skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> I also wonder why people aren't crying out for decent layout management for the web

They have been, and that's why today there are things like flexbox[0] and grid layout[1]. It just took a long time for the browser vendors/standards bodies to be convinced and then spec these things out to work within the confines of the existing layout models.

[0]: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/CSS_Flexibl...

[1]: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/CSS_Grid_La...
It's ridiculous to think that the choice of GUI framework would have a measurable impact at a market level. There's no strong correlation between using a fad technology and market success, so it's incorrect to use one as a proxy for the other.
This. Relatedly, losing an easy Google News Archive was killer for some of the research I'd like to do. Several papers/articles I wrote in c. 2010 would not be possible to do today.
The point is - is this true or not? I strongly believe my assessment is correct.

As for the "lack of empathy" - I actually intended to add a coda, as to how the life of young Alyssa Rosenbaum was pretty miserable, and how I, as someone who grew up behind the Iron Curtain and actually lived and suffered for two decades under a stalinist-like dictatorship (unlike armchair libertarians who read Atlas Shrugged at Starbucks in a comfy western city, all decked up in turtlenecks and designer jeans), I sort of understand her visceral reaction to the horrors of that kind of regime. No, not "sort of"; I truly understand - again unlike western readers.

But then I said to myself - this is the accidental "thought leader" of a movement, the rise of selfishness and base instincts, that - if left unchecked - would burn down the world and put a stop to the project that has started 6000 years ago in Sumer, and still going strong, that we call civilization.

So pardon me if there's another side of me that says "screw Ayn Rand and her insane mumblings".
I found this quite fun to play with. Especially with the "how did it know" breakdown after. Cool!
What? No, the "entrenched organization" that regulates voting rings exists to keep HN from turning into a morass of marketing puff. The quality of the submissions and comments are literally the only thing of value here.
That must have been fun times!
2017 Pulitzer Prize Winner in Feature Writing
IndieHackers' founder got really good at getting startups to provide detailed information, and then also on publicizing the crap out of IH itself. If I had to guess, Stripe wants that skillset in marketing (or "growth hacking" or whatever else the cool kids call it now). All of that can feed Stripe's customer pipeline.
Making desktop apps might be a nice lifestyle business for niche segments, but there aren't many (any?) big businesses built on desktop apps any more. Microsoft and Adobe are doing well on the desktop, churning out new versions of apps they've been building for nearly 30 years, but I can't think of any company built in the last 10 years (at least) that came up that way.

In the meantime, here's one of those "web-based unicorns" you so despise: https://www.google.com/finance?q=amazon&ei=viTtWMGfNMWQ2Aa42...
Well we are moving to a web first world, and passing the terminal days of IRC. Trying to avoid web technologies isn't going to do anyone good. Best we can do is try to make them better are secure. Light weight clients can be written in C if you want. There's nothing that needs a web browser

Here's the spec if you're interested[1].

There's also a weechat script if you want a command line client[2]

[1]: https://matrix.org/docs/spec/

[2]: https://matrix.org/docs/projects/client/weechat.html
> “On one occasion a computer in the United States was compromised but, following infection, an uninstaller was launched within hours, which may indicate this victim was infected unintentionally,” the blog post said.

A surprisingly refreshing feature.
I think it's a lot less clear what the societal benefits of forcing copyrights to expire are. For patents, it's much more clear -- a patent prevents others from copying the invention, so its expiration allows other to use that invention for economically interesting purposes, which have a net societal benefit. So on the one hand, the temporary monopoly allows the inventor to profit from their invention, and costs others their ability to exploit it, and after a certain amount of time, those needs are reversed.

For copyrights, in the purest form, what do you really get from letting it expire? The only really tangible benefit is to allow people to obtain the work without having to pay anyone, and (theoretically) make it easier to preserve and distribute orphaned works without the permission of the creator. It seems like as a lawmaker, it's really not that hard to rationalize saying "I can pass this legislation, extending copyright, or I can directly cause Disney to forfeit X million dollars in revenue".

