skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Topic Social Microblogging Network
Hi guys, we've just released Topic and we think that we are going to disrupt the power of technology.
Topic is the largest micro-blogging social network in Spain. In the first 5 months of its release, Topic was downloaded by over 50,000 people – and users logged onto the application an average of 3-4 times a day.Based off of news and rumors around your immediate environment, Topic allows you to publish news and content based first and foremost on location and topic.But why Topic? No application currently exists that allows users to follow topics instead of following individual people. Other apps don’t allow users to follow information in a “satisfactory way” and Topic is the only app that can house topic-based content by location. We created Topic with this system of information-sharing in mind.Topic saves you from having to scroll to find what you would like to read and instead, allows you to follow only those topics you find interesting or rewarding.Topic connects you with others who share the same interests. But here’s where Topic is different: you don’t have to previously know the people that you communicate with. The users have shown that they need information to be order by topics, not by individual people.Lastly, Topic is the best mobile app to engage in great discussion. Topic allows you to converse with others about any and all of your most passionate interests, and that’s why it is such a great application.If you could please check out Topic and let me know your thoughts on how we can take Topic to the next level I'd sincerely appreciate it.
Topic website: http://www.topic.so/index
Apple website – Topic App: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/topic-de-los-chicos-de-crows/id569186190

Cheers,
Alex
I am biased, but It is a very straight forward implementation building directly on the protobuf interface. It lacks some of the niceties of the interperted drivers, but It is as fast as ( or faster in some cases ) then the official drivers ( as best I can tell )

The author stopped working on it for a little because he was tired of refactoring his code as the protocol changed and figured he would just add all the missing bits once they finished the protocol.
www.topic.so
Ask HN: What are the implications of Apple moving to 64-bit architecture?
It's very difficult to find anything related to this subject that hasn't been overshadowed by either "4GB RAM" or NSA discussions.

Is there anyone out there that can give an overview of what this move to 64-bit really means?

Does it signal Apple hoping to develop the A7 into the notebook/desktop lines of computers?
Reminds me when Darwin (Leopard days) went to x86 and the sources of Darwin were stale for a very long time
FTL has a fantastic soundtrack with a chill, electronic sound. Great coding music.
Per the API TOS and my personal experience you are correct, the API results are not identical to actual google results (at least the non-paid, but I believe you are correct and even if paying API results will not be the same as google).

That said I never had complaints regarding the quality of the results on my custom engine using google API, only that the query limits make it impractical for my purpose. Do you have a suggestion for search API, other than bing with no query limits?
You're missing the point. People usually have that brilliant idea about an useful service while making a sandwich. If you don't act on it, it's worth nothing regardless.

> someone who doesn't have your cultural and intellectual resources

Unless you are a scholar at the very top of your field, there are thousands other people with the same background and resources as you, or better. A good chunk of them will have had the exact same ideas, plus a thousand variations. A handful will actually do something.

> choosing which idea to act on there are clearly better and worse ones

The act of choosing is the beginning of execution, and is way harder and more valuable than generating ideas.
since it looks that linux won now, with big players maintaining it and a great ecosystem, i think the hackers love should all go towards FreeBSD now..

its a great OS, with a great background that should advance forward as another good open source option to linux and also against the closed source OS´s all around..

after all the heroic efforts from the FreeBSD community, to make the project going on even without the same support and attention that linux got, i wander if its not the time right now that this wonderfull OS start to get more traction and love from the hacker community?
is there any evidence they have gotten into VISA?

By VISA do you mean the credit card company "Visa"? If so, then yes of course they are there. Credit card purchasing records have been shared with law enforcement for years, and that isn't some secret NSA program.

You may be unaware, but Visa shares purchasing information with companies like Acxiom already[1] and has done for years.

Of course, you may be talking about some other "VISA".

