skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
That's a great idea, isn't there a common "defensive patents chest" for this?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PatentFreedom Looks like they got bought out by an Intellectual Ventures clone. One of my regrets in life is that I have lived within trebuchet range of the main IV office, and never did anything with it.
serious question since i don't have an ipad, don't they have the clock app like the iphone does?
Alternative medicine. Cancer patients. I'd raise their rent too.

Honestly, I would support a punitive tax on alternative medicine, like we do on cigarettes, maybe at 400%.
There's no reason that you cannot have really good open source drivers. In fact, most of the ones you use are.

The problem is that these corporations feel that providing insight to their competitors on how they're doing things is a bigger issue, and they keep them closed.
/s/Pure Script/PureScript :)
OCaml compiles pretty fast, especially if you target bytecode. Haskell on the other hand... is still faster than Scala, but not "lightning fast".
Of course I'm being sarcastic. It's just very shoddy craftsmanship to launch a website for Chrome-only and leave it like that for several months.
Sincere question -- what don't you like about the stopwatch in the clock app?
I've never been, but you will likely get free stuff. In 2013 everyone attendee got a Chromebook Pixel (and the new Pixel was just announced). The free stuff alone may justify the ticket price.

http://thenextweb.com/google/2013/05/15/google-is-giving-a-f...
Surely "hello world" is useful only if you release it under a copyleft licence since its purpose is to teach you how to get started with the language it demonstrates.

In any case, freeness is a goal for me as a user of software. I choose Gimp over Photoshop, for example, because I care more about still being able to access my photos in 20 years time than I do about having access to certain feature sets.
Thanks for sharing, I can't believe I've never seen this before.
The article definitely builds a case of 'us vs them'. Even though the article is a year old, it's definitely relevant given the MIT stress post (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9216238).

The most surprising thing I read from the piece was the manipulation of HIPAA code to prevent any confidentiality during therapy:

Wesley says she called his therapist without reading the essay. She decided
it was evidence of psychotic thinking and told Wesley she was going to notify
Sarah Lawrence. When Wesley, familiar with the ADA after his experience at
his previous college, asked her if she felt that he was a danger to himself
or other people, she said no. "That means you can't tell them," he says he
told her. According to Wesley, she said that it "wasn't his business" to
tell her what to do.

Telling students to 'forgive and forget' rape (even suggesting it was made up):

Instead, Epifano says, she told her it would be useless to press charges
against her rapist and advised her to "forgive and forget." She told
her there were no nearby support groups available and said Epifano was
too "behind" in her feeling process to join the one on campus. Instead,
she connected Epifano with a school counselor, who told Epifano she had
probably invented the rape to deal with a traumatic childhood.

Suggesting students just 'get over' their depression:

"I broke down after reading the letter," Shireen recalls. "I already felt
so bad, and now I was getting in trouble for it."

In that meeting, Shireen says, Santa Catalina's assistant director told her
she could be suspended or expelled and that she had put the entire high-rise
in danger. He allegedly said it was possible Shireen would become so
emotionally unstable that she might start running around the halls, threatening
her floormates with a knife, and asked her what steps she would take to improve
herself - "you have to be a social butterfly," he suggested - and told
Shireen she could only stay in school if she waived her confidentiality and
allowed her therapist to provide weekly reports to the administration.

And even applying pressure to 'get better' such that any small mistake will result in harsh penalties:

Shireen says. "Everyone kept telling me I was on their radar. They said
'on their radar' over and over and over."

It's all pretty disgusting. Though given the clear legality of the situation:

"Those codes of conduct are illegal," says Burnim, "no question about it."

And various successful cases listed in the article, why aren't there more 'ambulance chasers' for these types of problems?
It is very, very profitable, just not for everyone. So you might want to rephrase that. However, I can see an established brand like Nintendo getting foothold without a problem.
I think you're right. It's not coincidental that after Mr Postman delivered it and I set it up, I immediately went and had lunch in McDonalds.

