skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It depends on what you need. I just use a text editor for a lot of purposes. For writing a long complex document, I really like Scrivener on the Mac--but that's mostly for creating content prior to entering into a formatting/publishing phase. For creating a typical 1-10 page formatted document, Word is fine. But show is Libre Office for the most part.
And if the internet stops working for them because they use IE6, will they somehow manage to upgrade?
Government forms served as Word documents with complex table-based formatting and "fields" made out of underscores are truly the worst.

They are sadly ubiquitous throughout Eastern Europe, much like mathematics typeset using Word and MathType.
You can write code on paper and debug it in your head, running a simulator of the target environment in your brain. There is no "as if"; this was actually coding.

Coding is something you do in your brain, not in an editor.
How much would it take to replace Excel with an open source alternative? $100K? $1MM? There has to be a dollar amount where you can buy enough developer time to replace it.
I know someone who did, for nursing. It was more expensive, but much faster than going to a university. Gainfully employed since graduating five years ago, and was able to pay off the loans with the nursing salary after a couple years.
"Which nations? All definitions include five core countries: Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, and the United States."

It's very appropriate that this article was posted in HN. After all, these are the five guys of the Five Eyes- the intelligence network that's spying on the world they 'civilized.'

http://thinkprogress.org/security/2013/07/10/2276191/snowden...
Ok so I'm going to start applying for jobs before moving. Just made a new resume:
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/12891432/RickyGuResume.p...
> there are solid alternatives to the other products in the office suite

Are you sure? Does it not strike you as odd that OpenOffice/LibreOffice still haven't managed to replace Word?
Looks good ! I wonder whether it supports matrix factorization as well !
try libreoffice.
I absolutely agree. And while I hate VBA, it makes excel that much more powerful. It even makes up for some of the bugs in excel such as absolute references from a different workbook doesn't transpose using the built in transpose function. However, using the built in copy / paste formula functionality, it works fine. In this case, a simple macro which takes 5 mins to write will resolve this otherwise annoying bug.

Although the most annoying thing about Excel is actually the users who insist on using it like a database...
If you knew anything about the etymology of the word salary, you'd not have bothered writing that.

Here's a hint: Salary = salt given as payment for services rendered.
I'm more anti spying than anyone else, but how is this relevant?
Cool.

What is the structure of the sent.model file inside the corpusEN.bin zip archive?

It's a strikingly small file for something called corpus. Say I have a larger corpus, or a corpus in a different language, how would I go about building one of these sent.model files with more data?
If so, use Protobuf, BSON and jump in the wagon for SPDY.

Why JSON at all if you don't care about reading it?

I'm not against Protobuf, BSON, SPDY and the likes, my argument is just that JSON is used over binary formats only because it's readable.
Right now the word processor choices are Word or open-source Word clone, so I don't see the point for the end user. I use Libre/NeoOffice, but it's no easier to use than Word. I'd like to see a word processor more like old ClarisWorks/AppleWorks.
Many authors do already do this. I'm not sure if Charles Stross is complaining about having to write in Word, or simply use a workflow where Word is the end output for the author. The latter makes more sense as a complaint than the former, because I know many published authors (writing runs in the family) who use tools like Scrivener to write and then send it on to their agents / publishers as an exported .doc without any problems.

It could be worse, at least he's not writing scripts (which generally mandate you to use Final Draft)...
Arguing this is the exceptional case misses his point, I think.

He is intelligent, eloquent, and absolutely correct.

In _any_ field except "business letters and reports" there are numerous talented, creative people who use other software and understand his lament: "the major publishers have been browbeaten into believing that Word is the sine qua non of document production systems."

Some examples:

∙ Hard science research are the poster child where "Word slave labor" happens daily

∙ Math research, fortunately there's a lot the web can do but still the Word drudgery

∙ Engineering research

∙ Self-published and indie writers (Scrivener definitely has made a splash)

∙ Law

Who cares? Well, if you want to make a lot of money, these people would throw their money at you if you could ease their pain a little bit.

The publishers get a lot of bad press for other things they do (like Aaron Schwartz), but they're still wrong about MS Word being a publishing platform.
I think that Objective-C would qualify as a reasonably high-level language and offers a choice between manual and automatic, but very predictable memory management.
Help: Cannot find article on oracle about loading kernel modules via usb
A month or so ago there was an article about loading linux kernel modules over a usb flash drive which could record all packets on a persons computer. Unfortunately, I cannot find this article. Does anyone have the link for this?
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LyX isn't WYSIWYG but rather WYSIWYM (the "M" stands for "mean"), but I found it the most usable visual editor for word processing.

Edit: Why the downvote?
How does such spying jive with the following?

