skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This is a big part of why I can't take Microsoft seriously these days. I don't know if it's a function of their corporate culture, but they seem utterly incapable of being honest - either in their advertising or even with themselves.

Every major failure is couched as some kind of success. Windows 8 has been a flop no matter which way you cut it, but if you listen to Microsoft's external and internal messaging Win8 is a dramatic success that has sold like hotcakes.

I'm pretty sure if Microsoft was in charge of Chernobyl they'd find some way to spin it into a successful advancement of nuclear safety.

At some point you just have to come out with a mea culpa. Sorry guys, this was crappy, we will be better. Not every product is a smash hit, not every decision the right one - your ability to own up to these and fix these are infinitely more important to me as a customer than your ability to look me in the eye and call the sky purple with a perfect deadpan.
Not really commenting on your appreciation (I don't really know the details of Clinton-Bush-Obama's politiques on electric/hydrogen automobiles) but in the university where I studied some of my department-mates were working on fuel cells and their applications.

One of the most interesting (for me) applications was hydrogen fuel cell vehicles, and I could talk with some of the students involved in that research about the current state of the technology. I was also fortunate enough to test one of the vehicles they were using. While I still don't know the technical details, they mentioned that the main reason the technology is not yet available (I think Toyota wants to have an hybrid by the end of 2015) was the lack of investment or the shift of investment to battery powered vehicles.

What was more interesting to me is that the difference between an electric car and a hydrogen fuel cell vehicle is basically the source of energy used. With that I don't mean the technology if fully ready; as far as I know there are still concerns beyond logistics (for example, temperature problems, security...) but I would say those are part of the novelty of a technology.
Show HN: Jumpjet Preview - real time screensharing SDK for iOS and Android apps
Google+ Games service killed off
I've taken Lyft twice and both times I had to direct the driver. Which isn't a problem, really, but they are indeed amateurs in the real sense of the word compared to the Uber drivers and most cab drivers. It's kind of neat though since they're just people from the area and even though they don't know where everything is they're interesting to talk to for the most part.
Ketamine as a wonder cure for depression
Ask HN: What language do you recommend I learn?
Hello,
I'm looking for a new language to learn and don't know what to choose. I've been looking at Ruby, Haskell, Lisp and Go. I'm interested in a language that will increase my skills at programming, that will be fun to learn, challenging and will result in nice looking code.
Thanks :)
> With Go you don't have anything comparable to Django, Numpy, Pandas...

Given the age of the language I would assume building out its associated toolchain is only a matter of time. Python didnt ship with Django, Numpy, Pandas...
We were using Thoonk.

Jobs were originally pushed from our Django app, into a Celery job, which consumed the message, and published into Thoonk. Thoonk was then consumed by the old Python backend.

With this rewrite, we've also removed Thoonk and are using a fanout exchange in Rabbit directly. Go consumes the Celery job from the Rabbit queue.
"Having a space to work that you can ignore people is key to getting work done. Constantly being interrupted by people you live with or other people will kill your productivity."
Actually the greek populace is overwhelmingly in favor of keeping the Euro and they don't really buy into "Make your own currency, devaluate it like crazy and maybe in a decade or to you will have the same wealth as now".

In Argentina this didn't work that well either.
That just happened in SF, actually:

http://sf.streetsblog.org/2013/05/21/sfmta-to-designate-hund...

A 12-spot trial run was successful and now an additional 300 curbside spots are going to be designated for shared cars. Not bad.
ZipCar already has dedicated spots in Chicago all over the place.
These seem like such basic errors. Not validating responses because you trust the software you interact with to behave is such a basic mistake that you'd think the people that work on the X server from X.Org would have learned not to do that long ago.
I learned PHP years ago, never got past the "futzing around making a basic CMS" stage with RoR (I currently do most of my work in C# and ObjC). I'm sure I'll be politely corrected in this view, but the piles of add-on gems and scripting utilities that characterize Rails-in-practice meant that Rails struck me as kind of a moving target.