[1] http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/17/technology/acxiom-the-quie...
SRware is focused on removing google stuff...not really privacy in general, at least from our view.
Thanks!! Working on more search options!!
> Collaboration with allies is fine but that should come as a distant second to protecting your own [citizen's] interests.

What makes you think the NSA is sharing data with Israel for any other reason? We have strategic and human interests where they are located.
Ok, so what the fuck am I supposed to do?

I'm 24, and I'm a CS grad student. I want to do research, or at least research&development. I can code plenty well; hell, I'm typing from the end of the workday at my sweet internship right now.

But if you're going to tell me that even tech will leave me broke and unable to support a family at 35, what... what anything? Why anything?

Why pretend I have career aspirations if anything I can think of ends in being broke and useless at 35? Why pretend I give half a damn about any of the work I do if I can't ever rely on even a reasonably stable lifestyle, if everything is just moonshot after moonshot before the unemployment line?

It's one thing when I hear that I'll probably never have a flying car or pet robot [1]. It's another thing when I hear that I can't expect to ever have a family or make it to retirement without plunging into poverty, and I'm part of the privileged elite.

What. The. Fuck?

PS -- I apologize for the obvious emotion in this post, but it's a worry I've been carrying for a couple of years now.

[1] - http://thebaffler.com/past/of_flying_cars
The statement isn't saying "parts of a whole are worthless".

Yes, most of the time that is exactly what it is saying. Though when engaged on it invariably the definition will start oozing around amorphously to the point of complete and utter meaninglessness.

Firstly, we aren't talking about laymen and outsiders. In this case we're talking about the company that was far and away the largest technology company. Secondly, ideas may be plentiful, but so is absolutely banal, no-value-added execution. If the quantity of poor examples qualifies the statement, saying that execution is worthless is just as viable, as the overwhleming majority of execution in virtually any domain is terrible.

I have to chuckle at bit at the notion that ideas are so bountiful, though. It's a bit like how everyone is going to write the great American novel...they just need to think of the plot...but anyone can think of a plot so...

It's saying that seemingly novel ideas of solving a "pain point" in first-world life are usually fairly obvious if you'd spent an hour brainstorming with other intelligent people.

This is what people without ideas say. Seriously. As someone who regularly struggles to find ideas that are worth executing on, I seriously wonder what imaginary world so many on here live in.
Brazil hires its Postal Service to create a Gmail substitute.
It's also about the humanization of others. Many who feel this come to realize that they have built up fantasy Übermensch and that the people who still qualify as geniuses and greats are fallible and carry with them many of the foibles that come with the human condition.
Do you not understand what referential transparency is?

You can write "pure" functions in imperative languages. Any function which returns the same result for the same arguments is a pure function. You could write an entire pure functional program in C if you wanted.
Plugins work with Epic - another user has said 1password works in Epic.
A LOT of artists are learning hardware and no high level scripting or concepts. They know how to get LEDs and servos to react to you but have no clue what an object really is.
In this case you should have gone to a lawyer who knows this type of biz. not some random or general lawyer lol
We've been the Epic Browser for years now - were stuck with the name contractually!
How does one buy one of these? I live in the U.S. and visited a handful of the designated USA distributors but couldn't find a site that had one.
Haha, I mentioned it to Marc the other day-- he's out of the office now, but I'll be sure to ask again for you. :)
Ah, very interesting. I never even thought about it that way. So maybe the author wasn't trying to be misleading, but just chose their words poorly.
A lot of this is rhetoric that we expect from Realpolitik, but overall, I think Putin burnishes his and Russia's reputation with this sort of dialog.

I also wonder how common place it is for major heads of state to write essays in the Times.
lit will no longer ask for private gist access:

https://github.com/williamcotton/lit/releases/tag/v0.1.2

https://github.com/williamcotton/lit/commit/06c79eb3780663d2...
We block tons of fingerprinting scripts. More coming soon (fingerprinting is tough!).
Sometimes the level of convoluted arguments and rhetorical gymnastics people go to justify anything Israel related is remarkable.

