skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Tangentially related: I find it really ironic how the IM landscape has changed over the decades.

At first we had proprietary protocols like ICQ, AIM and MSN. Then we got clients that reverse-engineered the protocols and supported logging onto multiple networks, which was nice, but the cat-and-mouse game between IM vendors and the people reverse-engineering the protocol was annoying for all parts (i.e clients stopping to work and wasted effort on the IM vendor side).

In all this mess, Jabber was born, trying to standardize IM with the XMPP protocol and the Jabber implementation.

It never flied.

And now we are at a point where all these additional IM services pop up. Ironically, all of them are using XMPP under the hood but all of them go great lengths in adding crypto to make absolutely sure that they are not interoperable.

This is one of the rare cases where a standard was created which everybody is actually following, but which didn't create any kind of interoperability between clients.

It pains me endlessly that I must know whether I can contact person X via iMessage or WhatsApp or now this. And this time it's not even about reverse-engineering protocols. It's just about checking whether your client is a "legitimate" one. There's no technical reason besides actually removing checks and making server names configurable why WhatsApp couldn't talk with iMessage or why GTalk can't talk with WhatsApp and so on.
Such a simple idea, but love how it's done. Surprising that Android doesn't offer this as a standard part of it's OS. Well done MightyText!
I noticed yesterday that my android gtalk app was updating a thread when I switched to it. It seems like a recent change and it's entirely server side. Has anybody else noticed?
These guys are saying, "If you're a businessman that can make a cash-cow from buying 500 hours on oDesk, but instead of buying that time you're also a coder and do it yourself - BAM, suddenly the cash-cow isn't profitable anymore." Fine, it's not profitable. It's still profitable.
TumbSwap - Polish naughty girl
They'll waste years just trying to eventually get the NSA to answer with: "lots."

There's some twisted comedy in trying to trip up or catch the NSA though. They already know what you're going to say, ask, or pursue.
MS has so many products in so many different markets that I can't help but laugh at calling them a "one trick pony".
Fashion tip. If you want to be recognized as gamer on sight wear these: http://www.gamevain.com/2012/03/daily-pic-gamer-girls-do-exi...

Notice lack of pink skirts or anything pink for that matter.
Search is still there and still a huge part of the product. I think they've come to the realization that the future of personal search is in making it so you don't have to use search in the first place -- 9 times out of ten the information will already be there in front of you when you open the app.

You might want to perform a search a few times a month, but you'll want to use the new "What's next" view a few times a day.
Breakeven is the term people really should be using. It has been around for a very long time, and it is very clear about what it means.

The thing is, people want to use the term "profitable" because they want to spin where their business is at.

Operationally break-even would mean your income exceeds your hosting expenses.

Breakeven sans salaries, would imply that you're ramen profitable but nobody is getting paid.

And from there you could say "we're profitable enough to hire one programmer, but no more" or whatever.

The thing is people would rather say "ramen profitable" than break-even. Sure, ramen profitable has a specific meaning with more nuance, but it also has the magic word "profit" in it.

I think founders and investors should both work towards more level headed straightforward language.

I've been watching a lot of startup pitches lately, and combined with what I've seen in the last 2 decades, hyperbole has become quite the turnoff. Maybe it works on investors, they sure all seem to do it (e.g.: watch the Founder Fuel pitches) but for me it undermines credibility.

Kinda like dealing with a used car salesman-- have I got a startup for you! It has the most excellent traction you've ever seen!
Google Safe Browsing Turns 5 This Month
Dan Nocera (MIT) project seems quite interesting and seems to require much less energy by using something different than direct electrolysis:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KTtmU2lD97o
And 'his' company:
http://www.suncatalytix.com/about.html
So let's have some analysis, guys. Does this mean the bubble is still going?
We also have civil partnerships in the UK, with all the same rights and benefits.
Text Replacement in PDF Document & Stable PDF to Image Conversion
The long awaited version of Aspose.Pdf.Kit for Java 4.3.0 has been released. This release greatly improved PDF to image conversion has been improved. Furthermore, the development team has significantly improved features like text replacement, PDF to TIFF conversion, tag replacement inside a PDF document and Signature image rendering when converting PDF to TIFF. Below is the list of main improved features added in this release

