skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
One of my big reasons for wanting to pick up Python was to get me out of developing on Windows. As much as people love to tout Mono, it's simply not desirable for any .NET shop.

My biggest worry was if I was offered a job at a great company, how I would be able to adapt not to the language, but going from an entirely different platform, one that I hadn't used in anger since uni. Learning a language shouldn't be a problem, but as I've found out, most of my issues aren't in using the language itself, but adjusting to the Unix workflow.

Also, my big worry is being the "Windows guy" at an office. I doubt I'm the first C# developer to be laughed at because I develop on Windows, even if it's by (in my opinion) fairly crappy developers. Deep down, I reckon a lot of devs look down on people that have the audacity to call themselves developers when they don't build on Linux.

So, I guess my next two questions are:

1. Did you notice a decrease in "professional level" when you moved from C# to Python. I'm a mid-weight developer, probably not too far off from being a senior developer. With very limited Python experience I doubt I'd be able to just jump over to being a mid-level developer, and to be honest I wouldn't want to drop in salary by too much just so I can use a different language.

2. How easy was it to land a job writing Python if you've not come with "previous professional experience"? I've written a bit of Python, simply to script some things on a Windows server. I've got my own scripts, but nothing in an actual job. I reckon I could pick it up (Python/Django), along with a good dev workflow in Linux, within a few months, but I can see employers being skeptical to hire a C# dev if another Python dev wants the job.
Any code examples? What did he build?
Every editor, or at least every good editor for programmers, can convert 4 (or whatever) spaces to tabs. If it bothers you that much, you can set up your editor so that it tabifies files when opening them and untabifies when saving. This way you won't even know if the file used spaces or tabs - and that's how it should be.

In short: configure your editor to display to your tastes and save to whatever style guide you use in your organization. Problem solved.
Most of the people of the world can't really have a bank account, let alone be eligible for a credit (card). With Bitcoin you only need internet access.

Most of the people of the world can't really save either. Cash loses value over time, gold is hard to validate and keep safe, and is even banned in lots of places. Bitcoin to the rescue! Now everyone can start saving, and even be rewarded for that.

I could go on all day long, the benefits are endless. Just live in a shitty country for some time and you'll figure it out pretty fast.
Metin Oil Company - Throwaway on Behance
It uses the phase. The 0.75 is 180 deg out of phase (blue line of circle points to the left) compared to the 0.083. Compare to the square wave, as well.
Sounds like your company has far bigger issues than people sharing confidential information.
> I'll reconsider office 1.) when it is free 2.) when it works seamlessly on a Mac.

So, for the past year or two? https://office.microsoft.com/en-us/myoffice.aspx

The free online Office apps work great in Chrome on both Windows and Mac (not sure about Linux).
Why would anyone downvote him for being "racist"?
They don't release a binary, but you can build Chromium yourself.
Segmented stacks are better even if you have a relocatable stack. GHC switched from monolithic copy-the-whole-thing-to-grow-it to segmented stacks a while ago, and it was a big win. Not just because we waste less space, but because the GC knows when individual stack segments are dirty so that it doesn't need to traverse the whole stack. To avoid the thrashing issue we copy the top 1KB of the previous stack chunk into the new stack chunk when we allocate a new chunk.
Thanks. I forgot to mention in my panicky state that I really liked the app, nice work.
> functional restrictions

The online Office suite has much less functionality compared to desktop versions.

The most loyal Office users are not the people who write 2 page long documents. For example think of a bank who has completely customized Excel so it displays real-time market data. Now that's where you _need_ the full suite.
Couldn't they tumble the coins and cash out?
Those ideas may work on small sites but what happens when you have to maintain a black list of 4million IP addresses?
if only this weren't yet another PR piece for YC startups!
I read that he's an Australian citizen. But I'm not sure if anyone asked for his real identity (before trusting him with $1mm worth of bitcoin)
Your post prompted me to get off my ass and upload my .WAV file writer to BitBucket. I wrote it almost two years ago to do exactly what you're talking about -- generate a waveform and learn how to design my own sounds. There are a lot of sophisticated synth tools out there already, but I wanted to start from first principles and really understand what I was doing.

