skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'll respond, though I'm sure the reason nobody's responded is they're as tired of this conversation as I am.

1) Yet. When boiling frogs it's best to turn the heat up slowly. Canonical isn't providing a service for free here, they make money mining your searches and sending them to 3rd parties like Amazon. Compare this with its parent distribution's Social Contract. [0] Especially the phrase "We will be guided by the needs of our users and the free software community. We will place their interests first in our priorities." Note the lack of a profit motive as compared to Canonical's continuous search for monetization schemes.

2) Real users may not realize they have a choice, or that sending searches to 3rd parties is NOT normal in the GNU/Linux world. Ubuntu has intentionally made itself a "My First Linux" distro so many of its users are new to the idea of software freedom and are in need of guidance.

2b) EULA's are no excuse. Did you know that using Adobe Flash prevents you from working on GNU Gnash? It was in the EULA you agreed to. [1] Everything's confusing during your first *nix experience, the average person probably has a mental list of a dozen things that don't make sense, that's a questionable time to get people to sign off on privacy compromises.

3) Blurring the lines between local and global is interesting. Blurring the lines between Open Source and spyware is not. [2]

[0] - http://www.debian.org/social_contract
[1] - http://www.gnashdev.org/?q=node/25#eula
[2] - http://www.fsf.org/blogs/rms/ubuntu-spyware-what-to-do
apt-get purge friends

:(
http://www.internetworldstats.com/stats.htm

We're at less than 50% global internet penetration. How many of those people without internet have access to programming books and computers?

The only reason being a self-starter is so important is because of how trash CS(/math/engineering/stem) education is, globally, and because, unlike the other STEMs, self-teaching programming doesn't require expensive equipment.

Online education will almost certainly not deepen inequality edit: among the 30% of the world population that has access to computers and a safe, healthy childhood since it will allow people to skip the real barrier to entry in software engineering: dreadful professors and boring, overwrought courses at expensive to attend institutions.
You are correct, sir/madam/whomever....

http://www.linuxmint.com/download_lmde.php
The way I interpreted this part was that the extra 100€ the unhappy guy in the story wanted wouldn't have been able to fuel his car after taxes were accounted for.
If you cannot define what you want then do not ask for it.
Thanks for the end.
I thought they (Other ESPs [Exact Target, Responsys, Etc.]) debunked the idea that using phrases like "Buy Now!!!" or multiple exclamations marks increases the chance of an email getting marked as spam

I send over 150k e-mails per week and have noted that if you bundle together things like "free", ALL CAPS, and exclamation marks, you're going to impact deliverability (as measured through open rates). The key is not just one of these things but actually piling them on top of each other.

Gmail can be very touchy in throwing you to the spam folder if you end up with things like "FREE!!" going on, yet it will be fine with something like "free" or "yay!!"

Gmail's spam filtering seems to be extremely user specific though, so we might see a drop in open rates on Gmail when certain things are included in a mail, but it'll never be absolute and is very hard to objectively prove. You just get a feel for trends over the course of sending hundreds of campaigns.
> analyst Rick Sherlund said the sale of Bing and Xbox, along with other moves, could lift fiscal 2015 earnings by 40 percent

Short term, quarterly numbers-focused business people. Lying off 50% of their employees will also improve their numbers by 2015.

Apple and Google have become the largest tech companies thanks to their consumer facing products. Selling Xbox and Bing will only seal MS's faith as another IBM. Windows Phone and Surface will stagnate (even more) and eventually they will have to be let go too.

Non-tech people often ask me if IBM still exists when it is mentioned in a conversation. They'll be asking the same thing about Microsoft in a decade or two if Elop takes over.
Actually, I have many hours free, every evening and/or weekend... AND I want to get into bitcoin. :)

It's actually a modest goal: I want at least 1 bitcoin, and I want to sit on it, and watch it fluxuate with the market, or do whatever it will do.
How are you commenting if Amish/Luddites aren't suppose to use computers?
I have to agree with another commenter ... It's not NSA level ambiguity ... It is open source, go check it if you don't believe it! :)
And I'd rather be poor in the US or UK than in, say, Somalia.
Reminds me of a line from As Good As It Gets:

"What makes it so hard is not that you had it bad, but that you're that pissed that so many others had it good."
EFF blog post: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2013/11/aaron-swartz-hackathon...

