skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I am using both iOS and Android phones. Both have good and bad points. I am a hacker and sometimes I need Android's customization features. Most of my colleagues prefer Android because of it is hacky nature like me. But the reality is my wife cannot use Android. She had to tweak lots options that she don't ever need. Even my 1.5 years old kid can use iOS more effective than Android because it is much more responsive and well designed. UI is much more consistent that 1.5 years old kid can figure out how to do slide to unlock.

Apple producing hardware and software together and both of them equally important and should be complementary for success. I think that is why they cannot steal customers from Apple.
Movebubble, an app that aims to make renting in London suck less, raises $1.6M
Confused by true multitasking?

I picture an iPhone user who's discerning enough to understand the engineering trade offs, and prefers multitasking to be tightly controlled and specialised as it is in iOS.

I remember when Android users proudly touted Android's support for Flash. I think we've all since learnt why Apple made the decision to drop Flash. A mobile phone is a battery-constrained device. I want a device that's optimised for its constraints, even if that means developers get fewer toys to play with.
> Why should great journalism on screen be free when everything else comes at a price?

Much of what once came at a price is now available for free (to users). From sites like YouTube, Coursera, EdX, Skype, open access journals, etc. to content created and shared for free by millions of people on social media.

Why would news be different?
That's not the experience I've had in my faculty. My supervisor has referred to Nature and Science as "shiny PR journals". Besides, citations are what actually matter, because they show how popular your work is within the community. Why else would people who write cool software (GNU Parallel, Scipy, Numpy, etc) all ask for citations for their papers? If all that matters is "getting it published" and not "getting it cited", then they shouldn't care, right?
Great comic, but you should link to KC Green's site instead: http://gunshowcomic.com/gq/
Brian Will says that that whole OOP concept is bad (not to say about C++ which is OOP in the ugly way):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QM1iUe6IofM
> - Force people to convert their savings into consumption and/or investment, thereby providing a boost to GDP and employment;

So we shall all sacrifice our private property rights. There is stuff I own and I do not care if someone wants to take it for the GDP. It is mine and it will have to taken by force.

I have to say coming from a former communist country I'm really sickened by the Socialist direction Western countries are taking today.
It's unclear from the blog, but will Mondo be using Crowdcube's A/B shares?

A lot of Crowdcube investments issue two types of share depending on the investment size. At the higher end the A shares are regular shares, but smaller investors usually get B shares that are not equal and grant fewer rights.

The very simple question for Mondo, are all of the shares that you'll be offering via Crowdcube on the same terms as the shares that Passion have for their GBP 5m in the same round?
Quite a few languages do OOP f(self, args), not every OOP language does self.f(args).

Ada, Common Lisp and Dylan come to mind.
This is HN where the US is worse than the Stasi and that is not up for debate. Real smart folks here, at least they think they are.
Guide to make a WordPress Website
As long as there are companies, there'll be competition, and as long as there's competition, there'll be marketers helping one company to out-perform the others.
Airbnb 'delisting hosts for no reason'
The way I see it, I have limited capacity to build a mental picture of whatever I am working on. When I'm looking at pages and pages of verbose and repetitive code, it is quite hard. What does this bit do? Just checking the error condition and re-throwing the error. What does that bit do? Same boring stuff. Where is the meat?

When I'm looking at few lines of terse but complicated code, it is easier; it is all meat and little fat. Just enough to make a good steak.

But this only works if I understand the mechanics of that terse code. So when I work on something else for a while and I come back to some code for which I no longer have an accurate mental picture in my brain I need to refresh my memory.

I think mathematics is the same way. Imagine a full A4 page of equations. It is really hard, at least for me, to hold in my brain a mental model of what it all means. Sure, there's a ton of background that I need to be familiar with, but it's not in my mental picture. Imagine this: suppose you wrote rules for how addition works, and then multiplication, and then build it all up so you can do linear algebra. That's too much!

