skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Nothing new, but a good reminder of the idiocy of many not blessed with an education in mathematics, logic or Enlightenment thought. We, HN readers, are lucky to be so educated, so please let's do our best to bring more into the fold of fun with numbers. There are people like this still out there!
That's sort of the point. The problem it's trying to solve is election of extremist representatives with little incentive to pander to both (all three?) sides of their electors.
how is this actually being calculated, as for what i see is not entirely correct.

Digital Rental	Digital Purchase is not globally available for those movies listed, is this US based only? is the download data for that ranking based only in the countries where the movies are available for rental or buy only?
The best kind of documentation is that which is checked by the compiler and guaranteed to be correct - the code itself. Code that is well written, in good style using sensible variable names, can be as descriptive as good comments. Using a good static type system allows you to encode properties into your code that are guaranteed to be valid.

I certainly think some comments have their uses - but these are generally at the level of how systems and modules work, and the concepts used therein, as discussed elsewhere in these comments. I agree with the article that only 5% (or less) of functions need individual comments attached.
I'm still on VS 2008 as well. Is there anyone who has upgraded a substantially sized C++ project from VS 2008 to one of the newer versions that would be willing to share their experiences?
Ah, is that why http://famo.us just looks like a blurry pile of laundry to me?

But most importantly: didn't Intel release around this time last year JIT compilation of Javascript to run on their HID (GPU onboard CPU)? (wouldn't that make slow-execute javascript a non-issue?)
There is no evidence that "cutting corporate taxes to zero" will cause companies to hire more people.

(2012) New Study: No Evidence That High-End Tax Cuts Help the Economy: http://www.offthechartsblog.org/new-study-no-evidence-that-h...

(2012) Nick Hanauer's (banned) TED talk: "Rich people don't create jobs" http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CKCvf8E7V1g
For significant features implemented, you can look here:

https://wiki.php.net/rfc#implemented

Granted, this was a minor point release, so there are no new features (only bugfixes and minor perf improvements).
Some bandwidth tests:

root@ubuntu1204:/tmp# wget http://canadianwebsolutions.ca/speedtest/test.zip
HTTP request sent, awaiting response... 200 OK
Length: 3982587 (3.8M) [application/zip]
Saving to: `test.zip'

100%[=========================================================================================>] 3,982,587 1.39M/s in 2.7s

root@ubuntu1204:/tmp# wget http://speedtest.fremont.linode.com/100MB-fremont.bin
--2013-10-17 08:42:14-- http://speedtest.fremont.linode.com/100MB-fremont.bin
HTTP request sent, awaiting response... 200 OK
Length: 104857600 (100M) [application/octet-stream]
Saving to: `100MB-fremont.bin'

100%[=========================================================================================>] 104,857,600 7.98M/s in 8.2s

root@ubuntu1204:/tmp# wget http://speedtest.london.linode.com/100MB-london.bin
--2013-10-17 08:42:32-- http://speedtest.london.linode.com/100MB-london.bin
HTTP request sent, awaiting response... 200 OK
Length: 104857600 (100M) [application/octet-stream]
Saving to: `100MB-london.bin'

58% [===================================================> ] 61,442,944 16.2M/s eta 3s ^C

Inbound speed seems to be very adequate.

However, outbound/uplink is very slow:

Testing from Europe (UK) the speed is not constant and stable. I was able to see 3-7Mbps at a maximum (350Kb/s - 873Kb/s).

Not very happy about that, hopefully something will be done to improve uplink speed to at least 10Mbps.
I kinda think both Alcohol Soft and Killer Mobile are pretty bad names too.
Linux Pros Predict the Future of SteamOS and the Steam Machine
There's a lot of things wrong with ClickOnce. IIRC chrome's installer only uses clickonce as a bootstrapping mechanism for the _actual_ installer.

Problems:

* Can't choose installation path
* No offline installation
* Hard (impossible?) to use with a CDN.