•	Form field values are now extracted in proper sequence
•	When converting attached PDF file into TIFF format, the output image is corrected
•	Enhanced images conversion from PDF file
•	Converting PDF to TIFF produces garbled text is fixed
•	Signature image is now properly rendered when converting PDF to TIFF
•	Space appears between words once the text is replaced inside the PDF
•	Tag is not replaced inside PDF document
•	Extra space is being added between words, when replacing specific tag inside string
•	Text corruption is fixed when replaced inside PDF file
•	Extra space is being added between words, when some tags inside string are replaced
•	PDF conversion into Image results in black page is fixed
•	Text replacement wasn't performed for particular replacement order is fixed.
Is there a way to limit this to the most recent N (either hard-coded or as an input) entries? It's a bit slow to load when it has to load all of the history ever, and I usually only care about at most the last couple dozen commits.
Of course! I probably should have clarified and said something like "being able to run a real terminal alongside programs like Photoshop without having to us a VM has me hooked." I love linux, but there's a lot of software I use every day that only exists for mac/windows.
How is this different (besides visually) from porting my number to Google Voice? It seems to have the exact same set of functionality.

Also, koush's DeskSMS has been around much, much longer and is the exact same as this.
You are really lumping things together here.

What do the USSR nuclear accidents say about German or US or Japanese reactors? Look at how many nuclear accidents USSR Navy ships had compared to US Navy ships.

I can see an argument to 'close the old ways, we do it better now'. But 'close all of them, because I don't know the difference between them and I'm afraid of anything with the world nuclear in it' is just fear mongering and it's a shame that Germany fell for it.
For others like me that skimmed the article quickly trying to figure out how it was different than all the other iMessage competitors on Android right now, let me save you the trouble and show you the big difference:

> Uses your current Android phone number.

This is awesome. I hope it takes off quickly.
The first generations used what's called a touch wheel and buttons. The click wheel wasn't introduced until the 4th generation iPod.
Richard Branson tweeted this earlier:

"Learning by doing: doesn't that sound fantastic? That’s why I’m investing in @Codecademy http://t.co/V62rcoWK
While these are x86 cores, and clearly capable of running desktop software, it wouldn't be a good experience as the primary CPU. The circuit size almost certainly means that these are in-order CPUs, probably with minimal superscalar capability, and likely a shallow pipeline. So scalar code is going to run terribly on them. Desktop usage is dominated by scalar CPU overhead.
To be fair, the UNSC has the UK, US and France as permanent members, who can veto resolutions.
Codepen seems to be a great update/alternative to JSFiddle. The interface is intuitive and beautifully laid out. I don't use Apple products or Webkit as primary design tools, but for those who do CodePen is a great testing tool for code.
Google's Energy Efficient Data Centers
Drilling for the uranium is a whole chunk, according to http://www.nature.com/climate/2008/0810/full/climate.2008.99.... But sure, less than coal (but still, more than wind).

edit: added link.
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Code Breakers of Blechley Park is a pretty nice one hour BBC documentary on the subject.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JF48sl15OCg
It's kind of hard to provide examples because the question disappears once this happens. There's a link to an example in this thread.
Ask HN: How do freelance developers determine the scope of projects?
We're working on a new startup that would connect freelance developers with qualified projects.<p>The question is, what criteria do you use to determine the scope of a project? A response here or in this quick survey would be highly appreciated!<p>Survey: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/viewform?pli=1&formkey=dFI4cjQxQmRFR3FoUlNZRzVVRkJWeUE6MQ#gid=0
A long time ago (windows 98 I believe) my screen went blank and green text appeared saying "Hello, how are you?" I was about 12 at the time so I had no idea what was going on. I don't recall my response, but I remember the "person" on the other side saying "You left a back door open. Would you like me to close it?" I restarted my computer and I still have no idea what it was.

