skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The simplest way is through the use of your wallet. Buy "open". E.g.

- Need a new desktop? Buy one that doesn't lock down uefi by default, and runs linux compatible hardware

- New phone? Buy one with Firefox OS if you can wait that long, or at least go for one with a stock Android install

- New book? Buy one from independent publishers/authors who don't support DRM [1]

- New app? Don't use a commercial app store, get it direct from the publisher

- Music? you get the idea.

Voting with your wallet and putting money on the side of open helps keep commercial operators swinging in that direction. As far as government is concerned, I've no idea.

[1] Swift plug : http://leanpub.com for books, in particular http://leanpub.com/php ....

[edit] In response to the assorted "we're too small a minority" comments below, I would argue that historically with IT that isn't an issue. The internet & web were minority pursuits at one point, commercial walled gardens like AOL were much more common and popular, until the small minority of tech leaders (just like us) forged ahead anyway and showed with our feet how much better it can be. The people reading HN, while comparatively small in number compared to the general population, I think underestimate the power they (and others like them) have to influence the tech lives of their customers, users, friends and family. It doesn't always appear that common sense can beat big money when it comes to affecting the choices made by the general populous, but have some faith in your fellow humanity, these sways are usually only temporary.
Flock's big problem was, of course, that you had to convince people to install a whole new browser.

If they could redesign it as a browser plugin, it might have a shot.
I don't think the idea behind offering you the PDF option is to "prevent" you from using it....

In fact, it was Adobe that tried to prevent you from saving to PDF. It threatened Microsoft with legal action (especially in Europe) for trying to offer the "open" PDF format in Office 2007. This was widely reported at the time, but see, for example:

http://betanews.com/2006/06/02/adobe-to-sue-microsoft-for-pd...
The location for this competition is a particularly attractive bit of Scotland - the island of Easdale. This is a bit surprising as the island (and the nearby village on what is almost the mainland, Ellenabeich) was once the location of a huge slate mining operation - presumably the source of all of the conveniently sized flat stones!

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

http://www.easdale.org/
Same - if they're intentionally violating the spec then I'd really love to know why. I suspect this is just something that wasn't caught by testing / QA before release.
Speaking of business schools, this analysis sounds almost exactly like the Porter Competitive Strategy theory taught at such places.
Neither sociology nor social work (they're two different things) are humanities.
Word lens and google translate are incompatible.

The only real feature aside from basic OCR that Word Lens offers is that they make the "translation" appear in the same area where the original words were.

This only works because they only translate words, they don't translate what is actually being said.

If word lens were to attempt to do any actual translation, the amount of text would be greatly different, and the gimmickyness of their product would vanish.

Google translate wants to actually translate one thing from another. Word lens wants to translate individual words to help you get a basic idea of what something might say, which preserving it's futuristic gimmick.
EINTR is a flaw in Unix's syscall model: it forces on every single application the responsibility for dealing with something that should have been handled at a lower level. That's unrelated to C's error handling style; it would be just as ugly if every write() call had to be wrapped in a try-catch block to retry when an InterruptedException was thrown, and people would still forget to write that ugly boilerplate.
Is it any surprise that the sort of people who are still actually using Facebook would be the sort of people who would click on something as ridiculous as that
Dear Canonical: please let me pay for Ubuntu
Yes but perhaps they could have released their own turn-by-turn navigation and left maps on there - just like Google have on my Android phone.

Of course they should have done this a long time ago really.
It's a basic feature, and perhaps it's not perfect, but for those that use this app quite a bit, this is a huge help.

Worst case, it doesn't recognize the text, and you type it in, same as you had been doing this whole time.
Fermilab prepares for a future of muons
This. I was expecting something similar in size to a USB connector, but having seen it in the flesh, it's absolutely tiny!
Law, the fine and performing arts, and philosophy, on the other hand, are humanities.

I can name maybe two or three famous aerospace engineers off the top of my head, and they aren't going to be known to the general public.

If I started naming famous people with law degrees, artists, and philosophers, I'd be here all day. You were talking about "changing the world"?
Working on a portfolio site now and managed to convince the clients not to have any share buttons. It looks so much better.
How a Common Lisp Programmer Views Users of Other Languages
Already exists:
http://www.ubuntu.com/community/get-involved/donate
>Problem is that you then have to explain monads to average programmers who'll be using the language.

No you don't, this is exactly what you don't need to do. Do we explain the finer points of stream implementation to would-be C++ programmers? No, when they need to do something non-standard with a stream/monad, that's the time to talk about them. For the majority of programmers it's just "when you need to write to a file you do it like this".
TextWrangler when I'm at work on my Mac, I preferred the simplicity and the fact I can't leave a script without first saving, which forces me to rethink whether or not I really want to come back later to this code base or if that variable I left out would be better added now.