Here's a link to the library: https://bitbucket.org/cmcfarla/waveout

It's stupidly simple C code -- you just need to use three functions: One to open a file for writing audio, one to write a stereo sample, and one to close the file performing cleanup and bookkeeping. I included two examples -- a really basic example to just create a sine wave, and a slightly more complicated one that creates a sine wave with a panning effect.

While I've written a lot of code before, it's rare for me to put code up as open source. So, if I've missed something important, please let me know.
There is a whole lot easier a way to understand what the DFT does which doesn't involve complex things.

If you really believe this, try to generate a discrete Fourier transform without using complex numbers of one kind or another. It can't be done. Typically, scalars are (and must be) placed in s complex context (i.e. each term with a zero imaginary part) for the process to succeed.

> The second table is the same as the first except that sampled cosinusiods (the quaduratures) are used instead of sinusoids.

Ah. I see you proved my point. I should have read ahead. Your cosines are the imaginary terms, each 90 degrees away from their partners.
random question, but shouldn't we task the us federal map-making agencies with this? like the USGS or some such? I agree with you position that having multiple private sector entities do it seems inefficient. presumably, the usps could also license/use the whatever was built by the usgs. and congress could make sure there is no bs with the ip of the zip database.
> If that guy did not have some kind of insurance like banks do, how can he refund anyone?

Bitcoin is a relatively new thing, would not be surprised to start seeing bitcoin insurance for these types of services.

> Is that guy a US citizen ? can he be sued by his clients ?

I think it would depend if his clients have contracts, otherwise its a caveat emptor deal, especially when dealing with bitcoin.
Hard to negotiate with Hamas when their founding charter dedicates them to the elimination of Israel.
It was always free, these are just webapps not the desktop Office 365 which is their main product. But it competes favorably against google docs.
Understanding The Various Sources of Big Data - Infographic
GCHQ to be grilled on live tv about spying
This link was posted here a few days ago. Nice looking site and vid.

The big drawback is (apparently) the app mimics your computer lock screen - i.e your computer is not actually locked, just the app has gone fullscreen and makes it look locked. Not sure about security implications?
well clearly I would have called this a mistake (but I actually did need the money)
Damn. Sometimes I can't believe it. I have been following bitcoin quite closely for over 18 months now. The ecosystem is growing in ways only a few bold people have predicted. Fundamentally, it is about belief and trust. The protocol has largely proven itself. People are starting to believe in bitcoin. This is why the price is going up.

For those who say "It isn't being used as a currency!" here is my response:

Bitcoin excels as a secure protocol for tracking account balances in a decentralized, seemingly untamperable fashion, as well as transferring value very quickly to anywhere in the world at the sole, uncensorable discretion of the owner. It is both a payment protocol and a distributed ledger. A lot of people want these unique feautures, even if they can't buy groceries with it yet. Those types of merchants will always be the last to adopt.

Bitcoin also has the pontential to be used in diverse ways as "progammable money". It has a built-in API, and features like timelock, mutli-entity transaction signing (built-in escrow), and others that I don't fully understand. An AI bot could utilize bitcoin (might have trouble with a bank account!).

Also, see gold and its $8 trillion of largely made-up valuation (not stemming from industrial/ornamental demand). You don't see gold owners buying things with a few shavings ;) Bitcoin is far superior to gold in almost every way (it isn't quite as shiny tho). If society can make up several trillion dollars of monetary valuation for gold, then I definitely can picture bitcoin snagging a pretty decent slice (right now it is only 1/3,000 the size gold).