It appears that it doesn't understand that I could possibly work from home and went to lunch that one day and its heuristics are broken in some way.

I've turned it off now and I'm happy (plus I get another hour or so out of the battery)
Yes.

I'll gladly refer to myself as a girl, but I only ever use "woman" in formal contexts.
Given both iOS and Android support hardware controllers... and given how closely Nintendo ties in their games with their controllers... and given that you can get good margins off of hardware, a Nintendo-branded controller for mobile devices, that is required (or highly recommended) might give them the best of both worlds; they could continue selling hardware, continue controlling how the games get played, and still release them for mobile devices.

And given how consoles generally (start) selling at small margins, they might be able to make more money off of selling controllers at a higher markup—especially if they sell people a new one every two years (when they upgrade their phone), rather than every 6+ years (when a new console comes out).
> investors agree to grant higher valuations... in exchange for guarantees that they'll get their money back first if the company goes public or sells.

Is that not normal? To pay your investors and other preferred stock holders first (along with your creditors and such) back first before those who were granted common stock.

Or is the author saying the preferred/common stock deal is just a tech industry thing?
If this succeeds, we can expect .blows, .reallysucks, and .killedmycat to follow.
Ionic Creator: rapid prototyping for Ionic
This grabbed my attention, also. Anyone know of this entrepreneur and his/her start-up?
Gosh I miss heathkit. I could never afford anything there but it was a fun store to browse and the catalog was amazing.

Learned to solder on their AM radio kit (cheapest kit they had).

Soon we'll miss Radio Shack and there will be nothing left but internet orders.
The status quo does suck, but banning all paywalls would be worse, because sometimes the most substantive article on a story is behind a paywall with a workaround. That seems to be the case here.

I don't know of a robust way to replace paywalled links with open ones to the same story. Sometimes people post Google search links to WSJ articles, but those don't work for everyone, and presumably there would be legal questions even if it did work technically.

It's also not as simple as the publications not wanting anybody other than subscribers to read their content, since they choose how high to make their paywall, and most have well-known workarounds. WSJ is one, though theirs is a step more annoying than NYT et al.

Previous comments on this:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8777971

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8634076

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8647853
People go to GREAT lengths for the "eventual goal of sex"

Like get married
It gets downvoted because if it's a joke it's not very funny and HN doesn't really like jokes anyway, and if it's not a joke it's a 19th-century kind of bonkers.
By the way, they're hiring. And they're looking mostly for software people, who are steeped in web tech. They have some very interesting and challenging ideas for what they want to build on that front!

I got to meet the software side of the Carbon3D team (and printer) not too long ago, and came away extremely impressed.
FFT and Phoenix Wright are at least available as ports. I think you can make money with fixed price games, it's just not so visible because they are not played by everyone.
It cracks me up how that is the go to 'application' for all robots, drones and swarm-bots. It is used so often it has become a cliche.
https://github.com/BramBonne/privacypolice
Become a Data Scientist in 8 Easy Steps
would be interesting to see similar stats for the groups that applied. Both along the company categories and the gender/race breakdown.
I Can’t Write My Name in Unicode
I can't speak about OCaml, but Haskell doesn't have subtypes. That's where a lot of the complexity of Scala comes from as well as being a source of annoying bugs:

def f(x: Int) = if (x % 2 == 0) { x } else { None }

(This compiles, but the type of `f` is not `f: Int => Option[Int]`.)

[edit: the bug is not in the scala compiler, the bug is in my code - I almost certainly did not want `f` to have type `Int => Any`. My phrasing, now edited, was misleading. ]
sue Google

Sure, if you've got a few hundred thousand dollars, five years, and are OK with being blacklisted from Google during that time.
I was actually thinking of the Channel Tunnel :)
I think the point is that it was a much more literal connection.

Specifically, programming itself was often considered secretarial work and, as such, was generally given to women.

Men tended to participate as engineers or mathematicians.