Freedom of the Press Foundation blog post: https://pressfreedomfoundation.org/blog/2013/11/help-us-make...
Quake Live is just Quake 3, which was native and cross-platform by design. Why the hell are they removing OSX/Linux support? Are there any technical reasons for this?

If they were smart, they'd put it on Steam, integrate some Steamworks stuff, and enjoy a larger fanbase along with relying less on their own backends. Steamworks could even help them monetize things like skins.
He could write another "burning platform" memo and run Microsoft into the ground too...
Want a light weight .EML editor? Let him know.
Software like that is where we need "software engineering", with comprehensive requirements, verification, code reviews, sign-offs, extensive testing, etc.

It may also be good if such software was open source, so that anyone outside the company could also review it, if they so chose. See also: http://www.tuxradar.com/content/karen-sandler-full-interview
Geany is a great IDE, but for Python, I've learned to love Ninja IDE:

ninja-ide.org
Couldn't it encode the normal map in the RGB channels of a single extra image, instead of 4 extra images?
the inbox is a mysterious thing to find for me nowadays
Using an ordinary English word with no capitalization for your product's name makes the marketing copy hard to read.

I first parsed "Why rather kicks ass" as "Why rather kick ass" and thought "yeah, why not go kick some ass (?) instead of sitting behind my computer like I've been doing all day".

Then I realized you meant "Why our product (which is named "rather") kicks ass".
Police are getting tanks and heavy weapons from Pentagon for nearly free
Growth Hackers Conference 2013 Notes
> How would you go about getting supporting evidence for something that hasn't been tried yet?

You would get supporting evidence for each of a set of propositions, from which the efficiency (however that is operationalized in context) of the particular plan being proposed follows.

The whole point of the scientific method is that it allows us to have justifiable (even if not certain) evidence-based predictions of things that haven't been tried yet.
Scott Gu or Scott Forstall would be good, or maybe Scott Hanselman. It's any Scott's race. Basically they need to get back to their developer/engineer focused products to innovate. They are riding off the fumes/grace of the last innovations still. Maybe someone that will take Visual Studio and Azure cross platforms and really build tools the developers love not things that they hate like Sharepoint (and for some, Windows).
I really like what the guys at cognitect are doing.
This (indicate.io) And Mattermark seem to be doing similar things - compiling (sometimes superficial) data on startups in order to score them and sell that data to investors, press, or competitors.

If this becomes widespread, it'll be interesting to see the impact, both in what types of startups have a biased advantage and what "gaming the system" will look like.
Switching from imperative to functional programming with games in Elm
This is the first time I wrote an article not in my native language. If something sounds stupid or the content is nonsense in your opinion, I would be glad if you let me know. :)
I used to work in a world with lots of embedded software. My experience was that - regardless of domain or company -the "hardware" was regarded as just that - simply hardware. And it was tested as that - simply hardware - not as hardware that, oh by the way, had a helluva lot of critical embedded software. So issues that could have been caught at some level of testing weren't.
How to get a million page-views in 10 months
i know all these names, they were my heroes! XSReality, Eurocup, Razer CPL..those were the days :D
I suppose it would be similar to the existing scenario: the person already playing a game or watching TV gets pissed off at the person changing the channel or pausing their game. I can totally see this with kids and their siblings, but is this really a common issue between spouses? Not that I have tons of faith in people, but I would really imagine most adults were above that.
Not just Chicago -- also SF, Boston, Seattle, Berlin, NYC, Zagreb, Buenos Aires, Santiago, and Amsterdam... Nov 8-10, 2013.

http://aaronswartzhackathon.org/
No, though I do think a synchronous API is easier to work with. It isn't synchronicity that is slower. There are lots of socket-level options and buffer allocation options that need to be set up right for raw data transfer to go quickly. And the API needs to make it easy to avoid copying arrays of bytes. And I do have benchmarks for those.