If this was Chile or Brunei you bet there would be 0 apologists here justifying it. "You know I don't condone it wholeheartedly but ... blah blah sensationalized, let's all keep our cool ..." etc etc.
By an accident of history, I learned Clean before I heard of Haskell. It's a fun language.
Sounds like my reaction on Apple's version MVC: "Do I have to stuff ALL of this stuff into a Controller???". But if I use something like LESS with a ORM or Microsoft MVC with EF and nice IOC and builder patterns all of a sudden the controller does nothing else but evaluating the request and giving the right kind of response.
Well, al Assad has been active in the onion recently....
One solution is to spend radically less than the average and save radically more. There are a few good blogs that strongly advocate this approach [1][2]. I won't claim that it's the right solution for you, but it is a solution.

[1] http://earlyretirementextreme.com/

[2] http://www.mrmoneymustache.com/
Perhaps, I'm not sure as I don't meet many vendors in Redmond. I know that we have a lot of blue badges with H1s and you couldn't tell the difference (well, the American will speak with an American accent).

I'm actually stationed in China, so our body shopping tends to be local, where ironically, I (an American) am the one on the working visa.
sophistry [ˈsɒfɪstrɪ]
n pl -ries
1. (Philosophy)
a. a method of argument that is seemingly plausible though actually invalid and misleading
b. the art of using such arguments
2. subtle but unsound or fallacious reasoning
3. an instance of this; sophism
I believe you mean, "how commonplace it is for major heads of state to commission PR firms to advance their interests in US media."
Except for this: "and connect dots the US may not have."

A manual process could certainly do a better job, but no, it still isn't a guaranteed thing.
Perhaps "pure" events are a recipe for spaghetti code, the same way a low-level anything is a recipe for that. But if you have a framework built on top of events, then it's very maintainable.

MacOS apps, for instance, are built largely around Objective C, which borrows concepts from SmallTalk. They have delegates and other "we'll call you" concepts. Compare that with Windows apps in the past, where you had to write your own event loop and explicitly listen for events.

On the web, a library like Angular.js encourages you to put your code in one place and it "takes care of the rest". The "inversion of control" is once again very central to the whole thing. And in both cases, it makes for great declarative UI building (UI builder on the Mac, HTML on the web).

In short, if you have a framework, chances are it exposes BOTH kinds of things -- you call it to create / manipulate some objects, but it also calls YOUR code on important events.

If you don't care about mousedown/up events vs touchstart/end events - fine. All that can be abstracted into other events. But you need to respond to events -- whether user input or things coming in.

In our framework, Q, we actually strongly encourage the developer to update their views on events instead of "ajax success" callbacks. That's because Q is built to power SOCIAL apps, and when you're collaborating on a document, you can't predict when a new message will be pushed via a socket ... it may come from someone else posting it to the collaborative document!

So you can't just "avoid" events -- they have their place, especially in multi-user real time environments.
Like all MS concept videos, it's all very pretty but useless except for the most shallow kinds of collaboration - it's not so much promising any specific technology so much as a future in which you don't actually have to do any work. How many people do companies really need whose role in its entirety consists of quickly slapping together pretty-looking "reports" full of 3D graphs?

These superficial concept videos have about as much relevance to the world of actual usable technology as porn has to the complexity and compromises of married life. The encyclopaedia we have today is Wikipedia, not Encarta, and no-one cares that it doesn't have embedded videos of antelopes bounding or the galaxy turning.
Epic at present blocks tons of fingerprinting scripts. Comments above seem right to us as well that user-agent doesn't make sense to use from a fingerprinting perspective. Fonts+Plugins do though. We actually do and could've released things to protect against fingerprinting actively right now BUT it wouldn't have been comprehensive or defended against some of the key things we'd imagine a fingerprinter would use e.g. flash fonts call & more. So there's more work to be done - please join our forums and help us come up with more thorough solutions for fingerprinting.
...and wasn't willing to re-invent Windows for it.

