skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The confusion here stems from the fact that the term QBasic is ambiguous. On the one hand, it refers to the IDE and interpreter included with later releases of MS-DOS. On the other, it refers to the language accepted by that interpreter. Since QB64 is specifically designed to accept that same language (FreeBasic has a mode for this as well), I don't think it's unreasonable to consider QB64 a QBasic compiler. Would you find it similarly unjust if someone claimed to write a game in Python but they really wrote it in PyPy?

> QB64, however, is basically just like any other modern scripting language.

QB64 is not a scripting language. It compiles the QBasic language (with a few extensions) to C++ and passes it on to gcc. It seems like you're making a lot of assumptions about QB64 when you could instead be looking for facts.
Exactly! I would give anything if I could use git every day at work instead of CC.
Why is it a bad process? I know little to nothing about Jira (although I have worked in environments in the past where you don't start work on a defect without taking some form of ticket, and it didn't seem fundamentally bad).
There's No Such Thing as a Bitcoin
>A quick look suggests that the rule of law in Sweden is among the highest in the world. But if you got any sources on the contrary I would be happy to read them.

Those are just for general cases -- a median of government/police behavior. (Not to mention a lot of those are reported or based on data by government bodies themselves).

Doesn't say squat about specific people targeted by some agency (as examples, unwanted agitators, etc).

The "rule of law" is great in the US too in general, but you have people like J.E Hoover break all the rules in the book, or Senator McCarthy make his own rules, etc. Or you have the government maintain a whole prison, with torture, no due process, no trials, etc at all, outside the country (Guantanamo).

The treatment of law in general cases is not at all the same as the treatment of law in "targeted" cases.
So the alternative is to use napalm strikes? Drones are way, way, way more targeted than bombing a whole area.
That's pretty awesome. I wrote a SCREEN 13 graphical version from scratch. IIRC, the snake sprites were gradient blocks that were procedurally generated, and then used GET and PUT to pick and place them.

Wish I still had a copy of that stuff that I could put on Github!
oops, I am In Agra in Uttar Pradesh 283203.

Any idea for me. I never see any Company,corporate Anyone do anything in UP.
ISteve, The First Steve Jobs Biopic Is Now Available Online
Your biggest hurdle will probably be getting noticed. When people search for "how to build a website", they'll see a lot of references to wordpress or squarespace. How will they find out about your alternative?
A very informative paper on Docker, will definitely help me out when I start playing around with it. Well done!
Relays don't glow. Those are dekatron[1] gas-discharge (neon) tubes, the machine version of the human-readable Nixie lamps.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dekatron
Exactly: as a businessperson, are you really going to take the risk (even if small) that Paypal will, effectively, steal your money?
The judge giving extensions is key here. It is customary to operate like this in Scandinavian countries. The idea is that the police has to make a case to the judge that it is worthwhile to still hold him and that they are making progress in the case. Otherwise he would have been released long ago.

It is quite different from other countries, I know, but law is not handled the same way all over the world.
The wikipedia page about the non-obviousness test [1] says:

"The purpose of the inventive step, or non-obviousness, requirement is to avoid granting patents for inventions which only follow from "normal product design and development", ..."

What you described for swipe-to-unlock is very much the normal product design and development process, so doesn't (well, _shouldn't_) qualify it for patent protection.

And yes, I agree: the rules DO need to be enforced better.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inventive_step_and_non-obviousn...
But bitcoins do have a use. There's at least a few million dollars a month of value moving through Silk Road.