When I advocate terse code I don't mean it in a "here's my obfuscated C code sense". I mean that when I write "f . g . h" there might be more going on here than meets the eye, but as long as you know the rules of what . means in this context, it is super easy to follow.
> iPhone are so mainstream, so isn't so clear cut anymore.

No on countries where 500 euros is around the average salary and consumers have to pay full price for their devices.
Out of curiosity I just went to the Indy's website (now its only hope of survival). Unfortunately, my first thought was "damn, what the hell did I just click on?" If I want Kanye West, speculation on who'll be the next James Bond, and Duncan Bannatyne doing... something, that's what the Daily Mail's for. I really can't see how it has a chance.
if programmers are not actually solving similar problems as part of their jobs, sites like codility provide little value over standard IQ tests. all they do is waste the candidate's time and employer's money.
As far back as 1995, the association of banks here in Portugal created the PMB ("Porta-moedas Multibanco") which was a chip-and-pin card made for small transactions, and which didn't require neither a bank account nor an Internet connection to pay for stuff.

One would load it on either an ATM (using your regular debit card) or an authorized shop (using cash), and the card itself would store the balance.

They eventually discontinued in 2006, since it didn't really caught on.
Blockchain hiring UX design and Java back end (London, NYC)
True, But they also do much more things than Emacs does.
What isn't?

Without boost::format and boost::algorithm, std::string is a major pain in the ass to work with. Even including those two, there's still the distinct lack of unicode-awareness (and no, wstring doesn't help, and neither does "let's pretend it's all utf8 underneath".) And then there is the institutional problem that nobody agrees on whether, and if so how, to use std::string in their libraries' API's.

But on the bright side, string handling in C++ is not as painful today as it was in 2005, things do get better.
In my opinion, Internet can survive without commercial content. It worked in the early stages of the Internet, with people providing free services like BBS etc. for the good of the community. We would just move to more decentralized storage and communications solutions. We might actually end up even better than before.
I remember being drawn into the world of computers decades ago. Online your physical characteristics were irrelevant, your words and ideas were all that mattered.

When I read articles like this, it makes me think that some people don't like that.
This as well as £/shares seems like two key things that haven't been answered.
> Android might be a better choice but other than that it's really hard to image any rational person taking Android over iOS.

Assuming you can afford it, not everyone lives with US salaries and subsidized phones.
A new example of worse is better vs the right thing: the containers movement (esp Kubernetes) vs OpenStack.

Before that, (the early) AWS vs Grid computing/OGF.
Separate to the risks of investing, what are the risks of actually using Mondo as a bank?

I really like the idea but can't shake the worry of a huge financial loss is it actually possible?
I love when Android users project their inferiority complex in this way.

Yours, Smug iPhone User
This is true for fundamental particles. However, more than 99% of the protons mass doesn't come from its constituent parts. I couldn't find any papers on this question in the 10 minutes I spent googling (and I don't have my QCD textbook handy), but here's a few links:

* http://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/64232/your-mass-i...
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proton#Quarks_and_the_mass_of_...
Workout and hobby where you can see your results. You can touch them, eventually destroy.

You wouldn't believe how helping can be splitting wood with axe.
E=mc^2 doesn't come from the Higgs mechanism.
You're equalling basic human rights with the freedom to modify a tool (which the computer is). If you step back a bit you'll recognize that computers aren't the only important thing in your life.

Many people own cars and there's lots of proprietary things about them. Does that mean car owners are living in an authoritarian world? If those people just didn't ride cars they would be so much more free! It's the power to tinker with the cars, not the power to use that makes them free!

Electronics generally contain chips that are proprietary and that we can't change. And we usually can't change the firmware of those devices. Nobody seems to be complaining about that (except firmware in computers because that's supposed to be software again or something). Apparently we don't see how we're living in such an authoritarian world.