I don't think anyone would contend that CS is a female-dominated field although I take your point that some may consider it somewhat lower on the testosterone chart than traditional engineering.
Typically Canadian's pronounce it about as əˈbəʊt. A boot is pronounced əˈbu̟t. The sounds are distinct, but similar. I think many Americans here it as "aboot" because they're not used to the phonetic raising.
Dang, iirc, is a YC employee and therefore has different motivations than a volunteer moderator.

So I'm taking this as agreement with the OP to some degree. ;)
> In order to connect to known networks which don’t broadcast their presence, almost all your wifi-enabled devices: laptops, tablets, phones, etc. will try to probe for networks they know about

But aren't nearly all APs configured to broadcast SSID? So why is that probing necessary in general?
> In order to connect to known networks which don’t broadcast their presence, almost all your wifi-enabled devices: laptops, tablets, phones, etc. will try to probe for networks they know about

But aren't nearly all APs configured to broadcast SSID? So why is that behavior necessary in general?
"Testing these concrete things is bad, let's instead attempt to test these poorly-defined subjective things."
An API for manipulating Xcode project files
Well, what else can you do with a bionic cockroach?

An organic competitor to the Roomba?
Last year was two half-baked watches, and the (pretty awesome) Cardboard headset. I wouldn't recommend expecting an equivalent value in hardware.
and much more weather dependent.

As long as the businesses if the affected area do not mind the change I see little reason to not do it.
> What are violin strings made of? Well we can be sure it's not cat guts

Classically, the high e string is made of catgut, roughly cattle's gut.
Sometimes when I reset and start, it starts at 59:58 and counts up to 59:59, 00:00, 00:01 and so on.
You can get invites into new APIs, services, etc. So it is an opportunity to jump on a departing bandwagon earlier.

On the other hand, maybe it is a better idea to just steer clear of experimental Google APIs, services, etc and just use their core product - search and advertisements. Think Google Code...
I see the opposite.

Relational Databases are a perfectly good tool and will fit 90% of the applications being developed. But NoSQL is shiny, and we have to try the new way (despite the fact the new way was what people were doing before relational databases came along). Likewise with back end languages. We have plenty of good mature solutions on the back end, but people want to use Nodejs. Fine if your use case is many concurrent connections, but otherwise why not use something more "traditional" (mature, tested, understood).
Cyberlegs: a robotic brace that helps amputees walk
You Can Be Awesome at Hiring Developers
Show HN: One Place to Store All Your Product Roadmaps, Mockups, and Images
But nowadays, the behavior of an element can be completely styled by CSS. So in most code, you will find a lot of DIVs. And imagine having 10 DIVs nested: you can't possibly tell by looking at the closing DIVs which DIVs they are closing... Unless perhaps you put also the classname on the closing tag (which isn't allowed or enforced or verified). So, as you can see, the closing tag has very little utility. It only makes the code less readable (as it takes space). And also, but this is secondary, it requires more bandwidth.
Right, you don't have to implement it like that, but the point is that the job is guaranteed to be in one of these states:

* Hasn't been picked up yet
* Has been picked up, and currently has something processing it (because the lock is still there)
* Has been picked up, but whatever picked it up has gone away
* It's finished

Handling the jobs that haven't been picked up yet or are finished is easy. But what do you do about the jobs where the processor has simply gone away?

Well, if they still hold the lock you can give them some more time, and if they don't hold the lock presumably they died.

At that point you can decide how you want to handle that, do you just have something re-queue those jobs after some set amount of time has passed, or does someone manually look at the jobs and decide what to do?

As an example of something we use this for: You might have some transactional E-Mails to be sent out, each recipient is a row in the queue table, you have to generate an E-Mail and pipe it to sendmail, just before you shell out to sendmail you mark the item as "processing", then you depending on the sendmail return value you either mark the item as processed in the queue or re-queue it.