However, it's not in the interest of users of BTC to use a wildly unstable currency. My prediction is that bitcoin will be replaced at some point by another crypto currency which fixes some of its major flaws - particularly its deflationary nature.
I will definitely. Needs some clean up first.
Really?, Downvoted for stating a problem?
I don't think that a bubble feels like a bubble to the participants driving it. I remember seeing this same phenomenon with gold prices a couple of years ago. So many people were adamant that "this time its different" even though we have seen gold spike and crash many dozens of times throughout history. Now that some of these people are losing lots of money in gold maybe their views change but it won't matter, next time will be same for the people driving it.
Discretion: Graphic Gore: Drug Dealer's Face Blown-Off by Police
I have been trying to answer this question myself. FWIW, I would like to officially throw my hat into the ring as an addition to the network of folks you could use to deliver sites more quickly. I have a full stack development setup (all tools to do database to front end and all in between). I specialize in asp.net/sql server, but I am a fair hack with all the shiny new framework madness.
Outlook.com app for Android gets a much-needed overhaul
I always hated that page. It makes angular look like a joke. Ember actually has real sites under it's belt, and I think angular shoots itself in the foot having those novelty 'apps' on there and not a single serious thing.

Although, Analytics is built with angular if I'm not mistaken.
Well that's an unfortunate coincidence. They only just sent out this email a couple of days back: http://i.imgur.com/yZOdKTb.png
And the Pope just became Muslim. It is good as april's first joke but two weeks later.

Sadly Zimbabwe is having much more trouble than a simple hyperinflation.
Experiencing problems with IMAP connections!
Very good story about perp walks, and how they can be staged:

http://www.popehat.com/2013/04/09/misconduct-is-only-news-wh...
Ask HN: Would you hire a beginner who is only test-driving a new career?
Hiring an intern is a common practice, it's pros and cons discussed many times. But what about an enthusiastic beginner who already has a successful career in the other field but wants to try something different?

For example, a software developer who wants to try textiles pattern design. Or an accountant who wants to see how it feels to run an organic farm.

Traditionally, that wouldn't be looked favourably upon. But times change, and maybe such 'casual' workers could bring unique interdisciplinary perspectives to the business.

My question is, do you have experience in hiring such people? What are pros and cons? Would you specifically look for candidates of this kind?
Actually it's what most religions said about universe. It was all programmed at the beginning. All of our actions and their future possible results are known by god. The problem is how we can develop awareness about it, if we doesn't have enough perception by default. Religions say that just believe without questioning, we have reasons, we create the signs for you to believe. I don't know, but as an engineer it does look like god is the head engineer.
"and my memory"

When all else fails, this is the true old school solution. :-)
I want to know what cars these officers are driving that are capable of 150-180mph, or capable of sustaining speeds of 130mph over a significant distance. From my knowledge, 150 is a fairly exclusive club limited to not-inexpensive performance cars, and 180 is a very hard target to meet, mostly at the feet of German luxury cars. I know police officers don't make six figures, so the question is what car are they in that can hit 130 sustained, and 150-180 max?
Have you ventured over to bitcointalk?

The speculators aren't in any danger of disappearing, no sir, this is just an opportunity to buy 'cheap' bitcoin and increase their holdings. Because obviously squirrelling away as much of it as possible will help it become a viable currency...
According to Wikipedia, that style of game goes back to at least 1976: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artillery_game
This is why i haven't really gotten into it. Getting noticed is quite difficult with all of the noise. Folks interested in this should form some kind of collective/conglomerate etc.
I don't see any info about the version they're running, commands
"dtrace -l" and
"dtrace -f write"
just fail and print the usage on my Fedora 18 (package systemtap-sdt-devel-2.1-2.fc18.x86_64). Too bad, DTrace seems interesting !
There's no such thing as the "real value" of anything, only what people will pay. And that is pretty obviously not zero.
I love the lack of communication, and that people have to interact and learn through "body language". That captures one of my favourite aspects of multiplayer gaming for me, cooperation between total strangers without any detailed planning beforehand, so I wish there was more game elements to apply this to and more rewards for cooperation than just killing and not being killed (capturing a flag that spawns in the middle maybe?). But I enjoyed it very much already, I like the lack of guide & tutorial, the learning by doing, even the friendly fire, and hope you keep that minimalism :D
The Register reports that GMail went down exactly a year ago:

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/04/18/google_gmail_outage/
Reading "The Soul of a New Machine" [1], the story of building the successor to the Eclipse, when I was 13/14 was what made me want to work with computers, although I couldn't decide whether hardware or software was cooler. DEC had already won by that point, though. I even acquired a DEC Rainbow 100+ as my first "PC" (it was a hybrid 8088 / Z80 which could boot DEC's DOS or CP/M).