People recognize this potential, and thus choose to invest. The first mover advantange is massive. Network effects are very important - it will take quite the innovation to unseat bitcoin, and it has to be something that can't be simply copied/integrated into the existing protocol. The whole thing is sort of a self-fullfilling positive feedback loop. I'm a cautiously strong proponent, and find it absolutely fascinating to watch. These kind of events don't unfold that often.

TL;DR - magic internet money!

Sorry for the multiple edits. I wrote this on my phone.
Perhaps a demo might help you attract people not a password protected page
So you're basically saying your knowledge of SEO was limited to crude link building tactics that have since been rendered ineffective by algorithmic updates. You're not alone, as that certainly cuts out a large swathe of what SEO was.

That's not to say there's nothing left though. And although there's much debate on whether what is left is actually 'SEO', good old fashioned PR, or now falls under the related, but rather nondescript 'content marketing', the business case for conducting such activity is still very strong in many cases.
Instagram ads are turning into Likes five percent of the time
Instrumenting Every Line of Code Without Slowing Down Every Request?
My guess would be that a large fraction of EMTs are in fire departments. Fire departments are notorious for being full of racists. They were pretty segregated until the mid 20th century, too.

As the system was taken over by the government, the pay got good, and it's one of the best jobs someone without college can get. So you can bet that the incumbents would use any weapon, including racism, to discourage competition for these jobs.
An 80 character line limit almost mandates use of a 2 space indent, for most languages.

Personally I prefer a line limit closer to 100, and 4 space indents in most languages. Some languages end up with a lot more indenting than others owing to structural literals and lambdas, and they benefit more from a smaller indent.
I live in a country that used to need that. The real reason for doing that is simply not having to write so many useless zeroes. The people who were calling for cutting zeroes were mostly banks having issues dealing with whatever hard-coded limit was on their systems. There was no expectation that cutting zeroes would actually improve anything at all.

Though the situation was exactly the opposite of Bitcoin. Money was losing value so the numbers were getting too big. Bitcoin is becoming too valuable so the numbers are getting too small.
You managed to say a great deal without saying anything at all.

Classic old school SEO. Rock on.
No that's not sane. As you say yourself it is a pain to implement and complex code is more prone to errors.

It is far more easy to require a minimum length and choose a sane minimum, 8 is not.

Also see this XKCD http://xkcd.com/936/ as an information theory refresher.
Here's a page where you can get sales numbers per month and for the year to date:

http://ofvas.no/bilsalget/bilsalget_2013/bilsalget_i_septemb...

According to these numbers, Tesla did 98 cars in Norway in october, and 906 year to date - the vast majority (616) in september alone.
I agree. ISRO should tell the world how they managed this on a nimble budget! May be they should (read NASA) outsource their work to ISRO :)
Some of these could be due to training costs. On average in the US, white kids from wealthier families than black kids, and on average white adults have more money than black adults. If the trainee has to pay the training costs for a given job, then it is going to favor whites.

For instance, take "aircraft pilots", which the article says are 90% white. A small plane can cost in the neighborhood of $100/hour to rent, and one of the requirements for a commercial license is 250 hours flying as pilot. Add on to that instructor costs, and you need to have a fair bit of money available to even get to the point where piloting can be your job. There are some aviation scholarships, I believe, but they are highly competitive. I believe most students have to come up with the money themselves at least through getting their commercial license.

These wealth differences could also indirectly affect some of the jobs on the list. For instance, black people are more likely to live in poor and high crime neighborhoods where gangs are prevalent, and there is a lot of pressure on young people to get involved with the local gang. As a consequence, young black people are probably more likely than young white people to have an arrest record. That could make it harder or impossible to get a private detective license.
It was very 'popular' in the 80's and 90's for countries coming out of high inflation. Off the top of my head, Brazil, Peru, Russia, Poland, Yugoslavia, Turkey and Bulgaria all cut three or 4 zeros from their currency to make the numbers easier to handle and to try to mark a psychological end to previous inflation.

Zimbabwe did it about once every other year or so back in the mid 2000's.
They had a security fix for IE6, 7 and up just last month: https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/security/bulletin/ms13-0...