When I first implemented this class, I was upgrading a file caching client that talked to a custom file server. It kept about 80,000 files (about 16GB) in sync with the set of files on the server. The unoptimized Mac process started out about 40% slower than the Windows equivalent client. Afterwards, the Mac client was about 15% faster than Windows with no changes on the server. They couldn't get the Windows client to transfer as quickly as the optimized Mac client.

Could these optimizations be done in an asynchronous API? Sure. But as far as I can tell, none do. Maybe because they don't work directly with sockets. Normally that isn't a problem, unless you really need to push things across the network as fast as possible.
This is a very unusual kind of planted leak in the context of a candidate who is in the reckoning for being CEO. There are only two possible motives behind this story - either to scuttle or to aid Elop's chances of becoming CEO.

Given that Bloomberg seems to cite three sources who vouched for Elop's thinking on this, I think this could be a tactical move from Elop (because it would be relatively harder for his opponents to get three senior Microsoft sources to smear him).

Elop is shadow signaling his thinking to various Microsoft stakeholders. "I am not status quo. I will reconsider all old notions. I know Microsoft needs radical change. The era of Windows is over."
Amazon Analytics Service
Whenever I read anything about QR codes I can't take it seriously because I always immediately think of this: http://picturesofpeoplescanningqrcodes.tumblr.com/
Does it really matter to them? (serious question)
I just found libraw yesterday. Looks interesting, and I have no objection to pulling it in as an optional dependency. Pull requests accepted. :>

Freeimage looks like more than we'd need, and includes libraw. And actually, looks like it does a lot of the same things that Pillow does, wrt to various image formats.
Buzz was actually a nice bare-minimum functionality of social networking - lite Twitter. Plus is Google trying to consolidate some monstrosity of everythign Google Social into one space.

Buzz was fine, if ugly. The only real problem with Buzz was how they leaked private GMail information.
How I Built a Performant and Measurable Content Marketing Engine
http://www.google.com/ncr (no country redirect). Gets saved in a cookie. No more local search.
That's in case you get redirected to google.at or the like.
Go Mobile – DIY App Development Softwares
Thanks for sharing that. Pretty stark example of how Google is screwing up YouTube.
That's a fair point. Personally, though, I see biometric data collection as an inevitable, uncontrollable future, so I figure the solution to it is going to have to be a social one. Why spend all my time being afraid of people collecting it? It's how they use it that I care about.
Making the police into a military body. This can only turn out well, eh?

There's a reason why the US constitution forbids using the US military against its own citizens. There's also the European experience with military police (universally bad) and more recently, the Soviet experience with their various internal armies and militarized police (also bad).

Have we learned nothing from our fellow humans?
How to hire your first employees
I think (please check) that LuLu will convert a .pdf file into dead trees for you.
That's what it does, grayscale images are used to produce it.
Hm... I get 'Cannot read property '0' of null — visual.js:45'
C - This is more or less already the case in South Korea. You can't really use the Internet without a national ID card.
> They literally have been explaining this for nearly a year. There's no such thing as a G+ account and a 'Google Account'. They are the same things.

Now, yes, and some people don't like that. Of course it's 'free' for whatever that's worth - and you can do whatever you want. Just don't expect that people are going to be thrilled. Free doesn't buy you free approval.
I don't think its a privacy violation, and Canonical has been open about their actions, but I think it's a crummy setup.

On my mac, both spotlight and alfred (the 3rd-party application launcher I use) are capable of searching both my computer and the web, and neither send my file searches to the internet.
Why Cruise Ships are My Favorite Remote Work Location
If your position is that the word censorship does not have a negative connotation, I don't know anyone who would agree with you, including, it would seem, your earlier comments.

