skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Thanks eps. We wanted to limit who could ask questions primarily to keep quality high and to alert users when their question is answered, but this is something that we might open up if people prefer it.
I'm not sure what you're trying to say, and what the reference is about.

Is Fn-Backspace sub-optimal for forward deletion compared to a dedicated key? Sure. But it's there.
Who makes this? Launchers have access to way too much for me to feel good about trying one out on a lark without knowing a little about who made it.
Why are televisions interesting? PS3 and Xbox graphics are so many years behind PC now...

Have you seen one of the new iPad screens? It's hard to believe that that kind of DPI on computer monitors isn't going to have huge adoption.
Meet Svbtle, the blog tool you're not invited to, and Obtvse, its clone
https://blogs.msdn.com/b/wesdyer/archive/2007/02/02/anonymou...
I think this nicely illustrates why syntax highlighting is so much less popular with the older crowd. If you grew up without it, it looks bloody stupid. (On the other hand, if we had grown up learning to write colorized English from childhood, having to write without highlighting would be extremely aggravating.)
What is askolo technology stack?
The Google problem: paying for 'Angry Birds' with battery life instead of money
We're doing this at scale at MixRank-- it'd be interesting to chat. Mind shooting me an email? (scott at mixrank.com)
That node.js or iOS app startup is looking better all the time...
Yes the AZERTY Apple keyboard is full of suck (then again, so's the base one — at least the french layout, AltGr + 6 for a pipe? How about no?)
Why isn't F# in the list?
I think we need another thread of favorite scripting languages. Shell would have more than 15 points then.
You can trace the outlines and produce an exact or almost exact copy, and that's what Ariel actually is.
Ask HN: How useful are these "ambient apps"?
That's all I hear these days. Many teams are out there to "re-define social networking" by incorporating geolocation, mutual friends, common interests based on the FB social graph using push notifications to connect you with relevant contacts. Apparently many people in the valley hail this as the "next big thing in social networking". Highlight was hyped to the hilt only to get mediocre responses.

I'm based on the EC so there're not many early adopters here, so I would love to hear your thoughts. My question is, have any of you actually used these apps, cared to met someone at a nearby location and felt connected with this person to be your new friend? I just don't see how these apps can provide enough relevance for me to go out of my way and meet up with a stranger, who in the worst case scenario may or may not be a serial killer.
The FFI is still far better than most of the other FFIs for other Linux-targeting languages. Yeah, and MonoDevelop is not equal to Visual Studio, but it's a damn sight better than almost any other OSS IDE.
The beauty of Java is that is not ONLY a language, it´s three things:

1. A runtime environment
2. A software ecosystem
3. A language.

:)

So you can use 1. and 2. without having to write a line of Java if you
don´t like it. There´s plenty of languages that run on top of the Java
virtual machine: JRuby, xRuby, Jython, NetRexx...

Even Lisp and Cobol if you want.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_JVM_languages

There´s a yearly summit about new languages ported to the JVM...
http://openjdk.java.net/projects/mlvm/jvmlangsummit/
The End of Support for Firefox 3.6, Windows 2000, and Windows XP RTM & SP1
I don't mind the handing over information part, but I will almost always leave a website that wants me to register without showing me what they do. It's laziness on my part, and I don't complain about it in public, I just don't sign up for those websites.

Sites like this are just throwing away users for no good reason.
Old style tweet printing machine
Fight club? I'm talking about ostracism, not violence. It's sort of like the Perverted Justice except instead of going after pedophiles, it goes after corrupt government (which often involves pedophilia). PJ doesn't advocate violence. It's a public shaming mechanism.

How is that not a mechanism for promoting change? If bureaucrats and politicians are no longer safe behind a veil of anonymity, and must fear social ostracism, they're much more likely to behave. What's wrong with that?
Like the clean interface. Much better than formspring.me

However, each question requires its own permalink. So that people can share a particular Q&A.

Another idea suggestion would be, create a popular answers tab on all users page. So that if someone has answered 101 questions, his best answers don't get lost.
This solves a big pain point that I have with Quora. In the early days when Quora was in private beta, it was great because "celebrities" like Zuckerberg, Evan Williams and people like that would answer questions. But as it grew, particularly after becoming public it just didn't scale and all the elite-members left for the most part.

