skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I agree. I think the bad assumption is

"If I’m Going To Have To Buy New Computer Hardware Anyway…"

You don't. I don't think most people running Windows 8 think they need to buy a touchscreen.

PS: People seem to disregard that 4M people upgraded to Windows 8 within a few days of release. That's about the same number of new Macs purchased in an entire quarter. Microsoft made the upgrade path to Windows 8 far simpler than any prior release.
Ask HN: Email programs that support json or markdown content-types
Are there any examples in the wild of email readers (desktop or web) that support markdown and json content-types?

Content-Type: text/json; charset=UTF-8
or
Content-Type: text/markdown; charset=UTF-8

It seems like JSON would be a great way to deliver data such as address cards and calendar events, and would leave open room for plugins that can detect and work with custom json types.
Your first two paragraphs here seem contradictory. If the feature can already be implemented, and the cost is merely some syntactic messiness, then there is no change necessary to the runtimes - all you need is a little syntactic sugar.

As an aside, there is a grand history of array notation being nothing more than syntax. Try building the following in gcc:

int main() {
int foo[] = {1, 2, 3};

return 1[foo];
}

The expression a[b] is simply translated into a + b, which commutes. There's some constraint applied that something there be a pointer (so 1[2] is rejected) but it's weaker than it "should" be...
Natural-language likeness, with all its weirdness and power, was an explicit design goal of Larry Wall's perl, a language which was instrumental in creating the WWW as we know it.
20 Differences That Confuse Us All
Where Obama and Romney Stand on Life Sciences
London: Junior / Graduate Python Developer

Distilled is looking for a graduate developer to join our growing Python team in our London office. We currently have the following largely Django based projects:

* DistilledU - a feature rich online SEO training platform - our latest project that came out of beta in June this year and is being well received by the SEO industry.
* Distilled Store - an online store we’ve built from scratch to sell conference tickets and videos.
* Internal Tools - building a range of tools, from quick hacks to fully functional tools, pulling from APIs and various data sets.
* Distilled website - currently a Wordpress site that we’ve got grand plans for turning into something far more awesome based on a Django CMS and blogging platform called Mezzanine that we will fully integrate with DistilledU and Distilled Store.
* Distilled Tools - our internal reporting system and tool for managing freelance writers.

You’ll gain experience in Agile development practices and work in an open, fun and collaborative environment. Please apply at the URL below.

Requirements

* Python - some experience, not necessarily commercial.
* Frickin smart - you will need an uncanny ability to get stuff done.
* Passion for self improvement - technologies move quickly, we’ll expect you to keep up.
* Evidence of getting things done - you’ll probably have a number of side projects.

About the company

Distilled is a search marketing company with a big and ever growing reputation. We have worked with some of the biggest brands in the world, and are known in the industry as experts in what we do. We are 100% owned by the two directors, with offices in London, Seattle and New York. Employees number 52 in total, with London being the biggest office. We like to have fun, with things like Beer o’clock every Friday, regular company outings and a meeting room that is largely used for 4 player Mario Kart.

For more info and to apply: http://www.distilled.net/graduate-junior-python-developer/
Twilio looks better from afar
Oh, yeah, because Pets.com would have worked so much better as a mobile app.
Above 40th Street, the Powerless Go to Recharge
I saw this earlier, I am excited about it now.
Gimp and Paint.NET are inexpensive alternatives to Photoshop.

This one looks like a tool to easily do a very limited set of tasks.
But wasn't there like a beta "craze" up until a few years ago? Like when Gmail launched, Google Buzz and a many other sites and services that are long forgotten by now.

It certainly can work if the product is really attractive. But my suspicion is, that standing in line for an underwhelming experience might even amplify negative effects as the personal investment to gain that knowledge was substantially higher.
> It would be truly amazing if a private company was the first to set foot on another planet.