What, after all, do we mean by Western civilization? What was Churchill driving at in his definition, quoted above? There are three irreducible elements. First, the rule of law. The government of the day doesn’t get to set the rules. Those rules exist on a higher plane, and are interpreted by independent magistrates. The law, in other words, is not an instrument of state control, but a mechanism open to any individual seeking redress.

Not only are the governments setting the rules, they are denying individuals seeking redress. Worse, with gag orders, we can't even know if redress is owed.
Context matters. If I say something about a product in a comment or review, it will usually be seen as my honest opinion. However, if the same statement appears in a paid advert, it may appear as if I was endorsing the product for personal gain.

In other words, the whiff of dishonesty that adverts always have may rub off on me.
I really think that has to do with Microsoft's lock-in strategy and the fact that people only "know" Office in the corporate space.
> Third, representative government. Laws should not be passed, nor taxes levied, except by elected legislators who are answerable to the rest of us.

This must be why the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association's slogan in 1967 was "one man, one vote". The native population of northern Ireland saw American blacks in Mississippi on the telly and wanted to get the kind of enfranchisement they were getting.

Workers in Manchester in 1819 who had a rally for the vote were massacred by a cavalry charge.

Of course all of this was paradise compared to what Rhodesians, Indians, South Africans etc. were going through.

What a load of bollocks
I would say that Javascript is not too bad a language because it has those nice parts. But overall, it's still a language that feels weird given all the bad parts.

I still don't get around how `this` can be so broken.
Brown people are repressed abused and have resources stolen and withheld from them by white people while white people live in relative prosperity. Then white people use the relative instability and corruption in these repressed regions to support their own racism.
Undoubtedly the democratic institutions and cultures of the Anglo-American culture achieved great things. But the triumphalist tone of this article not only whitewashes the cost in blood that created this civilization of law, and ignores injustices that still go on today.

It just comes out sounding really self-congratulatory. I'm no fan of Howard Zinn or Marxist historical revisionism. But this article makes it sound like the game is done and the West has won. Perhaps if it had been more prescriptive, urging the Anglosphere to strive to be better, to refine the rule of law, increase personal liberty, and reform representative government, then it would be more convincing.
$100K is one developer-year... I would expect it to cost at least a hundred times that.
Sad thing is that key-rebinding is the first thing I noticed on that site. Glad I'm not alone.
My culture is clearly the best at being my culture. Other cultures just aren't as good at it.
I found the arguments interesting, but difficult to evaluate. I simply don't know enough history to engage with many of the author's points. The same is probably true for most readers.

If I had any criticism, it would be this: It praises western government too much. While I'm certainly glad I live in the US, it seems clear to me that better forms of government exist. The problem is that nobody has invented them, or no country has tried them. This is understandable. Switching systems is not only incredibly hard, it's stupendously risky. Things have to get really bad before people are willing to switch.

Also, anything better would probably sound ridiculous to us today. To quote Vernor Vinge:

If you go back to the year 1200 and you tried to explain to some noble lord why a democracy and intellectual freedom works better, he might be the rare sort of person who would listen to you. That's possible, that he would listen to you. But he would be quite right to laugh in your face and say, "You know what would happen? If I tried to open myself up to that? Tomorrow, I would be dead. There would be another clown up here on the hill, and he would be doing the same thing that I'm doing. What you're talking about is anarchy and it is impossible."

(from around http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RzRuPGnJxCs#t=52m25s)

Finally, even if I believe the author, he offers no solutions. If the anglosphere's special sauce is being diluted, what can we do about it? I've sat around for five minutes thinking, but nothing particularly good comes to mind.

Overall though, I enjoyed reading this article. Then again, I'm from the anglosphere.
It's been over a decade since I was a regular, daily Excel user ("power user", frankly). I still, today, haven't seen anything that matches what Excel was already back then.

It has its quirks. It's also damned powerful and optimized.

(I guess that's including its program-ability and the ability to interface it with external functionality via Win32 et al. I remember, for example, referencing IE 4, then 5, in order to "add" regex's to it via VBA scripting. Actually, as I recall that was actually Windows Scripting Host; installing the relevant version of IE at that time in turn caused WSH to also be installed.)

P.S. I was not number crunching during the Lotus heydays. I gather its products had some features that were unparalleled for their time and that Excel may never have fully matched.

P.P.S. As for quirks, I remember one bit of oddity emanating from a formatting function that an older programmer associated with a Fortran convention, when I happened to describe it to him.
CoffeeScript will save us many keystrokes here, too. :)
I think MS Word is fine; they just need to use an open standard document format.
Yeppp! a trivial test
What raised the English-speaking peoples to greatness was not a magical property in their DNA, nor a special richness in their soil, nor yet an advantage in military technology, but their political and legal institutions.