By focusing on people it seems like askolo will be able to avoid that fate as the celebrities won't get drowned out. One danger is to make sure the celebrities don't get annoyed/hounded too much. Need to strike a balance between feeding their ego (hey lots of people want to ask me things, sweet!) and annoying (ugh.. ANOTHER friggin question email). I'm sure you guys will be able to figure it out.
They're called the downvote mafia. Little to do about them.
How to Build a Killer Startup: A Chat with Chill’s Brian Norgard
There are two ways of recursively calling lambda functions, neither perfect, but both usable.

Func<int,int> fib = null;
fib = n => n > 1 ? fib(n - 1) + fib(n - 2) : n;

Or write yourself a Y fixed-point combinator, described in http://blogs.msdn.com/b/wesdyer/archive/2007/02/02/anonymous...

delegate Func<A,R> Recursive<A,R>(Recursive<A,R> r);
static Func<A, R> Y<A, R>(Func<Func<A, R>, Func<A, R>> f) {
Recursive<A, R> rec = r => a => f(r(r))(a);
return rec(rec);
}

used like this:

Func<int,int> fib = Y<int,int>(f => n => n > 1 ? f(n - 1) + f(n - 2) : n);

(I'm not advocating writing a fib function this way, but it's a useful example!)
Well, I signed up. Let's see what happens...
Lame complaints may be a problem, but I'm not so sure about complaints in general.

A link like this exists to give you a one-sided case for using an app. Following that up with a counterpoint seems like the most informative way to proceed. I think the HN standard should be that comments of the form "This would likely improve your product" deserve to be voted up, while "Here's why this won't work" should be voted down.
I agree with this sentiment, and I voted for D because of what it is meant to be. They want it to support any paradigm, with any abstraction layer, and be useful in almost any context. I like that kind of freedom. Especially in a native compiled language.

No, it is not there yet. The hope it that it one day will be. Because that would be amazing. It is already about as easy to write as Java, and usually beats it in performance.
Authentication Systems: Per-Site vs. Single Sign On
This is so short sighted it's almost laughable. "640K ought to be enough for anybody!", right? You think graphics are somehow to flatten off in the near future? Far from it, we are going to continue to see exponential growth in graphics horsepower and developers leveraging that power in games and rendering.
They raised $1.5 MM.
If it was protected by a design patent, it's expired by now (they last 14 years).

> could someone take a bitmap screenshot of Helvetica, product a font from it, and distribute that font?

Yes, and not only can they, people in fact do it. That's basically what Arial is, and there are open source versions as well.
Free software downloads
Comprehend (YC W11) is hiring, making big data analytics software
Help me Hack the Lottery or, the worst $90 investment ever
Wow, there are people who actually like JavaScript?!
Got it. I'm already looking into it.
The Essence of Blogging, A UI Experiment Inspired by Svbtle
Birth of a Book
If the permission system for apps is a whitelist of installed apps the parent has approved, then installing an app from the market wouldn't necessarily allow the newly installed app to run. The new app would just show up on the device-administration page for the parent to see and decide on.

Now, if the kid uses the market to uninstall the Kyte launcher itself... then I'm guessing the stock launcher or a pop-up asking what launcher to use would come up.
Hey rednum, thanks for the feedback. You can do some basic filtering on both the newsfeed and the individual page if you look right above the questions section. It's set to show all by default, but I think we can probably do a better job of making that more prominent.
I'm using a lot more (including django-registration) with 1.4, go ahead.
Ok that makes perfect sense. I know basic has been largely set aside for quite some time now and I always wondered what the point of learning a useless language was... this is the kind of stuff that I am trying to avoid wasting time on.
I voted Ocaml because it is what I'd call my favourite language: of all the language I have actually used, it is by far the one I enjoyed the most, and the one that made me most productive.

However, Ocaml is not the end of it. I know of Haskell, and I sometimes resent Ocaml's value restriction, or lack of laziness. I know of Lisp, and I sometimes resent the complexity of Camlp4.