I'm positing that filtering has neither a positive nor a negative connotation; that all information gets through anyway, it's only low-quality sources of the same information that are filtered; and that calling it censorship in a comment inappropriately pre-disposes the reader to a negative reaction.
Announcing Datomic Pro Starter Edition
All that glitters isn’t gold: Startup valuations & the liquidation preference
We're done working with clients
I was able to scan two "unscannable" codes: (5) "Even more reduced contrast", and (30) "Spray painted code" on my Moto X. Woot! What do I win?!
I don't get this. How could leaving memory uninitialized be better than zeroing it? Using calloc could be redundant in places, in that the allocated object might get initialized some other way right after allocation. But I don't see how it could ever be wrong. (There might have been zeros in that memory already anyway.) There are languages that have no way to allocate uninitialized memory -- are you going to say they aren't appropriate for crypto algorithms?

And besides, exposing a latent bug is a good thing, no?
I understand your distaste for Canonical. I don't like their policies either, and I support the FSF in encouraging people to use completely free distros like Trisquel whenever possible. However, I think it's important that we be fair in criticism. They have a very specific complaint, and I think we should address that directly.

Canonical should be criticized for the bad things they do and praised for the good things they do in the hopes that they will improve in the future. If we just set ourselves against them and criticize their every action because of who they are, it will only increase the division between them and the larger free software community. It's a division that needs to be mended. Without their work, free software distributions like Trisquel would not be possible.

trisquel.info
Does anyone have a paper (paywalled is fine, I have institutional access) on the tech behind this? Fascinating!
Why get rid of them? I wish I still I had my NES and SNES from childhood. Even if I couldn't play them, I'd love to just see them, for the memories and nostalgia.
EITC is not a negative income tax. In a negative income tax, below a certain level, each marginal dollar of reduced income produces an additional negative amount of income tax (or, equivalently, positive amount of refundable credit.)

EITC is a work incentive program that provides additional income tax credit with increasing labor income up to a certain amount -- the feature for which it is named as a tax credit for earned income -- and then tails off above a certain point. In the range from the peak to the tail off, it might be mistaken for a negative income tax, but that's true of any tax credit (or even, really, a tax deduction) that has a soft cap. But that's not really the basic design or function is, and, while the EITC may work fairly well, there's no good argument I can see that the negative-income-like portion of the top end of the EITC benefit curve is a contributor to its beneficial functioning, except perhaps if you consider it only against having a sharp cut-off where the benefit drops from the maximum to $0.
Many Quake players play at such a high-level of play, that the limitations of the web would instantly make the game unplayable to them. There's an awesome project at http://www.quakejs.com that have basically done this with emscripten (I'm friends with inolen, you've probably already talked to him).

Problem is, websockets are currently TCP only (TCP is unacceptable for a fast-paced real-time game). I guess there's WebRT but the support for that is not very widespread. Chrome and Firefox render webgl using vsync, which adds an unacceptable amount of mouse latency to mouse input. Chrome apparently won't render at 60hz+ even if your refresh rate is above it. I'm sure there's some additional latency between mouse events and updating the game too. It's a very compelling tech demo, but not something at the level that could be sold as a complete product yet.
And all of those things are wasting power, bandwidth and routing resources by continually connecting to/polling external services to see if they need to do anything. Instead of more passively listening and waiting for incoming traffic.
> You end up getting forced into bubbles that someone else has decided you belong in.

You are not forced into anything, if you don't want to be put into "bubbles" use other services.
Frank Shaw is arguably one of the most outspoken, take-no-prisoners, pugnacious PR heads of any large software company. Examples:

http://www.theverge.com/2013/10/23/4975448/microsoft-frank-s...

http://www.businessinsider.com/microsofts-david-pogue-tweet-...

http://pulse2.com/2012/07/28/frank-x-shaw-responds-to-micros...
Just about every technology is based on previous art.
Sorry things are running slowly!
Super cool! Confederate Express[1] is using a similar workflow, with great results. It's a really cool idea, and I'm surprised that it hasn't been used in more games up to this point. Seeing projects like this -- and spriter[2] and spine[3], really does make me want to get back into game development.