There's obviously a race condition here where sendmail might have returned OK to you but the DB server you're talking to blows up (so you can't set the status as "finished"). No amount of having unique IDs in external systems is going to help you because that'll just create the same problem. I.e. you have some state outside of your system that needs to be manipulated exactly once, and once that's done you'd like to mark the job as done.

In practice once you get the things that can fail between "processing" and "finished" down to some trivial logic this sort of thing is really reliable as an "exactly once" queue. To the extent that it fails once in a blue moon you can usually just manually repair it, i.e. in this case see what your mail logs say about what mails you sent out.

Redis obviously doesn't have the same strong storage guarantees as a disk-backed RDMBs, but we also have a version of exactly this logic that runs on top of Redis sentinel: https://metacpan.org/pod/Queue::Q::ReliableFIFO::Redis

It has the same queued/in-progress/finished queues using Redis lists, things are moved between the lists atomically and processed by workers, but of course if a worker crashes and burns at the wrong time you're stuck with some items in in-progress state and have to somehow figure out what to do with them. I.e. either you blindly re-queue them (at least once) or manually see whether they finished their work and re-queue them as appropriate (exactly once).
There are plenty of mobile games that measure up to that stuff, they're just not at the top of the App Stores because they don't move volume as fast as mini-games and F2P... and most of them are ports of classic titles.

For example, I played the heck out of Civilization Revolutions, Z Origins, Swords and Soldiers, and Bard's Tale on various mobile devices. Those all measure up in fun and complexity vs Nintendo's titles, although most of them are ports of older PC and console games.
OpenSSL preps fix for mystery high severity hole
Put off college for a year going to Europe to "find themselves"?
I started off learning Scala in a 2 man band startup for 3 or so years and moving to a company with 20+ full time Scala developers was a huge eye opener. All the things that hooked me about Scala like taking advantage of its relatively un-opinionated structure to be quite expressive with how you build things turned out to be major pain points when you scale out into teams who rotate developers on frequent basis.

I think I'm paraphrasing something I read about Twitter when I say that everyone who uses Scala ends up taking a subset of the language they are happy with, and that ends up being the case at a team level and intra-person level too (starting at the new place ended up with some very frosty pair programming sessions).

Add to that the necessity to cross train every developer who joins because recruitment is hard enough without specifying experience in a relatively obscure language and you have a constant cycle of painful recruitment, on-boarding and maintenance.
I'm getting a delay on the start.
Because Mr. Brainiac isn't skilled at managing his time.
> they were right, i didn't accurately follow their terms, but if they reviewed my app once submitted a year ago, that could've been avoided.

Couldn't they say that to you about reading the terms a year ago?
It's not really about "giving back". There's no obligation to give anything back at all and neither should there be. Rather, the GPL is designed to globally maximise the freedom to use, modify and distribute a piece of software. The only freedom the GPL does not provide is the freedom to take these freedoms away from future users.
> Surely "hello world" is useful only if you release it under a copyleft licence since its purpose is to teach you how to get started with the language it demonstrates.

I would argue that "hello world" is useful only if you release it under a very permissive non-copyleft free software license or, better, as public domain, for exactly that reason. Copyleft is excessively restrictive for this purpose.
Google Now is the winter of our discontent.
While that's absolutely true, they make no assurances on that, so if you spend $900 and get nothing... Too bad.
Nice one! I love a simple timer that does exactly one thing. I could do with the google analytics though.