Was this a virus, a hacker, something else? I completely forgot about it until this thread.
Hopefully we wouldn't have! I'd rather have had more intact city cores and fewer drivers.

Probably my major objection to the system, urban freeways, didn't have to be part of the system, and Eisenhower apparently personally did not want them to be, see http://www.fhwa.dot.gov/interstate/faq.htm#question23a Having destructive elements added to a giant plan usually seems to come with selling it though.

The German energy plan described in the article I'd bet involves a lot of tradeoffs to get support from various players. It sounds way riskier than say just more massively taxing carbon emissions and subsidizing energy R&D. But presumably those aren't politically feasible.

Another political infeasibility (I'd guess) that surely has been suggested elsewhere: Germans should instead get a large % of solar energy (or derived revenues) produced in southern Europe to pay for bailouts. This would also mean solar panels deployed more effectively, and local Greek, etc, labor employed for installation.
Just as a side note, the post was made in Taiwan's D3 forum, but from the use of simplified Chinese, it seems the hacker was from China.
Sorry to be pedantic; it was an Internet Draft, which anyone can submit, not an IETF RFC.
Trends in Master Data Management
Can living without the web increase the social divide?
Perhaps he traced the IP address back to the antivirus company.
And guess how I found out this had been posted here? ;) Thanks!
I noticed that too. There's no reason to not write simply "Taiwan," since that won't offend anyone's sensibilities.
I don't have enough knowledge to say whether that's true or not. Most C# programmers I meet, for example, are pretty competent compared to your average WordPress "programmer."
Mistakes Girls Make
"Pivot and Expand" is a thing. A real thing real people do when they think they have great technology that needs to be represented to reach a larger audience.
The World First Hardcore Inferno Diablo Kill Has Happened
I think it's not just Stackoverflow--in general, experts have better things to do than help Newbie #258349 walk through installing Ruby. After years of watching the same questions get asked over and over, they just decide to give up and go work on something interesting, so you end up with an echo chamber of "bump for answer, I have the same problem", "has this been solved plz send teh codez", "me too".
Nvidia  PR Responds To Torvalds' Harsh Words
Having worked in finance 16 years, I do not understand this fuss about semantics - "ramen", "beer", "sushi" ... profitable.

For starters, for any business, let's look at the numbers:

- market size, market share, market dynamics

- gross & net revenue - abs $ and % growth

- gross margin, gross profit, operating income, net income - abs $, % of revenue & % growth

- Balance Sheet, Income Statement and Cash Flow

Then we can talk semantics.

Edit: formatting
Most of the time when the IT guy makes sexual jokes, the girl laughs, so how was he supposed to know that this one time the girl was going to be offended?
No wind uses more. You need to mine for the raw materials used to build the wind turbine.

For the equivalent amount of energy wind turbines use hundreds of times as much raw materials as nuclear - even including building the nuclear power plant, not just the uranium.
"The objective of some" is another way of saying "I have no justification for this but want to say it anyways." Useless conspiracy theorizing and straw-manning.

The objective of whom? Please, name names. Or don't bother.
The headline is misleading - it's worse. The question isn't "did person X get spied on?", it's "how many people in the U.S. have been spied on?"

The answer to that question cannot possibly violate the privacy of any individual.

>> What’s more, McCullough argued, giving such a figure of how many Americans were spied on was “beyond the capacity” of the NSA’s in-house watchdog...

So, either: 1) They are totally disorganized ("dang, it's not like we keep a database we could SELECT COUNT(*) from, you know...") or 2) there is no way to estimate because they're doing wholesale collection of all the phone calls, web traffic, etc that they can get their hands on.

Pretty sure it's #2.
I think SO will be happy if they will be able to become a database for most common programming problems.

