skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Arstechnia hasn't done enough research.

You can (and I have) fetch the new Launcher from AOSP, compile it and run it very easily as a separate application. The Google Experience Launcher is a closed source Google app based on this which integrates Google Now.

https://android.googlesource.com/platform/packages/apps/Laun...
When I had access, I decided one afternoon to read the source to the CMD interpreter.

It was about as bad as I thought it would be.

About an hour into using my Mac Pro's shell, I wanted to weep in relief. Microsoft does not get it. (Or if they do, it gets perverted into something like PowerShell, which I recently wasted a week on).
This is the same argument that was used in the dotcom bubble -- profits don't matter because tech is different.

The fact that it's being trotted out again as justification should worry you.
McGinn isn't a professional politician, which is good because the professional politicians and the "Seattle process" have fucked this city for decades, but it leads to the occasional misstep. The city gigabit fiber initiative was his, though. That and some controversial transportation reforms are parts of his vision that convinced me to vote for him. Too many Seattle politicians are willing to sell themselves out to build consensus. I like having a mayor who stands for something I can believe in.
A lot of statistics like this in the UK are published by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, which openly admits to using a relative measure of poverty, the bottom third. So say your neighbours on either side were watching Blu-Rays and you had a humble DVD player. They'd count that as "poverty". Every now and then their PR machine will arrange for headlines like "one third of children live in poverty!!!" which sounds terrible in a developed country, but actually, is completely meaningless.
Great quote and very true!
Database migrations are being added to Django core, by the author of South.
Forensic tools used by law enforcement and intelligence organisations don't modify the system partition; in fact, modifying anything on the phone is highly undesirable, from a forensics point of view.

Re needing to wipe the disk:

1) Modern Android has 'adb backup' so if your phone is not locked, someone who got ahold of your phone can use it to dump your data from a non-rooted phone.

2) Law enforcement and intelligence organisations may or may not have tools to dump your data directly off a (desoldered) flash memory chip. You need to enable disk encryption (* ) to protect against this.

(* ) I'm assuming a disk encryption that's not rigged, i.e. has no key escrow available to law enforcement.
Is it "always" correct to extend the String prototype? No.

Is it "always" correct to NOT extend the String prototype? No.

Like all things it depends. If you are writing a library for others to use then you shouldn't be extending globals for the reasons you have given. And if you do, you need a good reason and make it very clear to the user. If you are writing an application or a closed-source library, then it is usually safe to extend globals because you are in complete control. Like others have said in the String case, it makes its a lot easier to read the functions that do string manipulation.

The only absolute rule in software engineering is that there are no absolute rules.
As a corporation, or are you counting their employees?
Modern Windows (NT stream) carries a lot of baggage from Win16, however; Win32 wasn't a green-field effort.
How much revenue does it have now?
Why do you want to use Node.js?
I hope it's useful! It seems to have a small number of dedicated users right now, a number of whom have said they'd like to support the site. I think I'm going to aim to get subscriptions in within the next month.

I must admit that one reason why I've been putting it off is having to finish setting up the business side of things. I probably can't put off figuring out my accounting much longer :D
In the poorest areas there are strong incentives for the residents to spend any extra money on necessities such as housing, housing maintenance, utilities, food and clothing. Much of that work would be done by other residents or local businesses. As far as I understand money distributed this way gets cycled through the economy at a high rate, changing hands many times.
"...if implemented, it removes the need for vast swaths of government."

Of course it does. What are the odds, however, that said swaths of government and the constituencies that support them would simply surrender and close up shop?
>> The Windows philosophy is to make sure that this one still works (which is a crazy goal IMO, but an interesting one)

It's a requirement. Imagine how many people would have never upgraded to Windows 95 if their Windows 3.x programs didn't work.

Each program Microsoft 'fixes' is additional sales.
This is a good point, and one that most people haven't written about. UBI means no welfare state other than UBI. It also means you rely on people to administer that income themselves.

On the other hand, it is socialism, and socialism has a dismal record of success. Europe tried it, and is now bankrupt and having waves of social problems that did not exist 40 years ago. The USA has tried it and now is permanently divided, either 47/53 or 99/1, depending on who you ask.

I say go back to natural living. Let government handle defense, roads and environmental protection. Let local governments handle everything else flexibly. But stop trying to solve people's problems. It doesn't work, creates other problems, and discourages people from accepting responsibility for their own futures.
I dislike both. Give me a private office with a door that closes any day.
could you be more specific about the project ?
Are the state finances in any better shape?