Coming from PHP where basically nothing happens unless you make it happen (for better and very often for worse), I found Rails confusing once you got beyond easy Active Record calls and into using gems. There are tons of add-ons that do useful things, but they do a lot of their work behind the scenes assuming adherence to certain conventions—which, I know, is a strength as well as a weakness, I get it. But that increases the difficulty of jumping past the stage of following a tutorial and just installing one persons collection of gems, scripts and other helpers.
And be aware that Go is quite young compared to Java, the optimisations will be better and better
(Sadly) advertising is just about that - bending the truth until it looks good; highlighting your strengths and not mentioning your weaknesses. If showing two images that are not to scale is the only thing wrong with this add, the headline is really exaggerated.

And the diagonal is larger, nowhere did they mention that larger display means larger display area. So at best the used metric is unintuitive, meaningless and/or underspecified, but that's far from lying. Welcome to the world of advertising.
A central planning AI to impose fairness and the right to basic survival could only come about and remain standing if there was enough support for it from those already in power to allow this. How would you suppose this would come about?

The future will hold a very different scenario than a typical first-world country today where the populous actually produces useful work. As a leader, instead you have a population who who in-fight amongst themselves for the best of the consumable goods and produce absolutely nothing of value for you. To make matters worse, they continually attempt to push their boundaries, growing bigger and bigger if not thwarted (as life normally does).

My other point, that techno-baron A will want to fight/defend himself against techno-baron B still applies. Won't anything that techno-baron A needs to do to defend himself against techno-baron B trump the humanitarian concerns for maintaining the lifestyle of his subjects that give absolutely nothing back to him?

Even if techno-baron A is morally inclined to do so, there will be others that are more brutal and would not. And even if the moral techo-baron A is able to completely conquer the world (seems very unlikely considering how schizophrenically both brutal and compassionate he would have to be), then his hold on it will at some time cease, probably under duress from threat(s) within.
I remember it well. It was indeed a PR gaff, not Microsoft's ad (Nokia shot that ad), but not misleading - the camera delivers. I know this because I use that camera daily, and it really is as stable (if not more) than that ad suggested it was.
The current release versions of Chrome (27) and Firefox (21). Both auto-updated. Since the flicker is the same in different browsers, it may be more of an OS or graphics driver thing.
The IE6 nightmare might be back soon
Apple ran the "I'm a Mac; I'm a PC" ads. Those started off as great advertising because they only pointed out bad things about Windows that everyone already accepted as bad things. Once those ads started becoming unnecessarily adversarial, they became bad advertising. Apple probably ran that campaign a bit too long.

Depending on your point of view, Apple's products are either A) Clearly superior or B) Not obviously inferior. For a not insignificant number of people, their choice of smartphone is a personal statement. Attacking products that people love is not a good way to create converts.

Attacking products that clearly suck works until a point. Then it starts to feel like a bully beating a defenseless kid. Microsoft's advertising feels more like a nerdy kid who spent all night thinking up clever and witty retorts, only to fail miserably in delivering them when face to face with the bully. The crowd of cool kids don't laugh with the nerdy kid, they laugh at them.
They actually didn't. Banks have been around for centuries and where instrumental in any economic growth beyond medieval farming methods...
java/groovy/scala/haskell/clojure/python
no php
Since you seem to be taking suggestions, could you add "overflow:hidden;" to the main div (#home)?

On Firefox 3 the site appears about 4000 pixels wide.
I like to take every possible opportunity to sing the praises of SQLite, which is one of the most widely deployed RDBMS's in the world. Not only is it open source, but it's public domain, and it's an incredibly stably developed and well-tested piece of software.

Please note that it's not for every application. It is not a client/server architecture. It simply a tightly optimized piece of C code that interacts with a file (or RAM) to create a lightning fast approximation of a SQL server that is ACID compliant.

