skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"You can plea to this crime and be sentence to 2 years in prison, or we'll charge you with a felony instead of a misdemeanor and several extra things to drive your minimum sentence up to 5 years."

I would be much more okay with plea bargains if the system required that the prosecutor only allow you to plea to charges they had filed against you, and refused to allow them to file more serious versions of the charges once they offered a bargain, ie, that the bargain was exclusively setting the terms of the sentence for the crimes you were being charged for in exchange for not forcing a trial to determine your guilt.
WhatsApp starts rolling out calling feature
Motivation gets you interested and starting, discipline keeps you going and improving, then motivation provides reasons to not quit.

note that this is not reducible, there's a unbreakable link.
Argument from lack of imagination. But I don't think the the large, well-represented adversarial client is as common as the clients who are simply stupid. Either way it's not something I have a lot of personal experience with, but Clients from Hell is pretty full up with stupid, greedy clients and equally stupid designers with bad contracts. As an example:
http://clientsfromhell.net/post/107004953453/me-your-invoice...

The above is clearly a situation where contract verbiage for transfer of rights would make any subsequent conversation on the topic very short. However, as to your general point, what do you suggest? Is that risk something that can be mitigated, or priced into your rates?
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Happy 500th!

If you've never tried Project Euler, it's a great way to learn new mathematical concepts, sequences, dynamic programming and other algorithms.

https://projecteuler.net/problem=368 was one of my favorites, because it involved turning an algorithm described in a paper into code.

I don't consider this a spoiler for problem #500, but if you're counting the number of divisors, you'll need this function:
http://oeis.org/wiki/Number_of_divisors_function#Formulae_fo...

As an example,
120 = 2^3 * 3^1 * 5^1

number of divisors of 120 => (3+1)(1+1)(1+1)

Even if you don't solve it, exploring the problem is a fun afternoon for a person with a computer.
Yes, I read somewhere it was supposed to be an Eclipse of the Sun :)

Note sure if apocryphal or not.
It would be interesting to mandate that all Mac Apps be written in Javascript so users could modify them. However this seems ambitious. Even mandating that all apps be scriptable seems to be a bridge too far.

Note that Javascript is supported in addition to AppleScript as a user level scripting language.

Much of the Mac OS is in fact open source -- see Darwin and other projects. However having the code for the OS available -- or having XCode installed -- does nothing for user programmability.

This comment is a good example of why it doesn't work for us developers to see ourselves as typical users.
Show HN: Learn programming and math while you chat with friends
I specifically point out in the article that it is not just loss aversion, but that there are valid reasons to dislike Windows 8.

I also don't criticize old interfaces because they are old. I specifically point out that the desktop metaphor was created for use cases that are very different from how we use computers nowadays. Desktops are not problematic because they're old, but because what we use desktop PCs for has changed a lot.
Excel is, by far, the most successful programming-for-the-masses environment ever created. I'm not talking about VBA, either -- Just the sheet and formulas are a brilliantly accessible functional programming environment.
The nytimes article shvetusya posted is one of them, and also:

http://www.wsj.com/articles/how-the-brain-uses-glucose-to-fu...

http://psr.sagepub.com/content/11/4/303.abstract

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3624962/

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3195474/
It's definitely a two-way street, but you can only control your own side of the street. Here's how I think of it: I don't particularly enjoy talking to people who can't find any interest in things outside their normal bubble, so I don't want to be the kind of narrowly-interested person that I don't particularly enjoy talking to.

I agree that it's annoying and frustrating.
I love the way the harmonic series seems to juuuuuuust baaaaarely diverge....
This article also made me think of a fun/fascinating project: creating a industrial organization economics model of the impacts of the Great Firewall on Chinese firms.

Are the economic benefits of the Great Firewall (e.g. propping up China's tech firms by preventing American competition) greater than the economic harms of hindering many businesses with a limited internet?

China is effectively deploying an infant industry model (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infant_industry) but instead of using monetary tariffs, they are slowing down or blocking foreign services. This has undoubtedly aided companies like Weibo and Baidu.

Simultaneously, the firewall acts like a tax on domestic Chinese companies. By raising the cost of accessing information or foreign services, it is raising transaction costs for virtually all Chinese businesses.

The model could be a simplified economy with different types of firms that have varying degrees of needs for information. Add a tax (or some similar way to model the transaction cost of finding that information when faced with different levels of censorship). That tax would be only levied on certain information goods (foreign internet services).

Then both businesses and consumers choose which internet services and information they will consume when faced with this tax. The internet services and information are an input to the Chinese firms' production functions and an input to the Chinese consumer's utility functions.

You could even test the model using this upgrade as a natural experiment. These censorship upgrades are an exogenous shock to access to foreign information. They are effectively an unanticipated tax increase. Data could be collected on how much this decreased business productivity in the days after the change and used as a proxy to estimate the tax.