Another example of a nice, simple timer is this app:

http://stopthismeeting.at/

A friend of mine wrote it some time ago. It shows a five minute timer that ticks unintrusively; filling a slice of the pie every five minutes. Upon being clicked it starts in the five minute segment of the current hour. Show this during a meeting, in order to track the time that you have spent discussing something that should have been in the invitation email for the meeting to begin with. :)

Maybe you too can add another view (I believe a modern term would be watchface) to your stopwatch?
These are very good news. We have enough malware and spyware in play store.
I think joining a startup can help you gain technical knowledge. If a student is motivated money wise right from the college, he/she would definitely opt for big name companies. Ofcourse, this varies across geographies especially in terms of money.
Cocoa Police
Strap spy equipment and bio/chemical weapons to them.
I hope this will continue to be supported as I'll be including it in my projects going forwards.
He couldn't find it.
My point is that the poor lose either way, so yeah, it could be a good idea. Obviously a matter of degree though.
Which was the aerospace co?
Noob German – German pronunciation trainer
so, aprox. uh'buh oh t
Super interesting blog post! Well done!
Id like to know more info about that aerospace startup.
The money is earned on whales. I think on average, about 3% of F2P players pay, but those who do spend a large ammount of money on the game. The others simply wait. What I find more worrying is that so many play the bad free games instead of paying 3 bucks and get a "real" game.
I've used Ionic before to build hybrid apps. The performance on iOS and Android (with crosswalk) is really impressive. For creating MVPs, Ionic was crazy fast. What would have took a month or more for native (complex UI), was prototyped in a week. I'm pretty pumped up about this tool.
It's not a joke, and it works. A boxing match, or even a street fight in which there are no serious injuries, is a good way to bond, whoever wins.

You walk away thinking "This other person is willing to get into a fight with me, and fight fair". And the physicality of it does cause some amount of bonding.

Plus, the adrenaline in your system that builds up when you prepare to get into a negotiation and would otherwise have nowhere to go gets used up the way nature intended, which makes it easier to see things with equanimity afterwards.

That's an excellent starting point for any negotiation (assuming the fight was indeed fair).

We have evolved with physical fights as one of the cornerstones of our interactions with others -- you can repress it, be in denial about it, work against it, or work with it. What should a hacker do?

TLDR:

The point is not "who wins the fight wins the argument".

The point is "let's you and me fight, then afterwards, we can discuss the argument with more equanimity"
There's a 1 second delay when it starts...

function start()
{
if (modus=="running") return;
interval=setInterval(step,1000);
...

I feel like I'm missing something here.
It seems like roughly the same goal could have been achieved by condemning a comic book store and turning the space into a park. Is there anything to this article that isn't just the observation "People like to go where parks are" repurposed into anti-car propaganda?
How do you attempt to discredit your competitor's technology using any and all methods including for example mass electrocuting dogs?
Why would you not assume the opposite? I would assume the most experienced people with the most knowledge, contacts, and money to be in their 40s and 50s.
Yes all iPads come with the clock app.
Only the conversations that you have while holding down the button on the remote control that tells it to start listening to you.
I've long since become accustomed to the fact that people around me don't share the same interests, and I don't share theirs. There's basically no reason to try to have a conversation with people.
Yeah, that seems like a good approximation to me.. People are probably wondering why I'm sitting here mouthing about.

This is good sound clip actually.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:En-us-about,_a_boot,_a_bo...
Are Humans Really Headed to Mars Anytime Soon?
that's what i'm saying. i wish they did. when they suspended my app i was being contacted by another team from google, AdMob, to "help grow my business". so i thought i was fine as long as i can make them money. they got me excited, then suddenly removed my app.
I wish valet parking was more prevalent. Does the additional real estate space from efficient parking lots/structures justify the labor cost of providing free valet to customers?

Of course, the real solution lies in eliminating personal car usage altogether (e.g. Uber)
Chrissy’s Invite REVIEW
> Not snarky

I see you've never read Anthony Lane's film reviews. :)
Thanks for the post! I am glad to know my thought process was correct.
For what reason was your app removed?
"Electrocute an elephant?"

"I'm sorry, we're looking for original ideas. Next applicant!"
Why Is There No iOS Version of Pidgin?
If you ever want to use it again, you -should- be able to manually set your work locations in the Now settings. Theoretically. At least, that worked for me.
Homeschooling – DiY alternative to public education
As an Android and iOS user, I think this is a step in the right direction. As a player I'd rather have a curated games store that allows me to discover new games easily.