One thing I've used it for the most, is for small, ad-hoc internal web applications. With the webserver as its "single user", it is incredibly speedy and reliable and holds a shockingly large amount of data (still works pretty well when data gets up into the Terabytes).
Ycombinator startups are examples of contrarian thinking? Not really, although I've grown to admire some of them. The article reads more like a suckup-atorial.
WHY didn't they use the Python sum and reduce built-ins for sum??
A Facial Recognition API For Google Glass
You could try my charityware WebGL game at http://www.penguinspuzzle.appspot.com/
Niflet is my first foray into modern web development (I'm a database developer by day), so I kept it simple, just Go and SQLite. I'm using Go's webserver, which is basic but wasn't hard to extend to do compression and other niceties. Templating is via Go's template package. SQLite gets embedded, making the entire app a single 5 MB file. A free Dropbox account is used for nightly backup, handled by a scheduled goroutine (Go's concurrency feature).

For a heavyweight web app that needs to scale to multiple machines I would've done things differently. It turns out that Go is so fast that needing to scale would be a luxury problem for me. In theory I can serve 70M users spread over a 10-hour day for < $100 a month.
Developing on a VPS
Just because everyone does it doesn't mean it's not lying and doesn't mean the headline is exaggerated.
It's a simple solution. But it didn't work in the majority of cases. This solution would also require Greece to go back to the economics of a developing country because they can't afford most imports, especially medicine or electronics.
Tourist.js: really flexible tours by Easel
Minor (or major, considering it's the main topic of this article) correction: Go does not run in a VM. It compiles to native executable binaries.
No, my opinion is that talking about doing the animal a disservice is incredibly rude and misleading. It's been killed. It's gone. The end. Nothing.

Praying over it, or cleaning your plate, is irrelevant to the animal.

If you were being pragmatic you wouldn't have brought up the animal, just money.
In defense of a wider/more horizontal form factor, it sure helps when displaying more than one app at-a-time. Which coincidentally is one of the main selling points of Win8.

I know that sounds a bit snarky, but it sure sounds and feels better than fuzzy math.
This works when you're a remote worker, but what about when you're a freelancer with multiple clients, using time tracking software? Where do you bill the "going for a walk to clear your head", the "restroom break" or that all-too-common one, "popping on Hacker News to see if anything exciting's happened in the last 5 minutes"?

Joking aside, I've reached burnout by driving myself hard to get 8 billable hours each day (plus communication, writing proposals etc on top), and apart from lunch don't step away from the computer even when tired and procrastinating. Because if I'm sat there working on a problem I can bill the client, if I step away (even though I'll be more productive when I come back) I can't.

I know it's a matter of perspective on how I define 'honest' and 'billable', but I cannot make the mental leap needed!
Wonderful, one more language for me to consider in addition to Roy and Parenscript. I guess there's also Whalesong for Racket, but I don't know how clean the cross compilation to JS is. I've always been drawn to Clojure but the JVM kept me at bay. The fact that it's not "Lisp all the way down" also clouds my decision for it. I guess Wisp would be highly compatible with Lighttable?
I think this depends on the culture of the city. In Seattle every coffee shop is full of people just working on their own.

If you buy a cup of coffee, no one bats an eye if you stay all morning. If you head out to get lunch and then come back without buying another cup obviously that's pretty tacky, but all AM or all afternoon is normal.
Both parties summarized in 2 posts.
Syria using 34 Blue Coat servers to spy on internet users
Karmabox - Do something good with one line of code
It will be a matter of years. I for one, am developing stuff today.
Wow, looks like he was hellbanned for a year and a half, still contributing, and I don't see anything wrong with the few posts prior to the ban. Account hasn't submitted spam. What an abuse of the hellban feature.
Tumblr VC returns: Make that 1,400% PrivCo revises the 5,000% figure
I kind of wonder why having her record sealed would matter at all. I suppose it helps keep her off of inconvenient watch lists, but the extensive coverage has almost made her a public figure.
Chrome for Android also gets bumped up to version 27
Show HN: Speakers, a simple event system for python
The only rewrite rule you need is one to direct all requests to index.php. Then you just parse the URL in PHP to achieve /blog/title-of-the-article. What is the problem with this approach?
It was Nokia, and the camera was really that good.
http://crave.cnet.co.uk/mobiles/samsung-galaxy-s4-video-is-s...
Perhaps I am misinterpreting your statement, but it almost sounds like you blame PHP for the lack of documentation of those libraries. Really you should be blaming the authors of the libraries for poorly documenting them, or the developer who chose those libraries, for choosing ones with poor documentation.
WillPeddleEverShip
A relevant response to ispebbleshipping.com
I'll take your word that that's what happened, but that cite doesn't really support the claim. I think we all agree there was a settlement and those contracts were cancelled.