At least with a patent expiration, you can counterweight that by saying "I can extend the patent, and Boeing continues to get X dollars, or I can allow the patent to expire, and other companies get to use that invention to make Y dollars." The tradeoff is a little clearer.

I would love to see better rules for copyrights moving to the public domain, not so much for the sake of Mickey Mouse, but rather for obscure and orphaned works, as well as simply decreasing the cost for the consumer to improve accessibility. But it's very easy in my mind to see why this is unlikely to happen.
Thanks, this all makes a lot of sense.
Maybe its useful to you, but to be honest, I cant remember a single thing about the standup meeting I had today and I made a point of paying attention. People talk about like "blockers", but if something is blocking me I just go talk to whoever can fix that, and if I need to know about something I just ask people to loop me in. I dont need agile for basic communication skills
Japanese Scientists Plan to Drill into the Earth's Mantle
Is there a router/firewall distro or administration tool for OpenBSD that's recommendable (e.g. like pfsense without all the enterprisey bloat, or like securityrouter without the licensing stuff)?
Common Crawl has a new news archive started a few months ago (http://commoncrawl.org/2016/10/news-dataset-available/) and the Internet Archive has had one going for quite a while.
read it again, they were ripping IH for letting dubious submissions through without proper vetting.

2017 Feb: "I'm never using IH again"

2017 April: "I love IH"
you could do some advertising to get more readers.
Acoustic analysis of keystrokes is nothing new to most of us.

Some of us are even familiar with acoustic cryptoanalysis[0].

However, combine these methods with this[1] tech, inspired on the work done here[2], and we have ourselves an impending crisis on our hands.

[0] Acoustic Cryptoanalysis - https://courses.csail.mit.edu/6.857/2014/files/23-shroff-hu-...

[1] Extracting Audio From Visual Information - https://news.mit.edu/2014/algorithm-recovers-speech-from-vib...

[2] Eularian Video Magnification - https://people.csail.mit.edu/mrub/papers/vidmag.pdf

Let's run through a scenario.

Your office orders pizza every Tuesday at the same time, via a coworker's cell phone. You are working on a technology that has the potential to disrupt several leading industries that are in bed with the government. After much lobbying, it is decided one day that your call to Domino's is to be rerouted via your broadband processor to an operative that mirrors your order to the real Domino's, and hand delivers the pizza at the front desk.

On their way out, they place a small, embedded, self-destructable camera device that focuses on your fancy new plexiglass installment. Over the next few weeks, the device documents all keystrokes and conversations from the front desk, and finds a way to socially engineer a copy of your codebase. Next year, seemingly out of nowhere, another venture suddenly launches ahead of your launch schedule, with your exact business model. All because you wanted some plexiglass and didn't think it was worth the money to actively scan the entire perimeter for bugs daily.

If this sounds crazy and far-fetched to anyone, then it would behoove them to look into past CIA infiltration techniques and also to realize that this is exactly the kind of stuff the CIA exists to do.
I remember reading that getting good 3D printed/sintered titanium was a big thing for spacex rapid assembly - I wonder if they use the same techniques...

e.g. http://hackaday.com/2016/05/19/its-time-for-direct-metal-3d-...
Last time I used this on Android, there were 9 points but I couldn't use any one more than once. You can double back in a very limited way, but the more complex patterns I wanted to use were impossible.

I'm sure there's more written on this, but most patterns I've seen are just way too short. And hug the outer edge, are in-order, etc.
If you target the native OS widget set, you must have a separate code base for each platform's native widgets. Things like Swing and Qt don't cut it.

Macintosh users in particular are sensitive to things like the placement of and spacing between UI elements; if anything is "off" from the gold standard set forth by Apple, they will scream and bitch at you because perfect UI consistency is paramount with this crowd.