This is no doubt aimed at Jared Diamond's "Guns, Germs, (Geography) & Steel"
Ask HN: Timer as a service
Does anyone know if there exists anything that would work as timer as a service?

For example, every monday, I need an http request to hit my server. At that time, then some business logic would kick off.

I currently do it with polling, but I think it would make more sense as a push request. And I think it would be even better if an external server issued the request at a given interval.

I have been googling around, but haven't found any services like that. Does anyone know of anything out there?
My experience with libreoffice scripting was painful: http://williamedwardscoder.tumblr.com/post/37291851878/makin...
I have.
I got my first job about a year in and finished up while I actually learned so much more and faster on the job. For the most part it worked out but the loans are ridiculous.

I went for programming. There were a few things that were nice like: learning about linux, learning some calculus, using different languages. There was a lot that was just dull or useless but given the range of people I'm sure someone did need to learn it.
One of the article's points is that civilization isn't secure, it's always under threat from enemies both foreign and domestic - that there are lots of things wrong with the Anglosphere with need to be fixed.

So then someone points out something wrong with the Anglosphere, something which needs to be fixed, and that comment gets voted to the top. I don't get it.

Further, it's not as if the author is trying to paint the Anglosphere as perfect. The best, healthiest culture in existence? Yes. Perfect? Obviously not.
Wow really? Apparently pointing out the obvious bias and rewriting of history is "racism." I mean I get that the victor gets to write the history, but this is the empire that put "No Dogs or Indians Allowed" in front of its bars, please done shove "civilization" down my throat so hard.

There seems to a be a large rise in popularity of such articles which cherry pick certain facts to paint a rosy picture of the colonial empire. I believe its the classic case of people wanting to read a history they wish was true rather than deal with the uncomfortable truth.

While I have no problems with people writing about the many positives of the raj, I believe that omitting to mention certain genocides and atrocities is akin to misinformation.
LO and other openoffice suites are progeny of StarOffice, originally released in 1985. Even with such a long development history, there are deep compatibility issues which make it unacceptable for the "power users" that comprise the most profitable segment of the market.

And if you really want to go down that rabbit hole of perfect compatibility, it's an absolute clusterf*ck. There are more than than 20 different 100+ page specs (some exceeding 500 pages) needed to properly parse excel files. An incomplete list (which you can find by searching for the keyword):

MS-XLS, MS-CFB, MS-ODRAW, MS-ODRAWXML, MS-OGRAPH, MS-OFFCRYPTO, MS-RMPR, MS-OVBA, MS-OSHARED, MS-CTXLS, ECMA-376, MS-OLEDS, MS-OLEPS, MS-DTYP, MS-XLSB, MS-OFORMS, MS-VBAL, MS-OAUT, MS-DCOM, MS-XLSX

But if you are looking to contribute to an open source project, consider some of these reasonably active projects (I'm sure I am missing some really good libraries here, so don't consider this a comprehensive list):

https://github.com/tealeg/xlsx (go, xlsx read)

https://poi.apache.org/ (java)

https://github.com/Niggler/js-xlsx (javascript, xlsx read)

https://github.com/Niggler/js-xls (javascript, xls read)

https://phpexcel.codeplex.com/ (php)

http://www.python-excel.org/ (python, based on openoffice )

https://github.com/randym/axlsx (ruby, xlsx write)

https://github.com/seamusabshere/remote_table (ruby, xls/xlsx read)
How many other software products have entire groups and conferences dedicated to tracking and mitigating the problems they cause? http://www.eusprig.org/
Typical self-congratulatory anglo-conservative clap trap. No one outside of a very small group of wealthy Britons and Americans (and, alright, some wealthy educated descendants from the former colonies) could possibly share such an immensely bowdlerized narrative of anglo history.

The freedom he praises is the freedom of the very rich and well-connected to impose their success on the less fortunate, be they poor sheep farmers in Scotland who saw their commons taken away by enclosures, indentured servants who were shipped off to the colonies in America or the inhabitants of India who had their livelihood taken away from them when textile manufacturers from Manchester forced the destruction of their local economy. (Notice, by the way, how this essay makes no mention of Indians other than the 2.4 million Indians who were pressed into service in the trenches in World War I and who, for the most part, suffered terribly to defend a country that had pretty much ruined their own.)

For this rich mercantile elite, yes, the anglo system is superior, which is why its ideals have now spread across the entire world (even in China there is now an elite that dresses in suits and engages in trade unencumbered by rules and regulations that protect the millions that are pressed into working in their factories under appalling conditions).

For the vast majority of people, however, the system is a disaster. It has ruined communal forms of organisation that protected the unfortunate and the weak. It has destroyed perfectly viable local economies and it has reduced millions of people to little more than debt bondage.