Here's an example of how to turn a directory of precompiled binaries into a click once package using powershell:

https://gist.github.com/jonnii/2628150

My powershell isn't _great_, so forgive any powershell oddities, but notice how much you have to massage the output of the mage tools to actually get it to do what you want.
Combined with SCOTUS rulings regarding campaign contributions, PACs, and Super PACs. There's a lot of money behind these ideologies.
One thing to bear in mind is that documentation serves two different audiences.

One audience is the people who will use your code. For them, every external method should be properly documented (sure, use a tool for this). And make sure it's good enough that (barring debugging situations, because you wrote perfect code) your "users" never have to look inside your code. (If I think about this in C++, I think you should be able to look at a properly commented header and never read the code)

And then there's the poor slob who's going to come in and debug/fix your code some day. He may not need to have every method doc'd but he damn sure needs to know what's tricky, what's interesting, where the gotchas are, etc.
https://www.mashape.com/community/telecom-data#!documentatio...
Note there is no speed improvement between PHP 5.4 and 5.5

Unless you need a 5.5 feature, best to wait.

Of course you can manually install the open-sourced zend opcode cache into PHP 5.4 and get the speed improvement from that.
That is a lovely fantasy but the world is run by grownups. Intelligence like defense has been outsourced to the US and Europe shows no signs of resuming their own defense. I think you will be in for few disappointing decades, probably longer.
The web is characterised by all code being visible by default, e.g. "View Source" in every browser. It's agnostic on whether you can charge for that source code, but in practical terms it's pretty tough to publish openly readable source and expect people to pay for it.
Amen.

This can "kinda" be worked around with "heat.exe" (don't get me started on naming of tools in the toolchain), but even then you'll need to explicitly specify half a dozen command-line arguments (-ag -dr -cg -srd -scom -sreg -svb6 -sfrag) to make the thing work.
Paul Graham Vs Albert Einstein
100Gbps DDoS targets the largest bitcoin exchange in China
On improving boot time, here is some Steve Jobs folklore:

Well, let's say you can shave 10 seconds off of the boot time. Multiply that by five million users and thats 50 million seconds, every single day. Over a year, that's probably dozens of lifetimes. So if you make it boot ten seconds faster, you've saved a dozen lives. That's really worth it, don't you think?

http://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?story=Saving_Lives.txt
This is pretty neat. Anyone have any ideas about how they obtained such complete data? Is it really from scraping the other sites mentioned in the threads?
I think that is also a very good point. Nobody wants to take America over, they just want to divide and make us weak. This goal is being facilitated by the political and financial elite for some diabolical end which is very likely to be mass secession. Long live confederate America!
Why don't you just use erlang then? This isn't in PHP's interest.
Until recently, technology made low-paying, undesired jobs obsolete at a pace that made it possible for more jobs to be created by new industries than the industries that have been disrupted by them.

We are now entering a period in which middle and high paying jobs being replaced by machines. High-frequency trading replaced a whole profession in the financial sectors. There are now machines that are capable to analyze an x-ray image and determine the cause of the problem, leaving the doctor with "just" the job of delivering the news.

So, yes, we do have a problem. I'm not a Neo Luddite. The purpose of this is not to destroy the Internet and all the machines, but I do think that we need to have an ongoing debate about the social structures that we are dissolving as much as about those that we want to build up.
What Does It Mean for the U.S. to 'Lose Control of the Internet?'
I know these. While they're still working on it, since emacs24 elisp with lexical scoping, and some 'stdlib' like dash could help simplify things. People were also discussing writing some non-toy-project lazy stream library that could be very helpfull to process buffers in a functional manner.

Have you used emacsy yourself ? I like this project a lot, and wanna extend many programs with it but I'm not versed into this kind of C programming.
The submission might be better linked to this instead.
I'll just leave this here. Be warned, it's a VERY long article.
http://sealedabstract.com/rants/why-mobile-web-apps-are-slow...
Somewhat off-topic, but there's a fork of PuTTy called KiTTy with some improvements.
I tried to phone in for more info but apparently the number's fake.
> fast track or simplified program for persons of note

There actually is a visa for Outstanding persons called O-1A: individuals with an extraordinary ability in the sciences, education, business, or athletics (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/O_visa).