That is where the crowd is, mediocre programmers are plenty and they won't be asking expert questions either. They need hand holding at every step. And if you could answer all they question they have, you could serve a huge crowd.

On other hand, asking expert questions may make you an awesome site. But the target audience is to little.

Because number of people needing answers to expert questions themselves are scanty.
Or a gal gamer could show up dressed in pink and proceed to clean everyone's clock.

(Former gal gamer who sometimes wasn't taken seriously because I was "too pretty" or "just a mom", which was always a good opportunity to take advantage of some fool while his guard was down. The second game was always more challenging because they didn't make that mistake again.)
How I Doubled My Website Speed in Ten Minutes
I don't really agree with the whole thing but it sort of makes sense and the headline is quite mis-leading. The violation of privacy supposedly would occur when they go do the research to figure out the answer to the question. The "saying" is irrelevant.
Stealthy Mobile Security Startup Bluebox Launches With $9.5M
I know a hiring manager at a major bank in NYC that is looking for iOS contract developer. Interested in NYC ?
Monsanto Forced To Repay Billions In Brazilian GM Soybean Royalties
I'm not sure if this helps, but I think Google Voice is still unavailable to 95% of the world (i.e., it's Americans-only) so that may be a large difference (if these guys support non-Americans, anyway).
Facebook wants to own Summer Olympics News
Renewable energy bills are paid for by consumers in their eletricity bills, as was made clear in the article.
Also, most (all) creative people will be able to recognize the tie-in to Warhol (thus art) and also the implied "democratization".
"YC seems to be far more selective"

"YC is very much like a harvard, while TechStars is like a state college network"

Interestingly (and of course unscientifically) a search for "prestigious techstars" returns about 2800 matches while a search for "prestigious ycombinator" returns only 98. It would be interesting to see what effect the more ubiquitous techstars has on a tipping point of notoriety because of the quantity of locations it is available at.
Just a minor design mark: do your really have to use the Baskerville ampersand? I clashes with your grotesk typography and makes the site look "designy", atleast in my web designer eyes.
No it's not. I had the same thought, but the author carefully points out from the standard: "The usual arithmetic conversions ensure that two operands to a “+” operator of type signed char are both promoted to signed int before the addition is performed."

He does assume sizeof(int) > sizeof(char), which is true on all platforms he has tried. It would be undefined on an AVR or other microcontroller where sizeof(int) == sizeof(char) though.
"many reviews" "more reports" "most reports"

We are better than this, people.
The one thing that drove me away from participating in SO are the moderators. I swear, every time I get a google hit for a highly-relevant, informed discussion on a non-trivial programming topic, it's a question that has been closed by moderators for some stupid excuse.

You talk about there being other forums, like programming. or whatever else... Well, moderators should move the question instead of closing it. Why not do a mass query for these high-upvote yet moderator-closed questions on SO and move them to whatever other forum? Why gag the community for the sake of moderator ego?

Anyway. I gave up on the idea of proving I am a good programmer by participating and pumping up my SO score. Participation in SO is painful, moderators destroy good will. It seems they have an antenna that detects good discussion about programming and they step into it and destroy it.

So my response is: I don't care anymore. I certainly won't bring it up on meta, enough ignoring the userbase was done on there before when SE flip-flopped from for-profit, give us your money to "we'll dictate what q/a sites can be created" for me to go back and expect any consideration.

So no. For me SO is a great place to find answers by informed people on several topics, but it's not a place to invest yourself.

Anyway, just one less user for SO.
I note most of those questions are basically some awesome trivia some guy discovered on the way while solving tough problems.

Or recommendations to books/reading/tools etc.
SO should get a noble prize for changing so many developers' lives in so many ways.
Well, they don't just sit there - they occasionally murder people and rape women and children.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Nations_peacekeeping#Hum...
Ooops! It's back.
Pebble is looking for a developer evangelist to work with 1000s of devs
We're looking to bring a developer evangelist on board our currently 9 person/engineer company.