The patch for IE7 is called IE7-WindowsXP-KB2879017-x86-ENU.exe
Sorry for your loss. I think a system like Portugal [citation needed] would go a long way. Treat drug addicts like patients rather than criminals.

May I ask what drugs he was battling with?
I cringe at the thought that some people consider this to be startup-relevant news (or even hacker-relevant news, for that matter).

I flagged this submission, I hope the usual complainers understand why.

If you don't, by all means, please elaborate.
Lazy and dismissive. For a joke post it would be ok, but it’s far too long, involved and reasoned for just a joke.

The number one reason closed source works is investment. My first private sector employer was an ISV developing an engineering tool for planning cellular radio networks. They had a dozen developers working with engineers from their radio planning consultancy business. Those radio engineers were never going to work on an open source project for free. In a situation where you need to include high value domain knowledge along with top level dev skills, and ramp up development very rapidly in a highly competitive market, that takes a lot of money, many millions of pounds. It’s the kind of investment most open source projects can never dream of.

Open source works very well when you’re scratching your own itch and have plenty of time to scratch it. The catch there is that you have to have the itch, and know how to scratch it. In other words it has to be a subject area you’re very familiar with, and you have to have the dev skills to implement it yourself. That’s why it works so well for IT infrastructure projects like OS kernels, editors, browsers, web servers, communications protocols, etc. As soon as you need expert input from another knowledge domain, outside of computing, either there's be a lucky coincidence that happens puts the dev skills and domain knowledge together, or you’re looking at paying people to help with the project instead of using their skills to earn money.
I prefer localbitcoin and bitcoin-otc, but I do have an verified account in MtGox.
The Myth of the Design Studio Turned Product Company
It's not only about the USA though.

For example in France there is no private incarceration industry, prisons are overpopulated and in inhumane condition, underground drug economy in suburbs create all sort of problems and yet there is no sign of even depenalizing consumption of marijuana.

Why ? I don't know.
No not really. Sounds like your ego doesn't match the reality of a medium sized business.
That's pretty much exactly where I headed on this.
Agree, but then the same should hold for all the 'samsung beats apple in the cell phone market' nonsense.
Here's a rebuttal http://unicornfree.com/2013/37signals-isnt-mythical-youre-no...
Double negatives are a bit flummoxing.

"This isn't a bad idea"

Is flagged red
When are these online wallet companies going to start using colocated servers owned by themselves instead of Linode and other vps companies.
Wayback Machine shows the document recommending 4 spaces when it was first released in 2009.
I don't follow the Samsung-vs-Apple news, so I don't understand its relevance to the topic at hand.
I believe the fact that you can collaborate on documents online with a suite that offers you quite high level of compatibility with legacy documents is relevant. Also, a big player in the software industry implemented something significant.

It's probably much more relevant to hackers that how important role India plays in controlling AIDS (or, for that matter, the daily BTC/Tesla/etc. posts).
Yes, but the creator of Zerocoin has stated that it seems unlikely to integrate into Bitcoin's blockchain and may only be usable if it is put into a new blockchain.
> Granting that, why bring Italy up them?

Because I live here and it's a very good example of proportional systems not being strictly better than what we have in the US.

> swap coalition partners and form a new majority coalition if a minor partner wants too much.

Easier said than done in many cases.
Every number is interesting http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interesting_number_paradox
Bitcoin Passes 300 Dollars [Business Insider]
And for every case where Polonium use was discovered, there could be dozens of poisonings that went unnoticed.
i m ok with the feds stamping out crime. But i m not ok with the feds stamping out something which also has use outside of crimes. I sincerely hope bitcoin transactions aren't associated with crime, so that its popularity can grow more mainstream.
As someone who has psychological scars from having to create and maintain IE6 compatible webapps I can't help but have absolutely no sympathy for the web experience of any IE user.