Web-based apps get something of a pass because they look and feel like Web-based apps (though not always; witness the grousing in this thread about the new Mac Spotify client). But things like Qt and the XUL-based Firefox, which try to look native but miss subtle details, fall into a sort of UI uncanny valley and are roundly rejected by the Mac community.
Well, the parent was talking about _bombing_, so Pearl Harbor is a reasonable point.
shrug, works for me.
It's really is depressing seeing the stuff about the great barrier reef etc. Hard to hopeful that we can change course when every indication is that we as a species are not capable of cooperating on such a level.

And even if everyone on earth agreed, who's going to enforce such policies? Would probably require a literal New World Order. Have fun getting the conspiritards (who would have been proven right) to go along with that one.

Hence, my "duck and cover" post elsewhere in this thread, that I sincerely hope was more joke than not.
How many winners do you intend to select?
If it's a loose tie, it's not a big deal that I don't know about their big life milestones. Sometimes I hear through the grape vine, but if not then the next time I see them we have a lot of catching up to do!

Would rather offer congrats in person than write a generic message on their social media wall.
A 10C rise would put us in the Cretaceous, the hottest time in the past 300 million years. It would melt all ice on earth and the globe would be unrecognizable due to sea rise. This has happened before. It hasn't happened in a couple centuries before.

A 3C rise will kill a lot of plants. A 5C rise will kill most of the plants, and if they can survive the change in biodiversity, the release of methane and CO2 from everything rotting, starving predators, and extreme weather and fire, life on earth might survive and eventually recover after a few hundred thousand or million years.

A 7-10C change over 300 years would, most likely, kill every single thing on the planet that was not transplanted by humans. There are only two ways to survive that without human intervention.

1: Be wide-ranging enough to spread very quickly to areas that become habitable as they open up. A few times a century the entire ecosphere will have to pack up and move to live in the changing climate as floods and deserts move things around. These plants would find it impossible to thrive over the long term and have very little chance of surviving.

2: Literally just tank the entire thing start to finish. For most plants, they will not be able to significantly change their range over this time. In ideal conditions yes, under the massively destabilized climate -disappearing coasts, halting ocean circulation, temperature swings from freezing to sweltering- no way.

The plants in northern Canada would have to be able to survive in tropical heat as well as they currently do in ice and snow. Plants in the tropics would have to survive 100 meters underwater. As the permafrost melts, plants will spread northerly- but the climate will catch up. Ironically it would be better if we killed 99% of plants right now so they could beat the climate. As it stands in a hundred years tropical vines will not be winding their way between New England evergreens- they will be dust in a desert. The pines outside my window will be choking in 40C weather. Boabab trees wouldn't survive in the soil here and Redwoods won't survive in Greenland.

NB: I don't mean to say I think the total collapse of life on earth is likely at this point in time. I think at present even humans are pretty likely to survive what's coming even if we stay our current course for 30 years. However I would give it better than 50% odds that a 7C+ warming would kill multicellular life. Most of the assumptions that you have to make to lead to warming that high necessarily kills everything, eg ice melting, circulation stopping, humans not giving a fuck, etc.
Wow, the blacklist of classes is really long.
'culture', 'diversity', what does this actually mean? As if London is going to become some kind of backwater! The tourists will still come. The migrants will still come. There are millions of migrants in London that will stay after Brexit.

And if there are fewer property speculators and the housing market cools off a bit, bloody good thing too.
The article doesn't have clear examples of the 19 types of smiles.
My analysis of the Voynich Manuscript text
> who is going to spend millions to fight them?

I am hopping one day everyone will be feed up and there will be millions in funding.

Personally I don't think this gets fixed till we can give special copyright to Disney and other corporations and free up the other 99.5% of copyright.
It does mislead the reader, because this pattern is the case for most malware, and has been for over a decade. If you only work on it on weekdays, you are probably not a CIA hacker.
We detached this comment from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14088559 and marked it off-topic. Please comment civilly and substantively or not at all.