However, Haskell and Lisp are not the end of it. See, http://vpri.org/html/work/ifnct.htm and http://www.vpri.org/pdf/tr2011004_steps11.pdf showed that with the right tools, a few hundreds lines of code is sufficient to make a TCP stack, or a Cairo-like graphic system, or even a whole programming language stack that's more powerful than Lisp itself. When I see that, I know that I think Lisp, Haskell, Forth… are already obsolete. The market just doesn't know it yet.

However, COLAS and OMeta and Maru are probably not the end of it…
You have not been following Groupon closely enough for this sort of analysis.

Consider the biggest change Groupon has made in the past 5 months was the implementation of Groupon Scheduler. Scheduler is a free booking service to help merchants of the world organize appointments. It's free except for a link to Groupon-- the price of using the scheduler is awareness of the fact that you could run a Deal or Now! deal with a few clicks and a phone call.

Considering that Groupon spent so much of their engineering talent on Scheduler, it's easy to see how a company with universal small business appeal like Fee Fighters in it's current form (give or take a few reminder links) becomes super desirable to Groupon.
Clever PR: Facebook bends a non-story to their favor
I had no idea Google even had classes
Great suggestions. You can actually share an individual Q&A using the "share" link right below the answer.
How does it compare to QtCreator, do you know?
I don't have an answer to your question off the top of my head but I am curious as to why you would want to download all of the open source code on there?
Amazing how fast the original idea has evolved. There are now at least three versions being simultaneously developed and two of them didn't even exist a day ago.
From a business perspective converting every potential customer to a happy paying customer that you can profit from is the best. Extracting the highest dollar that each customer is happy to pay will make you the most money but is very hard to do.

Flat pricing can keep some customers that would have paid more from having to do so, which is one reason I like it so much as a consumer.

I am amazed with the success of http://www.humblebundle.com/ in non traditional pricing. more economics should be built around what people are happy to pay.
Go without a doubt.
FB is indeed probably upset because employers were stupid and started asking applicants for their info directly instead of going behind their backs and asking FB for it instead (which FB would have happily given them ... for a fee, of course).

It's pretty likely FB will quietly roll out a paid background check service (which will be hyper-secretive and kept whisper-quiet) at the same time they are publicly grandstanding about this issue. In the linked article, there is a link to a second article about a US Senator who is currently crusading on this issue. He comes right out and says there will be exceptions for law enforcement, government contractors, and jobs with security clearances. Look for them to extend those exceptions until social media spying is back to being a de-facto part of applying for a job, any job. They're going to legitimize this while pretending to be fighting it.

(sounds paranoid, yes ... until it happens)
Yes, IBM has fabs that are similar to GF.
> In selecting a typeface, you're also necessarily selecting the font

No, the reverse of that. A typeface of the overall look, a font specifies the size and things like bold, italic.

So what is commonly called the font is really the typeface, and what is called the size is actually the font.

Back when fonts of a specific size were physical thing this mattered a lot - you only had a limited number of fonts for each typeface.
No, users who have already installed the app get the same experience as when they originally downloaded it.

And there's nothing automatic in our wrapper that 'calls back' to trigger.io and modifies the user experience based on that. We simply ask that if you continue distributing the app in the app stores that you pay the appropriate tier.
Things You Didn't Know About... Math
Does this actually work? Could I email you offline about your process?
Plus, even if cooling between layers were figured out, we'll probably just end up with lots of transistors that we can't all power on at once, since we're already at practical power draw limits for most devices.

We don't just need to cram more transistors on a chip, we need those transistors to use proportionally less power (preferably even less than that).
good for you, happy coding then ;)
I guess Bash would fit under Shell ?
I took a gap year after high school, and am taking a leave of absence in the midst of my junior year in college- both experiences have taught me more about the world and myself than my time formal education ever has. I'd recommend the year off if at all possible.
Your Facebook user name and password is exactly like your copy of a key that lets you into their house. Your having picked the character strings used doesn't matter. You are entering their system when you use that key.

Them letting you put a bit of your furniture in their house (i.e. content you own) doesn't mean the house itself is yours. Nor does it mean that your permission to enter their system necessarily transfers to other people even given that you happen to give those other people a copy of the key.
Amazon lost money on every book sold for many years.

