skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Yes, of course we can all move our repos to Bitbucket or wherever, but ...

> It won't be a minor inconvenience if Github goes away.

Yeah, I don't think you made a very good case for your argument there.

Some companies are completely dependent on Windows as their staff or software can't work with anything other than Windows. Not only won't it be a minor inconvenience, it would be an existential crisis for the company if they couldn't use Windows.

Github has done a lot for the internet. But I'm pretty sure we can live without it. There are many other competing services out there. I would say the best thing about Github is the fact that lots of big open source projects are hosted there. If they all moved to Bitbucket, would it be that big of a deal for everyone?

Some people would miss some features that were only available on Github. Most people just need a git:// URL to push and pull from.
You don't have to go to Europe to look up population statistics. In fact if you live in a big international city like London or Paris, you might have a skewed perspective on the diversity of European nations.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethnic_groups_in_Europe#By_coun...

Reading down the list, most European nations have around 80% or more majority ethnicity. Even those with lower majorities tend to have closely related minorities, e.g. Belgium with its Flemings and Walloons.

By comparison the largest racial/ethnic group in the U.S., non-Latino whites, is under 65% and shrinking.

All that said, I personally think the high rate of imprisonment in the U.S. reflects a lot of latent to overt racism and can't be defended. I think that was the GP's point but I'm not sure.
> The actions from what we've seen so far are completely legal; what Snowden did is not. It's incredibly simple.

Ah, innocent until proven guilty and all that!

I am not entirely convinced everything we have seen the US do in this case in legal in international terms. By pressuring countries to ignore the asylum process in order to carry out an illegal extradition is already crossing a line. If he was to be extradited it would be breaking international law.

And the US was one of the primary authors of these international laws, treaties and standards of human rights.
Ask HN: Who's the kid on the front page of Y Combinator.com?
He's wearing his glasses all wrong.
Interesting. Did a Google search which turned up this explanation about why it's considered broken: array covariance means runtime type checks rather than compile-time checks, which are more expensive and could hide bugs that could be caught when compiling. (http://blogs.msdn.com/b/ericlippert/archive/2007/10/17/covar...)
Not many people seem that interested in my approach to solving the feed reading problem. I run my own backend and frontend and just let it fetch things for me. Then I periodically check in and flip through to see what's new. If I wind up on some new platform on which the web frontend doesn't make sense, I'll write a native one which speaks the same simple "POST in, AJAX out" language. No big thing.

I set up a Kickstarter to turn it into open source and release everything I've written and then some, but it seems the momentum just isn't there yet.
Just because it pisses the public off, that is no excuse for anyone to leak information at will, let alone be pardoned for it.

By that logic, anyone who freed slaves in the South during the Civil War shouldn't have been pardoned by the states whose laws they broke and prosecuted to the fullest extent.
While that makes much more sense, that's not what karma means. So if that's what he meant, then he doesn't actually believe in karma.
Building something or some prototype is the best way for me to learn some new tech. Just reading about it never works for me. The idea is to first find problems and then look for solution on internet in tutorials, documentation stackoverflow etc.
The Review | WinX Mobile Video Converter 
It is a brand-new fast video converter to convert MKV, AVI, MP4, WMV, MOV, FLV, AVCHD, M2TS videos to any pop Android mobiles, tablets and players, which enables you to play different videos on The New HTC One, Android Samsung Galaxy S4, Galaxy Note, Amazon Kindle Fire, Google Nexus 7, etc. It has as many as 200 built-in profiles, covering all prevailed Android devices with different resolutions and screen sizes.
Excellent work! There are no great libraries to handle this type of work anywhere, that I've found, without requiring an entire stack change.

My next project was to build something very similar to this. I've done the same before in PHP many years ago for the company I used to work for so I was confident that I could do it. Having this to leap frog my development is going to be extremely useful. And by that, I mean any extras I'd develop I'd contribute back.