"When deep space exploration ramps up, it'll be the corporations that name everything, the IBM Stellar Sphere, the Microsoft Galaxy, Planet Starbucks."
No offense, but I think you are greatly confused about the economics of lawyering. Without getting into a full blown 30 page explanation, you do not always take home big bucks. This is a common misconception.

There is in fact, a large risk of "no payout", or worse, a loss, if apple decides to argue about your billing (which they will). As a firm, you may end up having to pay your associates more than apple pays you, depending on how things go, generating a net loss for the firm. Your associates get paid well (particularly in the IP field), but usually this just about makes up for the large amount of law school debt they have (which can easily be $3000+ a month). Again not that they are poor starving people, but the salary differences you see often are eaten by debt payments and the fact that they work ridiculous hours.

On the direct "payout side", you are right that trademark work is not usually contingency work, but a lot of other work is, in which case the risk is immense. Firms are often fronting many millions of dollars in large cases, and all you have is the hope you will get paid on time. Your recourse if you don't is to sue the client, and then spend even more money, and either settle for 50% to not drag it out (the average time to resolve these cases is 7 years), or hope a judge doesn't think your billing is atrocious.

This risk is certainly less in the corporate world (in my wife's area, family law, individual clients can have something like a 35% non-payment rate, particularly in hard economies), but still there.

Again, i'm not saying lawyers don't make money, and aren't well off in a lot of cases, but to pretend that lawyers are somehow guaranteed "big bucks" in cases like this is just a fantasy. It's a business. Sometimes you do well, sometimes you don't. There are no guarantees, and there is always risk. Given the state of the legal job market and the legal world , if you want to make big bucks, running a law firm and taking cases like this is not the way to do it anymore.
A great entrepreneur can come from anywhere
This is not remotely close to what "easy mode" and "hard mode" mean in video games. … Hard mode is not "elevated chance of Balrog attacks, reduced chance of Death Knight attacks".

Yes it is. Some video games have "the enemies are easier on you" and "bad things less likely to happen" as factors that are controlled by easy mode/hard mode. Anyway, it's just an analogy.

And as you correctly note, the statistical reference class of men have it easier (in some regards), and harder in other regards.

The important question is to tot these all up. After all, it's no good if someone sat down 100 years ago and said: "OK men get all the high paying jobs, ability to vote, serve on juries, be a politician, and the women get less work when dating. Fair?".

I question some of your "advantages women have". Many men actually don't want to be hit on all the time. There are cases of men literally murdering, or reacting violently to, a gay man who's come on to them. Some straight men feel uncomfortable in gay bars. I don't think it's an actual advantage. How much of the "victim of homocide from business partner" is due to women not running businesses as much as men? Perhaps, rather than a advantage, it's a disadvantage.
Shameless plug, but Rust is intended to be that. There's also Clay, etc.
The article seems to suggest that businesses will re-evaluate their options and many will choose to go from Windows to Mac.

Whilst this may happen more often that it used to, Windows still has some important advantages.

Apple stuff is expensive, in the UK a Mac Mini will cost you at least £500 whereas a cheap dell powerful enough to run Office and other apps can be had for less than £200.

Microsoft also has an complete eco-system with Windows Server & Exchange etc as well as client OSs and has an army of professionals who are highly trained in these specific tools.

One of the big reasons IT depts love Windows Server is the amount of fine-grained control it can give over permissions on Windows clients as well as IE etc, there is also extensive third party tooling built around this.

As far as I am aware there isn't really an out of the box solution that provides this sort of thing in the Mac world.

There may be a lot of small businesses who can swap a Windows Server for a bunch of Mac (or even Ubuntu) boxes and a dropbox account + web apps. On the other hand I'm not sure Fortune 500s are exactly dying to put all of their data at the mercy of google etc.
Definitely. But with still mostly paper recording, limited data standards, and particularly onerous privacy requirements (justifiably so), it is not a foregone conclusion that the big data trend will impact medicine anytime soon.
> After all, business is war.