And thereby, being unwilling to disrupt themselves, made themselves ripe for it.
Even after researching the definition of burnish, I'm not sure if you meant that he makes his reputation better or made it worse by his statements.
I'm not one of those social-justice tards. Believe me. 90% of things online don't even phase me, but this post just left me with a gross feeling.
Obama has, at least:

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/06/opinion/06obama.html

Fun footnote:

Barack Obama is the president of the United States.
Very cute and nice but the categories are too broad in name and narrow in focus "Server administration" = Apache setup etc.
How much evidence do we in fact have that the rebels gassed their own people in a false-flag operation? I had heard it was a possibility, Putin seems to think it's all but certain, but I haven't studied the issue in depth.
Backstabbing happens everywhere, unfortunately. The main problem with MS was that it was too profit driven for too many years instead of trying to do what was best for the users. Making profit eventually has a direct correlation to providing consistent quality that is better than the next guy or more consistently better. It all comes back to happiness; customers are happier when they get what they expect (intuitive) and what the need (low bugs, fast), not what they want (shiny UI).

They had some really shitty code. http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2004/2/15/71552/7795

My fav:

private\ntos\w32\ntuser\client\nt6\user.h:
* The magnitude of this hack compares favorably with that of the national debt.
My computer science class at a top state university was like 70% foreign in the mid 90s; today it's much worse. The American talent pipeline is just not full enough to satisfy demand. Hiring ANY programmer that meets our requirements is difficult enough without having to worry about where their citizenship is.
Reading some of the other articles on this blog, this guy needs to realize he's not a unique snowflake and has no business giving 'life advice' to others.

e.g. http://www.freedomtwentyfive.com/2013/03/where-does-it-end/
WTF,

- If they express view point it's, "advance their interest"

- If they don't, they are arrogant or indecisive

What you are saying is,

- If your view is not same as my opinion, I will find an excuse to insult you.
Better. Think "polish".
Exactly. We are sort of beyond that point. And one kind of wonders. Alright, we know how bad it really is. And then another blow comes.

What is remarkable is that quite often these revelations come after government officials have revved up their PR machine and have lied about some fact. Before they would tell lies and it was all "Yeah this is rumors, unfounded, disgruntled employee, traitor, communist homosexual etc etc wanted revenge". Now they spew a lie and bam! a new proof of contradiction follows it from Snowden's documents.

This must be very infuriating for them. World top intelligence apparatus got its pants pulled down in front of the whole world to laugh at.

I wouldn't be surprised if someone out there in Langely, VA is not planning a fatal accident involving Snowden by now. Piano falls on him from 5th floor, hmm, or something ridiculous like that. Something that might "teach" others a lesson perhaps too.

I used to think this government wasn't operating like that (obviously through my own naivete) but these days I just don't know.
The two meanings you present are the same meaning. It could roughly be "all except" in either case.

> (where it means "almost" -- e.g., "He all but went bankrupt)

This makes sense with the individual words. On the scale of loosing money, he did everything up to, but not including, going bankrupt. He did everything except going bankrupt; which is almost going bankrupt.

I see your point that because in a non-quantitative description, it effectively means "almost", people might confusedly use it to mean "almost" in quantitative descriptions, without thinking about what it means.

> Actually, the problem is ...

So, I cede that that is a problem, but I don't agree with the "actually." There are people who don't realize that it means "almost", and might say "He all but went bankrupt" to mean that he really went bankrupt.
Snowden was able to access all the systems from his outsourced office in Hawaii.