The tolls on the new Tappen Zee bridge are expected to be $15, and even that might not be enough to fund it after the hole Coumo blew in the transportation budget after deciding to pillage a general fund instead of raising tolls for commercial vehicles last year.
> You have a chance of a job at a household name company (who can afford to be selective)

There are many such companies out there and the better ones will talk to you politely first, look at previous work you've done and then perhaps invite you over for a couple of interviews (including some code puzzles). I was once flown from Europe to Florida before any code puzzles, got to see the whole company, talk to founders (the company was a subsidiary of a household name in games) and technical directors before sitting down for some tests. It was a great experience and I felt very bad for turning down the job offer because they treated me so well ...

Google and Facebook I'd avoid from what I've heard (no firsthand experience though), they seem to hire talent just to keep it away from the competition.
My money is on the bookie ... !
That seems to have changed over the last few years.
Tim Berners-Lee: data and the new web.
More like 1 man will have $18, 17 men with none will refer to him as "the honorable..." and the two men who still have a dollar will be "trouble-makers".
One paradox of money is that the more you distribute it, the less it is worth.

When you think about it, this makes sense. If it's easy to come by, it's proportionately "worth less."
Here's a different service I made that includes other regions, continously updated spot instance prices, and a few other nice features: http://ec2pricing.iconara.info/

It's also available as an API: http://ec2pricing.herokuapp.com/api/v1/eu-west-1/
I think as long as PGP or any encryption is an add-on to internet apps like email and the web, it's doomed for general adaptation and for effectiveness.

It needs to be a fundamental part of the individual apps' (email, web, etc) specs, or more ideally part of the underlying internet (tcp?) that apps are built on.
Weak argument, probably the right conclusion. Internet users number may be the most important metric, considering it spans continents now, including countries at different levels of economic development. There's more likelyhood of hedging.
edit: I think the metric is important because users can become innovators and providers easier then ever, not just because they have disposable income.
This is what I used to use it for, on my Playbook.
the decorator module also preserves function signature, which is nice (check out the FunctionMaker class - it's crazy)
I found'there first smartphone' and 'way to modern' to be too distracting to carry on reading.

Also the argument I did read appears to be weak, the number of potential users doesn't seem to matter if they don't bring you profits.
does it bother anyone that the optical drive is no longer present in the rMBP models? i know i very rarely use my optical drive, but for some reason i feel like i would miss it. haha.
> Even with no revenue, it's worth something, right?

No one is saying it's worth nothing.
Yawn, is someone calling social networks "the tech sector" again? Yeah, right, because material science and industrial automation technology and others are obviously agriculture or something.
A War on the Poor
Only about 10 minutes of streaming HD video.

Or about 50,000 emails, or 1,000 websites (gzip compressed), or 50 Google searches every single day, or a hi-res photo of your loved ones every morning you wake up, or the confidence of never getting lost again.

I know you're being sarcastic, but for several years I was on a t-mobile plan with 200MB per month limit on my Nexus S, and I used without worry and only went over the limit once.
Even as a right-winger, I'm in favour of universal welfare, provided this isn't offered as a bolt-on to existing means-tested welfare. This should be implemented as a straight replacement, so that we can reap the cost savings in administration.

The article points out "the only thing standing in the way of dramatic poverty reduction and dramatic inequality reduction is, as always, politics"

Unfortunately we'd almost certainly see a rise in the cost of living (food / energy prices). If people can afford more, they'll be charged more - that's how free markets work.
Wikipedia gives better overall picture in TL;DR fashion.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_Access_Card
Looks like it was fixed on 10/28, which is definitely a long turnaround since it was first posted 10 months ago. I suppose it took so long because it was a pretty specific situation (removing a notification while inserting one while hitting a 10 minute timer) but still, that just goes to show two things: the latest KDE has fixed a ton of bugs, even unusual ones like that, and KDE still needs more people looking at bugs so things like this can get a faster turnaround in the future.

If anyone does find something like this that isn't getting enough attention on the official bug reports, I'd suggest just mentioning it to a developer friend who uses KDE.
don't know.. they haven't released the numbers AFAIK.

But it's not really relevant IMO... Is there another industry that will pay out $1 billion for a company with no revenue (and no patents)?
NSHipster book preorder: Obscure Topics in Cocoa & Objective-C
I know this is a cause celebre among some libertarians, but dang if it makes any sense to me. I'd love to see it applied, though. It's a good thing to be proven wrong :)

I see two lines of inquiry here. First, does this work on a small scale? Many HNers have lots of disposable income. I see lots of people buying expensive electric cars or talking stock options. So put your money where your mouth is. Go find 10 people who are poor and give them each 15K. I'd offer three stipulations. 1) It has to be anonymous, 2) It has to be one-time, and 3) you should anonymously follow-up after 6 months.

