skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Its been a while since I configure my CPU, but I am currently running Ubuntu 12.10 (upgraded incrementally from 10.04), with an alternate desktop (Awesome). I have never* noticed a program not work because off this, including the applet icons. The main point to consider in this is that most of the programs that Ubuntu runs are not written, nor maintained, for Ubuntu. Therefore, they should work perfectly well with other desktops.
The only incompatibility that Unity introduces is when you are actually using Unity. When you are using another desktop, a program that works in another distro should work just as well.
If you install, for example, the package "mate-session-manager", you will install a traditional desktop, and still be running Ubuntu. There are many other desktops to choice from in the Ubuntu repositories. Admittadly, installing one not in the repos will be more complicated.

* I have actually run into 1 problem (with java) arising from the fact that Awesome is a non-re-parenting WM. This rarely came up, and was solved by claiming to be running 'LG3D' as my window manager, as that is on java's hard coded list on non-re-parenting WM`s.
Azure Mobile Services - http://www.windowsazure.com/en-us/develop/mobile/
If you mean competing with TicketMaster, etc, go read http://lefsetz.com/wordpress/

It turns out most of the acts scalp the tickets themselves for additional income.
Good news for the Parse team, but not so good for Parse users.
Given the very lucrative and competitive mobile market space, we will likely to see tremendous updates in the Android platform if Google have acquired it.

At least Facebook won't be biased about what mobile platform to support, it can support all other platforms without focusing on specific Android.

I use Parse as my backend for my iOS apps and it is absolutely useful. They provided a great service and the mPaAS approach to developing and managing mobile apps data and services is revolutionary.
The mean salary in New York City's finance industry rose from $80,000 in 1981 to $360,000 in 2011, while average New York City salaries rose from $40,000 to $70,000.

You may be right, but I just don't think there are a lot of tech companies that could offer a mean salary of $360,000 and remain profitable. Especially small to medium size companies. Compare that to hedge funds, which were basically printing money and could pay their small staffs extremely large salaries (and even larger bonuses).
Did the existence of shale oil or tar sands delay crude breaking $80/barrel? More expensively exploited resources typically aren't exploited until their market price makes such exploitation profitable. We've known about the vast amounts of oil under the Bakken Formation since the 1950s, for example.

If this stuff is more expensive than Bolivian lithium, we won't do more than tinker with it until it's not, and consequently I wouldn't expect it to have much impact on the price curve — we'll all still be buying the same stuff until then.
"tell the theoretical mathematician on the team about Unicode identifiers in Java"

...thus reducing his productivity to zero while he hunts through the Unicode maps to find the glyph he wants?
"You Should Probably Send More Email Than You Do" http://www.kalzumeus.com/2012/05/31/can-i-get-your-email/
Depends on how you say it. If you say it as a way to browbeat them, sure. But if you have arrived at a point in the conversation where it is obvious the job they have chosen is one that a) cannot help you, and b) makes sure the person who has chosen not to help you cannot hear about it, then it is pretty obvious they have a shitty job.

You can either acknowledge that or sweep it under the rug. I'd rather just acknowledge it. So I think it's possible to say with sympathy something like, "Man your bosses have put you in a terrible situation. You have to take the heat, but you can't help anybody. I'd bet you can find something better than that."