You aren't the first person I've seen make this erroneous assertion. Snowden worked at an NSA site, the Hawaii Regional Operations Security Center at Naval and Telecommunications Area Master Station Pacific. http://www.navy.mil/submit/display.asp?story_id=31660

Furthermore, Snowden was only "outsourced" in the sense that the division of Booz Allen that employed him is essentially an employment agency for the DoD. They aren't significantly different from the bodyshops that proliferate in the tech industry. Other parts of Booz Allen (which are now practically an entirely separate company) do operate like mini spy agencies of their own, but that is not who Snowden worked for or reported to.
"perl -c" checks syntax without executing. (Try it and you'll see a lot of syntax errors using perl 5, so no chance of it executing -- but even if you run it under perl 3, you have nothing to fear.)
Hm. Chrome, Firefox, Opera, etc.. release a new version multiple times a year. Microsoft ties IE to OS releases which happen every 5(+/-) years.

Dear Microsoft: I'd love to hear that cosmic resonating pop of you pulling your head out of your ass.

I recognize that the latest version of IE finally has auto-update. It taking Microsoft this long to do what Firefox and Chrome have been doing for years doesn't do anything more than certify that Microsoft Actively makes my job 50% more difficult on a daily basis.
Here is my guess:

The second photo you realized you had showed the subject holding the device used to take the picture sent to your colleague. You investigated that particular device and found a way to uniquely identify it's pictures based off some characteristic of it's photos, not necessarily EXIF, then scoured the Internet for photos with the same unique characteristic until you found one that revealed more information about the subject?
"Ladies, there’s always the pole."

That was reductive and unnecessary. Otherwise a good piece.
> and no-one cares that it doesn't have embedded videos of antelopes bounding or the galaxy turning.

I care. I think Wikipedia would be greatly improved with relevant embedded video content. Unfortunately, getting high quality relevant public domain video is virtually impossible. It is nice to think about though.
> The DB essentially becomes an API/service used by the application....

Exactly, which is what Martin Fowler is pushing with NoSQL... The idea that many people have been using RDBMS's as encapsulated databases for decades is usually lost on the NoSQL marketing though.
Great closing paragraph:

My working and personal relationship with President Obama is marked by growing trust. I appreciate this. I carefully studied his address to the nation on Tuesday. And I would rather disagree with a case he made on American exceptionalism, stating that the United States’ policy is “what makes America different. It’s what makes us exceptional.” It is extremely dangerous to encourage people to see themselves as exceptional, whatever the motivation. There are big countries and small countries, rich and poor, those with long democratic traditions and those still finding their way to democracy. Their policies differ, too. We are all different, but when we ask for the Lord’s blessings, we must not forget that God created us equal.

And yes, it's hypocritical and carefully crafted.
I wonder if we can turn it around and use an aphorism that 70-80% of the advice from any particular VC should be ignored.
Not to mention prosecuting Bad Guys who are totally guilty or suing people who totally deserve it.
> railing against the semantics of an exaggerated expression

I'm arguing that those exaggerated expressions seem to be in use so much lately that its misleading people into believing false information about the H1 program and its evils. I would really hope that none of what I clarified needed to be clarified and was common knowledge already. But despite HN being a fairly knowledgable crowd, the extent of the discussion here suggests otherwise.
did you even read the article? it was written for (and runs fine on) perl 3. it's basically a huge nop.
No other mention of Trine on here yet. That game looks so beautiful. I'm however having trouble understanding the steam key thing. I put my key into steam but my games aren't there to download. Oh well. Downloading Amnesia a Machine for Pigs right now anyway. That wasn't part of this bundle, but happened to release yesterday so I've got games in the queue before having to worry about this bundle just yet.
Theres a lot of stuff thrown into HN these days. I'd say that interesting pieces on world events is a lot better than some local story (such as some local Boston or SF event) which has popped up on the front page from time to time.
Agreed, on both points. Fun and awesome design. Since I have so few skills on the left side of this talent sheet, I really appreciate how polished it looks.

I was a little sad that our framework benchmarks [1] and/or a "server-side performance" talent category were missing. :)

[1] http://www.techempower.com/benchmarks/