[1]: http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/829559023/confederate-ex...

[2]: http://www.brashmonkey.com/spriter.htm

[3]: http://esotericsoftware.com/
My father almost died on a cruise. He has serious Diabetes/Heart issues, and from eating too much, his heart went into Bradycardia (slow erratic rhythm). They kept him alive on the ship quite well, left him in Cozumel in one of Carnivals "recommended Hospitals". The nurses don't speak English, they did not use gloves and did not have food during the weekend. You don't really want to get sick on a cruise.
http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1661802484/hyper-light-d...

This game totally needs to implement this. It has some similar ideas though. Take a look at this closely: https://s3.amazonaws.com/ksr/assets/000/945/686/c415709a876b...

notice how the wind blowing right to left affects the sprite: his cloak moves with the wind. Now that's attention to detail!
Rails or Sinatra?
I found out about SourceTree after I had already learned the commands and it improved my productivity a ton, I can do everything faster with it and rarely use commands. It has so many features baked in it is amazing. Huge props to Atlassian for buying it and making it free. It is now my goto recommendation for anyone getting into Git.
Distribute Your iOS Apps with Travis CI
New Freebies- Kellogg cereal, Robox Platinum and $610 back on Xerox
Hah! That even happens with fairly modern games, like the PC port of Grand Theft Auto IV. The game could not fathom that I have 3GB of VRAM. You would think game developers might have wised up by now and added a few extra bits to whichever field stores that number, for futureproofing purposes.
Tech is not Microsoft's problem per se. Microsoft has great tech, they are building some great products, and are genuinely getting a lot better at a lot of things pretty fast. They just don't know how to sell to consumers well yet. They haven't had to do that until the last 5-10 years.

J Allard, Ray Ozzie, and the like have the potential to do great things, but honestly CEO of Microsoft is maybe not what they would do best at or enjoy.

Microsoft needs a systems thinker, someone who gets the business side and the tech side, while having the ability to shepherd great products on the consumer side and service the business needs of their huge enterprise customers. That is a ridiculously tall order and I'm not sure that anyone would do an outstanding job with it.
" Traffic generated by users being misled into going there is not legitimate in terms of the trademark."

FixUbuntu is a very very very very clear case of nominative fair use.

I can't think of a less close case in recent memory.
They are using the trademark as it should be used - to describe the product they are talking about.

The fact that Ubuntu may not like what they are saying makes no difference.
The disclaimer makes clear it's not associated, and they don't pretend, anywhere, that they are associated.
With all the uproar about Youtube comments, you'd be forgiven to think Google was doing all of that.
I'd prefer one library that works across all three major platforms, but if someone wants to send a pull request to add os dependent ones, I'd check those out.
Larry Page has his office in the G+ building, and has said a number of times he is committed to seeing G+ be a success.

http://www.virante.org/blog/2013/04/23/is-google-still-the-f...

There is a lot of hate for G+ and/or the service unification stuff... I personally dislike it - but I don't think it's going away anytime soon.
What exactly is that, though? None of the social links in the bottom right corner go anywhere. The only thing on that page is an email submission form.

The wording leads one to conclude that it must be some alternative to YouTube, but I don't see anything else on that site.
In the weeks before the twtr IPO: NFLX off by 2B$. TSLA off by 4B FB of by 10B. It looks like investors reallocation to me; the type of investor that reallocate like this are more of the speculation breed than the buy and hold breed. I would not be surprised if TWTR is under original IPO price(26) by the end of next week, as it fails to inflate.
Very similar to Jeter Filter (http://www.jeterfilter.com/), but more general! I like it.
Quake Live is already native and fully supports Linux. They are only changing the installer from a browser plug-in to a stand alone.
Given that they acknowledge they have customers on Mac and Linux and yet they couldn't be bothered to choose an installer that supported them I think we all know where this is heading.