Sure, that's how they're paying this month's rent, and I don't begrudge them that. But them making a career out of that isn't good for anybody, them included.
Benchmarking MongoDB Replica Set in Amazon cloud
Facebook are stepping into new (for them) territory here. Unless this is an acqui-hire, it may be an "X isn't shutting down" statement I can believe.
If it turns out nobody wants to watch the movie he wants to make, at least not hard enough to pay for it, maybe he shouldn't try to make it. If he bankrolls it with his own money, and it turns out that nobody wants to watch it, it's probably because it was a bad idea. Kickstarter lets you find that out, with some uncertainty, without wasting a year of the lives of dozens of people.
Facebooks problem is a fundamental development culture one, 'move fast and break things' is not great from the perspective of developers latching onto your platform. If the reward is great enough, yes its worth it...
Varsity Tutors Starts Accepting Bitcoin Using Coinbase
I think a large part of its draw on this site is that he's packaged the ideas from the 'hacker' perspective. It's an interesting thought experiment to think of other slightly dated but mainstream activities could do with a similar treatment.
I'll throw in my bit of speculation. Relatively recently, Google lured Eric Brewer, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eric_Brewer_(scientist), away from Cal. I bet they are going to make a huge infrastructure related announcement.
Actually I'm talking about medical schools, which often have admit rates below 5%. Taking the top 5% of every ethnic group is the same as taking 5% of the entire applicant population, so this only applies to med schools with admit rates below 5%.

I'm not talking about undergrad.
haha, I really hope you are right about the problem space. I'm currently building a company that hopes to solve exactly the "forget about food and then are starving and make a bad decision" problem. Not ready to say more yet, but again, sure hope you're right :-)

Anyway, if it's that thing to have on stand-by, I'm sure its ok, but so is an Ensure, a Balance Bar, a Slim-Fast, etc, so again, no real innovation here.
"full mobile back-end" is pushing it. Don't get me wrong, I love what Parse has brought to the market, but the capability of it is limited at the moment.

One of the biggest limitations is the length for which cloud code methods can run. (Nothing longer than a second, IIRC)

You can build a social sharing app, or share some data between apps, but building a "product" on it is limited to very simple cases.
I'd rather see that approach than a no entry, shut down developers approach. Admittedly Facebook offers a lot more than Twitter to justify such a cost, but Twitter seems like somewhere developers want to be too. Paid usage API sounds like a good idea to me.
9 cool things about the new $100 bill
What do you see as the holes? Care to link out to your three projects?
You are looking for a product called Ensure. You can find it in every mini-mart in the country. It has actually been scientifically developed and tested as a meal replacement and is based on real research by people who know what they are talking about rather than one guy who is making a lot of guesses...
That's not really fair. Google seem to work very hard to provide a first class iOS experience on their own services. No reason to assume they'd shut that down on something they acquired.
There's definitely a bit hand holding with Parse that makes it attractive to a inexperienced developer. If opening a socket and sending and receiving binary data makes you nervous, then Parse is going to make you feel a whole lot more comfortable.

But the real win with Parse is that for small to medium sized apps, you don't need to manage your own servers. Apple takes care of delivery, Parse takes care of the backend. You don't need to worry about uptime or maintaince or 2 am notifications that your server is down.
> And it's evident throughout history.

Sure, if you happen to have been brainwashed under Soviet Russia.

> "hocus pocus and abracadabra" are childish BS.

In your hands, sure. In mine, it has been working amazingly well in calling out childish BS.

> americans in general have an aversion to social sciences and politics

Hocus pocus! In any case, I'm not American. Try hocus-pocusing that.

>> I hope you don't believe that the natives had claim over the entire continent.

> I very much do.

I'd ask why you think that. But now I'm bored.

> the European immigrants surely can not claim any part of the continent.

If I weren't so bored, I'd ask you what you think it means to make a claim on something, and who else recognizes the claim, and who enforces the claim. I'd ask you about people who recognize or enforce claims of others, as to what basis they could have for recognizing or not recognizing claims. I'd ask you what you think of three Yemenis claiming that Mars was their ancestral property, and NASA has no business landing there [1]. I'd also ask about NASA's Brian Welch who claims "Mars is ... the property of all humanity". I'd also claim his own house to be the property of all humanity, since that too is "out in the solar system".

But I got bored. So I'm not asking anything any more.