Similarly, when people pay for VPN services (or other ways to get around censorship), these can be modeled using averting costs (generally used to model pollution costs). A traditional example of averting costs: a person buying bottled water to avoid getting diarrhea related illnesses in the developing world. The model assumes that the cost of the bottled water is less than the cost of getting the illness (thus why it is a rational averting behavior). Therefore, the amount spent on the bottled water is a proxy for the unobservable cost of polluted water (albeit a lower bound). (Note this is only true in certain cases in the developing world, as obviously people the developed world are drinking bottled water when their water is entirely safe to drink). Thus, the VPN can be used as a proxy for how much the Chinese are willing to pay to minimize the harm of the Great Firewall (and thus representative of a lower bound of the cost of the firewall).
I don't think it's even a matter of definition. Most people just don't want to program computers. They want to just sit down and use them. If they really did want to write programs (in any way you define that term), they would: the tools are available. A few people explore macros, etc. provided in sofware such as Excel, but most people don't, and it's not because of the tools, it's because they just don't have the need to do it.
Ask HN: Should I stop posting on hacker news?
My submissions never reach even 5 upvotes. Should I stop posing out of frustration?
> Why can't stuff be priced according to the purchasing power parity of that country. A lot of this stuff is simply over priced by our standards.

Disclaimer: I am a proud pirate.

Generalizing, rightholders don't care. They regard intellectual property as pretty much analogous to physical property. They don't have to sell you something if they don't want to, and they don't have to sell something they're selling at a price point amenable to you. They regard the idea that somehow people are "owed" media content at a price reasonable to them to be an example of a sense of supreme, titanic, piratical entitlement. Can't afford it? Don't watch|listen|use it, then.
Yeah you can actually take it further and see Aliens as a struggle between two mothers, Ripley and the queen alien, fighting over the child Newt.

It's also interesting that the strongest characters in the movie are women. Ripley is the strongest civilian, Newt the strongest colonist (the only survivor actually), Vazquez the strongest marine (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JYkxCzBszOQ), and the queen alien is the strongest xenomorph.
The Ongoing Quest for the ‘Brain’ Chip
> does throwawayvictim have an obligation to take part in that due diligence process by reaching out to the investors?

No, in fact he should not. The DD is the investors problem, not the OPs, if they do lousy DD, do not spot the anomaly and invest anyway at least he'll have a fat target assuming there is a case here.

> Regardless of his own attachments to the code, and his emotional response to its false attribution

False attribution by hearsay at this point in time, that's not actionable.

> a response I think most of us would have, by the way - the investors "don't know what they don't know", and I think any good samaritan would consider it his duty to inform someone who is at a possible informational disadvantage, especially when that information could prevent the investors from dealing with a loss or a future liability. It also reflects the character of the startup using the code, an additional and relevant piece of information that the investor is disadvantaged not knowing.

That might get you into a lot of trouble.

Your analogy doesn't hold water on several fronts, for one nothing got stolen.

> Is it your duty to call up VC to warn him about his unexpected caller?

No, in fact that might be construed as interference.

> That the caller has expressed a monetary motivation for his visit, and that he has taken advantage of your good will and stolen a car you were willing to loan freely to anyone who respectfully asked to borrow it?

This could be but the OP is not a disinterested and objective party. So he should contact his own lawyer and discuss his options rather than to take advice from strangers on the net with extremely limited data.
Just because something supports commerce doesn't mean it should be free. My city (Mountain View, CA) has outlawed plastic bags and requires stores to charge for paper bags...commerce supports that were "free" to the consumer in the past. Yet, for some reason, the city provides TONS of free parking in municipal lots.

Car owners kind of already pay for infrastructure for their vehicles through excise tax, gas tax, and tolls (not really, but at least its something). Why not charge for parking too?
Yeah, download SBCL, load quicklisp.lisp, done.

I don't see what the problem is on Windows.
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Yes, it's different for me. I do DD many times per year and I always look at the code if the company is claiming IP rights. And depending on what they're doing this can be a half hour browsing session or a deep dive lasting a couple of days.
By "programming" here I just meant someone who writes (or modifies) even a small amount of code. We found that this was always an extremely small fraction of users, even in the easiest cases.

I certainly agree that self-identifying as programmers would be totally the wrong criterion.

Consider the number of people today who edit a URL in their browser location bar (for example to delete unnecessary trailing information if they are going to email it, or to try to fix it if it doesn't work). I bet a good study of a representative user population would find that only 10% or less would do this even if it was suggested.

If someone is willing to do that I'm willing to consider them a programmer in this context. They have made the basic leap to understand how to map between text and behavior, how to debug, etc.
It's an awful feeling. It has been done to one of my open source projects before.

