skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
For the record Thunderbird's IMAP sync is not a reliable backup mechanism by itself. If many emails are deleted from your account, Thunderbird will sync (and delete your files locally) before you have the opportunity to copy them off somewhere safe. I know this from deleting all my mails off my gmail account (to make an encrypted archive) and trying to use TB as a reliable storage method -- since I had just taken a backup of my TB directory I didn't lose any mail, but it should be emphasized that TB with IMAP sync is not a backup mechanism.

However, there are some great TB extensions that will allow you to export your mail into a reasonable, portable format every so often. I use ImportExportTools to export my mailbox to an mbox file and store that file securely. I can use this file to reimport to Thunderbird or any other mail client, or even to read some mail directly. :)
You raise a good point (that it already is nerds only) - I hadn't thought of it that way.

I do hope it does see some increase in deployment, having used a WebOS device it really is quite nice.
Game Theory 101
What we need is for big, well funded companies to somehow use their influence to get bad laws changed...
Very interesting. I would love to see this for other programming languages, especially Ruby (probably fairly easy) or Objective-C (may be quite hard).
As somebody who knows and have done work for the Paperlex guys, I can genuinely say that they have a really interesting product, and the guys running the biz are bright. I think they're going to do well.
You do realize that US workers' wages dropping would pump more money into the rich corporations that they work for, right? Those corporations are going to go right on exploiting people - the only difference is that it would now be easier to exploit US workers in addition to workers in other countries.

It's not just US workers that would suffer. Workers in other countries would suffer when US workers stop spending ask much money on more expensive things, like, say, imports from other countries.

Sure, wages will balance out. But if everyone gets screwed by that, do you really think you've given workers a fair deal?

Finally, you say: governments would have to consider the possibility that workers (as well as employers) might be able to find a better deal elsewhere.

Disregarding the fact that it is prohibitively expensive for most people to just pick up and move to another country, wouldn't governments just end up saying "well damn, our workers are getting screwed - let's erect some barriers to foreign workers to fix it", thus bringing everyone back to the same place eventually?

I just don't think it makes sense to open the floodgates to foreign workers. I think a better answer would be US foreign policy that encourages other countries to invest/nurture their high tech sectors.
Try blocks: http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blocks_(C_language_extension)

If you use Clang you can use them on non-Apple platforms.
> The problem is that C++ doesn't have finally/unwind-protect and thus requires RAII to approximate it.

I don't agree with this statement, at least for finally v RAII: RAII is far superior a tool to deal with scope and resource management, as it requires less work on the part of the resource user and is as a consequence far more secure. It also ties in with C++'s memory semantics and therefore exists "for free", which is nice. Even more so in as messy a language as C++.

RAII has issues, one being composition (a subject on which `finally` is worse, not better) and the second one being "in-place" operations, which `finally` can handle but — at the end of the day — should probably be implemented separately.

`unwind-protect` handles both case very nicely and is therefore — as far as I'm concerned — superior. Although it has an (easily dismissed) "inconvenient" over RAII of adding a special form to the language.

Smalltalk's `BlockClosure#ensure` is also quite nice in that department, though I'd say slightly inferior to `unwind-protect` as building on it is more expensive.
COPPA is pretty far afield from my area of expertise. I'm more than happy to encourage people back at the plex to talk about the situation with COPPA and our services though.
Thankfully, this is the Kindle Touch, not the Kindle Fire. I"m guessing maybe 1% of people will use their Kindle Touch as an MP3 player, so this is mostly positive news - A jailbreak vector with little damage seen in the wild - the potential is their, it's just unlikely to be leveraged.
They're part of http://www.themonsterengine.com/ which asks children to draw a monster. The artist has an interview with the child about their drawing, and paints the child's drawing.
How to Spot a Scammer
I've been looking forward to the day I have time to allocate to learn vim. This post was the first one I've seen that would allow me to jump in it quicker.
It is an inadequate measure, and what I meant is that in that dimension, men still have it better (I suppose in my attempt to be pithy, I opened myself up for misinterpretation). Economics is a metric that's relatively easy to measure as opposed to personal happiness and so it's a yardstick we can look at that's not unrelated (as a grad student that left a good tech job for school, I can say not having to stress about the state of your bank account is a privilege that I took for granted). And from what I've read in recent studies regarding happiness among men and women, men seem to be doing better at the expense of women (see, for instance, this 2009 overview: bpp.wharton.upenn.edu/betseys/papers/Female_Happiness.pdf)