[1]: http://edition.cnn.com/TECH/9707/24/yemen.mars/
5 User Interface Design Features That Need To Stop
Parse is handling 10 million requests for our app per month, and I'm very uneasy about this.
Congrats, Parse guys. Please try not to let Facebook ruin an awesome service.
Er, no. An economist would be horrified by Harrison Bergeron, as demonstrating the most damaging possible form of egalitarianism and nothing like the grandparent proposal; the point of a height tax is not to make tall people shorter - whatever good or purpose is being fulfilled by tall people is still fulfilled after the tax, and the tax serves the useful function of raising revenue while also not distorting any investments or consumptions or plans.
Unfortunately, intentions about how you'll operate after an acquisition are just wishes.

There's a huge corporate political apparatus that just paid a lot of money for the right to implant their thumb print on how you do things. You may be able to push that day forward, but unless you wind up in charge, there's not much long-term hope.

Congratulations on the acquisition, but sorry about the acquisition.
Because we'll enjoy cheating on it so much more, or something?
I also lurk there. I will say they're a little too picky sometimes on what is and is not acceptable fashion, but they're great for teaching what good-fitting clothing looks like, as well as matching up clothes to create a style. Especially for someone who is not overweight, clothes with a proper fit can make a dramatic, huge difference in appearance.

Every time I look at that subreddit, I feel like a slob for what I wear.
I think it depends on what your purpose is. If we're measuring people as economic cogs, and those measurements are sent to other institutions, then I agree grades are very useful tools.

But in voluntary schools where you pursue your own interests (and not some certification), grades are so ineffectual that they're generally nonexistent. At least in my experience. Tests may corrected, but there isn't a grade. You just see what you did wrong. When you ask the teacher for more detailed feedback on your progress, they don't pull a number out of their butts, like "2.7". That whole grade infrastructure is for another reason.

As for "freeloading students," no one cares. (In these more voluntary forms of education.) It is your choice how much effort you deem appropriate.
So surges of facebook apps will have data with default ACLs set to everyone?
Also, film adaptation that was phenomenally well done: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tvqsv1pPSbg
Shout out to HN favorite grellas for being our counsel.

https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=grellas
>And explaining the details behind the opaque steps does not make them any less opaque to the uninitiated.

Emm, by definition it does.
I actually think that software plays a huge role in causing this horrible customer service from airlines as well. I am a frequent flyer on American (125k miles last year) and have had numerous experiences that led to this conclusion. One experience in particular happened on a recent trip to Europe.

On this particular trip I was flying on a code-share BA flight (this means a flight I bought as AA, but flew on a BA plane). Normally with my flyer status I can upgrade to a good seat without issue. I was however booked in a terrible middle seat on my return flight. I called AA and they couldn't figure out how to upgrade me. I called BA, same thing. I called American Express Travel, they couldn't figure it out either. The response I got from everybody was very helpful (I get better customer service than most people, due to my flyer status), but they simply couldn't figure out how to actually make the change in their system. When I got to Heathrow, I asked a BA agent at the counter if she could change my seat. She couldn't figure it out so she called another person over who was more experienced. This lady then 'hacked' away on her terminal for literally 10 minutes. She was giving me updates the entire time on what she was doing. She tried a variety of different options to change my ticket until she found one that worked.

While there certainly is a human aspect and a policy aspect to bad customer service with Airlines, I believe that some of the problem is the result of the customer service representatives having to deal with really really bad software. Most of them simply don't actually know how to make the changes that customers want so they just tell them it isn't possible. My guess is that if the airline industry was able to massively upgrade their software you would see a huge improvement in customer service simply because the representatives would actually be able to accomplish the requested tasks.
Here is what I would like the professor to do. Follow up with a "normal" test and see how the students perform. If the class average was greater that prior year performances, the co-operation actually helped in drilling the concepts in.
There are a bunch of different liquid feeds available.

Well known brands include Ensure and Fortisip.

