skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Before I go off on this tangent: I own a license to ST2 but use VIM. I have no intention of buying ST3 and thus have no skin in the game.

Blog posts like these are interesting but do they really belong on Hacker News?

Why wouldn't they belong on Hacker News?

First, the ecosystem is designed in such a way that "popular" or "interesting" content (disclaimer: this may not include things you find interesting) get bubbled up so others can discover it. If it truly didn't belong on the site, it would just get buried.

Second, I'd wager that a decent percentage of the reader-base either use or have considered using Sublime Text. This information is thus relevant to them.

Third, it's about a startup (makers of ST), a business decision, and a customer's response to that decision. That basically reads "hacker news" moreso than a lot of the content I see get bubbled up.

Furthermore the sense of entitlement is a little obscene...

The author prefaced this by declaring that he doesn't mind having to pay for an upgrade. He even advocated for a subscription plan. His issue is with the way they handled the whole process.

Unlike anything else, when you buy software it contains issues and bugs. You do so knowingly with the caveat that the vendor will continue to address those problems. This agreement, whether in SLA form or unspoken, is what enables software companies to actually ship products.

If a company chooses to cease support before an expected time frame is up in favor of building a new, isolated version without backwards compatibility then there will undoubtedly be upset customers. This is especially true for products that have an ecosystem built around them.
Enough said!
Now I am doing my MONSTER ITALIAN Espresso!
Cool, let's just ignore the science of "coffee is bad for you" folks. Everything has to be so fucking simple now - it's either good for you or it's bad for you. Screw the other interacting variables.
This is very much a side comment, but I've noticed that there are a lot of these kinds of questions on StackExchange, but it seems like a lot of them are closed (this one was closed within an hour of it being opened) because they don't fit within the goals of StackExchange.

My question is: is there somewhere else where these kinds of questions (not totally on topic but still relevant to what programmers do) can be asked? I'd love to see more of them!
I agree that on its surface it is propaganda. I also think its interesting to see how people fabricate weapons in a war zone (or not). Some of them don't seem like they would actually do what the designer hoped.

In general, in this age of 'high tech' weaponry, it's amazing that rebels can go up against a modern army at all much less keep it bogged down for as long as they have.

That said, in a non abstract way the material is deeply saddening.
Maybe try commenting the link with something clever on posts from here: http://www.reddit.com/r/cakeday/search?q=cakeday&sort=to... - That may help spread the word?
Use honey instead of sugar or syrup it is very good.
The more you read actual journalism about the conflict the more you'd wonder exactly how the rebels have broadly deployed encrypted frequency hopping radios, high end western .50 cal sniper rifles with spotting equipment, shoulder fired emissions seeking anti-aircraft missiles, vehicle mounted 40mm AA, and daily arial based wide area photography.

And if you went as far as chatting up some folks that had recently been in syria, you might wonder why they'd say it's not uncommon to see a fair amount of guys with short blond hair and high end tactical clothing "advising" syrian rebel rear echelon types.
Every time I drink coffee, I get mini-seizures. It's like my brain becomes TOO over-active, and causes it to work faster/harder than it is capable of. I stay away from coffee all the time as a result.
"Once Windows 8 starts to take off, probably when the first service pack comes out, I fully expect the people still using XP to begin the upgrade process."

Once Windows Vista starts to take off, probably when the first service pack comes out, I fully expect the people still using XP to begin the upgrade process.

Once Windows 7 starts to take off, probably when the first service pack comes out, I fully expect the people still using XP to begin the upgrade process.

Heard it before. I expect some people to never ever leave XP, because they'll have one little activex control that their entire multibillion dollar operation runs on, and they will continue to insists a shrinking pool of vendors support it at all costs, because any expense is worth it compared to any downtime experienced by shifting their business process to anything resembling modern technology. They will be few, but they will still exist.
Autonomy within an organization sounds novel for morale, but it's a major shift from today's business culture. Strategy would also be incredibly difficult to execute. Organizational leaders need to be able to align their people down a common path.

If autonomy is the end-goal, start a company or go freelance.
There is only one way I've found to successfully deal with a bully: Fight back with everything you've got, and don't be fair about it.

I got a LOT of flack from teachers who would give me the usual "solve problems without violence" bullshit, but here's the thing: In every school I went to (we moved around a lot), I got picked on by the local bullies one time, and ONLY one time. Sure, I got the shit kicked out of me a few times, but you don't actually need to win the fight. Once they realize that you won't just passively take it, they leave you alone. You will, however, have to deal with ignorant teachers.
Code.org: Dedicated to growing computer programming education
I don't think I am proposing vigilante justice, are you confusing comments here perhaps?

The intent is absolutely a factor at the decision to prosecute stage.

