wondering "how I can teach my kid to program?" and think that this is a good app for that.
There's plenty of time later in life to work hard. Having time to truly play is what's at a premium. If a 6 year old's performance on in a sport can make you angry then maybe it is time to re-evaluate. Sure, I can see the point about applying yourself 100% to something, but maybe that's not the right question. The kid isn't really demonstrating that he is unwilling to take things completely seriously, only that he's not willing to take this sport completely seriously. Kids don't always take things seriously, it's part of being a child, don't take that away from him.
I want what you're having...
I don't think WizBang could ever take away the beginner running into compiler errors, but I feel that the beginner programmer has so many problems to face at once that this situation can be improved. By using WizBang, they can interactively learn about looping and branches without worrying about syntax.
Microsoft adds free root certificate authority to Windows
Framework for NIB-based multi-view iPhone apps
VentureIQ - q&a for startups/entrepreneurs - whatdyathink?
Seems like an interesting project to teach complete beginners. I'll test it out to see if it can help my girlfriend understand more about programing...
Functional Programming Fundamentals Lectures
Resolved now. Thanks!
It's redrawing the screen on every submission, instead of doing the submission in an XHR. This is one place where Ajaxiness would really help, because the only indication you have that you've submitted a score is to look at the browser bar to see if the page is loading.
I'm not familiar with the studies you are referring to, so what I am about to suggest may have been controlled for, but I wonder if the apparent increase in strength of the placebo effect is simply due to recent drugs being less effective (with respect to placebo). Or alternatively, perhaps there are more new drugs these days for treating conditions where it is quantitatively difficult to measure the outcome-- think: anxiety or depression not high blood pressure or pneumonia.
Psychologically, there is a big, big difference between offering cash and offering almost anything else.

In "Predictably Irrational", Dan Ariely ran an experiment where people were asked to perform a certain task, where each person was offered one of three payments for the task: $5, $0.50, or nothing. The people who were offered more money worked harder at the task... But the people who were asked to work for free worked harder than either of the groups that were offered cash.

Then he performed a similar experiment, except he offered candy equivalents: cheap candy, expensive candy, or nothing. All three groups worked with approximately the same amount of effort.

Then he performed the same experiment -- offering candy -- except that he told each participant how much the candy was worth. People worked as hard as if they had been offered the candy's equivalent in cash.

http://bookoutlines.pbworks.com/Predictably-Irrational
Funny, I've also been doing some thinking about moderation and implicit/explicit voting recently. Fascinating topic. Here's my piece: http://www.trendpreneur.com/online/link-voting-real-time-res...
I'm flying from Santiago, Chile. Btw, anyone else from Chile coming?
This is definitely a cool project. I think, introduced the right way it would certainly work along your intended concept.

There have been a few attempts at pushing the complexity down so that non-programmers can work with complex things. Like Data Flow programming systems for example.

Showing somebody how to build a simple data processing app in one of these systems is very rewarding as they realize they can coax the machine to do what they are telling it. But I've mostly dealt with adults, not kids.
I think in any field that requires thought, you are much better off hiring people who are just plain interested in thinking.

That is to say, if somebody is a lifelong learner and has passion for it, I'd hire them way before somebody who lives, breathes and eats a particular language 24/7.

People who are interested in the world around them spend their lives increasing a well of knowledge that comes in handy in remarkable ways, not to mention the fact that they know how to learn what they need to know, when they need to know it.
Tweetie 2 Features You May Not Know
What's next in the /. -> k5 -> hn chain?

Sorry, but k5 was never in that chain. reddit, perhaps, is/was the next step after Slashdot.
Agreed. I'd love to hear more along these lines.