There may have been some specific things in the Apple model that were anti-consumer (perhaps there were price floors, it's not clear) and if so good riddance but the linked negotiation seems to be indicate that the major points of contention were:

(1) the migration away from wholesale pricing (publisher sells online stores X copies of an ebook, do whatever they want with them);

(2) publishers wanting to force higher prices but Apple insisting on a price ceiling. The MFN was explicitly tied to this in the first email from Harper Collins.

(3) Apple's commission.

What specifically about the app store pricing model hurts consumers?

Does a wholesale model makes sense for digital goods?

Does anyone really believe that Amazon was going to keep losing money on ebooks at the same scale as before when they were 2% of volume?
I see... I'm an old man, so I don't have any homework. =)
NoBackend – data driven apps without thinking backend
Why would you make a topic making a statement as the title and then use the same statement as a question in the actual post??
I don't have the book handy but I think Edward Tufte discussed this sort of lying in his classic book.

http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/17744.The_Visual_Display_...
> I have a little open source project that lets two Linux users share a console session remotely.

Me too: https://syme.herokuapp.com

SSH is really handy for this kind of thing as long as you don't need a browser.
Groove Salad is very good, but sometimes it reminds me of porno music. I've been rotating between Space Station Soma and the Dubstep channel (which actually plays quality Dubstep (if such a thing exists)).

Soma.fm is one of the websites I like giving money too, I only wish they had cooler things in their store (I've got the mug, and the hoodies/t-shirts aren't too appealing to me).
77TB is quite a bit, but part of being able to charge little old ladies $80/month who only do 20MB of email is running into the occasional fellow who does the opposite.

Unlimited. Hu keep hu-sing tha word. I do-na think it mean wha you think it mean.

Edit: I'm not sure why this is getting down-voted repeatedly but let me just add: If a company is going to use the term "unlimited" it has to be prepared for 2 eventualities. 1) Some one pays the monthly fee and transfers 0 bytes. big win for company. 2) Someone pays the monthly fee and transfers at full speed 100% of the time. Potential big lose for company. If a company is not prepared for both of these outcomes, don't use that word. It sucks to grab the first and then try to outlaw the second with TOS weasel-ry.
It's like the Megahertz Myth. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Megahertz_myth

Their claim is technically true, if the way you agree to measure size is diagonally (this is how TVs are advertised after all), and also pretty meaningless and disingenuous. What I find interesting is that Apple on the other hand rarely seems to focus the message on numbers, even when they have a real numerical advantage.
http://www.anandtech.com/bench/Product/701?vs=191

That's a big enough difference to count as significant. Especially when you consider that Intel's been lowering their power budget and spending larger portions of their transistor budget on the integrated GPU. The Pentiums on the market in 1995 were 10-12W, and the Pentium 2s on the market in 1998 were 30-45W followed by a die shrink that brought power back down to 20-30W.
I'm intrigued by disadvantage 3 from http://www.sqlite.org/mmap.html :

The operating system must have a unified buffer cache in order for the memory-mapped I/O extension to work correctly, especially in situations where two processes are accessing the same database file and one process is using memory-mapped I/O while the other is not. Not all operating systems have a unified buffer cache. In some operating systems that claim to have a unified buffer cache, the implementation is buggy and can lead to corrupt databases.