(https://www.nutricia.co.uk/fortisip//)

(http://ensure.com/)

These have the advantage of careful preparation and high standards of QA.
Assuming that most transactions "just work", then these interactions are by definition at the margin, which means that fixing them probably isn't very profitable. I guess it's OK to complain about it -- I think it sucks, too -- but these companies are probably acting rationally.
Vulnerability in Viber for Android enables lock screen bypass
really? well, I'm actually looking for people right now. I mean, this month I need a bunch of rack and stack help (but I'm willing to take you through setting up several brands of switches, if you sign on before I set 'em up myself) I can pay $15/hr on a 1099, (remember, that means you pay both the employer and employee payroll taxes, so at minimum, that means you are paying 7.5% more of that as taxes than you would as a w2. Plus tax calculation effort and stuff.) but I've got a kinda informal headhunting deal with a buddy who needs similar skills. He pays a little more (full time, though, and w/ health benefits, on a w2, and I think he would pay like $15-$18/hr, but between the w2 and the benefits, that's significantly better than the $15 on a 1099.) I point him at good folks who work for cheap, and instead of giving me a recruiting bonus, he lets me rent you back at a discounted rate. So yeah, if you are in silicon valley, drop me an email (in my profile) and call your first few days 'paid interview' and maybe you get a full time gig with that other guy?

(I hire people full-time with benefits, too- but right now, I don't have enough revenue to hire another full-time. I do need some help moving, though, which is why that shady deal with my buddy is so good for me; I get some per-day work, but can attract someone that wants to be full time, and thus end up paying closer to full-time rates.)

I am okay with a full-day minimum; I'm not expecting you to show up for an hour for $15, and I usually get lunch or dinner or something.

But yeah; I don't know. “Napoleon's hat on the battlefield is worth 50,000 men”. - most people expect /leadership/ - and most people think leadership involves motivating people through personal charisma and confidence.

Personally? I understand how bad leadership can destroy value, but I don't really see how good leadership (in the personal charisma sense) can help anything. I think good leaders pick good people, (or, at least, the best people available considering the compensation the company can afford.) then mostly get out of the way. I mean, i do a lot of "no, don't spend time on that, this other thing is more important" - like today, I redirected an employee away from working on new images and towards improving our per-port BCP38. And I do training, too, but that's really more experienced individual contributor type work.

(And as for Napoleon, after the french revolution? the french soldiers were treated better than any of their contemporaries, and I think that had a lot to do with their success. I mean, I'm not entirely discounting Napoleon, but "Liberté, égalité, fraternité," I think, really had a lot to do with his success. It's not a unique strategy; every Caesar since, well, Caesar has used populist rhetoric and policies to gain and keep power, but at that time? the rest of the world really treated their soldiers poorly, and France was, at least in Europe, uniquely populist.)
"What’s so sad too is how little it would often take to resolve the situations. You bend a policy here, you expedite an order there, you bubble an issue up to a manager."

This might be harder than it looks. A lot of customer care is outsourced. The vendor's employees aren't in a great position to bend, or bubble, or expedite much, if anything.

Calls come in, data goes out, but .. who do you bubble a problem to when 'the company' is far away and you only deal with them within the confines of a system?
you laid down an excellent foundation and then just dismissed it on the conclusion.

why does buying parse makes perfect sense for facebook? you already mentioned they are doing fine there, with their little piece of the internet in their app. why would they want to support 60,000 apps that does other things out of their little corner?

....oh, will they bait and switch them? all 60,000 apps forced to login via facebook only next month?
Parse is even more attractive to the experienced developer. After 15 years of backend bullshit, I was pretty stoked to find something which could make almost all of that pain and suffering finally go away.
This error can't happen in Rust. If blocks must be braced.
Great job on this. It's a really convenient reference, and I love how each element has a code sample, which is usually what I'd be looking for. I have this bookmarked now for future use, thanks!
> Yes. (at least on iOS, not sure about Android or Win)

er, what? It's an afternoon's worth of work, involving basic PKI and TCP sockets. I know it's an afternoon's worth of work, because I've done it in an afternoon.
I tend to do that when I'm using run-parts, or similar processing over a directory of files that will all be read. It ensures that files are always loaded in a predictable order.