You're trying to equate an act in the public interest (freeing academic information), with an act with clear criminal intent (credit card fraud). They simply aren't treated the same way and nor should they be.
BCPL vectors seem to be the same as C arrays, no?

dmr wrote at http://cm.bell-labs.com/cm/cs/who/dmr/bcpl.html that “C was invented in part to provide a plausible way of dealing with characters when one begins with a word-oriented language. [...] BCPL later found a solution better, on its own terms, by providing an operator (%) analogous to its !, such that v%i designates the i-th character in a vector. However, the earliest BCPL applications tended not to process packed characters in vectors, but to spread them out early into one character per word, process, and then pack them again if necessary.”
The "what question is interesting enough to reach HN front page so we can close it" watch is alert and active, thank you
Well, fuzzy tries to find something to use as a 'destination' file so it can send across some hashes. Railgun has more complete information because it is keeping synchronized and thus the part making a request can specify the dictionary to compress with in a single hash.
Isn't it odd that his website is styled the same way windows 8 is and all of his blog posts are on windows 8? Not the toughest of critics, I'd wager.
The effort put into backwards compatibility at Microsoft is always interesting... here is a presentation on research into supporting legacy 2D custom controls on arbitrary 3D surfaces:

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/wpf3d/archive/2006/12/12/interacting...

video: http://channel9.msdn.com/Blogs/Charles/Daniel-Lehenbauer-and...
Skip 50 seconds into the video and you'll see the killer feature here: a seamless handoff to your companion mobile app.

It seems they're even offering analytics with it: https://developers.google.com/+/features/play-installs
rsync is going to perform checksums on blocks to see if the blocks are the same.
It transmits these checksums, and where the checksums differ, it deltas the blocks. Note that insertion/deletion in a file can push block boundaries off between two files, causing a problem known as "stream alignment", which can cause your binary delta to be much larger because it doesn't realize the block really shifted 16384 bytes over (or whatever), and so it thinks the client really doesn't have any of the bytes of that block.

In any case, if you know the files are related, you

1. Don't need to do any of this. You can simply send the binary delta that is is usually copy/add instructions (IE copy offset 16384, length 500 to offset 32768)

2. Can precompute the deltas.

You can actually precompute in any case, it just makes no sense unless you know you will be diffed against something else.
If that's the case, so be it. Sometimes no news is good news.

Flip side is managers who strive to find something, anything, always, wrong with your work. They may or may not realize it. If you suspect you're working for one, try leaving a deliberate flaw for him to find, or inject self-depricating humor, every encounter; if this seems to satiate the need to criticize, time to go.
Slightly times a lifetime.
From the perspective of someone offering analytics BaaS, I loved how she pitched analytics! And also the education part. I think education will help us bring analytics tools to more companies. By the way, if anyone needs help instrumenting their funnels, I'm here to help :)
Somebody buying 1TB of Drive space presumably intends to use it, and Google won't make a huge margin on that. (Don't know their cost structure, and wouldn't reveal it if I knew). But most people getting "free" Drive space with a laptop is not going to use most it.

Additionally it's unlikely to amount to $1800 subsidy. Storage costs decrease exponentially, so the value of 1TB in 3 years is much lower than 1TB now.
This is brilliant, thank you!

I was lucky never to be bullied physically in school. But I deeply sympathize with those that have been.
It remained to be seen whether he had committed a crime. That is what the trial was going to determine.

That said, I agree that since the prosecution was taking the position that it was a crime, it's not surprising or particularly concerning that they were looking at his past statements as evidence for establishing intent. That is a normal and expected thing for prosecutors to do.
Been developing Sublime Text (1 through 2) for about 4, 5 years. In all the time, free updates. After 5 years, switches to a paid upgrade. Is met with this sentiment.

Am I the only one who thinks this is crazy?

By the way, most people are saying that he didn't add all that much functionality to ST3 (and complained about it), now the OP is complaining because he "disappeared for half a year to work on the new version". So some people are angry that he didn't add functionality and charged money, some that he added functionality, but charged for it, but everyone is sure to point out that it's not about the money.
Horrbily one-sided. Wikipedia's article has both ways coffee is good and is bad for you.

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

The important thing is that the dosage makes the the medicine of poison, and that while drinking two or three cups a day may be better for your health than not drinking coffee, drinking ten cups a day is bad for you.
So in the UK if someone trespasses on your property, you can't call the cops to have them removed, you have to file a lawsuit?
Hey - great idea: simple, original, useful - I like it a lot. FYI though, I tried signing up through twitter and keep getting a failed timed out message back. Might be a twitter issue but worth looking into. Hope it takes off for you.
Preventing Interface-Induced Backbone.sync Firestorms
To get back to sports, this is also how outfielders (in baseball) catch fly balls: http://psychology.clas.asu.edu/files/2002_JEP-HPP%28Uncatcha...
In my experience, the IE* compatibility mode don't capture 100% of the quirks compared to working in the browser directly.