Worth a read: http://finance.fortune.cnn.com/2011/12/27/should-startups-fo...
Yeah, Go has a really great implementation of this.

I write a lot of Ruby, and it does feel awkward that Ruby wouldn't have this construct.
Not having pretty font rendering must be so hard on the poor Windows minority, suffering under the stifling oppression of the Mac OS majority... Oh wait...

Seriously, if you want pretty font rendering, complain to Microsoft. The problem isn't that the sites are designed on Mac OS, it's just that Windows' font rendering sucks. It's horrific. We can't fix that. What is it you want us to do, put all text in images? That's been the traditional response to your platform's horrific font rendering.
As someone who is just starting to learn to code, this is an interesting list, but I can't help but want more info. The "why" each language is preferred is missing. Obviously some of this is in the comments, but summarizing that text will take quite some time. I can't help but think additional related questions might provide greater context to each preference.
langs = list()

f = open('langs.txt', 'r')
content = f.readline()
while content != "":
line = content.strip()
if line != "":
temp = {}
parts = line.split(" ")
if "points" not in parts:
temp['title'] = parts[0]

nextline = f.readline().strip()
parts = nextline.split(" ")
temp['score'] = parts[0]
langs.append( temp )
content = f.readline()

newlist = sorted(langs, key=lambda k: int(k['score']))
print newlist

"""

[{'score': '6', 'title': 'Cobol'}, {'score': '6', 'title': 'Rexx'}, {'score': '7', 'title': 'Fortran'}, {'score': '8', 'title': 'Ada'}, {'score': '8', 'title': 'Pascal'}, {'score': '9', 'title': 'Groovy'}, {'score': '12', 'title': 'ColdFusion'}, {'score': '14', 'title': 'Delphi'}, {'score': '14', 'title': 'Tcl'}, {'score': '16', 'title': 'Shell'}, {'score': '18', 'title': 'Forth'}, {'score': '20', 'title': 'D'}, {'score': '23', 'title': 'Visual'}, {'score': '24', 'title': 'Smalltalk'}, {'score': '29', 'title': 'SQL'}, {'score': '30', 'title': 'Assembly'}, {'score': '31', 'title': 'OCaml'}, {'score': '32', 'title': 'Actionscript'}, {'score': '51', 'title': 'Lua'}, {'score': '57', 'title': 'Erlang'}, {'score': '74', 'title': 'Scheme'}, {'score': '92', 'title': 'Scala'}, {'score': '100', 'title': 'Other'}, {'score': '120', 'title': 'Perl'}, {'score': '123', 'title': 'Objective'}, {'score': '125', 'title': 'Lisp'}, {'score': '163', 'title': 'CoffeeScript'}, {'score': '187', 'title': 'Clojure'}, {'score': '192', 'title': 'C++'}, {'score': '194', 'title': 'Java'}, {'score': '205', 'title': 'Haskell'}, {'score': '235', 'title': 'PHP'}, {'score': '303', 'title': 'C#'}, {'score': '355', 'title': 'C'}, {'score': '515', 'title': 'JavaScript'}, {'score': '718', 'title': 'Ruby'}, {'score': '1133', 'title': 'Python'}]
"""
I prefer PHP to Lisp.
Oberon-2
Hey flavio - we're using node.js, mongodb, and redis.
The number of votes for Objective-C is really funny to me, because I've never talked with a fellow objc developer that would describe it as their favorite language. Apples platform may be their favorite platform to develop for, but I and everyone else begrudgingly uses objc to target it.

Granted, they have been adding some very useful features to the language over the past couple years that I rely heavily on, but I'd never go so far as to call it my favorite.
I picked Python because I like Python the language.

I put up with the standard library, I'm not thrilled about there being so few decent cross-platform IDE's supporting Python, and module hell can drive me nuts, especially considering the fact that a minor version discrepancy means the module won't work (e.g., module built for 3.1 refusing to work on Python 3.2, although perhaps there's an incredibly simple solution to this which has evaded me thus far).
It's hard to find people to follow, even though I'm well-connected to the initial group of users (lots of friends in YC, started using Quora in 2009, etc.).