Now to start playing.
I may be missing your point here, so forgive me if this seems ignorant, but I do not see how something like Puppet accrues this "invisible state".

I'm in the midst of a large puppet enterprise deployment at my day job, and it seems they've taken great pains to prevent any drift from happening. You get a dashboard webapp that shows you every puppet run on every machine, and a large overview that gives you states like "nonresponsive / changed / unchanged / pending / error".

When a puppet run makes a change to a systems, that run is marked as changing the server. If you're getting lots of "changed" runs on a system, you immediately know to go look at that server because something is making that box deviate from your defined baseline.

You write your configurations (manifests), add them by name to the webapp, add those to groups, and then add machines to the groups, which define what set of manifests to apply.

On my admittedly newbish level, it would seem this system is completely immune from any drift-over-time, provided you bother to glance at the dashboard occasionally. We're going to put it in our NOC as soon as the deployment is done :)
The US has a lot of people in prison because it's a big rich country with a diverse population.

And it wasn't before 1980? That's news to me.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incarceration_in_the_United_St...
The homes of the people living (or the rock wall) there are probably the cause of the lack of beach.

Beaches are dynamic things, they get eroded during storms and are built up at other times. They can recede inland hundreds of metres over the years. Conversely, large amounts of sand can be deposited, extending the land well out into what used to be water.

Humans putting houses, sea walls, groynes, bridges and other structures along the coast conflicts with the natural movements of the coast. In this case, if the houses were located further back from the beach, there would still be a beach there.
Can you explain what you find more expressive in c# compared to ruby?

I've been a c# developer for over 5 years and I have to disagree with almost everything you said. Ruby blew my mind when I learned it.
Why nobody gives a shit about your cool app anymore...
Thanks for reminding me of Io.. not.

I was so happy with Lua and thought it was such an elegant and clean language.. then I looked at the side-by-side comparison between Lua and Io on the site you linked.. and now it seems clumsy and ugly.

Unfortunately a language is only as good as its implementation and tooling and Io's implementation is "experimental" at best (and development is pretty much dead) + the utter lack of tools and third-party support so I will have to stick with Lua.. and try very hard to forget Io again.
Show HN: Mattermark's Hottest Startups
I agree, but can't help but wonder if the "me" from 20 years ago would have found this very confusing while I was learning to program. I learned from books with all that long-winded banter - so now I'm not sure if I actually NEEDED all that stuff in order to learn. Guess I'll never know.

This method, however, is PERFECT for anyone who already knows how to program. I love it, and actually came here to say that I wish everything everywhere had a page like this on the web.

The brass tax, get down to business, of ANY topic in 15 minutes.
Mathematics: 1,000 Years Old, and Still Hot
It's not up to Google to encrypt your e-mail end-to-end, though. That you have to do yourself. This technology exists and is called PGP.

Obviously Gmail's HTML interface can't work with these e-mails, until you get some way to sandbox part of the DOM on the client. Search won't work either.
Do it in one line?

Javascript callback functions don't count as "one line". :)
Allow me to introduce you guys to NixOS, and its ops counterpart, NixOps.

http://nixos.org/nixos/
https://github.com/NixOS/nixops

It's a young project but it already solves most of these issues.
> Well then let's make them store the entire internet.