Not true, not even metaphorically as with team sports. War is about literal destruction whereas business is a competition in production and creativity.
What I find amazing about this is how they could make such big technical advances leading to such big cost reductions by essentially being unencumbered by bureaucracy and bad incentive structures. (And that's of course not to deny their hard work and smarts - I'm really impressed by what they've done).

I suppose it shouldn't be a surprise, but it's still hard to avoid naively thinking that surely there had been technical challenges holding up the technological progress in those areas for so long.
How Mexico's Zetas Enslave Engineers
I doubt very much that there is a timeline. It's a product and the last I heard was staying close sourced. Having said that, I would not be surprised if some of its libraries are open sourced. I know of at least one that is in the pipeline.
I go to the page and it shows "Sign in to Facebook to scan your permissions", I am however signed in, clicking the link takes me to my Facebook feed. Does anyone else have this problem? Chrome on W7.
Revised Apple statement on iPad "copying" appears in UK papers
In the past programmers associated with the term "systems programming" stuff like kernel development and hardware control. Today it seems to be used more often for concurrent network service software programming.
So all the things that really should be patented, turn out to be better off left unpatented for competitive reasons. Nice.
PS1 had some great games. Obviously Gran Turismo needs to be mentioned - it was important in the development of 'realistic' driving simulations.

IMO the original is much much harder than the follow-ups. Those licence tests were hard. (And a great part of the game play that they only really realised in much later incarnations, that tiny short challenge had the "just one more try" feature that's important for good addictive game play.)

Tomb raider is an interesting choice. It's a huge franchise, and very very popular. Some parts of the games were really good. But the games did suffer from unnecessary bugginess. Which is weird because that company produced other great games that were not full of bugs.

Owning many systems is, obviously, something that people who love games should be doing. BomberMan on SNES is god-like multiplayer; MicroMachines on Genesis / megadrive is the best version; etc.

It's a shame that as the hardware (and the storage medium) is dying that people have to rely on emulation. Mostly this is great. But for some systems it's not, and for all systems it's not legal.

It'd be nice if there was a simple way to pay for playing roms, and if people could work on emulators for dead systems without facing scary legal stuff.
HNCache Chrome Extension
'Antivirus' for Facebook digs into applications' permissions
NoSQL databases benchmark: Cassandra, HBase, MongoDB, Riak
It's the reverse. I can't carry a bottle of chemicals without spilling it on myself, or take apart an machine without dropping a few pieces in the sewer, so I stick to the virtual world where my poor hand-eye coordination won't get me killed.
I agree completely; we are looking at tech choices for a new project and Datomic is an excellent fit for the way we want our systems to work, but we're just not comfortable with the closed/paid model, especially for such a young product. For now we are looking at ways to use an accumulation based system (vs update-in-place) in PostgreSQL. If anyone has any experience with this I'd love to hear about it!
Bookmarking is an interesting phenomenon, as there are so many different ways people prefer to save and access information. In your case, you may want to check out how Kippt allows you to archive all your shared links from Buffer:

http://blog.kippt.com/2012/10/03/buffer-archive/
Not lazy. That's a duh for anyone who wants people to test something.
Great insight. My "first project" was something way too big for a first attempt and crashed and burned before it even "launched". It was such a bad experience that I didn't really try anything for 3 or 4 years. Then I decided to try a couple of really small projects and it's been a much more manageable experience.
> There is no real need for runtime sized arrays, as one could already use vectors [...] and allocate them on the stack

And how exactly would you do that? alloca() aside, there is no such thing as a stack allocator.
Aha, interesting. I was doing some quick scanning on Google-Books and other places to try to find the earliest usage, using variants of "numeric literal" and "underscore" as search terms, and couldn't find anything pre-1990s. Now I find the Ada stuff, and it wasn't coming up because all the '80s Ada documentation/discussion refers to them as underline characters, rather than underscore.