A couple of years ago my father and I scrapped the last of the Rainbows (not rare enough for a museum to be interested) and a Micro PDP 11/23 (no interest from museums or UK PDP enthusiasts, and too hard to ship internationally). It was a sad day.

[1] http://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/0679602615
Is there any reason why you don't use a profanity filter, like this one - https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/simple-profanity-f... .

It is an issue where you object to a certain subset of language, language that is used to express strong or passionate feelings about things. I have never given swearing much thought and I don't understand what makes you object to it.

I guess I have always felt that the less people have to sensor themselves them better.
The wikipedia article on the subject [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Profanity] is not as informative as I'd hoped.
Amnesty has repeatedly criticized Sweden for too harsh conditions in the "häkte", where remand prisoners are kept in isolation for extended periods of time.

For some cases prisoners are kept in isolation well over one year. This is a form of low-intensity torture and causes measurable harm to a person's brain and personality - PTSD being one of the more common residual damages done.
And remember, people kept in "häkte" remand prison are suspects, still to be treated as innocent, and frequently exonerated by the courts. They still suffer the harm from the extended isolation.

Sweden in many ways have a good prison system but the extensive and common use of isolation by prosecutors is really bad and a disgrace.
I find it highly annoying that people who promote client-side MVC and one-page apps always claim that it's trivial to make pages linkable and make browser navigation work, yet the wast majority of real-life single-page apps are missing those features.
We have to be careful when we question the "real value" of specific assets as we may tumble in an essentialist philosophical debate where we have to question the "real value" of every single asset in the universe. There is no inherent difference between gold and bitcoins, they're both scarce assets, one in slightly higher demand than the other. The value of assets is mostly[1] determined by both supply and demand, and as long as the demand is higher than the (more or less) fixed supply of bitcoins, the value will always be > $0.

[1] Please enlighten me if you know more ways of determining the value of assets.
iSteve...And I thought Pirates of Silicon Valley had some inaccuracies.
But nonetheless, it is quite the watch.
The down votes may be a result of people detecting loaded questions, but in the event that they are not, here's my response:

> Is Ember.js actually worth learning? What's the point of my learning yetAnother.js?

You're a Java developer, so it may be harder for you to understand the productivity boon that frameworks like Ember.js and Angular.js provide than it is for people who have been dealing with jQuery spaghetti code on client-side javascript apps that have become increasingly more complex as browser javascript engines have become more capable. Ember.js, Angular.js, and other frameworks that offer two-way data binding are great because they take care of the dom manipulation details developers have typically had to manage by hand in the past. It frees people up to worry more about the business logic of their javascript apps. So if you're a javascript developer sick of writing boilerplate DOM manipulation code, Ember.js is definitely worth learning. I'm partial to Angular.js because it was built with testability in mind.

> Will it make me a better programmer (like learning Haskell will)?

Probably not, but it will make you a more productive programmer.

> Will it enable me to get a pay rise from my current £480 per day contracting fees?

If you're writing Java on your main contract, probably not. This is a bizarre question anyways and probably the source of your down-votes. I personally don't look at learning a new library or language in terms of how much extra money it will make me, but instead look at how much more productive it will make me as a programmer.

> Is there a more diverse and active job market than there is around my current main language (Java)?

I don't know much about the Java market, but I think it's safe to say that knowing Javascript cold and keeping up with the trends in that world will make you pretty darn employable these days.