Here's my thought on why they did it.

1. Exclusive ownership of IP has a lot of value to the investors. The IP can be licensed out and can be used as a competitive advantage. When the company is sold later, IP is an important part of it. Claiming IP ownership of your project increases their funding appealing to the investors. Otherwise, another group can just easily use your open source project to build a competing company.

2. Claiming ownership of the IP gives the appearance of their development prowess of building the project from scratch. It adds to their technical competency to the investors. In reality what they're really good at is taking credit of other people work.

Now what do you want to do? It has been a hurtful experience and you are probably pretty emotional. I would. But time to check emotion at the door and start to play ball.

You being the exclusive ownership of IP has tremendous advantage. See 1.

Tell the investor you own the IP. You were just being philanthropic to open source it; however, you still own and control the IP. Investors really try to avoid tangled IP so they can sell the company in a clean bundle later.

As for the startup, you can sell them a license for a large fee to allow them to close-source their new modification. This essentially let them buy off control of a branching of the project. And investors like it since it gives them control over future IP addition.

You can consult for them, but I think it's a bad idea given how these people have behaved unethically.

You can tell them to stop claiming ownership of the IP and give attribution, and remind them any future changes they make have to be open source as well.

Or if you want to play the long game, you can sit back. Let them develop the company. Later have your lawyer sent them notice that you want to audit all their code to make sure any derivation of the project is properly open sourced.
The biggest mistake that Microsoft made was calling it Windows, if they called it Surface instead of only their hardware that way, and kept on selling windows non crippled for the desktop, they probably would have gotten away with it. Nobody cares if they share the same engine under the hood.
I'm not an OpenBSD user (I was briefly, but now use Linux or OS X because of software availability, though I may go back at some point), however, one thing I really like about OpenBSD is the philosophy of doing it their own way. It's very opinionated and I find that to be a good thing. One of the things I find frustrating with Linux is that it tries to be everything, which is good for flexibility, but bad in some other respects. OS X on the other hand has a lot of opacity to me, and I'm not particularly fond of Xcode or objective-C.
maybe i just want to know what's popular so i can watch it on netflix/etc?

no better metric for popularity than seeders/peers
5% seems pretty good to me actually! The number for iOS is probably, what, like .01%?

I have a soft-soft for Hypercard -- it was the first programming I did, back in middle school, on the school computers.

They were those old black-and-white macs with Hypercard, and a variety of stacks. We all knew the trick to turn on author mode (level 5 or something? it's been a while!), and from there you could explore and mess with existing stacks.

I still remember the thrill when I first discovered loops, and that I could write a script that would move a character on the screen in response to keys being held down. Then I discovered if statements, & made enemies that chased the main character. Honestly, I FELT LIKE GOD. I had created life.

No instruction, no books, it was all just poking around.

There's really something magical about an environment like that, and it's sad that we've gotten away from it.

(Maybe minecraft or something is the modern equivalent?)
Snapchat Web Series
Fair points, though I would say two things:

1. Touchscreen computers are in the minority now, but I don't think they'll remain in the minority. Kids are growing up on iPhones, Android phones, and iPads. A computer without a touchscreen will seem increasingly anachronistic to them, so designing against that trend is a backwards-looking strategy.

2. I don't see how the changes Microsoft has made in Windows 10 so far were necessary to make it a better desktop OS. Removing charms, for example, did nothing for desktop PCs. Microsoft could have made the charms features (e.g. search) accessible via the taskbar without removing charms for those who do have touchscreen computers, and can access it easily.
> the penalty for wrongness is nearly nothing at all.

Well, I think Edwin Brady showed a couple of C++-template-errmsg-like-things during a couple of his talks, but having actually programmed semi-advanced C++-template things I think I can agree on the general thrust that type-level problems are in some sense "better problems to have".

Btw, thanks for the exchange. (This is getting too off-topic, so I'll leave it at that.)
BitShares.org Website Launched
Agreed (though "functional" is quite a stretch -- "dataflow" is accurate).

And how many people, given a spreadsheet, are willing to look into the formulas and tweak them?
Armurariu PLANTA MEDICINALA
One of my favorite parts of Project Euler was getting something where the math seemed beyond me, but I could use a tool like Google to get further.

Not to cheat using Google, but to discover the name of the branch of mathematics I had no clue about, and then to learn enough to keep going.

I still remember the afternoon I spent doing chromatic polynomials by hand, each graph I drew having more mental exclamations on the end, because I was goddamn getting it.