Which commonly-used operating systems lack a bug-free unified buffer cache?
Yes, you have valid complaints, for why you wouldn't recommend today. I think those complaints are going to go away, over time.

The world of 10GB/mo dataplans is as dead as the world of 14.4 Kbps modems, it just doesn't know it yet. Google Fiber is going to push the other ISPs kicking and screaming into the modern world.

When I record videos on my Android Phone, they're automatically uploaded to the cloud for me. I can view them instantly. There are Android Cameras / Videocameras coming to the market that do the same trick.

Also, I'll point out to you that people in Moore, OK are looking through rubble for family photo albums. If they'd been in the cloud, instead...

Also, Notepad professes to be a word processor. It sucks at it, and ChromeOS's native video-watching app sucks at it.
Wow! I never thought about looking at how much I've spent on fuel over a long period of time. The problem for me is that we have multiple cars.

I currently drive until the red light comes on, fill up, and look at the trip counter to see how many miles I've driven since my last fill-up. I then reset the trip counter and repeat. My time is spent in mixed highway and city traffic.

I'll have to look at modern hybrids once something actually breaks on my car. I'll consider everything equally once it's time to shop again.
Having had to manage the worst possible situation (multiple rounds of layoffs), it's a shitty situation for everyone.

Obviously, it's the worst for the people who are being terminated. As a human, a good manager wants to assure them that s/he values their contribution, blah blah, but all they hear is what is said in the first 30 seconds. Hit the high points – we are laying you off, you are getting n weeks/months/years of severance, here is all of this in writing, plus your benefits package and final check, do you have any questions?

It's also very unlikely that the manager had much say other than in terms of force ranking people (if that). I found out at 9pm the night before that I would have to cut more people than planned.

Your boss may have been thinking something along the lines of,"20% of our company just lost their jobs and you're worried about the free chair massages???" because their brain is still in the context of not only "I can't protect my team," but also "I had an active role in their termination." They're often in the "bargaining" phase of grief and thinkin,"without x, I could have kept one person," or "One of my leads could do my job with this new team size, so my leaving will save 2-5 jobs in the next round." Those things go through your manager's head.

The best a manager can do is to take the "survivors" away from the office (conference room in another building, on a walk to a local park, whatever) while people have the opportunity to pack their personal effects. Tell the team everything you can about why the layoff took place, who was affected, and get as much of the bad shit out that you can.

They'll rant at their managers, they'll rant at the company, and the managers have to take it. Try to avoid the company party line and give people as realistic a view as possible of what is happening and what will likely happen. Try to bring in the highest execs possible to answer questions, because a manager may or may not know, or be able to tell, some details about the financial forces driving the decisions.

TL;DR - It sucks for everyone, including your manager, so s/he may be crankier than normal. Extend compassion their way as well. If you're a manager, see the blowback coming and get in front of it and be genuine.
To be fair, blame mod_python all you want, seeing as it's deprecated, I don't think anyone cares. Meanwhile mod_php is...far from deprecated.
It is going to take ages to clear young developer minds that safe strong typed languages don't require a VM and we have to thank Sun and Microsoft to have spread that misconception.
They are crazy expensive -- most have significant amounts of platinum. Also, there are fundamental problems with operating them in cold climates.

Fuel cells have some traction in fixed-base applications (backup power for small buildings like fire stations) and for mechanical equipment like forklifts.
Not giving out a clear error message is ugly and the rest is beyond belief, but [0] clearly mentions a limited number of messages, with more details on [1]. The smallest limit there is 400/800 messages per hour/day and rather ridiculously low traffic limits of 60/120 MB per hour/day.

The former shouldn’t really be a problem but I can see how the latter are difficult not to exceed regularly, especially if free trial accounts have even stricter limits (they are not detailed in [1]).

[0] https://www.fastmail.fm/help/email_resource_limits.html

[1] https://www.fastmail.fm/pages/fastmail/docs/pricingtbl.html