It's made worse because the Facebook Connect prompt on the homepage shows ~12 friends using the site, but once I log in I can't find them. There should be a word for that. Soup Nazi UX or something. "Here's some soup. NO SOUP FOR YOU."
Well obviously. Since when are press releases a reliable source of information? Especially given the number of companies that say "our product is not going to change" only to have the product change six months later.
IMHO, Python is probably one of the best languages in general. But I consider Perl, its opposite in many ways, one of my favourites.

In Perl I can be witty and find my personal style. Sadly enough, my code poetry might not be somebody else's. Reading other people's Perl code can be hard.

On the other end of the spectrum, Python feels aesthetically dull to me sometimes. But it's a great language to program in with larger groups of people, even when they have different skill levels and coding styles.

In the end, these languages are all just tools; you can do a hammer's job with a screwdriver, but really all tools have their purpose in the right context.

(Go's missing, though.)
Embrace The Fact That Your Business Ideas Suck
General workings of an LCD; live teardown by Bill Hammack
Ruby is the language that Puppet and Chef (the 2 most popular configuration management systems) are based on.
There are many ways to dramatically lower power usage if you're willing to accept slower speeds. Intel has recently demoed some extremely low-voltage transistors that used power in the microwatts. You can make up for this dramatically lower speed by adding far more circuitry using 3D chip-stacking.

Another possible solution is to use 3D chip stacking to add dedicated hardware for a wide variety of tasks, most of which is turned off when not being used.
Caching Cocoa Drawing Code
Who was acting :)
Don't know, but QTCreator is a C++ IDE (I think?) which makes it a non-starter for me.
All these design changes are done to increase revenue. When they talk about streamlining the experience, it's about giving ads a more prominent position across all their products and not just search.
A list of users sorted by the follower count would be a very good step in a right direction.
I'm pretty sure they mean jQuery. Coffeescript is on the list as a separate item so that can't be it. Not much popularity behind Objective J and such. Definitely one of the javascript libs, I think we can all agree the javascript language sucks.
How to get into your zone
It is incredibly difficult to build a runtime like .NET, especially as it was never designed to be cross-platform.

Just a historical note: The Shared Source Common Language Infrastructure [1] aka "Rotor" is an alternative version of the .net 2.0 platform developed by Microsoft for research/education use. It can be compiled for FreeBSD and Mac OS X 10. Its rather out of date, but maybe shows that MS did make some kind of effort to make it cross-platform.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shared_Source_Common_Language_I...
Hope you get some traction with that project. Would love to see some math wizards look into that.
neat idea and i like it,
i am curious on what is your competitive advantage here - what would you say you do differently/better then let's say codeacademy ? And how much do you expect to charge people for this ?
Secrets To Increasing Your App Rankings on iTunes
Thank god for the "basic" interface.
Hey jfarmer, thanks for checking out the site. That looks like a bug - you should automatically be following them if you used Facebook. We'll look into it right away.
Apple’s new iPad boasts better colors – how did they do it?
Nice, I'm going to check that out :)
Tradeoffs are a sign of a false dilemma; rather than choosing one solution or another, use them all where they work best. This is where Unix got it right all those years ago; Unix isn't just a slightly more stable platform for running today's bloated and monolithic software, rather, it's an elegant system for connecting maintainably-small utilities. The shell glues said utilities together into programs. Such an approach combines the best of high and low level programming, reuse and specificity, tradition and novelty, etc.

I know shell isn't going to with this popularity contest, but a return to it is what's badly needed in CS today. Instead of attempting to recreate the shell in C# or Java's supplied libraries and subsequently becoming frustrated when interaction with the "outside world" is clumsily accomplished through an FFI pinhole, just use the shell as it was intended: as a lingua franca between utilities.

Write what requires prolog in prolog, what requires c in c, what requires awk in awk, etc. Use flat file databases such as starbase or /rdb and avoid data prisons such as MSSQL, Oracle, MySQL, etc. Make all of these utilities return sane return values and spit out JSON formatted output. Finally, tie it all together with shell. If you need a UI, code it as a thin layer in TCL/TK, python/pytk, ansi c/gtk, or, consider pdcurses, etc. Profile your program and find any weak links in the chain. Recode in a lower level language only when needed.

Programming doesn't have to be hard. As in speech, the more one says, the less one means.