So yes, I definitely agree with you in that quality of life is made up of so much more than your economic situation, but making enough to live on (with a strong emphasis on enough) is for a disproportionate number of women a source of unhappiness and unfulfilled aspirations. I suspect if we as a society were to attack the root causes for the gender gap in wealth and income, we'd also rectify some of the causes of unhappiness for both genders.
There is lots of relevant research on gender stereotypes identifying how early these stereotypes are formed[1]. The inequality is equally bad in scientific research too, with even the most advanced countries performing bad in that respect [2].

1: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Draw-a-Scientist_Test

2: http://ec.europa.eu/research/science-society/document_librar...
I'm not sure that I understand these. The artist seems to assume that the children intend every single stroke and odd shape, which seems to miss the point.
While you're right that intelligent autocompletion is not a feature of a programming language, clearly it's much easier to create one for some languages than for others. It's not a coincidence that there's still aren't any really usable intelligent autocompleting editors for JavaScript but there is a number of very high quality ones for C# and Java.
Advanced Bash Scripting
You can substitute "user", but as william42 pointed out, the distinction means little. Feel free to bring up to anyone here relying on VC that their users aren't their customers, and be amazed once again at how little insight that provides.

If you want to contribute some signal instead of noise, you could say they have two sets of customers with sometimes opposed motivations. But that isn't uncommon (and if it isn't another set of customers, it's your suppliers or the hours in the day or something else). As I said, everyone plays the balance game.
What's with this "Chrome marketshare has surpassed Firefox, therefore Firefox is worthless" meme that is going around lately?

Firefox still has >25% browser share[1]. That gives them de-facto control of the searches from a large number of of them (excluding the people who change their default search engine).

If Mozilla can't get >$100 million a year form Google with 25% of the world's deployed browsers then I'm going to start a search engine and pull an Lycos[2].

[1] http://gs.statcounter.com/

[2] I think it was Lycos. One of the early search engines bid money they didn't have to get a placement on the Netscape search engine, and then went and got funding based on the placement.
> And I'd make some of the CoffeeScript syntax standard,
> and maybe bring in some concepts to keep spaghetti
> callbacks under control.

You may be interested in keeping an eye on this branch:

https://github.com/jashkenas/coffee-script/issues/1710
Grants for teaching the world to read
Yes, pyrasite does just that with a python wrapper around the gdb commands.

https://fedorahosted.org/pyrasite/

It was discussed here:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3014484
I think that includes the time to transfer the data.
Try the Code Review StackExchange - this is hardly the right place for your post.
I started reading this a few weeks ago, and was struck by how much casual magic there seemed to be in India at that time. In the parts describing his childhood, every other page described a mystical experience. It made it a little hard to connect with my life, and by extension, trying to understand how it might have affected Steve Jobs. My only (cynical) explanation is that the magic was a result of a yogi cult of personality, which Jobs was able to use later on.

I'd be interested to hear what other people thought if they've read any of it.
An a[id^=up]:hover { background: green; } rule (and a similar one for down links) would do wonders to help with the usability of the up/down buttons.
I don't think I do understand, no. What does Hacker News not being written in C have anything to do with the discussion? Weren't we talking about iPhone apps?