After launching on Kickstarter (http://kck.st/HumIV5) to some early success (85,000 pebbles presold and counting...), we're starting to plan our watchapp market, API and SDK strategy.

If you're an experienced developer evangelist, I'd love to meet you. The next few months are going to be quite busy, so we're looking to add someone to the team soon.

- hacker/coder background

- pumped up about hardware/software combos (like Pebble!)

- experience in a developer-facing role

- comfortable writing/managing documentation

Very good pay, benefits and options in a company that is practically 100% sales-funded...

We can pay to relocate you to Palo Alto, Calif. and happily hire foreigners (7/9 are canadians + 1 Nederlander + 1 American.)

Please email your resume, github/twitter/blog to jobs@getpebble.com
Neither the three mile plant nor Fukushima nor the accidents in german plants were located in the USSR. And Tschernobyl was in the neighbourhood (even if it weren't a technical comparable plant, it would still be an in my eyes understandable factor).
The author explicitly, expressly contextualized the usage by including the example "profitable since day 1." Which everyone understands, first, not to mean literally within 8 hours of when you started working on it, but more the first few days or even couple of weeks, and secondly, everybody understands it refers to the direct expenses of the project. There is no misunderstanding. There is no miscommunication. Everyone knows you're talking about cash-flow and hosting costs.
About 6,000 people die from coal mining every year in China alone. By contrast, 6,000 is the median estimate of the total number of people who would die from cancer from Chernobyl. Now, Greenpeace managed to come to an estimate of almost 100,000 by making certain unusual assumptions, but if you make those same assumptions when looking at the pollution that comes out of the stacks of coal power plants you would find at least vaguely comparable numbers of deaths from coal plants every year.
The point is that the goal is to generate growth through reinvestable cash flow. Only when a business has money left over for owners (after they have eaten) is it profitable in this sense.

Opportunity cost has nothing to do with it. If I have created a business that pays me $50k a year (to live off of) and throws off an additional $25k in earnings that I can reinvest in the business, I have a profitable business. It can be grown through reinvestment of profits, and has value to investors.

None of that changes if I could be making $1M per year doing something else. You can't say that the business isn't profitable just because I have a high value alternative. It just means I'm not maximizing my income (which is a personal choice, not some indication of business health).
Google Cracks Down on YouTube-to-MP3-Ripping Sites
it really does seem like they are looking for people in their 20s. Their application asks for your HN ID for instance.

We use HN ids to keep track of applicants, not as a filter (it's all one codebase). There is a link on the application form that lets applicants create HN ids for any cofounders who don't have one.

As for the age of people we fund, I've never studied this systematically but it feels like the median age of people we accept is about the same as the median age of people who apply.
A Bunch of Sales: The Tuesday Handful
Robby, congrats on the new launch-- it looks great!

Zero-click search is really impressive when it works [edit: actually, this is zero-search search: you get results without searching, simply based on context]. I think greplin can make it work with heuristics + usage data over the last few years :-)
Showing not just what's next, but context (when, where is it? what emails are related?) makes this really cool-- something that can very quickly form a habit, perhaps.

PS: why show Sunrise and Sunset times?(first screenshot on landing screen) Do people actually search for that? Personally, I don't care-- the day starts when I wake up.
What this guy is saying is "If you're a businessman that is 'profitable' because your server costs $20 a month and your startup brings in $1500 a month, while you put more than 200 hours a month into it, then you're not profitable."

And he's not wrong, because on oDesk you could be bringing in $4000 a month with the same time investment, and the only reason your startup is profitable is because you're not factoring in all of the capital costs (not just cash).
I don't have time to read such a long document now. Can someone who has tell us if there is really something worrisome here, or if this whole fuss is just more noise from the same crowd that thinks bike lanes are a UN plot to strip us of our rights. (I'm not making that up: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/04/us/activists-fight-green-p...)
"Learning by doing"

Except that learning by codecademy is not doing it's learning

Learning by doing might be learning while working as an apprentice for a master plumber, carpenter etc.