My fiancee and I have formed a company around her custom jewelry and fashion designs. We're getting all the pieces in place and are very close to launching.
Subscribing... interested in this as well.
I like the idea, definitely the sort of thing you want to get used by school-age students not 'proper' computer scientists though. Recently was reminded of just how damn easy it was to do the most basic of programming in the BBC Micro era; no real syntax, no complexity, but in 10 seconds you could write something that printed 'JOE ROCKS' infinitely on the page. If this has the same level of just-do-it, and sufficient sample starting points, it could be really cool.
It's connection pooling, not a fork-per-accept web server. Each worker is select/epoll/kqueue'ing for individual requests.
You could always provide your own package repository and/or build your own packages. It's not terribly difficult, and certainly isn't any more difficult that maintaining your own auto-update mechanism anyways. And if you have your own package repo, users will get updates from your repository whenever they update their system...
Great! There isn't much instruction on what to do once it's installed, so I recommend opening up the examples (available from the sourceforge files page) to get an idea how the blocks behave.
Ask HN: Give back original stock certificate?
Hey all,

A startup that I used to work for recently contacted me and asked that I send back my official stock certificate b/c they needed to re-order the numbering (per advice from their lawyer). I have no reason not to trust them - is there any reason why I should not do this? thanks!
Google Code Now Supports User Clones for Mercurial
>> Oh, maybe they won't make hundreds of millions of dollars. Should I give up my rights so "recording artists" can be filthy rich?

It's a fallacy that most recording artists are "filthy rich", not mention how much they make is irrelevant to the discussion at hand. What "right" are you giving up?
What happened to that - it won't load for me ...
I'm surprised some of those sites felt that it was worth paying $129 a month for it. It's cool software, but those strike me as some small niches.
Also it wouldn't kill my history/back button
I hit this, too. Regression tests were failing when I changed code that obviously shouldn't change the output of the program at all. This happened on a regular basis when we changed numeric code, because of the normal limitations of floating-point arithmetic; we just made sure the numerical results were accurate and updated the regression tests. (The regression tests were quite handy for finding logic errors; they weren't really used to test numerical accuracy.)

But in this case I was just adding some error checks, which weren't even being triggered. Clearly this shouldn't affect the results of our numerical calculations. Since my code shouldn't affect the calculations, I was convinced that our existing numerical code had a subtle memory or timing bug. (I knew that floating-point code was tricky, but clearly I was doing exactly the same operations on exactly the same values.) I spent days staring at code, and then my boss told me to stop working on it since the results were clearly correct in both versions, even if they weren't identical.

A few weeks later I read about how values change when they're copied out of the x87 stack into registers. And I thought, naw, we couldn't possibly be using x87 arithmetic. But we were. Which was horrifying, since floating-point calculations could be a bottleneck under some workloads. But we had been running that way since before I started working on it, so at least it wasn't my fault. I added a compiler option to request sse2 floating point instead of x87 floating point. Voila, predictable floating-point results, plus measurably faster performance on a few tests.
Courier New is the "Typewriter" style font.
I'm glad you brought up Fitt's Law. It only goes to prove that click targets should be close to what you are working on. A decoupled menubar does not achieve this unless what you are working on happens to be at the top of the screen.

Everybody seems to assume that "oh, Apple is the usability expert" that everything they do is some kind of gospel. But they screw up sometimes also. In my case it was a deal breaker, in your case you take it as God's own truth.

I stand corrected regarding dates and Workbench. :)
I just wanted to know if any actual computer scientists had input on the project's goals. I have looked into Alice, scratch, Popfly (discontinued), and couldn't really find one that was very similar to WizBang, so I was also thinking putting it on HN would dig out any project that was amazingly similar.

Edit: scratch, not squeak
Its great to see companies sharing what they've learned from experience about system architecture. So many times this sort of stuff is very difficult to plan out and the only real way to get it right is through experimentation. Having first hand descriptions like this is a great resource if you are setting something up the first time.

I like that they posted their unicorn config file too!
Isn't that most of advertising? None of it really says anything real about the product. It is all about sticking an idea in our heads.
Facebook Group for Startup School '09
i blame techcrunch and the rest of the media, they focus too much on hyping the companies they write about and let the PR firms push bullshit down their throat
I think they're trying to get some cred by participating in the IETF process (even if the IETF rejects everything).

I suspect out of band communication is expensive and ISPs consider this a cheaper alternative.
Why weren't both of these bugs caught during code reviews?