I don't know if it's any faster to get it.
web client technologies are open. this is a client technology.
I wouldn't agree. I haven't tried it recently, but I tried Windows 8 in a VM on a Mac Mini when it first came out as a preview release. I found it enjoyable even with just a keyboard and mouse.

Wow. I love how you disagree, but then go on to point out you are anything but an expert or regular user of it, and only used a preview, which isn't even the same as what we real users are using. Let me say, as someone that uses Windows 8 every day it is horrible. It pisses me off regularly. I've detailed it here:

http://envoy510.wordpress.com/2013/07/19/windows-8-worst-win...
I moved from the Bay Area back to Portland to work remotely, so I fit in these statistics. I did it because Portland has a more laid-back focus on quality of life and I'm able to live without a car here.
Just my opinion based on a limited and outdated experience (see down thread comment - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6565296), but I definitely didn't feel like Metro was poking me in the eye.
Much of the so-called "gerrymandering" is required by the VRA, which this proposal would certainly violate. http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2013/10/15/how_mic...

This looks like a terrible gerrymander. But there is actually something of a method to this madness. The GOP actually didn’t have much choice but to pack voters into Detroit- and Flint-based districts. Detroit has had two African-American-majority districts since the 1960s, and Republicans were probably required under the Voting Rights Act to retain both of them.

This was no easy task. The 13th and 14th districts had both seen their African-American populations drop below 60 percent, and both had suffered severe population losses in the 2000s, requiring them to take on quite a few additional citizens. Making matters worse, there were barely enough African-Americans in all of Wayne County to create two African-American-majority districts entirely within that county’s borders.

Since it was impossible (and possibly unconstitutional) to draw lines to make sure every African-American in the county was in the minority-majority district, redistricters needed to add those voters from Oakland County, which has a growing African-American population. This is actually the source of the odd appendage we see jutting northward from Detroit; it crosses Oakland County to take in heavily minority Pontiac. Even with all this, both districts are only 56 percent African-American and the 14th still elected a white Democrat over an African-American incumbent in the 2012 primaries.

The neighboring districts were then all pushed toward Republicans, as the most loyal Democratic constituents were removed to comply with the VRA. Even a Democratic legislature would have drawn something akin to these districts; there just aren’t many other options. No neighboring district is left with an African-American population in excess of 11 percent under this map, suggesting that the heavily African-American precincts in the state were pretty well gobbled up.
This is absolutely a better method that the current process of gerrymandering. Texas, Illinois, Florida, and California are awful.
Good luck in your role and no personal animosity but "graduating in computer science at the university of Milan" and "i've never really programmed" - really? What on earth did your degree consist of?
This is a well informed and put together article. Up to date technically and the Author knows what he is talking about. As a former HF trader I endorse it, great piece.
An army of robot baristas could mean the end of Starbucks as we know it
Ubuntu for phones officially launches with 13.10
Here's my interpretation of GP: since every governmental org wants to snoop, it is not enough to "break away" from the US* because it doesn't solve the underlying problem: insecure internet. Let's find solutions that presuppose the government is trying to snoop.

*Unless you don't mind being snooped on by your own government.
> Also, DRM as proposed via EME is really all about Hollywood movies. It is not about copyrighted materials in general, nor should or can it be (see Hixie's post, or just see the Web).