The Utah facility is supposed to be able to store the next 100 years of all Internet data + traffic, even at the current projected rate of growth.
Network intrusions in China weren't done against the U.S. public either, but Snowden disclosed that publicly.
I mean software development in general.
About the Advantages:
-I see C#/Java copying the functional language features, which isn't supported by default which yields an ugly code, more lines to write.
-No one can argue on the amount of the libraries available, but It's more JVM/CLR thing, so you can access it from anywhere
-on the concepts not being exotic? well, porting functional language features doesn't really help :)
-on the benefit, I believe coding in a functional language is more productive and more expressive, don't you?
Yep. If - like most people - you know nothing about cars, then you wouldn't know how long it actually takes to fix your car. So if the mechanic chooses to 'over-deliver' by fixing your car in 3 hours, instead of the actual 6 hours it takes, that's going to set your expectations. You'd think that it takes 3 hours to fix a car, and you'll be pissed when the mechanic takes 6 hours the second time around. Which was the problem the author faced.
BTW, OT but what do you think of Larry, Sergey, and Eric?
buying* a product. My bad!
You're right.
From wikipedia
"In the 2012 James Bond film Skyfall, the island served as an inspiration for the lair of villain Raoul Silva but filming did not take place on the island itself. One section was recreated at Pinewood Studios in Great Britain and the rest via CGI"
well, then why porting its features to those languages ?
This is a very ordinary problem, and it's usually solved like this with Puppet:

Specify the service declaratively, and subscribe it to the package that provides the payload.

service { 'myservice':
ensure => running,
enable => true,
subscribe => Package['myservice'],
}

Then when you upgrade the package on that node, either by using ensure => latest, or by manually specifying the new version, Puppet will automatically restart the service.
Perhaps I should've been clearer.

It's also incredibly disrespectful. Posting "and?" requires zero effort from you and contributes nothing. If I want to continue the discussion I have go over my comment and guess what the problem was. I have to describe what I guessed your argument might be before I restate what I said. I admit that my original comment was not particularly well-written or insightful, but I think if it it was worth a response it should get more than a single punctuated word.

My point was that if they don't mind killing a journalist, why would they mind if a small number of innocents die as well?

Probably because they don't feel the journalist is innocent. And practically speaking, you're probably a lot less likely to get away with murder when there are bystander victims.
You can't send an email?
Have you heard of Newsblur? Sounds exactly like what you're describing.

API: http://www.newsblur.com/api

Open Source: https://github.com/samuelclay/NewsBlur

Also, cheers for not including a link to your Kickstarter.
Also, English Russia: http://englishrussia.com/category/exclusive/
That's completely dependent on state a local laws. Its California so... yea physical force may not be legal.
> zero warts

C# is a nice language, but oh man, is that asking for it!

My pet example of a wart is the set of requirements on the iterated collection in foreach loops. Most C# developers probably think that the collection has to implement IEnumerable, but it is not so! I pasted the requirements from the spec at http://pastebin.com/EfsAmz6f

This is also a case where the dynamic type does something different than the static type. If you iterate over a statically typed non-IEnumerable collection, it will work fine (assuming it implements the required methods). But if you then change the type to dynamic, I think you get a runtime error.

So there's a wart for ya!
Codecademy for the cloud: Google’s new Cloud Playground is pure genius
South Korea issues cyberattack alert as sites shut
I used to develop software using C#/Java back in 2003 :)
and I've been using functional languages for a few years now, and never looked back.
I don't support it, per say, but it's a bit like how you don't support free speech for all unless you support free speech for nero-nazis and other groups you find personally offensive.
Yeah, they could have made the change in C# 3.0. I just don't think anyone really felt the pain until the Task Parallel Library came along in .NET 4. Since the TPL API is lambda heavy people really started using lambdas for asynchronous tasks, which leads (or used to lead, anyway) to pain and misery when using a loop iteration variable.

It could always be worse, though. Look at JavaScript. Simply copying the loop variable in the body of the loop doesn't work because all variables are scoped at the function level. So your "local" loop variable is actually a single instance for the entire function and you have the same exact problem. Instead, you have to actually create another function and immediately execute it with the loop iteration variable as an argument, and then use the parameter within the function to do whatever you wanted to do. Not cool.
Who knows, the demise of Google Reader seems to be spawning a lot of cool projects and Show HN's. I don't think it's the end of the world...seems to be driving forward innovation.
Anyone else catch the Gauss reference[1] in the for loop section?

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carl_Friedrich_Gauss#Anecdotes
Attacks against civilian infrastructure, like hospitals.