Google could very well go "We don't support IE. If it happens to render or work at all on your browser, count yourself lucky." and I wouldn't care a damn.
India is easily one of the largest consumers of Linux. But consumer has a different meaning than contributor.

>>I find it sad that most OSS conferences are held in Europe or USA

Bangalore has its own version. Its called FOSS.in, there is also a Pycon. We also have regular conferences, meetups and hack nights. Checkout this Bangalore based company called HasGeek(https://hasgeek.com/)

The ecosystem is no where as mature as silicon valley, there is no where the kind of VC ecosystem like silicon valley. And YC like initiatives are non-existent.

And yet despite all this, nearly every one good I know has a namesake large company job while they are starting up on the side. There is massive start up interest and we are well past the days where people used to aspire for large company jobs. Though Ivy league degrees, and strong alumni connection gets you fat pay checks at big companies. People are beginning to match that with their own start ups.

Long way to go for us. But the opportunities are immense.
This reminds me increasing at gold last year.
I'm biased but I always recommend that anyone interested in SEO start with the Beginner's Guide. It is a fantastic resource that is updated regularly frequently and I find it easier for folks to grasp than many of the alternatives.

It's not "straight from the horse's mouth" as is the case with the Google guide (which frankly what Google wants to drive rankings does not always tie up nicely with what actually seems to drive rankings in practice), but I always have users start there and then look further afield if they're still interested.
It's still a decomposing dead animal, preservation just slows down the process. If you don't believe me, leave a pack of bacon in your fridge for two months then take a big sniff.

Of course, picked vegetables are also decomposing at a certain rate - but they don't have a dead animal smell. This is also why I'm excited about Soylent, and I haven't seen them play up the sustainable/ethical angle as yet.
Does Microsoft need a turnaround expert?
It's becoming 'too valuable' in USD. There are other currencies, and the world does NOT in fact turn around US.
There are a fair number of Vietnamese doing residential construction work. Same for Koreans. There are a LOT of Polynesian people doing construction. They aren't numerous in absolute numbers, but something like half the men work in construction.

The main thing that pushes people toward construction work is a lack of education, poverty, and a desire for a middle class life. It's hard work, but generally pays well after you're at it a while. But I think there's limited upward mobility for some people, because I notice lots of Asians in residential, but not in commerical, and definitely not in public works projects.

The reason why public works construction's heavily white is due to construction unions, who have generally seen their numbers declining. The tendency is for fathers to give their jobs to their sons. That fills the apprentice pipeline, and keeps Black and Asian people out. (A lot of Latinos are in construction and get in unions just by force of numbers.) These are the best construction jobs, and can get you an upper middle class lifestyle.

I think the issue of declining jobs or declining union membership tends to cause racist outcomes, even if the people involved aren't racist. Basically, if the overall field is shrinking, the tendency is to avoid hiring. If there are provisions to pass jobs on to their kids, people will do that. The end result is entire fields where the racial composition doesn't change.

As for Asian vets versus physicians: the coursework to become a vet is similar, and vet school is very expensive, but the pay isn't that great compared to a physician's pay. Becoming a vet is really a field for people who come from upper middle class families.
The fact that the most used office suite has added one of the most relevant features which may make it interesting as an alternative to google docs may be somewhat relevant to startups (they may be interested in using the 'most used office suite' again...).

But obviously, you are entitled to your own decisions.
We experience a bit of survivor bias here.

With Arafat, the assassin almost got away with it unnoticed. There could be other cases of Polonium use as well which were never reported, it's remarkably tough poison to detect.
Is Twitter telling the truth about their "active user" stats?
$320 now.
Huh. I don't follow news about India/AIDS or BTC, but Tesla is a startup IIRC.
And yet IE is the browser that I would say has the least amount of functionality judging by the fact that it doesn't support a lot of modern features (<IE10 that is.) So if you're complaining about the 'web not working the way you want it to' then I would say you really shouldn't be using IE.