Computers and smartphones are also tools. Just like with the stuff before, the most important thing is that they do their job in a good way. Being a toy to tinker around with isn't one of them, at least for me. And that's the only thing your so called freedoms really give you.
I often feel that it may have been that we were already addicted to the internet, and thus were a little more inoculated to the newer version.

Conversely, a lot of people who didn't really like computers ten years ago are now hopelessly addicted to their phones. So maybe its just more practice, and we can look forward to more people doing this as times goes on.

If successful phone-based VR takes off though, we're all screwed ;)
Right now it's backed by some prepaid card provider. Once they get a banking license, bank accounts will be protected under government regulations, so afaik as secure as any other UK bank.
The app that could transform the lives of children with illness
Got a link to the talk/slides? As someone who works in a bank I'd be really interested what a truly green field approach looks like!
A good example is Go. Many have written blogposts describing how great it is that it's such a simple language because the code is easy to read. And I can't deny that. The code is simple to read.

But then I read through pages and pages of such code and all with little meaning. Here's a loop, here we check for an error condition, here's another loop, here we check check for another error condition. It makes it harder to see through all that and answer the question "what does this code try to accomplish?". At least for me, the more code there is, the harder it is to see.
The real problem with Android is security, it cannot just be tacked on as an afterthought.
Ken Owens, CTO of CiscoCloud shares his views on cloud native computing [video]
Because none of that is really free; it is a matter of determining the funding model. Newspapers haven't quite figured out the model, and during the transition we could end up losing a number of the 'quality' press and the institutional memory of journalistic practice that comes with the territory, which, depending upon your point of view, might be a net loss to society.

For example: Open access journals aren't free. They are paid for through predominantly public funding and pubic/private grants to researchers and universities. They are only free in the sense that we are getting rid of the middle-man (private publishers) that in many cases have increasingly dubious value (pretty much all of the labour is actually carried out by uncompensated researchers) and in many are actually parasitic.
5 reasons to embrace the cloud
Specifically UK bank deposits are protected up to £75,000 under the Financial Services Compensation Scheme. If you've got so much money that you have > £75k in a single bank for any length of time (house purchase etc aside) then you have a different order of problems.

http://www.fscs.org.uk/what-we-cover/eligibility-rules/compe...
Not directly related, but a fun anecdote.

During an art history course, the prof when at great length explaining how high art was unsuccessful, and true artists cursed to be starving, because the general public could not fathom, yet even remotely know, what is true art.
Half an hour later, she went to speak of the stupidity of (right-wing) politicians regarding art. "So the nazis divided art into true art and degenerate art. They did two exhibitions to showcase each, but they were well embarrassed that the 'degenerate' one was way more successful! Ha!".
I work at Mondo. We will be a member of the Financial Services Compensation Scheme (FSCS) and all customer deposits will be insured up to £75k per person.

During our current alpha test (and before we have a banking license), your funds are actually held by our partner bank Wirecard.

Edit: The internet beat me to it. My work here is done :)
> Plus there is a still a significant anti-banker mood where being a retail only operation could be of significant benefit.

If they are operating as a retail bank they will have the same regulatory constraints. I recall a previous attempt to create a bank was dropped after a basic set up of the legal framework to meet the regulatory requirments was estimated at £50million
I think what makes a tradition is the work that is in the original spirit of the project [1], not the exceptions to it.

I would argue that the original developers of Unix over at Bell Labs were horrified at X and the "monolithic" applications that were being developed for Unix.

So much so that they wrote an entirely new operating system, Plan 9 that pushed composability to a new level and also included its own windowing system called 8½ (which was rewritten later as Rio).