"any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind, and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee." -- John Donne ( http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Meditation_XVII )

If someone does something in your name and with your money that you would be ashamed to do yourself, how is that not an attack on you? Honest question.
Perfectly normal is an observation of frequency of occurrence, and one I won't dispute. "hiddenfeatures" was complaining that this was (to paraphrase with words from your observation) "perfectly normal", which he found odd in that his tax money was promoting this, when he didn't see this as a government function.

"keithpeter" referenced that in Europe/UK (and I will confirm that various jurisdictions in the US of A do so as well) local governments promote all sorts of pet social projects. At this point "keithpeter" referenced free CDs.

That's when I pointed out the CDs were not free to produce which was "hiddenfeatures" point about tax money going to promote a product.

Now, I'm not sure where "hiddenfeatures" is from, but I am from the US of A, and things like this do happen here as well, and some people don't like it for a variety of reasons. Constitutionalists, for instance can't find Linux promotion in any of the original Articles, nor in any Amendments.

For me anytime I see even small amounts of money spent I compare it to what I've been taxed for the year and calculate how much of my money went to support the program. If its less than I have been taxed, I can claim to have completely funded the program, if it's more, then I can calculate how many years I had to work to completely fund this a program. If it's far more than I can be taxed in a lifetime, I try to calculate how many people like me will have all of their lifetime tax money poured into said program.
I think you're going to have problems getting this off the ground for general consumers because the data is sparse. However, I think (based on your Krimpets example) that you could usefully target immigrant communities (international and interstate) for specific things. For example, I'm from Ireland, and of course there are particular kinds of foods that are very popular in Ireland and the UK that are hard to find in the US - rather than worrying which aisle they're in, my first hurdle is to just find a store that stocks them at all! Perhaps targeting particular groups like this could help you get the early adopters you need to achieve network effects.
http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/2000892040/fred-feed-rea...
I do this with web technologies but may be applicable to other areas as well:

1. Read tutorials if available, then books in that order. Not to be exhaustive but just to get more stuff into my head.

2. Do a small project that uses it.

3. Repeat from step 1 but with more info to digest and a slightly bigger project to work with.

After some 4-5 iterations I would have a nice grip on the technology and a handful of small projects to show with.
Haha, golden, classic line! Came here to post it, came into my head seconds after reading the article :)
https://startpage.com/do/search?q=bible+anonymous+charity
Video Pitch your Startup on BETAbeat
- Support your good competitors, not the bad ones.

- I agree on supprting competitors in an early stage market, as long there is enough beers and pizzas for everybody. In a mature market, things are different, take your time and your ressources to support...your team and your customers.
No, you're not. It would be nice if they had one, though.
Or is it because they have human rights and aim to rehabilitate instead of punish.
Show HN: my weekend project thinksteve.org a library of Steve Jobs web content
Would like to see a demo of this with a large data set.
One thing the google reader apocalypse seems to have taught us is that everybody's sense of entitlement is way too damn high.

Feedly is documented. Type "feedly keyboard shortcuts" or "feedly tutorial" into google and you'll get all kinds of good (and concise) information. The fact that you didn't try to find any documentation doesn't mean it doesn't exist.
He could take his entire music library into space with a multi-gigabyte digital music player.
Somewhat irrelevant but anyone else think Medium's URLs are really ugly? Why can't you just get a plain pretty subdomain? I'd use it if it were that.
Is the lesson "HN polls are unscientific, biased samplings of groups of people that might or might not contain any members of the audience for your technical book?" ;)

It doesn't help that this is a generic poll about generic books. Of course imaginary books poll worse than imaginary websites: They're more expensive (because imaginary books have an imaginary label saying "$9.99", and imaginary websites are free and subsist purely on popular goodwill and flamewar-powered Carnot engines) and neither of them has any real content so it's impossible to evaluate the amount of imaginary value one is getting for one's imaginary money.