I use a win8 vm for IE10, win7 for IE9 and run copies of XP mode within win7 for IE 6-8
A lot of bold claims here. It's unfortunate that the article focuses solely on the potential benefits of caffeine/coffe but glosses over the possibility of there being any risks associated with them. That being said, I applaud the author for providing references for all the claims he makes!
Thanks for the explanation, that does sound useful! :)
SongPop Scales to 1 Million Active Users On GAE
Here are some observations.
1. When I go to the site, I get the understanding that I am at the site of a chocolatier, but I have no idea what makes this chocolate different/better

2. When I click on 'about us' I get educated on how stone ground chocolate is how the mayans made it, and how the chocolate is not refined through rollers, conched, or tempered. I have no idea what any of those things mean or why I as a consumer should care.

It would be much better in this case to educate me with pictures, or maybe an infographic. I went to the page and waded through the text for the express purpose of trying to understand why I should buy/eat this chocolate rather than the stuff I normally buy. Does it taste better? Does it taste different? If so, how?

I get the sense that I should prefer this over 'regular chocolate' but I dont know why?

So I think the chocolatier should do a better job of convincing my why I want to try and buy this chocolate.
Is it really?

I understand that honey and syrup isn't as bad as pure white sugar, but is it really something that is "good"?
minus the social spam

Somehow I find that hilarious.
Polygonian - Triangle Art (Require Google Native Client)
It's AltGr+7/0 though (on german and swedish layouts at least), which is much worse. Open curly brace is a killer if you are doing it with one hand only. Also the AltGr button is only represented on the right side of the keyboard while you get the Shift on both sides, which makes it more awkward to use with two hands in some situations.

edit: Wow, just learned that Ctrl+Alt is the same as AltGr from the comment below. I've only used computers daily for 21 years ...
That's true, but at least personally the only two I know of are Dandelion in SF and Choco Vivo. Others with 'bean to bar' have somewhat of a questionable reputation.
It's very easy for the abused to turn into abusers, hell I nearly did. It is what is making me so uncomfortable reading these comments advocating that the solution is to let the abused extract violence on their abusers. In too many cases, the abused discovers that they like the taste of violence, the power it grants them over those weaker or slower than them. And I can't knock them for that, violence feels wonderful. That's why I've had to be very careful not to let myself slip into that mold and remind myself that on the other side there is someone who is feeling the very same pain you shirk from.
Well, no good binary delta algorithm uses compression dictionaries anyway (since they are binary deltas, not compression algorithms :P), except to compress the newly added strings, which you can't avoid.

Note of course, that relying on the data not being corrupt on the client (which you must if you assume the compression dictionaries are sane) is dangerous. I assume you guys must store some checksum that you compare once to make sure when someone says "i have version 5, delta against this", that they really have a good copy of version 5?

SVN used to what you are suggesting, btw. We only send clients deltas against the versions they already have, and precompute them in some cases :)
Would you want to see a video about the bean to bar process only or with bean to bar vs what we get in the market?
You've got to consider that since they're tribal/rural, they also doesn't exactly ~need~ money to survive, and extra money is extra money in the same sense, so you can get a some extra luxury, they already have food*

* Wikipedia says they take subsistance from crops, fishing, rodents... It also says they make their own clothes, so, what's a lot for really? Aren't you failing to remember they don't depend on money as much as we to survive?
I think you're off the mark, because you're always "working for someone else". Details change, but ultimately there's no difference between "mak[ing] something that is useful" and working for others. Sometimes the terms are great, and sometimes they're awful.

The implicit assumption is that "working for an established organization" must imply "working with miserably low levels of autonomy". I'm not sure that I agree.

If we negotiate better terms, we get more autonomy and more compensation. This will also give more people the financial means to start their own companies and get that level of autonomy.

The problem is that the exchange rate between capital/establishment and talent/effort is very unfavorable in comparison to what it could be.
Maybe we should be talking less about forming "tribes" and more about how to make programming accessible to anyone who needs to solve real problems using computers.
Just go through Bootstrap and you'll be fine http://twitter.github.com/bootstrap/
I think exposing kids to programming is a good thing. But when so many applicants fail the Fizzbuzz test, do you think there is something innate about coding? For other subjects, like math, you can get most people to do the basics, like add 2+2.

http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2006/07/separating-programm...
http://programmers.stackexchange.com/

"This is a collaboratively edited question and answer site for professional programmers interested in conceptual questions about software development."
WikiSynonyms: Find synonyms using Wikipedia redirects
That's an issue you run into once, set your editor, and then never have to worry about it again.

On the other hand, curly braces will plague you as long as you use C-inspired languages. An editor will only help you to more easily produce the cruft, it won't absolve you of the responsibility.
I'm never speaking as a lawyer on HN, just as someone has some familiarity with the justice system that anyone could acquire by reading the news. I don't think my opinion should carry any more water than that.