I suspect at the end of six months you'll just find the same poor people, even though technically you've offered them half a year's salary at 30K. But this is very easy to prove one way or another. Somebody like Zucerberg could probably run a sample of 100 or 500 without much problem. I'd love toe see the results.

My second line of inquiry is: does this work at scale? In other words, is the political system capable of simply giving out money? I seriously doubt it. From what I've seen, a simple program, especially involving lots of money, will grow in complexity very quickly. Yes, technically you should be able to direct-credit anybody with a bank account within seconds. I have deep reservations that anything like that would actually happen, though. If you got 50% of the money to the poor you'd be doing well, and I wouldn't bet on that much traction.

The larger point is that literally trillions have been spent over the decades on poverty. Programs have been created and executed by some of the smartest people in the world. People who have managed empires of tens of billions of dollars have went down this road. And poverty still abides.

I'm not saying it's intractable. I'm simply saying that caution is in order here. "Prove it" is the correct response when offered really simple solutions to problems that have stumped thousands of others. Don't write a flashy article, don't persuade me in an opinion column, don't show me some economic study. Prove it.
When people start writing articles about how "This isn't a bubble" - it probably is.
Yes. We should change summer time because you work in an "effectively windowless office".
I did the same, and was confused for a second. It wouldn't have occurred to me that startups would be interested in an MBA one way or another, really; the laptop seemed to make more sense in context (though still very little sense).
Dennis Ritchie, the father of everything
Look up 'VIPR teams'. They have already started doing operations at bus and train stations. If you live in the US you might want to talk to your government representatives if you feel uncomfortable with living in a police state, as it's damn close to being in one if not already there.
Then you find the benefits paid by all these programs, determine the expenditure per beneficiary and set one flat basic payout per week to all who qualify.

You toss all these other assistance programs in the trash. One central agency administers the money. EBT cards could be administered separately from the basic income card. The rules would be simple, the cards are usable wherever debit and credit cards are. All government agencies would be required to accept them as well.

There are so many aid programs just in the US alone I bet no one can find them all, even at the Federal level the number of programs which partially if not wholly overlap is costly. Then throw in state ones which do essentially the same and we waste an incredible amount on money in just administration.

One way to solve that duplicate effort, get the feds out or get the states out. One agency should be able to administer it all.
The idea to do something like that is just plain... ugly. It's almost like guessing MIME type based on the file content (hint: IE). I wonder how long it will take until someone finds a security exploit of this "feature"?
To me it is like pop music. Once and awhile a band like The Beatles comes along, enamores the whole world for a few years, and then fades from the popular conciousness.

Treating The Beatles like General Motors is where the problem lies. Twitter, Facebook, Snap Chat and their ilk are more like the supergroups of yesteryear than the industrial giants that our investment infrastructure was designed to support.
Right--the problem here is actually unions and not whatever we were thinking.
This should be part of the Google Play desktop website, and it's actually abuse of the open Android platform by Google that it isn't. (Yes, it can still be abuse if developers can technically host APKs elsewhere in the same way that any monopoly can be abusive).

I can see Google banning this or trying their best to block this pretty quickly though and shows just how far Google has fallen from being open. I could be wrong though, will be watching this website with interest (and using it to download all my apps, for sure). Props to the creators.

EDIT: For those wondering why Google would be bothered by this - the Google Play app distribution channel is the big factor that requires Android device manufacturers to pay their license fees for Android and prevents them from forking the platform. An Android device without Google Play is an automatic no-buy for most consumers. However, if APKs - even just free ones - could be downloaded onto a device without Google Play, then it allows users and manufacturers to easily bypass a lot of the lock-in.
I could care less if the bubble pops. In fact, it would probably be a good thing. Everyone who is in tech for the wrong reasons would have to find something else to do. San Francisco might go back to being a liveable city. And the real hackers, the ones working on real problems (instead of novel ways to share pictures of cats online) would suddenly find themselves back in an environment that closer resembles reality.
Is there anyone doing better reporting of poverty in childhood?

Or is the problem more around behaviours and societal stuff than money?

A Channel 4 documentary is a poor source of information but the breadth and depth of the problem is shown in programmes like Skint. The nihilism of multiple generations, the apathy, the learned hopelessness. http://www.channel4.com/programmes/skint/4od

While these people may not be objectively poor[1] the children have obviously sub-optimal lives.

[1] People have homes, and food, and heat.
Usually, standard libraries tend to change only when a better way is demonstrated not just as abstractly doable, but becomes used in practice over what is currently in the standard library, because, otherwise, what's the reason to change what's established?
"anti-consumer, anti-developer and anti-hacker"

Of the last two, you'll get no argument from me, but I would argue this is not "anti-consumer". Consumers do not care about the things developers and hackers care about. All the exploits allow for disabling security procedures that can be activated over the air.