Maybe I am wrong, I'm always happy to hear a different perspective at least.
What about Star Office and Blender, didn't they start as closed source and now live on happily as open source projects? (I might be wrong, too lazy to look it up).
> I'm often disappointed by some of the front page submissions these days

The supposed decline in submission quality is mostly an illusion. PG set up a page that only shows submissions by older users (first six months or first year --not sure which) to evaluate the supposed submission quality decline:

http://news.ycombinator.com/classic

Additionally, everything has an item ID #, so if you want to prove it to yourself, you can go through everything sequentially.
Hey, works for relationships too. Smart people often don't have it the easiest in society, and can tend towards too much reticence and inhibition. You can't get accepted if you don't try. The important thing is that you learn from your non-successes, maintain a positive attitude and more than anything, keep trying.
That wasn't my implication. When I originally started with HN, I was telling myself I didn't want to join another community and all I wanted was aggregated links worth reading.

I am now 917 karma into said community. The wagon, I fell off it.
For ObjC:

https://github.com/albertz/Pyjector (and then access the ObjC runtime via the Python ObjC bridge)

https://github.com/albertz/FScriptAnywhereSIMBL
Solid advice. I like the idea of minimizing plugins and mastering the fundamentals, because this is true strength of vim.

If I was pinning my productivity on customizations then emacs would be the clear choice.

If I wanted the perfect coding environment for language X, there's a good chance it would be an IDE.

But with vim, I can open any text file on any system and edit the hell out of it amazingly efficiently. It's extensibility is a nice bonus (very nice in some cases! eg: https://github.com/tpope/vim-fugitive), but at its core it's about raw text manipulation.
We've been using rfoo to do this. It doesn't seem to impact performance when you're not using it. When you are using it, it's unsafe if you do unsafe things. We primarily use it for debugging by passively inspecting the messed-up portion of the server's state.
I was under the impression that you could already do that in Ruby, although I don't use it much and very well could be wrong.

Edit: Never mind, I just tried it and got an error.

Weird. I could have sworn I'd seen it done somewhere.
Ask HN: I have some loyal users. How do I get more of them?
I made a site called http://cyrolaughs.com/videos/267601721-1XF7b_MNEIAg the weekend before Thanksgiving. It's like stumbleupon for videos.

I posted it here on Hacker News and got some really good feedback. I've done some very basic moderation and added a few features that users have suggested.

I have a problem that I'd love to get some advice on.

Right now, I have ~30-40 unique visitors/day after my initial HN spike. They're accounting for ~200-700 pageviews/day (yesterday 600 pageviews on average 15 pageviews per visit and are spending on average ~19 minutes on the site). I'm getting some people to stay on the site up to a couple of hours.

It seems like the site is reasonably "sticky" but I don't know how to generate more traffic. I've been posting the "top videos" of the day on my friends' walls on Facebook and I have been tweeting a video per day, but that will only get me so far.

I'd definitely be curious about ideas on how to move this project forward.

Does anyone know of old threads here on HN about this? Or other blogs that talk about this sort of issue? I really appreciate your advice.
Nicely done. A new or returning vimmer will profit from following his advice.

His best recommendation is at the top: don't configure a lot of settings and plugins at first. Start with a minimal setup, and slowly work up from there when needed. In particular, don't copy someone's huge .vimrc.

In fact, that's good advice for any tool or technology: start minimal, and only add what you need, when you know you need it.

To his minimal initial configuration, I would suggest one addition: set a colorscheme that looks good to you in the terminal/gui environment you normally use, and choose from the default schemes rather than downloading a pack of them. I like elflord (it doesn't use a lot of red, which is hard to read on a black background), YMwillcertainlyV.

To see which scheme you're currently using, open an existing file in your favorite language and then:

:colorscheme

To cycle through the available schemes:

:colorscheme<space><tab>

Each tab will show you the next scheme's name; hit enter to try one.
> Since creating an object requires specifically allocating it on the heap, having it destruct when the pointer leaves scope is no good.