I use Notepad++ at home for Web Development and MS Visual Studio 2010 Express for C++ for the compile and test features.
How else could Adobe keep milking people for Adobe Professional?

Cost quote from them in 2009/Early 2010: 1K to 2K per user depending on features.

I passed.
You need to tell it that the source language is Russian; if you tell it the source language is English, it will try to recognize Cyrillic characters as Roman, which doesn't work. Also, it looks like the scan option is not available for Ukrainian at all. But for something like a restaurant menu, you're probably fine telling it the language is Russian--there is a high degree of mutual intelligibility between the two languages.
The photos in recaptcha are mostly street names and numbers from Google StreetView. Very elegant combination of two ambitious projects.
Couldn't ever be considered the best, it's US only
Is it worth taking fiber supplements? It seems tough to get enough fiber even with some fruits and vegetables every day.
"Still using Facebook"

It's like you're actively denying the fact that it is, TODAY, the largest and most used social network in history.

Would you at least let it BEGIN it's user decline before you call it dead?

Let me guess: You ran to G+ on Day 1 (because one large advertising company is worse than another large advertising + email + search company...)
OMG, quick...

Ban Google Go now!

Programming languages don't kill people, programmers kill people...

/sarcasm
The two mechanisms are not very similar. With the blocks mechanism (if I understand correctly) the resource itself implements a method "execute this code and clean up yourself". This only uses the standard mechanisms of the language (i.e. blocks.) The control is with the resource.

Python's 'with' inverts the control - the control is with the language runtime and the resource is passive here. In fact 'with' is a special syntax extension, with calls to hard coded method names (__enter__ and __exit__) done by the Python runtime. The resource itself (or the contextmanager representing it) only implements __enter__ and __exit__ and is passive with regards to this mechanism.
I think as it's an extract or adaption from a book there's very possibly more to come. Leave the reader hanging so they come back for more possibly.
Are you still on that diet? If not, how are you maintaining your new weight?
I think Google could do something similar to what they did to Voice recognition in Jelly Bean. They managed to make 80% of their voice engine work offline. If they can do that with voice, I think they can do that with their dictionaries.
Don't you worry about the future of Python, let me worry about blank! - Guido
>try:
>> f = float(someText)
>> catch ValueError:
>> # I just parsed you, this is crazy,
>> # here's an exception, throw it maybe?

No, you have it exactly backwards. It's with return values that you have to check after every call to be safe. With exceptions you can truly say: if I don't know what to do if this fails then I don't do anything. You can let the exception bubble up higher, all the way up to crashing the program if you like (which gives a nice stack trace that can then be debugged).

With return values, if you don't check then you could be building up more and more trash and you won't even know it until you either hit a point of code that finally does look at what's returned, or if an exception occurs (e.g. segfault).
Is it me you're looking for?
Use Ghostery (http://www.ghostery.com/) or Do Not Track (http://www.abine.com/dntdetail.php), or various others addons like these, and you will have the problem partially solved.
Of Apples and a growing appetite
I try to apply the principle of charity no matter how much I know about something.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principle_of_charity

It's a far better way to learn from other people than simply assuming they are racist/communist/terrorist and dismissing them.
I wish they would fix the "will break" 3.5mm jack.
I think google news needs a really easy way to report sites that don't work. I'd say 10% of the time I'll click through to an article and it will throw a paywall up, or simply redirect me, or tell me the article doesn't exist.

Also I'd love the ability to block certain sources e.g., the wall street journal since I'm not interested in reading the just the first four sentences of the article.
Microsoft’s app Translator is really good. You can even download language packs so that it works offline.
why not just put them all there and let the user decide which ones they want shown. I mean, it doesn't matter if there's a stumbleupon thing if I never use stumbleupon. Put 'em all in. Make it easy for users to add new ones (or small ones) and hide which ones they don't want.
I've also read that Apple didn't want to provide Google with the information that turn-by-turn feeds back.

But that was in TC comment so treat it with ta pinch of salt until verified elsewhere
I see your point with the 3d printing revolution but imho the two most important sentences in the article are:

The line between ‘computer’, ‘program’ and ‘media’ blurred to the point where consumers were successfully confused about what it was they were actually buying.

... another where it is successfully co-opted by big money and governments in a concerted effort to give us all a subscription to online Life-As-A-Service where you will be beholden to some party for the ability to gain access to knowledge, information, the right to communicate and so on and where the act of programming will be as tightly regulated as the export of cryptography was.