A consumer wants a non-hackable phone, so if it lost they can lock, track, and erase it.

Does this mean we cannot have both ownership and security? No, but Google doesn't look like they are interested in that.
Ebay to accept more digital currencies
This might be too political but after seeing another article on basic income I'm curious what other people on HN think about the politics and economic ideas behind the politics.
"Merge" is overstating it. It is a NT kernel with some very small and inconsequential "fixups" done to it to make certain DOS constructs work.
"That security might not just keep people out of poverty. It might let workers demand better wages and working conditions, because they know they always have something to fall back on. In other words, it could level the playing field for the bottom 99 percent."
This is exactly what America's corporate backers don't want. Who wants a workforce that has the ability to say no or to do anything other than beg for the chance to be hired at a low-paying job without benefits?
Maintainer of the dataset here. Most of the inacurracies have been fixed now.

More data will come soon. Thank you for all the feedback, I appreciate it!
I think this was inevitable given the sheer number of cheap e-readers and basic media devices being manufactured in China which happen to use Android.

A more revealing statistic is web traffic, where iOS leads at 63% (stat: Piper Jaffray), and has made recent gains. 40% of apps downloaded in 2013 Q1 were iOS, vs 51% Android. 74% of revenue generated by apps was iOS (stat: Canalys). Business use: 62% iOS, 35% Android (stat: Citrix).
This is the dumbest socialist propaganda I've read in quite some time. The end result of such an intervention is inflation, not poverty cuts. Because the money will be going out faster than it is collected simply because of logistics and population increase.

There is a famous event of this happening in the old west, large portions of land was just handed out in a state lottery. It changed nothing. This is not a sustainable solution to the problem of bad income mobility.
Well, at least in the worst case, they would all have $2800 per month to fall back on.
Capitaine Train is super useful. The official SNCF (French State owned railways company) site is unusable and tries to upsell you everything but the actual tickets. Capitaine Train has a minimalistic design, fast search and has niceties like .ics to remind you of what you bought.

(I'm in no way affiliated to Capitaine Train)
Most people have the belief that since you have an MD you are near god like. Few realize the large number of bad/average doctors & surgeons are out there. It would be great if there was published performance reviews for every time of doctor, including your primary care doc.

Practically everyone on HN programs, but few came from MIT, work at Google, or could write a paper that would make Carmack question his choices. Think of programmers you have met that aren't self motivated or continually improving their craft. It's exactly the same with doctors. Some just get their degree (which albeit is a lot of work and money) and never self improve. They can be swayed by drug companies who give them a nice dinner without really understanding what they are prescribing or why. They do the bare minimum to get their CME and select the easiest path to get there.

If you have something serious, that may or may not require surgery, it is in your best interest to seek out the absolute best you can afford. Look for institutions that get ranked high for those diseases/injuries which produce a lot of research on the subject.

You are a startup and looking to hire a programmer, which do you select:

* Guy who learned PHP 4 and has been writing everything in Dreamweaver since without changing

* Guy who learns Go/Scala etc and enjoys reading other's research,

* Guy who wrote Go/Scala etc

You are someone sick and need advice/treatment:

* MD who graduated from South Dakota State (no idea of they are bad/good, sorry SD) and practices in a town of 5,000 people

* MD who works at a ranked institution and is always looking for the best treatment after evaluating new research

* MD who invented the surgery

There are obviously many shades in between... but treat your MD like you would a programmer you want to hire. It's not easy to figure that stuff out of course, but do your best in researching them. If you can't find much stuff on the MD/hospital then be cautious/take another opinion.

The above is based on my wife's experience in 4 different ranked hospitals in major cities dealing with patients coming in from unranked hospitals who often was doing stuff out of date/not efficient or flat out got stuff wrong/harmed the patient.

PS: For your furry friends, this is much harder as vet clinics arent ranked and typically your only choice is a ranked teaching vet hospital. Quiz your vet on where they got their degree and what conferences they attended this past year (this won't mean much other than they are actively seeking out new methods/research) You increase your chances of getting a good vet vs old Dr Bob who still ties the horse to the fence post. Look for a Vet from UC Davis if your are in the bay area.
Show HN: Anybody want to take over this project?
"If I fly to London and look at my phone (which compensates for time zones) and it says it's 1300, I figure it will be similar to 1300 at home in many ways: late but not too late for lunch, during normal working hours, and most everything is probably open."

Realize that you're on HN, where I've heard long arguments about why your laptop and/or phone should not adjust the timezone of the device based on location. People who argue with a straight face that "the vast majority of people want their laptop to display their home time when abroad".