It is actually possible for compilers to help out with this in many cases:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Escape_analysis
My Predictions for 2012
I do this, but I buy all most of my books from www.betterworldbooks.com. It has free shipping to Argentina(where most pages won't even ship here, and Amazaon charges a hefy fee), and it gives a lot of the profits to charity. Getting books in their original language is damn ahrd here, and I care a lot about that. I don't like reading translations if I can help it.

But honetly, the bookstore seems to be blossoming here. I've seen more bookstores opening than closing in teh last few years. Specially ones that serve coffe on the side(or maybe it's their main business), and ones that selled niche or used books. I'm sure the fact that importing books is ahrd for a private citizen has a lot of imapct on this. Shipping from Amazon takes at least two weeks, and I've waited as much as two months for a shipment from BWB. And I can't even think of a good book page for books in spanish, but I can't say I've looked to hard for that.
To my knowledge complying with COPPA is a difficult and tedious process. Common sense does not apply, and in fact, in my understanding, can often put you in violation of the law (for example: stating that you are going to remove someones access for being underage , because then they can reasonably understand that lying is in their best interest).

Blame your own government, not Google.
He brings up the point of Symbian going open source and having a fallout. I think this is different. Symbian was a old, tired OS that wasn't extremely exciting. webOS has a fairly active homebrew community that will do some pretty cool stuff with the source.

Also symbian was pretty much a phone-only OS, and I'd imagine was pretty tied down to feature phones. webOS will most likely be ported to netbooks pretty early on when it's released (the development emulator runs an x86 version), thus making a low-power consumption cloud-based netbook environment.
Ah good catch. Thanks.
Reducing Abandoned Shopping Carts
Thanks for the link. I haven't used C# 4.0 or later, but your anonymous tuple thing looks good.
22nd Dec aka the EA Massacre: Why we are skipping it
It's a complex topic, which I suspect cannot be done justice in a post on HN.

I am currently being evicted. My mother has informed me that due to my father's medical situation, I am not welcome to come home again. My two adult, unemployed special needs sons still live with me. I am deeply in debt and in very serious trouble. In some sense, I suppose I probably look like "the poster child" for all the financial issues your "typical" divorced homemaker can have. But it's really not that simple.

I have a deadly genetic disorder. So does my oldest son. I not only raised my sons, I also homeschooled them for many years. They both have a long list of special needs but are also incredibly intelligent. I nearly died about 11 years ago and this led to being diagnosed late in life with "atpical cystic fibrosis". All of this ultimately led to me getting divorced, in part so I would be in a position to save my life and get well. My sons were on the same page with me. My husband was on the same page with the doctors, who were all too happy to wash their hands of trying to get me well and just blame my genes.

I could not have gotten well without the ongoing dedicated care of my two sons, who were 11 and 13 when this journey began. I had their backing when most of the world was actively trying to talk me out of my crazy scheme to actually take care of myself. Getting well has destroyed me financially but had I not gotten well, I would likely be in worse straits by far, both financially and in overall quality of life. I have gotten off boatloads of drugs and the hole in my left lung has closed. I have been well enough to work a full-time paid job the past five years, which I really was never well enough to do before. The condition I and my son have is one of the more expensive, chronic medical conditions around. And though I have gotten myself basically health, there is no cure. For me, it will be a case of "management" for the rest of my life, but the answers I have come up with are vastly superior to anything else out there, both in terms of quality of life and in terms of financial impact. This miracle could not have been pulled out without the backing of my sons.

I wish there were easy answers with regards to the whole gender equality thing. I think of such things as a matter of "sexual morality" in that as long as heterosexual people have sex, children will result. Human need is a complex thing and cannot be boiled down to any one thing, not money, not length of life, not career success. Given the details of my situation, in spite of my current dire financial situation, I think I got the better deal in keeping the kids. If I get through this, a career can come later. But first I had to live. I've done that.

Perhaps it's time to go play a game. Examining my navel in public is an old habit that I like indulging but it often comes across as shocking, disturbing and problematic for other people.

