skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I didn't use Steam since switching to Linux in 2008 until now that it is officially available. Some of that 1.85% are new (or returning) customers.
Thanks, that was my initial reaction as well. I'd have expected it to be a few enthusiasts, maybe something like 50.000 worldwide. 1.85 % of the Steam user base is more than a million players!
Electronic Ghosts
I wished people would use software based on merits, not on popularity. That being said, Bzr is slow, it was always slow from day 1 -- and slowness is part of the UI experience.
Actually, it's "no, unless" and "yes, if" that are synonyms. "No, because" carries the implication that the listed justifications are irresolvable.
For every imaginable problem there is at least one simple, clear and obvious solution that only makes the problem worse.

If Greece hadn't defaulted, they wouldn't have cut 25% of the public workforce. Oh no. They wouldn't have been able to pay nearly any salaries.
Git was by far the fastest, this was a big factor when evaluating the move from svn (or similar) to a new system.
Source: https://github.com/antimatter15/ocrad.js
Bingo. It's a management problem, not an individual problem. Management can turn "Yes, if..." people into mindless drones over time by constantly shooting them down and feeding them negativity. And where does that negativity come from? The next level up; someone above that manager telling them they can't do things and what they should be doing instead, or rewarding them for aligning their team's goals with the status quo. More often than not, it's driven by fear and the danger of getting fired, or a strong desire to fit into an existing structure and climb the ladder.

In my opinion, most people will be "Yes, if..." people given the right cultural conditions; this looking at people as dichotomous types set-in-stone is dangerous and in my experience incorrect. It is as divisive and ineffective as the current US political climate. If someone has become a No person, it's likely because they're being moulded into that by their management, or has been in the past. Fix the environment and create an innovation-positive management structure and they'd probably jump at the opportunity to take more risks. I have seen this happen first-hand.

W. Edwards Deming, 8th point: "Drive out fear, so that everyone may work effectively for the company." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W._Edwards_Deming
No, this is not false.
Rumor has it that LightTable will be open sourced very soon, but I doubt it will ever take the place of Emacs.
Don't want to rain on the parade but - What is the error margin of this poll/survey? A margin of error of +/-2% would be very good for most polls.

There is definitely a need for a 'third' choice when it comes to desktop gaming platforms, hopefully Linux can take off sometime in the future.
The primary use case of the power button is to power down the machine. Of all the times that the button is hit, how often is it hit with the intent of hitting the delete button? For me personally I would guess it's happened maybe once or twice in the couple of years I've had an Air.

So to me it seems like having to confirm that I want to shutdown after I hit the shutdown button, by either clicking or waiting, is a hurdle on the primary way the button is used. I can see that in the scenario posted that it is a "high impact" if you accidentally hit the power key, but overall the number of times that that happens must be low enough that bashing Apple's design decision has to be a little over the top.
>git won the mindshare war. I regret this - I would have preferred Mercurial, but it too is not looking real healthy these days

I confess that my perception of Mercurial is the diametric opposite of the author's. Recently I believe I have seen a modest resurgence of interest in Hg and increased uptake. Am I just seeing this through some peculiar VCS-warped glasses?

I believe that much of the popularity of git stems from github making it very easy to adopt, something that bitbucket doesn't seem to have pulled off as well.
F3 is Mission Control, F4 is Launchpad (and I don't use Launchpad). I thought the op was about switching not launching.
"Apps" in this context probably means mostly "websites I used 'login with facebook' on".

(I would have had a closer look if this wasn't a closed-source download ...)
One could also posit an Anthropic Principle of time travel: the fact that we still exist means that our universe is among the tiny subset of potential multiverses in which time travel is not discovered, or whose use is sufficiently constrained so as to not result in destruction or paradox.
IAMA woman AMA.
Thats data that is automaticly gathered by steam - it's not a "survey" where you can pick OS.
There was previously a published paper that did a hierarchical clustering of a bunch of whiskies:

A Classification of Pure Malt Scotch Whiskies
Lapointe and Legendre
Appl. Statist. (1994) 43, No. 1, pp. 237-257

http://www.dcs.ed.ac.uk/home/jhb/whisky/lapointe/text.html

http://www.albany.edu/psychology/bcd/share/scotch_classifica...

It would be interesting to compare their results with the OP.
Shell via LFI and /proc/self/environ
This might explain why the Australian Aboriginals didn't use left/right for directions[0], but instead used cardinal directions.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relative_direction#Cultures_no...
The entire machine is milled out of an aluminium block. "Cost reduction" is utterly irrelevant when you're burning through cutting heads like that.
XSLT Inclusion Vulnerabilities
There's a slightly silly-but-entertaining film in which an aircraft carrier goes back in time. The spoiler of the film is that one man who is left behind in time becomes absurdly rich by becoming a pioneering "inventor".