(Incidentally, one of the perils of trying to draw historical conclusions from text searches, or data sets like Google Ngrams: you could get completely wrong results if you miss a shift in spelling or word usage.)
Older Web cams (and a few modern ones built into laptops) used to come with a physical privacy shield -- a shutter you could move to block the camera when it wasn't in use. I like the idea.
Anecdotal but we're not. We have 240 windows 2008 r2 machines and are waiting for a good reason to upgrade.
The Doppler effect is how Hubble determined the universe is expanding. All of the galaxies around us are shifted red.
A little bit of background in the form of an Editorial from Molecular Therapy, a well-regarded gene therapy journal (pay-walled, I assume):

http://www.nature.com/mt/journal/v20/n10/full/mt2012194a.htm...

An interesting paragraph from the editorial, indicating that the regulatory process for this sort of gene therapy is still quite difficult:

"This lengthy and tortuous approval process raises several questions. Frequent reapplications are very time-consuming and expensive, which in this case led to the demise of Amsterdam Molecular Therapeutics, although thankfully private investors were able to continue the process. Nevertheless, investors will shy away from supporting biotech companies unless greater clarity and predictability can be achieved in the process of regulatory evaluation and approval. The Glybera saga also highlights problems specific to ultra-orphan drugs—because obtaining large-scale phase III data with a very limited number of patients is virtually impossible, procedures to handle these indications must be further developed."
Wow, she is such an happy-happy-joy-joy blogger^evangelist^blogger that I never though she had time to write any code.
It recently got a big update, and now happily runs without X11. So it's better than it's ever been. If you've used Gimp on other platforms, I'd recommend it, but if you're just starting out I'd recommend something else.

Better (though paid) alternatives for OS X are Acorn and Pixelmator. Pixelmator is a more traditional Photoshop-like UI, while Acorn (in my opinion) is nicer, with a one-panel design that gets out of your way, while still having a host of powerful tools and scripting support (with a choice of languages: AppleScript, Python or JavaScript/JSTalk).
For the last 2 years yes.
Programming Makes You High
I have a Motorola Milestone (European Droid). I think it has a good screen and size. But indeed, it's very underpowered.

I'll be getting a Nexus 4, even though I think it's too big. If it was 4", it'd be perfect.
Lose them to who? Is Linux or a Mac really a viable upgrade path for most corporations? How much Windows expertise has been built up over the years/decades? How many interoperating windows products are they already running? Legacy software? All of these are major barriers to switching.

And this is the key to Microsoft's strategy with Windows 8. Roll out their next generation paradigm while piggy-backing on the momentum of their current generation software and infrastructure. If they had waited too long to transition, it would have been a situation of "well if I have to relearn everything anyways...". Forcing this paradigm on their desktop and server customers now was key to keeping the majority of their userbase in the transition.
You're assuming each user has only one device.

This seems like a bad assumption, and a worse one going forward.

And right now, I end up having to find the right device to run that app I want to use instead of using the device that I like with the app that I like...
Sure, I'm not claiming that it's impossible. But what if the technological breakthrough is a sustainable way to mass produce bio-fuel?
Bottom line: if you need reports you should be thinking about phantomJS. There are other projects like wkhmltopdf but I think phantom is better and more flexible.

Phantom sites on top of QTWebKit (and more specifically QTWebFrame/Page) so the code is quite approachable if you want to look under the hood. I think the only downside is that QTWebKit lags a bit so a competing technology built on chromium would be even better. The other downside of course is that your rendering needs are significantly higher than generating text based email (if you are at significant volume).
If it is not clear: "nobody cares about yet another.." here means "nobody (among people that stereotype might be applied to) cares (finds it offensive) about yet another..". That is the meaning is the opposite to your interpretation. I agree the initial comment might have sounded ambiguously.

Your comment could be less patronizing.
Paint.NET is the only relatively feature-complete tool I've used that is remotely on par with Photoshop. I actually prefer it to Photoshop in some ways because the UI is more intuitive.