Whereas in the real world people judge their materials in the context of specific authors, subjects, goals, and budgets. People compare (e.g.) a copy of established-Github-wizard Scott Chacon's Pro Git (a try-before-you-buy CC-licensed free book) to the thrill of trying to learn Git's canonical workflow by reading its man pages and browsing flamewars about rebase v. merge. Or a ten-minute Railscast Pro about Devise, paid for by your boss, to the option of having to admit to that selfsame boss that your project's hand-rolled authorization code got hacked.
Which is one of the reasons I like them as much as I do. I can watch the iterations, they work hard on their product are committed to open source, and release regularly and often.

The other big win for me is I can read their code, I understand python & have a number of items I'll be able to contribute to upstream that will help others use the product.
I don't understand the hate with the decision of Google shutting down the Reader. Apparently, the Reader users aren't worth that much.
He did say c style language. I went from Ruby to Java. I have found it very hard to accept the Rails maintenance story since then.
Are you working for the government?
You lost all credibility with me by claiming you would assault someone over an argument.
"The technology that the NSA now wields far exceeds Senator Church’s most excessive dreams of a surveillance state."

The author apparently thinks Senator Church didn't have much of an imagination or had never heard of the Soviet Union or China.
I did (via the contact form), but no response was received.
I'm not sure I'm brave enough to force forward secrecy in my Exim config just yet -- I can't find an option to log handshakes (unless it is logged as part of the message logs -- which can be kept) -- but I suppose refused messages would show up in the reject log.

Still, I'm not sure if I'm even ready to force SSL at all... for incomming SMTP. Sounds like a good way to break your email infrastructure (and reduce spam ;-).

Essentially mail transport is pretty much unencrypted -- I see SSL/TLS having potential to help fight spam by forcing some form of authentication (via DNS sec, CAs etc) -- but not really a useful tool for securing email from snooping -- for that I would advocate S/MIME and/or GnuPG (Gnu Privacy Guard).
Wizards of the Coast, Equity Distributions: Part 1
If it's on the radio I believe I can record it and play it at my leisure - as a 12 year old with a budget of $0, this is how I obtained most of my music. Has time shifting become illegal? If not, I am not at the mercy of the whims of a DJ, no more than I am at the whims of when a TV station plays episodes of Doctor Who - once it's on my DVR I have it forever.
Patent lawyers tend to be significantly more in favor of patents than Justice Stevens.

As for courts, given currently binding precedent for software patents, barring changes in legislation, no court other than the Supreme Court should decide that software patents should not be allowed. Given that the Supreme Court failed to come to that conclusion, it is hard to find a court that would say that. :-(
I reject this line of thinking completely. It leads to artists concentrating on monetizing existing art rather than creating new art. That's bad for society. Furthermore, live performances? Really? So that guy that creates an amazing piece by himself using Garage Band or whatever, but can't perform it live: he's just screwed?

And it's also just bullshit logic. It's the equivalent of saying that photographers should give up getting a decent commission on their photographs, and instead concentrate on selling champagne at a high mark-up at their gallery exhibits.
I'm fine with Reeder switching to Feedbin, but why couldn't the author update the desktop all at the same time as the iOS client? This means there is a gap where Reeder on the desktop just won't work correctly.
Actually, the point was to prevent unauthorized self-publishing...

This is what doomed the market in 1983, people made so much shovelware and shipped to actual stores, that when someone arrived on a store and grabbed a random title, it was 99% of chance of it being utter crap, thus people stopped going to stores.

Nintendo that came up with the idea to just outright make hard as possible for people to self-publish games, going to the extent of even limiting large publishers amount of allowed games per year.

Thanks to indie renaissance this is being relaxed now, but not too much... Companies are still scared by the prospect of repeating 1983 or repeating iTunes (that has thousands of shovelware games and discoverability outright suck)
> The brass tax

Or the brass tacks, even:

http://www.phrases.org.uk/meanings/get-down-to-brass-tacks.h...

Sadly, English isn't as logical as Lua.