I propose renaming EME to "the Hollywood API."
No in-place upgrade from 8.1 preview? Ugh.
Well, I did use it regularly for about 3 - 4 months, and since it was a preview, I assumed it would only get better.
I ordered my Mirra chairs with bright red upholstery. No regrets yet.
Obligatory functional style:

import sys

reduce(lambda i, o: o.writelines(sorted(i)),
map(lambda args: open(*args),
zip(sys.argv[1:], ('r', 'w'))))

If Guido didn't despised FP so much maybe we could get a nicer lambda syntax... but here's anyway.
> But you don't need backup since you have SkyDrive now ;)

Oh what a fallacy this is. Cloud storage is at best a backup solution for some personal files you don't value too much, but in no way a replacement for a full-system backup.
Ok, the problem is not the documentation. It's the specifications. This problem is exacerbed by management methods such as Agile/Scrum, where no specification document is built from the collection of task descriptions stored in Jira (and IF you are luck to have anything significant in the task descriptions, more often, from what I've observed, it's hand waving and shin pointing than anything precise written down).

And even if some specification document is written, it still remains the problem because when going thru all the phases of analysis design coding and debugging (whatever the period of the cycle you use), it is not updated!

Now we should probably distinguish API elements from internal implementation stuff (but the blog article mentions APIs).

When documenting internal stuff, unless you've developped internal APIs (which you should do!), the documentation can indeed be descriptive, to help maintainers orient themselves and avoid pitfals.

When documenting API, what you need mainly, is the specifications of the API.
This will be the "contract" with the client code, and if there's a discrepancy between the API specification and the implementation, then it means there's a bug (somewhere, of course one could decide that the specifications where wrong, and need to update the specifications instead of the code). Most often it will be a bug in the code.

But the point is that either you have tools to track the specifications elements down to the line of code, so that when you create or modify a line of code, you have easy access to the specifications, or you put the specification in the docstrings (documentation comments) in the code, to get the same easy access. And note that this is a read/write access: specifications may need to be updated when the code is maintained.

So I would agree, write less documentation, write more specifications. Close to the code.
Hoe en wanneer plant je best je rozen?
It's not necessarily "monkeys", but, disturbingly, Microsoft developer tools are becoming more and more oriented towards "wizard-and-designer-clickety-clickery" type development.

There are a few exceptions to this rule (think EF Code-First), but that's a drop in the ocean.
I'm surprised how good this looks. Cyan hasn't really been able to produce anything of high quality or good taste for the past 10 years (and I say this as a huge fan of some of their earlier games). What little they show here though looks both tasteful and intriguing.

I hope this will be a turning point for this struggling company.
I prettified the code myself too, but it's really unreadable. Have you extracted the parts into a nice library? Mind sharing your efforts?

Honestly, without going into the source code, I was like, this is matrix transformation, this is matrix transformation.. then I saw matrix3d and I was like yeaah!

I believe that no software can excel without a good mathematical foundation. What I see coming is that this approach will be extended by P2P Load-Balancing. Similar to what Bitcoin Hackers [1] were doing and still do [1].

--

[1] http://community.websense.com/blogs/securitylabs/archive/201...

[2] http://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/1364/how-can-i-st...

PS: Page 3 on the article answers the headline: No!
So how would one deal with projects that contain 1000s of files?

Run a script to enumerate the files and populate a wix file? Zip up the different parts and have the installation process unzip them?
only to pwn some noobs
One of the few TED talks I really like is very similar:

http://www.ted.com/talks/cameron_herold_let_s_raise_kids_to_...
Civics 2.0 proposal
Or your favourite library from another language, Erlang is quite lacking in that regard. I had a go at porting RSpec:

https://github.com/lucaspiller/espec
To paraphrase The Incredibles, if everyone is special, than no one is.

If 10% of the functions are commented, I will assume that those 10% are more important or have more error prone or dangerous usages. If every function has a boilerplate comment, I lose that information.
Having spent yesterday setting up a new laptop to dual boot Windows and Ubuntu, Ubuntu works far, far better.

Windows needed drivers installing for everything from the network interface up. And I'm still having troubles with the network - I can use wifi fine, but the wired connection refuses to pick up an IP with DHCP.

Ubuntu on the other hand needed a single change to the boot parameters to make screen brightness adjustments work. (Windows also needed a driver for this). Otherwise it works perfectly.
Is there any check/balance on the definition of "criminal threat"? Because that's a pretty loose definition a priori.