It takes a special kind of myopia to gloss over all of that and proclaim, like this article does, that the anglo system is superior because it promotes free trade and rule of law for the rich.
How would I go about using this directly from Python, os.system calls?
Intellectual technologists may simply disagree with the premise of a law, rather than fail to understand it. You can't create new technologies with a mindset that sees only how things are, not how they could be better.
.docx is an open format, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_Open_XML
OOo/LO is a straight forward clone of MS Office. It shares all its design weaknesses and adds some of its own. Except foor freedom, I don't see any reason for using it over MS Office.
While I commend the drive to switch to career it is a little scary that it's apparently so easy to become a $100k engineer in 5 months in SF.

Reading HN from the other side of the pond in UK sometimes I get the feeling that there's more money than sense flying around the startup world and that this sort of switch to work in this startup ecosystem is why there are so many dreadfully poor app ideas that should never see the light of day being funded with millions of dollars of VC cash.

I may just have a slightly distorted view of startup world but is it really that easy to score a highly paid job with so little experience because they're so desperate for bodies who can write some code or is OP someone very talented who's just rolled with it and got very lucky?
Publisher's workflow now insists on copy editors using Word with change tracking to mark up submitted manuscripts. The author then gets a copy of the marked-up MS to check. Which means having to use at least a tool compatible with MS change tracking on .doc files. So I'm blissfully Word-free until I hit "compile" in Scrivener ... but after the output file (RTF) goes to the publisher it comes back to me as a Word document with tracked changes and I have to dive into the turbid depths once more.
You coudnt be more wrong. Read more about it here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_British_salt_tax...
Never-before-seen military footage of "Black Hawk Down"
Why not ask some people from Angola, Mozambique, Ivory Coast or the Congo about it?
And what happens when you do? Pay them again to keep maintaining the code base? Problem is few products can find a sustainable business model around open source.
Godspeed gcb0, Godspeed!
Interesting. Let's say you are right and Singh means "salary" (It's not clear). Here's something from Wikipedia about that:

By the time of the Hebrew Book of Ezra (550 to 450 BCE), salt from a person was synonymous with drawing sustenance, taking pay, or being in that person's service. At that time, salt production was strictly controlled by the monarchy or ruling elite. Depending on the translation of Ezra 4:14, the servants of King Artaxerxes I of Persia explain their loyalty variously as "because we are salted with the salt of the palace" or "because we have maintenance from the king" or "because we are responsible to the king".

Somehow my point stands.
It's a published format. Open, not so much: to parse .docx properly you've basically got to re-implement Word -- they carefully drafted the standard to make it hard for rival XML processors to work on their files.
I think they don't like the situation but not enough to turn off their TVs? Maybe they feel powerless. Maybe they feel like the government is the good guys and the ends justify the means. Nobody they know personally has been waterboarded.

In my ideal society the majority has more respect for education and rationality and ergo they would have thought, "hm, maybe this PATRIOT Act and increased surveillance is exactly in line with the goals expressed by the terrorists."

Or they'd at least think, "what's going on with these congressional districts, some sort of Uzumaki?"

But what seems to be happening is that nobody is angry enough to even vote differently. So I'll probably move to Canada or something.
Because it needs to be said
ironically, every self respecting hacker would be ok if he was trhow in jail for that. He didn't invent it or anything close to that, but tried to sell and make money. lacking a proper car analogy, akin to a script kiddie advertising malware he found on some BBS of later.
I didn't really appreciated MS Word until I started using Apple Pages: Pages has no draft mode! Suddenly clunky Word seemed to have a better interface. The problem is that over the years Word has become a poster child for feature creep, but that said for each feature that you detest there is someone else who is fan.
Thing is nobody really ever types a url anymore, beyond perhaps:

http://advrider.com/forums
Pretty sure the article is about different cultures within the "white people world," not about comparisons of "white" and "brown" cultures.
In the US. You can find developers, good developers, for cheaper than that outside of major metro areas in the US, Europe, etc.
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I agree with you - cart before the horse. If there were a good standard document format vendors would agree to support - rather than the weak default of bolt on plugins that can import and export other formats, presumably there would be an open field to experiment.

Since Office and Windows are Microsoft's furnace products there's no way I can see it happening.
You made my day. Or night being precise.
Linux? (http://events.linuxfoundation.org/) EDA tools? (http://www.dac.com/)

Having problems is not the operative issue. It's userbase. All software has problems; Excel is one of the projects that has a large enough userbase that you can schedule conferences about its problems.

P.S. "EDA" is of course more than one tool, but it's close to the right scope and what jumps to mind right now.
Actually, the Latin political systems are quite obviously better for the powerful, as the weak tradition of rule of law and equality under the law allows them to more easily exploit the political process for their own gain.