Peace and have a great evening.
Social media in the workplace: To ban or not to ban?
In C:

- Allow labels to be followed by variable declarations or the end of a block.

- Change switch to make each case its own block, and not fall through by default (but add a keyword to explicitly fall through).

- Support labeled break and continue (often much clearer than goto; sometimes separating the inner loop into its own function is clearer than either, but not always).

- Change the precedence of & and |.

- In do/while, evaluate the loop condition within the block's scope:

do { int a = ...; } while(a);

- Allow variable declarations anywhere in an expression: not just

while(int a = ...)

as in C++, but even

while((int a = ...) == 0)

or

getvalue(&(int a));

- Standardize some GNU extensions such as ({ }), void pointer arithmetic, __attribute__((pure)), and __builtin_unreachable().

- Standardize visibility.

- Standardize Apple blocks.

- Tuples, with quick unpacking:

{int a, bool ok} = func();

- Explicit control of may-alias, something more powerful than restrict.

...This is fun.
Perhaps it was "legal" but still "unlawful" as personal copying was tortuous whilst distribution was illegal under criminal law?

That is the lawyer can claim "it's legal" whilst knowing that they're acting unlawfully?

http://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/1609/whats-the-diff...

(Perhaps someone with legal certification could confirm).
My bad. (Perhaps it implies I'm a "karma whore" that I jumped to the wrong conclusion?)

I hope you don't really regret the fall.
Can someone explain to me what WebOS actually is?

Wikipedia says it is based on the Linux Kernel, so is it like Android which sits on top of a small Linux kernel, but has its own API for UI and telephony?

My understanding is that to achieve fluid, high FPS UI we need to HW accelerate, which means getting specs from HW manufacturers, which traditionally has been a problem for Linux hobbyists. The people who have access to these are the manufacturers. In this sense, WebOS would have difficulty achieving any kind of traction.
RTFA. They want developers to move to Austin. Developers in the Philippines or India need not apply (unless they have a greencard).
Zope has this facility and boy it was useful for troubleshooting live systems.
Most drugs have to license 1-2 patents at most.

If you get rid of software patents, this problem becomes quite manageable in the medical world.
Hence "not yet".

It's been amazing watching the performance surge in postgres these past few years. I wonder if Red Hat or similar will try sponsoring a tilt at the TPC-C crown in future.
Not related to Moscow protests, but I saw a segment on the news last night that the local fisheries patrol will be using UAVs to patrol for illegal fishing. The UAVs will operate 24 hours a day and continually sweep the restricted zones for fishing operations.
Or Cycript, which all of us iOS hackers use. ;P

http://www.cycript.org/
http://iphonedevwiki.net/index.php/Cycript
Right. The "new" keyword is never necessary and is usually actively counterproductive. In Java, "new Hammer()" must allocate a new object and it must be exactly a Hammer instance, and to work around those limitations we get the joy of AbstractHammerFactoryFactory. In Python, "Hammer()" can return an existing object and it can be a subclass of Hammer; callers don't need to know the details.
Objective-C also has Cycript at http://cycript.org/, which has a hybrid syntax of JavaScript and Objective-C and supports injecting into any running process.b
Facebook IPO to create 'thousands of millionaires'
That would be my answer for Python as well. Interesting that both languages have the same flaw, when they're normally very good about eliminating boilerplate.
"I'm confused about what the smoothing is supposed to be doing"

If you have, for example, 300 data plots collected once a second for 5 minutes, and that looks too noisy when you paint your chart, you may choose to smooth the lines by aggregating the data into buckets that are larger than a second. For instance, you might choose to sum all the plots in a minute, and divide that sum by the number of plots that were in that minute, thus reducing 60 plots to one while retaining an accurate representation of your data.

When you drag that slider, you are aggregating data into larger buckets.

Good luck in your travels finding a chart library that works for your application, and if you try Rickshaw and hit any stumbling blocks, hit us up on github.

Cheers!