Rob Pike had this to say about 8½ [2]:

> The entire system, including the default program that runs in the window — the equivalent of xterm pasting between windows — is well under 90 kilobytes of text on a Motorola 68020 processor, about half the size of the operating system kernel that supports it and a tenth the size of the X server without xterm... The small size of 8½ does not reflect reduced functionality: 8½ provides service roughly equivalent to the X window system. 8½’s clients may of course be as complex as they choose, although the tendency to mimic 8½’s design and the clean programming interface means they are not nearly as bloated as X.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unix_philosophy
[2] http://doc.cat-v.org/plan_9/4th_edition/papers/812/
YC Summer application open
Interesting read. Neither an interview nor an article, it reads more like a stream of consciousness content centered around neuroscience tech.

The core idea (for those screaming tl;dr) is based on the initial quote "[t]he history of science has shown us that you need the tools first. Then you get the data. Then you can make the theory. Then you can achieve understanding." Ed Boyden feels that the tools part has been largely left undeveloped in neuroscience, and his group has apparently been working on the problem for the past decade or so.

One such new technology/tool that I found most interesting was:

> Our group had been developing a way of taking brain circuits and tumors and other complex tissues and physically expanding them to make them bigger. What we do to make the brain or a tumor bigger is we take a piece of brain tissue and we chemically synthesize throughout the cells, in-between the molecules, around the molecules, in that piece of brain, a web of a polymer that’s very similar to the stuff in baby diapers. And then, when we add water, the polymer swells and pushes all the molecules apart, so it becomes big enough that you can see it even using cheap optics.
Stephen Fry deletes Twitter account after Baftas 'bag lady' criticism
That's a good overview.

> (ideally in the early stages)

That's an important part of the original COINTELPRO in the 60s. While many people know the FBI targeted MLK, a lot of the FBI's counter intelligence goals were about preventing any leader from even forming in the first place, or allowing any critical mass of black people to associate, because association is power.

> rape of possession of child pornography

Note that parallel construction probably doesn't use anything so heavy handed in most cases. "Laundering" intelligence information is easy when the target is carrying a real-time tracking device. Most of the time they probably just inform the local police when/where you are driving. Then they simply need to tail you until they see you do something they can call a traffic violation. At that point they have probable cause which is good enough to get a warrant that can be used to "find" whatever they want.

> perhaps they first send disruptive internet commenters,

We have documents from GCHQ's "JTRIG" department that explicitly state[1] that's one of their primary methods.

> JTRIG Wiki

I suggest reading Greenwald's original reports[2][3] (which contain the source documents from Snowden's archive).

> only if the target is still a threat

That's the problem - it depends on how you define "threat".

> how much do they actually do, and what effect do they have?

I doubt we will ever know for certain, but if you're seriously interested in that question, then you should listen to former Guantanamo detainee Moazzam Begg's answers. He talked[4] at 32c3 about just how far we've fallen.

Also, it's important to remember that rights are about protecting the people that society hates. When a group of people is liked by society so they aren't a target of oppression, there isn't any need for rights. It's the people that most people see as not deserving of rights that need their protection.

[1] (from [3]) https://firstlook.org/wp-uploads/sites/1/2015/06/jtrig-540x5...

[2] https://theintercept.com/2014/02/24/jtrig-manipulation/

[3] https://theintercept.com/2015/06/22/controversial-gchq-unit-...

[4] https://media.ccc.de/v/32c3-7443-the_price_of_dissent

TL;DR - Watch [4]!

edit: I know [4] largely talks about the UK. While the UK is slight ahead of this slide towards dystopia compared to the US, the US has it's own problems.
They're used quite differently and that should be the characteristic defining them. A hairdryer and a car are both things built around a motor - yet they are hardly the same.