Keep in mind that Ember.js and other frameworks like it are really only valuable to people who are writing single page javascript applications. If you aren't, or you are against the idea of building single-page applications, then these frameworks won't really do much for you. Although, you can still get some value out of them.
Of course, Hitachi actually had a semiconductor design and manufacturing subsidiary, and their H8 microcontrollers and SuperH CPUs were quite popular at one point. I think they've sold all that off now though.
(Open)VMS was still being developed, sold and commercially supported at that time and several years afterwards, and HP still offers commercial support and made (so far) last release in 2010, so that's not so "ancient". HP also kept selling Alpha based hardware until at least 2007.
"Not vetted by CNN"
> Google Documents service has already been restored for some users, and we expect a resolution for all users in the near future. Please note this time frame is an estimate and may change.

So many words for "we're still working on it."
When you see things like Ember.Object.create() it's a clear sign to run, this isn't Java
Sounds like a good reason to flag the article.
I would argue that for the sake of the law, having a backup of cars behind an officer all doing the speed limit is a good thing. It's called the speed limit, not the speed range. As in, the maximum you're allowed to do on that road in perfect conditions. If we want to enforce the laws, having everyone follow a pace car going exactly the speed limit is a good thing.

Having an officer going 65 in a 55 just to relieve congestion means the law is irrelevant.
Why a simple government website was named best design of the year
Yeah I'm familiar with what QBasic is and many of the other BASIC dialects that preceded it (I'm old :P). I'd agree that it's a language variant / dialect. My issues is when people talk about QBasic as if it was it's own single entity. But then I guess where do you draw the line? eg by my same logic, C++ just a variant of C, yet it's clearly sane to describe them separately. So perhaps I was being overly picky.

As a side note, QBasic does support line numbers - albeit for legacy reasons and not recommended syntax. And some dialects of BASIC did support functions - though the syntax was awkward so I usually just used GOSUB / RETURN when I needed procedures with no return values.
Some of hte ideas from http://www.w3.org/1999/04/Editing/ might come in handy there. What realistic usage scenarios are there for multiple clients concurrently uploading (parts of) the same file?
The Pirate Bay co-founder charged with hacking and stealing money
That's basically exactly how my girlfriend has always (incorrectly) described herself.
The prosecutor formally has to make the case to extend the remand prison, but it's a formality.

Of course it benefits the prosecutor to keep someone locked up while you work on the prosecution evidence.

But it severly restricts the imprisoned person from working on their defense. Thus, it is bad for the legal principle of "equality at arms".
There are serious efforts to move towards "income dependent repayment," sincerely intended by their advocates to help people.

But solve for the equilibrium: colleges can now increase costs even more, and rely upon the state to collect their fees for them in perpetuity.
Brain’s reaction to the taste of beer helps explain why it’s hard to stop at one
What rituals? Extreme Programming and Lean are inspect-and-adapt processes. You might start with something out of the book, but then you are supposed to tweak relentlessly. If you are doing it in a ritualistic fashion, you're already doing it wrong.

The client never cares about what methods you use. That doesn't mean you shouldn't use any methods.

I agree that experimenting is dangerous: any powerful tool is dangerous. But it has worked for too many people to call it a delusion.

Regarding "couldn't fathom", I'm glad to substitute "didn't fathom". But you certainly didn't understand them, and many other people did.
Interesting tidbit in the article is that majority of Sony's profit comes from their life insurance business:

http://www.splatf.com/2011/11/sony-profits/
It's down less than 5%. That's not exactly out of the ordinary. They are probably expected to miss their earnings forecast.
"Free fall" is a bit of an exaggeration. Yeah, it dropped 4% really quickly this morning, but in the grand scheme of market drops, 4% is not that large. I was expecting to see a 10%+ drop. A 4% drop could be attributed to a lot of different things not directly related to the company's business or someone making a big move before earnings announcements.
To be fair, they only quoted 3 9's and I doubt they'll lose that because of this
This book should be on the HN reading list.