For me, the lift from earning a right answer is palpable.
Would type annotations help PyPy’s performance?
Lxc-wrapper: an opinionated LXC wrapper
The Pirate Bay is back online
Learn How to Code with Online Resources – Free and Paid
Aha. Do you have an outline of a better way?
Yalz77: an LZ77 compression algorithm designed for code simplicity and clarity
Your first sentence sniped me and I almost wrote a Big Response before I read the second line and realized you're obviously joking…
I wonder if you can add automated researching of the specific topic, using some NLP and maybe wolframalpha, you can perhaps get a crude version of basic topics such as 'the height of the Eiffel tower'... You can just paraphrase that into a question and ask WA.
I'm hardly in the position to be telling you how you learn a language best, but I always felt programming type puzzles of the oj.leetcode.com variety were better for getting me to learn a programming language, where as projecteuler.net was better at developing mathematical/algorithmic reasoning skills. A non-trivial amount of the early puzzles are do-able by hand.

Anyone else feel similarly?
I came to believe religion was essentially bad for humanity after reading and following Christopher Hitchens. He has a great book:

http://www.amazon.com/God-Is-Not-Great-Everything-ebook/dp/B...

Here's my other favorite 'religion is bad' infographic:

http://www.religico.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/12/who-kille...
Cron as a filesystem
The bottom of the barrel in this discussion is an embarrassment.

All: Personal swipes are neither civil nor substantive, so they break the Hacker News guidelines twice over. When you're tempted to post them, please don't.
This isn't unknown, it was very public at the time and there's tons of articles about it.
Show HN: Branch iOS Share Sheet – add links with automatic share tracking
The person we're talking about in this thread is accused of a spectacular crime: playing an instrumental role in the theft of millions of identities from several of the largest companies in the world, for profit.

What's the role "plea bargaining" plays here? He could legitimately be facing a double-digit custodial sentence no matter how cooperative he is.
One of the things that's freaky to me is that the harmonic series up to n terms is proportional to log(n)...

but the sum of the reciprocals of the primes is roughly proportional to log(log(n)). That's a crazy slow divergence.
Yes! I had that same feeling with this one:

https://projecteuler.net/problem=307

I couldn't solve it analytically for the life of me. So I wrote a small simulator, computed the answer to within 7 decimal places or so and then tried to figure out why that was the right answer. Then the lightbulb went on and I realized what the real answer should be and it worked.

As I wrote above, I am not very good at math, but to be able to use the computer to make your math understanding better than what it was before you started solving a problem was a huge up for me.
I wasn't able to get the movie export working though
As somebody that used to work at NOAA (not at NCEP, but worked with a lot of people at NCEP).

No, there is no unit testing!

anal.sh is short for analysis.
I will check that out, thank you for the pointer.
My biggest fear at the moment is that they will turn around in the future and try to take action against me. If they are telling others that they wrote the code, and if someone tells them about my code, i wouldn't want to face a legal battle. Maybe it's unfounded, but I'm still a bit emotional.
Comments like this are not welcome on Hacker News. Please read and follow the rules:

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

https://news.ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html
Yes. We have TinyTinyRSS on there now.

Note that Sandstorm is still in development and for the moment we've created a hack to allow ttrss to make arbitrary HTTP requests in order to update feeds.

However, in a few more months this won't be necessary. Instead, when you click "subscribe to feed", the app will call a method on the Sandstorm API saying "Prompt the user for a URL and then give me permission to access it". So, you'll get a dialog box to enter the URL rendered by Sandstorm itself. If you enter a URL, it's plainly obvious that you want the app to have permission to fetch it, so Sandstorm grants said permission. We call this UI the "powerbox".

Notice how the UX here is equivalent to what we have today, where the app renders its own prompt. This technique of inferring security decisions from actions the user was doing anyway is the core of how we plan to implement tight security without inconveniencing the user.
It would be great to do that as part of the editing stage! So you go to fix your markers and it's already partially researched or a search is 1 click away.
This is almost certainly true, and if there were as many people trying to use node on those operating systems as there are on windows I expect you would see a similar number of complaints.
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A system without plea bargains offers no incentive for any rational person to cooperate. It instead encourages everyone, guilty and innocent, to ruthlessly impose additional costs on the rest of society --- most notably on the innocent accused, who are allocated fewer resources with which to vindicate themselves.
With Content-Security-Policy we can prohibit an app from using images or other assets from third-party servers.
I was only recently introduced to Project Euler but already I'm addicted. I've got a folder where I've named each solution as pXXX.ext and try solving the problems in multiple different languages. I refuse to move on to a new problem until I've solved the previous one (I don't solve every problem in multiple languages. Instead I've been using it to learn/play with languages here and there I don't really know).

Congrats to Project Euler on their 500th problem!
Yes, the name collision is unfortunate, but it has nothing to do with Ubuntu JuJu.
Ah, yes. I should have included focus-follows-mouse, that's pretty crucial to how I work too.

There's actually a registry setting to enable it on Windows, but so many things are so completely unaware of it in their design that it breaks a lot of stuff.