So if you look at it closely: This swing is not only about hardware and software anymore. It is much more about data and the services that it enables. Think of facebook, google etc.
My point was that programmers are happy to push the "error" handling off to some other part of the code, far away from the point at which the "error" arises, in some place that usually has no real idea how to handle it, or present it, or what have you. All as if there's some default privileged path where everything is running normally, and then this occasional strange special case that crops up now and again. Exceptions explicitly encourage this style of programming - keeping the error handling apart from the main logic is their very purpose.

But were programmers to consult the history of their compiler's output (representative summary: "ERROR ... ERROR ... FAILED ... WARNING ... ERROR"), it would be obvious that in fact errors are highly likely, even if you know what you're doing. So what makes the error case different from all the other cases?
Personally I think the community might be spending too much time on Python 3.

Python 2 is fine, and the upgrade will offer few significant advantages for most people.

I think the effort would be better spent working on things like frameworks and tools for web development.
Google chat using the messages app in OSX ML.
Its just one app that everyone I meet talks about, I am surrounded by non-tech people from all walks of life, no bubble here. Apple has become a bit of a embarrassment.

In fact one friend felt bad about upgrading his iPhone because his provider offered a upgrade on his contract. He said it didn't cost too much so doesn't matter. These are normal people who think iPhone is becoming a joke.

This is because of a sub-par launch that was over anticipated and a complete mockery of the richest public company in the world because of this single app. A app widely used by millions for transportation times and searching for places.
The idea is nice. I'm one of those few geeks who actually does select text as I read it, but the implementation makes changing highlighted paragraphs non-intuitive. Re-selecting something to move doesn't seem right. This thing has been created on my screen and I want to move it... maybe arrow keys, maybe clicking to where I want it to go.... click-dragging some other piece of text on the screen is just a very non-intuitive means of motion control.
Here is my guide to run it under ubuntu karmik
http://mapopa.blogspot.ro/2009/11/firefox-01-aka-phoenix-on-...

My guess the same instructions should work on ubuntu 12.04 lts
Skype on MacOS, Windows Phone 7, Windows 7 and Ubuntu. Sucks a bit on Ubuntu.
Of course you can.

Just like the developers would ditch Twitter for the next big thing if it ever pulled a MySpace.

There was a mutually beneficial relationship that is no longer (as) beneficial to one of the parties.
Ever microUSB cable I have differs significantly top and bottom:

- The top has the USB symbol that is embossed enough to feel it without looking.

- The top of the metal sheath has "hooks" or other indendations that are both plainly visible and can be felt with a finger tip.

- The top of the metal sheet has sharper corners, while the rounded bottom corner are easy to both feel and see.

This is across probably half a dozen different brands of microUSB cables - I have sets of cables permanently in charges in 4 rooms at home, at work and a few cables in my bag.
> I can name maybe two or three famous aerospace engineers off the top of my head, and they aren't going to be known to the general public.

You're overrating fame as an indicator of merit. The fact that aerospace engineers are in great demand speaks to their usefulness to society.

> If I started naming famous people with law degrees, artists, and philosophers, I'd be here all day. You were talking about "changing the world"?

That was an interesting selection of three fields. There are many famous lawyers, but do they change the world, or try to keep it the same? As to philosophers, they famously never come to any practical conclusions about reality, instead dissecting it with new terms they invent to sustain the illusion that they're having a useful dialogue. Their low social standing is richly deserved.

Artists, on the other hand ... they certainly change the world. They sometimes do it by making us see things we were always able to see, but didn't realize.
Mark my words, within the next 3 years facebook will begin to decline. 90% of the people I speak to say they don't use facebook anymore because it's got boring.
This being in the context of a binary choice, it shares a basic flaw of any 2-party democracy: if there are more customers voting the wrong way (i.e., "closed"), commercial operators have no incentive to go open.

If you know your opinion is not mainstream, why limit your choices of commercial goods this way?
My team of four got into YC with not a college degree between us. Two of us had most recently gone to community college, one of us dropped out of the University of Washington, and one of our teammates had just done six months at USC. Granted, USC is a "good school," but if you have a strong team that can demonstrably work well together, you have a good shot of getting into YC. In our case, we'd been on a very competitive high school robotics team for four years and had done other tech projects together.
This would essentially lock out new "social media" sites as the effort of manually installing a share button is going to be too much effort.
Posted two days ago: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4556838
also, i should perhaps mention, compared to some other libraries, pytyp is integrated with ABCs and the Python type system. so you can use isinstance() with these expressions, for example.
Plus the users of my browser of choice

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/adblock-plus/...

Certainly no majority overall, but a huge number of people that never look at ads, because .. ads sucked too much.
Not sure if I'm following you. Are you saying we shouldn't vote because our only 1 vote is meaningless in the crowd?
Michael Spence: Hard truths about global growth
It's an interesting view of history, but without providing your reasoning for why you think the pendulum is about to swing again I have to assume that it is not.
Facebook working on tracking of purchases based on ad-view
You did not carefully read the GP.