The longest sentence for hacking in the U.S. on record, according to Wired, is for a guy who stole two million credit card numbers and sold them for $20 a pop to organized crime: http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2010/02/max-vision-sentenci.... He was sentenced to 13 years and paying $27.5 million in restitution, but will be serving about 9 years in a minimum security prison.

The maximum sentences exist for guys like that (and I don't think 9 years in prison is unreasonable for hacking that resulted in $86 million in fraudulent charges).

A quick Google-ing shows that people who engage in activity that doesn't actually cause substantial economic damages, even when facing a dozen felony counts, just don't get substantial jail time. Which makes the "35 years in prison" hand-waving just plain misleading.

Now, maybe you think a 6 month suspended sentence and a felony record are too harsh for illegally accessing a network. I tend to agree with you--I think that copyright infringements should be purely civil matters and accessing networks without permission should be misdemeanors, not felonies. But that's a totally separate argument than: "OMG our system is so fucked he was going to get 35 years for not doing anything wrong!"

I guess my point is that things can be wrong without being an indictment of our whole society. Not everything we should change is the result of the fundamental corruption of our society, the fact that our Congress people are bought out, the fact that our government is one step away from fascism, etc. When you throw the misleading "decades in prison" language around, you force the debate in that direction, instead of more sensible and productive ones ("maybe we should make the misdemeanor case of the CFAA more robust and not so easily side-stepped by simply claiming the hacking was in the furtherance of some other crime.")
RankTrackr - new simple SEO tool
For the past few months I've been working on a new rank tracking service that would have the features that I needed. Google and Youtube tracking with high accuracy + Mobile app
> Welcome to the twenty-fourth century.

If we (as a human kind) want to get there, we'd better get to fixing those problems; there's still a lot of work to do.
I assume you guys must store some checksum that you compare once to make sure when someone says "i have version 5, delta against this", that they really have a good copy of version 5?

Yes.
@drakim
Yes IT is waaaayy better...
(of course keep sane proportions)
you can check several papers at pubmed.
one here [1]
[1] = http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21310307
The AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) system [1] is perhaps the most comprehensive RBAC deployment I've encountered in a web-based service. It's extremely powerful, extremely flexible, and rather hard to use. AWS is a service designed (primarily) for developer-types, so if they roll out something that requires users to have a relatively strong understanding of security concepts (and to expend some thought and effort to get things right), that's arguably OK.

Google is a different story. People commenting on this thread would appreciate some in-depth manual controls over the resources each Google credential can access, but making this sort of thing accessible/understandable to an average user is a formidable challenge.

They might be able to get part of the way there using a something like a TOFU (Trust on First Use) policy - e.g. after you create an ASP and use it to login over XMPP, that ASP would only be usable for XMPP logins for the remainder of its existence. However, this might still confuse some users or break some assumptions here and there (e.g. what if you have a client application that's designed to do both email and chat?)

Besides all this, I wouldn't be surprised if Google would have to do some major backend re-architecting for this sort of thing to even be possible...

[1] https://aws.amazon.com/iam/
Railgun is used between CDN and http server, while this one seems to be between browser and http server.

Railgun only requires website to deploy a client, and cooperate with cloudflare. User's client doesn't have to be Chrome or whatever; web server doesn't need to be aware of Railgun. It's transparent to both HTTP clients and HTTP servers. SDCH, however, requires a modification to HTTP/1.1 protocol, which implies changes in both HTTP clients and HTTP servers.

Both are quite promising, though, Railgun is easier to adopt.
Http://www.dailygood.org/view.php?qid=5296
Here are my first impressions from a brief test drive.

http://luciangames.com/blog/2013/2/26/the-loom-game-engine
I really like these guys (http://solvemedia.co.uk/index.html) I think it just makes it more interesting... and hey you may even make a bit off it. But I think reCaptcha is becoming impossible to solve
That's a great approach. Thanks.
That works the other way too (Microsoft Office, Photoshop...) and people gladly pay for them.
That shipped sailed 15 years ago, time to move on.
> I personally think Vim is best for me but it comes with a huge cost of learning - probably into the thousands of dollars if you account for your productive time spent upfront.

Or free, if you find it de-stressing to unravel the beauty of all the features while sipping on some tea later in the night.
Ask HN million downloadshow to monetize such thing 
Say i have very viral desktop app (like youtube downloader or file convertor ) that is free and i have more then million downloads, what options do i have to monetize such thing ?
i will like to avoid , installer/spamming tricks.
thanks !
Am I the only one here amazed that is seems to "know" through what perspective you're looking at it? How is it doing that?
Wanna buy a loophole?
"Think Different" creator thinks Apple is losing the ad war to Samsung
How to write a Lisp compiler