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

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Write a letter to your future self
My search engine crawls its own results. The downside is the index is very tiny, under 100,000 pages.
The last 12 articles in my "blog" (http://web.onetel.com/~hibou/blog/Blog.html) cover my statistical analysis of the Voynich Manuscript. I have concluded that the text is almost certainly meaningless, and figured out how it could have been generated. My generated text has all the important statistical properties of the original, except for some details of paragraphing, which can easily be handled by postprocessing.

There's a related thread discussing it at Voynich Ninja: https://voynich.ninja/thread-1812.html
Rouhani’s Government Is Trying to Remove the Ban on Twitter
I have a uneasy feeling this isn't satire...
Ask HN: Anyone here using a microkernel OS as a daily driver(Desktop/Laptop)?
They will be party to a lawsuit; and I'm guessing that they'll settle for some amount even if they would almost surely win. Their legal costs will be far more than $800 in any case.
Italy has the 8th largest economy (by 2016 GDP) in the world. this is struggling? Italy doesn't have a struggling economy. Italy has a disappointing growth forecast to those who conflate growth with health. Tumors grow rapidly too.
I moved here over a decade ago, and it's fantastic. So much cheaper than Cambridge yet perfectly commutable, and great countryside to boot.

But yes, we tell everyone that it's really bad so we keep it to ourselves.
> when you're measuring your IRC client's memory use in hundreds of megs, there's a problem.

Not really, unless you're using most of your RAM or you treat this as a fundamental principle. I've never checked my Slack RAM usage, and I'm sure it's higher than if they built a great native app, but it's also never had any performance problem with Slack or any other application (okay, except for Eclipse, but I stopped using that when Android Studio came out).

> It isn't uncommon for me to need to choose which "essential" apps to turn off to get something done on a maxed-out MBP

And there's the key. You have a very specific use case that is probably extremely rare. I'm a full-time developer and as far as I know I've never been low on RAM on my first generation Retina MBP.
Whats the process for Google to make this sort of thing? Does some 7 figure exec say we need to make it easier to draw bikes and then Google gets their army of 10x engineers to make this happen?
Finance: The Ultimate Reading List
"Web technologies" makes it sound like it requires WebRTC or something. It's a set of HTTPS endpoints that you shove JSON-encoded messages at. Certainly a bit "fluffier" than IRC (no prefix-length binary protocols here, sadly), but much more interoperable in the modern world (i.e. you can write a browser extension that can speak directly to a Matrix server using the built-in JSON+AJAX APIs; Matrix servers won't need specific egress exceptions in enterprise firewalls; etc.)

HTTP2 (if used) already makes the metadata parts of the protocol pretty concise and low-overhead; it's just the messages themselves that are large. So it'd be nice if—at least for the message bodies—there was an optional binary layer-6 encoding (e.g. CBOR, BERT-RPC) that clients and servers could try to negotiate with their Accept headers, with an expectation that many servers would implement it, and an allowance for constrained clients that implement that encoding but not JSON.
Well, if you want to spin it positively, that problem might take care of itself. Literally.
I think I recall reading somewhere that the upvotes a story gets on the /newest page weigh more heavily in promoting the story to the top main pages, than the upvotes a story will invariably get when its on one of the first few main pages.

I don't have a reference for that, however, and I don't know if it is true or not.
Compared to the GP's "Jewish men..." notion, as though that were a useful group descriptor when it comes to behaviors. So, I suppose... compared to the often monolithic notions of Judaism that I so often encounter on and offline.
Data-mining, indexing, quotations, meta-data, have all been extracted before. It seems more like the degree to which Google are/want to do it, rather than the idea to do it?

If I get the same treatment as Google before the law then doesn't this mean I can copy any whole corpus of work, use it, recopy it, share it, make derivative works, etc., all as long as at the end I write something new - a music track inspired by their work, say? That appears to be what the judge is saying when applied to other works??
Python and the need for speed
This is dope. Salute to Courtland and Stripe.
There's something to be said for the emotional value of a recognizable symbol for the most powerful military in the world.