Lots of general purpose computing chips exist in all kind of devices, yet that doesn't make them computers. The great majority of people uses smartphones still mainly a communications device, just like they used phones before.
Web fundamentals – performance
In my personal experience, C++ suffers from a surfeit of programmers who don't have a perspective on just how unproductive C++ is, and fall into the trap of considering themselves as an elite based on the complexity of their language of choice. I'd recommend C++ programmers learn how other languages have moved far beyond C++ in usability, because that will help them in writing C++.
No, hardware is produced by big companies like Lockheed Martin. They adapt their proprietary solutions for NASA.
i've heard it characterised something like this: you need to program better than the average statistician, and apply statistics better than the average programmer.
Why not learn just one of these:
- programming languages with different paradigms (Functional, Imperative, Logic etc)
- Data structures and algorithms (implement a few in each paradigm)
- Compilers
- Digital electronics
- Operating systems
- Networking
- Math for CS
- Orthogonal: Art of debugging, collaboration, technical writing for documentation

Learning the fundamentals, becoming better at these will help one see through the 'stack of tons of languages, tools, frameworks' and yet be able to handle all of these with relative ease.

I wish 'Elements of Computing systems'[1] were there when I started as a programmer.

[1] http://www.amazon.com/Elements-Computing-Systems-Building-Pr...
I want to use QT Creator but I find some things frustrating such as finding out how to change compiler options in a reliable way. Sometimes it is QMAKE_CXXFLAGS or some other option in the .pro file. In every other IDE it is a tick box in project settings. Yes yes I know a tick box sucks but it sure makes things easier to remember how to do rather than yet another cryptic bit of text in a config file, I have enough of that anyway.
Slides are at https://speakerdeck.com/mattheath/handing-failure-in-microse...
Sadly not many of the videos are up yet. I'm pretty certain they were recording all of the sessions so they should be coming at some point via NDC.
Here's a way to get started:
* watch YouTube videos Jamie Oliver - he has lots of great intro videos, including all the equipment you'll need. You can always get one of his books. His video on knife skills really helped me out.
* get "The Joy of Cooking". It's a treasure trove of recipes which you can learn from.
* learn basic knife skills. You need 3 knives - a chopper, a paring knife, and a bread knife. Others will help you both those 3 are the essential.
* start simple and work your way up. You should be able to make eggs in just a few minutes. Learn a simple breakfast recipe, a simple lunch recipe (like a fancy sandwich) and a simple dinner.
* watch a few cooking shows. Even an entertainment show like Chopped will give you some ideas for how chefs look at a pile of recipes and compose something.
* if you drink, learn a few basic cocktails. also learn the basic red & white wines.

With a little bit of practice you'll realize that you just need to have a few stock ingredients on hand to be able to take care of yourself every day and cook for friends and family.

The feeling you get the first time you cook a meal for someone else is a great one. :)
I'd argue that a mutable by-value string type is not suited to most applications, hence why many other languages have avoided providing that style of string type as their core string type.
So true! Alton Brown is a genius. Plus he throws in a chemistry lesson.
This Stanford grad is one of the few female VCs in Southeast Asia
> For example, coding standard says every "case" statement has to have a "default" switch. grep "case", grep "default", and you get wildly different numbers!

I hope that's an error in the document. I assume they meant "$(grep -r 'switch (' . | wc -l) != $(grep -r 'default:' . | wc -l)".
Cnt: rkt container build tool
I'm not sure why you say that about the STL - you didn't give any examples.

Having worked with it a large amount at this point it seems to me to be mostly very well designed and focused on fundamentals of the parts of a program that are both common and non trivial.

Some things are messy (like hashing) some things are missing (like serialization) and some things would be incredible to have (like thread local heap allocation, lock free concurrent data structures, some sort of dynamic stack allocation, the functionality of something like capnproto, shared memory and memory mapping...), but in general it seems like it covers the fundamentals well.
I'm eagerly waiting for the day I can use emacs as my window manager.
Again, the assurances you get from a seatbelt are dwarfed by the safety harness, they aren't additive. That is, you are going to have to check everything very carefully anyways, anything that allows you to be less careful then isn't very useful, and can actually be counterproductive. Continuing the analogy, the cheap seatbelt kills you when combined with a fancy safety harness/ejection system; it isn't helping, and it can actually hurt.
Monday Motivation