"We believe a terrorist exists in GB. That constitutes a criminal threat. To catch him or her, we need to run big data analysis on all communications."
Proportional Representation is a much better way to give representation to minority groups.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proportional_Representation
Its quite terrible on this workstation, so I'm gonna have to go with a no. Also isnt offloading everything to the GPU a bad idea on mobile?
"web monkeys"
Cute. Meanwhile you're the one developing in VS on Windows.
When I started using 8 I wasn't too bothered by the missing start button, now I think I might actually prefer it without. I like the start screen, but I don't use any actual metro apps.
Is a clean install recommended or is an upgrade fine?
Would using "-webkit-transform: matrix3d" allow a way for websites to use a computers GPU for computation? I.e. stay on a page to calculate pi, work on SETI analysis, or mine for bitcoins?
>Do they?

The perception is that they do, and I have to say that I share that perception. I'm open to be convinced otherwise ... by facts.
So funny cat and dog pic
Really cute cat and dog picture that is in the same time a funny pic!
I feel the Windows+X menu is a disaster. It is the worse UI for a menu ever. Is it a traditional start menu? a context menu? It feels really out of place with the entire Windows 8 UI. You want a shortcut to the Control Panel? Device Manager? Event Viewer? Let's just throw it on the start/context menu! The whole Windows+X menu seems like it was added by an engineer and was completely overlooked by the design team.
A great overview of the space. The numbers and techniques are realistic and the article refrains from the moral debate (which you can find elsewhere...)
KashFlow has been acquired by IRIS Software Group
Chase Bank limits cash withdrawals, bans international wire transfers
Disrupting market is not easy, but it significantly easier, if the first priority of the company is not being self sustainable and instead rely on on venture capital. Twitter is an interesting example in that context. A company that surfaced a unique user behavior and created utterly new communication patterns. Yet, because it didn't focus building a business, it ended having to rely on archaic business models to finance itself while in the process disregarding the people who helped make it grow.
Nice, smooth flow to it.

It might be nice if rather than assigning you a random string as a username it used something like "Click here to set your user name".
Ah right, I do not consider that a feasible thing right now.

How would facebook (or the non US equivalent) work if data was encrypted on everyone's PC. There is no PKI that would support that at the moment (Although a social network that also acts as a PKI is an interesting idea.)
You know, right after Windows 8 was released, I noticed something really interesting. While I was struggling with it [1], there were a lot of people on reddit and here being extremely positive, and on reddit there were attacks against anyone that was negative about it. At first, I figured I was just out of step. Gradually, the number of people complaining about Windows 8 grew to overshadow the boosters, where finally the boosters were nowhere to be seen. I believe it was a campaign by Microsoft to try and turn the tide they knew would be there, against it. It failed because Windows 8 was so horrible.

So, 8.1 comes out and here we have a new account (6 days old) with a glowing review. Pardon me if I'm a little skeptical. I've been had before.

[1] http://envoy510.wordpress.com/2013/07/19/windows-8-worst-win...
I would assume any country with a big enough economy/budget is monitoring international internet communication in its totality. Or at least attempting it. Of course there's really only a hand full of nations that could likely pull it off.. This list is obviously purely speculation but in the game are probably: China, Russia, Germany, UK, maybe India.
when I was a grad student, we regularly removed foreign students from our lab web site when they were renewing their visas due to the belief that visas were approved more quickly the less the government could learn by googling your name. That is, if they can quickly learn anything about your research, those are all potential red flags. If a quick google search turns up nothing, you'll just be rubber stamped through.
The Gravediggers of Innovation | Paris' Taxi Mafia
Just out of interest, how much worker participation does big tech companies like Google, Microsoft, Apple or Facebook really have? From what I can tell it is all perceived participation and the CEO and more importantly the investors have the final say. There is a massive difference between worker participation and investor control, workers are rarely investors or share holders in big companies.