"But as a symbol... As a symbol, I can be incorruptible, everlasting." - The Batman
Was hoping for something original but nope:

> these services are not open
Flash player was A pretty minimal download and was not a resource hog. Shitty punch the monkey ads hacked together by people who couldn't program were the CPU killers
The real irony is that OP's bio says

> JavaScript Hacker at Slack

meaning he works for a company that heavily leveraged an existing protocol, IRC, for which there are already a metric fuckton of native clients and libraries for every platform under the sun.

Implementing their shitty web client was undoubtedly far more work than supporting a handful of native clients.
Yep, it's back up.
The Browser! https://thebrowser.com. I frequently see its recommendations percolating through to the front page of HN. 5 hand-picked articles a day drawn from every corner of the internet, covering philosophy, literature, technology and other things, linked, pithily summarised and available as email newsletter, RSS feed, or full-text Instapaper/Pocket auto-push.

Paid service ($34/year), but a month's free trial is available: https://thebrowser.com/try-the-browser

Disclaimer: I am associated with The Browser, but my affection for it transcends my professional interest :)
I've never heard of some governing body in France or England taking away the title of "software engineer" for someone who wrote faulty code. What are these governing bodies?
Yeah, the structure of the site isn't really conducive to RSS, while a site like the NYT or a friend's blog, with regular structured posts, is.
It's mostly CPU performances I experience. Rendering any video, gif, website takes sizeable CPU power (for a cheap CPU in power saving mode).

Never had issue with RAM. I can remember a few friends who bought netbooks with 2GB memory some years ago, they quickly realized that they simply cannot run their development environment in that. (I'm talking swap death where a click that should take 1 second to act takes 1 entire minute).
async-reactor – Async Stateless Functional Components with React
The crowd here will likely prefer the open source fountain, which is a markdown style language that can be used with your favorite editor:

https://fountain.io/

I'd recommend it to anyone -- even non-technical people -- it's a shame it wasn't what became the standard, but you can export to final draft format.
> A great alternative to Slack, in the spirit of IRC, is matrix[1]

Does it have Android and iOS clients?

If not, it's not a great alternative to Slack. It's not even an alternative to Slack.
> It should be possible to define a subset of the Python language, uninspiredly dubbed “TurboPython”, that excludes those features that stand in the way of high-performance JIT execution ...

IIRC this was part of the inspiration for rpython [1].

[1] https://rpython.readthedocs.io/en/latest/
>I mean, if you're going to say Windows Forms and WPF apps are not "desktop apps" then you're going to have to do a lot more than just declare that they aren't.

Windows Forms is a wrapper on top of MS Win32 API. And WPF is also based on native widgets wrapped (with some extended with managed code).

In any case, C# apps are not much represented in the majority of Windows desktop apps, most of which are written in C++ or similar, and surely all the succesful ones. Can you name your succesful C# desktop apps? (not in-house enterprise apps and no developer tools please. There where the users have no choice, even Java does well) I'll name the succesful C++/Delphi/native/etc ones and we can compare our lists.

>You're just listing ways that they are different. They both run in a virtual machine that abstracts away the actual machine. You know, the metal in the phrase "close to the metal."

A call to a native drawing lib that doesn't pass through 10 layers of abstractions and bizarro architectures is as good as a direct native call. Especially from something like C# that runs circles around JS performance.

But even so, few consider JS to be what makes e.g. Electron slow.
Inside Blue Apron’s Meal Kit Machine
At least in the US, 99% of developers are "exempt" and make the same pay if they work 10 hours or 100 hours. Overtime = "free" labor you can extract from your employees.
the hero we need
10 Tips for Hackathon Success
This would be great for flowcharts and diagrams. Sketch out a rough diagram on a tablet, and then have the shapes and lines "snap" to crisp versions as soon as they are identified. Even better if I could draw it on a whiteboard, take a photo, upload it, and get a response back as soon as it's done being converted.
Alphabet wants its lawsuit against Uber to play out publicly
The should not contact law enforcement when someone refuses to leave the plane because it's overbooked.

If someone is actually causing a problem or is somehow dangerous, then yes, by all means, call the police.