(I still have several boards from a DG computer on my office wall. Geek porn...)
Ejecta: fast open source JS, canvas and audio on iOS
Every byte of bandwidth wasted on this article is a byte to much. Act now! Together we can stop bs (byte slips)
Hi, I'm a patent examiner. I won't apologize for the agency, we have more than our share of problems, but I also think we get more than our share of criticism for bad patents.

The PTO simply has no ability to change patent law. We apply it as it's written by Congress and interpreted by the courts. A few points on the law without getting into criticism of the agency (you can get easily find that elsewhere):

1. The burden on patent applicants is too low. There's a presumption that a patent will issue as soon as it's filed. The patent examiner has to prove that whatever is claimed was obvious, didn't work, wouldn't work, etc. If the patent examiner can't meet that burden, the patent issues. The patent applicant doesn't have to tell us about the state of the art prior to the "invention", what the improvement is, or why it deserves a patent.

2. As discussed upthread, the obviousness standards are too low. If you can't find evidence that each and every aspect of a claim was in the prior art, you have to allow the patent. Even then, a patent attorney can attack the rejection if the different prior art documents wouldn't fit well together. As an examiner, you can't simply say that something would have been obvious, with no supporting evidence. If you try to make such a rejection, the patent attorney will appeal your rejection, you'll get reversed on appeal and the patent will issue anyway.

3. The process naturally skews towards patent applicants. Most (nearly all) patent applicants have an attorney who is fighting 100% for as broad a patent as possible. The examiner is supposed to be a neutral arbiter who applies the law in an evenhanded fashion. There's no party fighting for the public, pushing back hard against the patent attorney. It's like a courtroom where only one side of the story is presented.

You can find a lot commentary/criticsm of the patent examination process online BTW, but not generally on the tech sites - look more towards legal/academic literature.

(Speaking on my own behalf, not the agency's)
Holy cow. If you said to me "How is Richard Jewell related to the Atlanta Olympics?". I would not have guessed the correct answer: "rescued hundreds of people from a bomb."

I would have guessed the libel, which I will not repeat here.

Memory sucks.
> particularly its deflationary nature

Which IMHO is what will kill it; it's just a terrible feature for a currency.
I don't need to lie about what you wrote, you are doing that yourself.

Firstly, you come out with this stuff whenever an even tangentially related topic comes up on HN. So you are not making an observation about political science, you are engaging in advocacy. You are saying "Hooray for throwing out the rule book! That keeps us safe and stops the towelhead terrorists!". Like you did here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4474143

Secondly, you are engaging in the no true scotsman fallacy whenever I give a counterexample. Breivik wasn't true terrorism because he was just one guy. Well that's irrelevant. The size and scale of any terrorist attack ever made up to now has been insignificant next to the damage to civil liberties from "security" or even to the death toll from road accidents. The difference is whether the population get hysterical, as you are advocating, or maintain their sense of proportion, as I am advocating. Marinus Van Der Lubbe was also just one guy, but we got Hitler and the Nazis being given emergency powers as a result of the Reichstag fire, because the Germans in the 30s ran around screaming about how the scary, scary legions of communist barbarians (well funded by their Russian backers) were a serious threat to all of civilization, just like you keep screaming about how the scary, scary legions of islamist barbarians (well funded by their oil-sheikh backers) are a serious threat to all of civilization.

Well we don't have to treat this crap as natural. Any sane society, like the Norwegians today and unlike the Germans in the 30s, can just refuse to be scared, and put checks and balances in place to curb the politicians, like the European courts curbed the British government.

Politicians taking away liberties under the excuse of "security" is the oldest fraud in the book, as anyone can see from Julius Caesar's comments on Sulla. Nobody who grew up in a country with functioning schools and books has any excuse for not knowing better.
No new products in sight, so numbers will be bad. This is all the investors getting out/shorting before the Q numbers roll in.

The best thing? Has nothing to do with actual performance of the company right now. Gambling.