The GIMP is good, but it's less stable than I would like in my experience.
The King | Socyberty
lol; maybe, but i'm pretty sure samsung gets first dibs on naming all galaxies..
NASA shifts vital computer tasks onboard long-running Mars Odyssey satellite
If you think about it, it's no more brittle than ajax calls that return HTML. Having used this technique successfully, I know it works and can work well.

I don't recall any handicap at all.

Yes, this kind of solution requires more resources.

Yes, if zoom, filtering, panning and other interaction is required, then the server would have to output SVG and some javascript to manipulate it.

These objections are all worth raising but do not negate the power of this kind of solution. For certain categories of highly interaction apps with a large amount of image or data processing, doing all the work on the client side is a really bad idea, given the wide varieties of client capabilities and available bandwidth.
I've been drag-and-dropping my favicons to a folder tree on my desktop for years. Dropbox made this become awesome since now my bookmarks follow me everywhere. Screen shotting would be nice as would being built in to the browser, but they're going to have to replicate the dropbox feature to convince me.
I should also note: if you want to go this approach you might have luck embedding the generate report image in a dataURL so the user doesn't have to turn on images to see the data. However, I don't know if that works in all browsers or web mail clients.
True, but things like this going on at least allows the lawyers to justify their salary. The more important this stuff is, the higher that salary if likely to be.
Thanks for responding. I appreciate you taking the time to explain what you mean. I didn't mean to imply you criticized a specific test, I'm just trying to understand what critics of testing actually mean by "teaching to the test".

I suppose our probable point of disagreement is fundamentally that I don't think classes will ever impart a "general understanding". I consider the purpose of a class to be imparting a specific skillset, and most of the skillsets taught in school are quite amenable to testing.

You are also correct that my arguments in favor of testing implicitly assume teacher quality matters in a significant enough way to measure - if it doesn't, measuring them is pointless. (Then again, so is trying to use teacher quality as a lever to improve outcomes.)
This has been discussed here earlier
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4714341
I feel like I'm on the bleeding edge already with just normal Chrome. They push new updates all the time that break sites and change commands that disrupt my flow. Anybody else have this problem? I hope they can keep the bleeding edge to Canary and resolve all issues till they push to the standard chrome version. It would be nice to have the choice of being on the bleeding edge or not. That said, I love chrome and all of its tools. Thanks Chrome dev team.
or c) change the system and lower your personal success but it's worth it because in aggregate you've helped the world more than you've hurt yourself.
I've been using Canary for dev for a while. I would suggest to have both the shipped and alpha builds of Chrome open at all times. While Canary gives you some nice features early on, it is still considered unstable and you don't want to be testing in an unstable environment. I love using it to dev, but then I always switch back and test everything in prod chrome.
Newry & Mourne area 'highest' for all cancer deaths
Powers of Ten Film
How to Attract - and Detract - with Good Ad Copy
I'm really happy with my new 32GB Nexus 7. I'm wondering whether a device of this size with cellular radio (like the forthcoming Nexus 7) could replace both larger tablets and smartphones as many people's only portable device?

The form factor seems to be right in the sweet spot for portability versus usability, i.e. it's much less bulky than a full-size tablet, is much less expensive and also offers substantially better battery life, whilst retaining a screen large enough for pleasant video watching, gaming and especially web browsing and ebook reading, criteria which even the largest smartphone cannot compete with.

I'd love it if there was a Nexus 6.5 and a Nexus 6 to compare with the Nexus 7 though, as I think 7" is definitely right at the upper end of the ideal size range.
For me, one reason is the new server manager, it makes it so so much easier to manage multiple servers at once. (http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/server-cloud/windows-server/s... click the plus on Server Manager)
It's more likely that a 45 year old exec would be less interested in a 23 year old woman visiting him regularly in his office, in case it appears to be inappropriate. One of the difficulties for young women in IT/Dev is finding a mentor, and having important close relationships with more experienced folks.