IO read/write functions are not limited to the net package. net.Conn supports a subset of these (interface types) and it is entirely idiomatic and possible for a net.Conn flavor to endup at some deep layer of your code in a function accepting generic io in args.

Functions taking non-net "in args" returning "error" can not be assumed to always return "net.Error". You will need to test the type (reflectively) and then safely cast.

For example : http://golang.org/pkg/io/#ReadFull

Is it "non-idiomatic" to wrap net.Conn as another non-net package type and then use it?

http://golang.org/src/pkg/net/net.go#L22
"Python behind the webserver is a powerful tool and one that has enabled a lot of great sites and products and services. Unfortunately, once the content hits the wire, the Python stops."

Not sure if im being ignorant here but surely this is a problem for most server side languages? PHP, Ruby, Go, Perl would all suffer the same problems. Browser vendors only want to have JS client side for obvious reasons, this doesn't just affect python.

Js is clearly doing a fine job at client side programming, should we not be happy with that?

Why are people obsessed about creating a "jack of all trades" language instead of letting languages do what they do best?

Taken from the comments...
"I suspect javascript will become like assembly and all languages targeting the browser platform will need to be compiled to javascript."

That sounds like hell to a front-end developer. Its bad enough learning coffeescript or other dialects if a company uses them, but other languages too?
If you want an "official" (i.e. kept up to date by the UN) machine readable list of countries then this is a better source:

http://www.unicode.org/cldr/data/charts/summary/root.html

This list also has currencies and some other stuff, but a Ruby script to extract what you want should not take more than 10 lines.

This list has the added advantage of being available in pretty much all the languages in the world, in case you need localisation for your project.

Side note: if you want to check if a list is up to date, check for "Aruba" and country code BQ (Caribbean). They changed the status of independent country a year ago so many lists don't have it yet (used to be a Dutch colony).
That's a problem with those browsers. They shouldn't hijack a gesture as common as "swipe".
Incase someone doesn't get this: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0584440/quotes?qt=qt0361067
Either most of my chargers lie, or 2A isn't the problem he claims for microUSB.

I'm inclined to think the latter, as if I put my display on top brightness and play any games that uses my phones GPU, I get warnings that my charger delivers less current than needed to charge if I "only" use my 1A rated chargers.
Even if we do that, it's only 0.000001% of the people doing it. It doesn't even begin to scratch the big threats.

People are so easily bought by them that all our efforts seem so small.

I really think we're not gonna be able to change the swing back to freedom. 10 years from now, we're gonna be 100% controlled by them and, as the author said, the Life-as-a-Service era will start.
For myself, I'm worried about the future of writing -- you need a spell checker. An automated spell checker would have caught the majority of the misspellings in your article.
SeenBefore: A search engine for what you have seen before
An interesting application of this concept was in WW2 for bombing dams - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bouncing_bomb
Yeah, not sure what the point of this post is. I've got a share button in my desktop, tablet and phone browsers (not that I neccessarily want them). These are for tracking and branding. Facebook, Twitter et. Al have not only implanted tracking widgets on nearly every site, they've also got little banner ads. For free!
google maps with offline cached maps works fine for me. are you on a recent version?
In the dark, they don't help you.

And some manufacturers, like WD put their stupid logo on top.
But you also end up getting all of the fructose and none of the fiber, which your body needs for processing the fruit without the sugar hit. Lustig: "When god made the poison, he packaged it with the antidote."
Remember that there are two possible outcomes, one where the internet successfully manages to cause a swing to the edge of freedom, and another where it is successfully co-opted by big money and governments in a concerted effort to give us all a subscription to online Life-As-A-Service where you will be beholden to some party for the ability to gain access to knowledge, information, the right to communicate and so on and where the act of programming will be as tightly regulated as the export of cryptography was.

It seems so me that in the 1990s, the future that was widely (outside some truly dystopian sci-fi fringes of the net discourse) regarded as the worst-case scenario was the Internet becoming like radio -- i.e. another peer-to-peer medium turned into a broadcast medium. So it may be worth noting that while the best-case scenario hasn't changed much since then, the worst-case scenario has.
And here I was hoping for some kind of thesis on the woeful state of affairs surrounding the fact they've had 2 major versions competing for developers attention, the with "older" fork being the more the widely supported one.
You can block any source you want. I have many sources blocked (ie TechCrunch) and others favorited (ie Verge). Just go to settings.
Why do people even use Ubuntu these days? Unity was bad enough, but I can't fathom why anybody capable of using Linux would stand for nonsense like this. There are so many alternatives out there, too. Debian or Linux Mint are often more than sufficient replacements, without the headaches.