Usually it doesn't matter, but if you have dependencies it allows you to express them in a simple fashion. (e.g. defining a function in one file, and using it in another.)
I didn't mean to be critical, but I've done some research on this topic, and one hears far too often the claim that the market can be predicted. It can't, not in any consistent or reliable way. If it could, the market would collapse -- businesses would refuse to try to raise capital using equities.

The efficient market hypothesis (EMH) says the market can't be gamed or predicted. No one knows whether the EMH is a legitimate theory or has an effect on the real market, but one thing is certain -- if there was a way to reliably predict the market, it would collapse. The market's very existence depends on the idea that all investors are equal and no one can (legally) game the system.

> This article may have been looking at correlations after the fact ...

That's one of the trickier aspects of investing -- the regularity with which one hears of a correlation that pops up after the fact, and the implication that it might have been exploitable in advance. But ex post facto correlations are just that, nothing more. They even have a name for it -- Monday morning quarterbacking.
Facebook has a mindshare problem. I no longer consider it a driving force in my social interaction and I'm of the older generation. The younger generation seems to have abandoned it already. It's now a deposit for the occasional family photo and lately seems to be full of chain spam.

When you think back to the history of social networks (AOL, Compuserv, Friendster, Myspace) these things don't have a great half-life.

They need to reinvent themselves and fast, and extending their reach isn't as much the issue as reasserting relevance through great content.
They may not be the majority but there are acquisitions where a service keeps running. This is one of them.
Email PG.
You might believe that, but the question is: will you have a choice?
Emacs has the TeX input mode which lets you type special characters using their TeX names. So you can type \alpha for α, \to for → and so on. And if you don't like that for whatever reason, there are other alternative input modes you can use.

If you're using a tool which forces you to use a map to find glyphs, you're simply doing it wrong. Really, there is no excuse in this day and age not to support Unicode well!
Congrats!

We couldn't be happier to have Solomon as a speaker at our conference in Paris on June 7: http://dotscale.eu

See you there :-)
And I was having such a great day until I read this. R.I.P. Parse
First time hearing about this: apt-get for Windows
You don't need big muscles to pick fruits and vegetables though, just endurance (I've done it for a couple of summers as a job).
The power of concentration and focus.
Even freshly baked croissants were once an odd novelty.
soon we will be able to mine the realtime social space for memes and meme likes. sounds valuable.

facebook hasn't delivered. years ago i was sold on this service - i envisioned a future where i could find a doctor via my social network, or collaborate with a team member from within facebook on a document, or play a realtime game with a friend.

the only thing it seems to be good at is spreading wall spam and obscuring content. lets start with the ability to review wall posts by date instead of the endless scroll of stupidity.
Yeah, at my school operational semantics was only covered in that same PL theory course. The undergraduate programming languages/compilers course never went into it, unfortunately.
Facebook bought strobe in 2011 which was also an "app delivery network" and did nothing with it. Why pick up another one?
Agreed, fitting clothes make a huge difference. A good haircut also goes a hell of a long way, for boys and girls alike.
Percona Live has no code of conduct
Damn dude, you're handsome. For real. Looking at your picture in the link you provide on your profile, you look absolutely fine. I'm not one of those people who is lying to you.
A similar one that i use http://dochub.io/
US Navy to pay $1M to make Android more secure
Diary of the Hitler Diary Hoax
Tent (https://tent.io)
Why? Makes sense to me. Why else would Facebook want to "power my app" with Parse?

Haven't they always only offered developer services for their own platform and not the wider web?
I guess I didn't realize this was about muscles. I was just replying to the guy asking if agriculture was done by hand. Maybe shouldn't follow threads via the /comments page. I end up not knowing what the context is.
I believe they were just being funny, reporting how ridiculous these event ticket buying process became, instead of reporting this as a comparison between two companies.
Still sticking with that horrible name, eh? I guess if you don't care about a wider adoption...