So we should look for absurdly rich people who have made dozens of inventions.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0080736/
3D sonograms let blind expectant parents "see" their babies
"Start cleaning : this plug in can access all of your data on all websites tabs and navigation activity."
Kind of ironic.
Pretty useful anyway.
yeah I did not get the explanation of why he did not use Tesseract. It seems like a "self evident" argument was dropped, but I am not in the know about why it's obviously not possible. My guess is that Tesseract is spread across 100 files and does a ton of IO or something that can't be translated easily??? Dunno
I've always wondered about this. Now, what if, in "reality" after every unit planck-time the universe forks itself N times based on all the things that could have happened but didn't? And if you went back in time, you go back to that particular fork and so that there is no way to ever detect your time travel? I realize this a fairly naive idea..
Interesting! Indeed if you work with freelance developers, or you work as freelancer, getting "quotes" is quite some work, and understanding if it is a good price or not, also.
As I am working on a side-project trying to help others with making quotes, would you have some time to chat more?
Is it opt-in or opt-out?

Edit: Nvm found my answer

http://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey

Its optional. Also other people have mentioned that steam randomly chooses users to take part in the survey and then asks them if they want to participate.
I hate when people say "git won the war", it sounds like an excuse to close minds and stop progress.

What if "Microsoft won the war"? Or vim? Or IBM? Or Java? Or Taco Bell?
93*
It does, in a 'lazy' way. e.g. You can scroll an unfocused window when you're mose is over it.
"The author of this addon has not been verified"

How ironic
"most of Canonical's in-house projects have abandoned bzr for git".

Nope. Unity, Mir, Upstart, all of the new phone/tablet apps and platform tools are on bzr on launchpad.

Not disputing the fact that git has won the war, just nitpicking that point.
Well the krauts had consistency going for them at least

The weak rule the weak the strong conquer the strange
LIST OF THE MOST HAPPIEST STATES IN U.S
A study says these are the 15 happiest states in the U.S. Did your state make the list?
Massive use of unclear 'it' reference in this text. Funny how it reminds me js..
In the same way, one day, when someone will discover life on other planets or something similar, there will be people telling us, that people knew that life exists outside of the Earth.
Evidence is one crucial point that is necessary to be able to distinguish tattle from facts. Knowledge without evidence is just a possibility.

An in my very amateur opinion, Mr. Snowden receives the personal credit simply because he has provided the world with evidence of that previously "known" activity.
There is a view that General Winter managed very well by himself.
Wouldn't it be highly probable that the untimely death of any of those men would cause almost everyone born after the war to cease existing?
If Tcl Core wanted to move to git, Fossil exports repos to that format. So they really lost nothing. They have a small team of commiters as well so Fossil works just fine for them.
Only 34 but I decided I might spring clean and removed 8 of those that I don't need anymore :)
Keep building it up. Add github and linkedin logins, build up the collaboration and contribution metrics features, grow at places where people and projects are really interesting, add to the team, maybe apply to an accelerator. This is my life moving forward. I love crafting every peace of it and I want to build it in a way that energizes the community within to do more, generate more, and amplify its amplifiers.
This is a good nuanced response, recognizing the complexity of what the post is broadly criticizing: the quality evaluation of ideas.

You cannot shoot down the (positive or negative) evaluation of all ideas as "hating," for that would be incorrect. Ideas may be evaluated independently, and some people are quite good at it.

With that accepted, the argument for what types of evaluations are valid must become more complex and again, nuanced. This blog post does not achieve that, instead trying to argue for the rather extreme position that all negative evaluation is disadvantageous to everyone.

It just ain't true.

So, yes, as anyone with half a brain knows, jaded "hating" and constant skepticism are poor excuses for intelligent evaluation. Even knowing that, the extreme emotional responses to any idea always get the most attention, and are often amplified out of proportion. A balanced measured evaluation is rarely noteworthy, even if it's right, so it may seem as though the startup community or workplace trends toward the negative. The psychology of crowd mentality is the fascinating angle here, not the end result. Find the source of the problem and change the systems which motivate this sort of behavior and we might have a chance.

You're totally right though: as with most worthy pursuits, the extremes are easy pits to fall into, but the balance is both correct and difficult.
>The problem is, I have a MacBook Air and delete key is only 3mm apart from power key and I mishit it from time to time

The problem seems to be with the user not with the Mavericks update. Stop accidentally pressing the power button, problem solved.
Do you know if the new "perf" tool can also be used for the same purpose?
Ask HN: What's your speciality, and what's your "FizzBuzz" equivalent?
I was recently chatting with friends and the question came up:
When hiring a programmer, FizzBuzz is sometimes
(and controversially) used as an initial filter.
What's an equivalent filter for mathematicians?

I know that HN is filled with people who have specializations outside of programming, so I ask:

What is your specialization, and
what is your "FizzBuzz" equivalent?

Added in edit: Fascinating answers - thank you. I'd love to respond to many of them but that would probably trip the HN flame-war detector, penalise the item, and I'd get no more replies! If you want a reply, email me, or make sure your email is in your profile. And thanks again to all.
Remember the netbook craze? They put linux on there, but they didn't start to sell in volume until they replaced it with windows.

When people buy something in a PC form factor they expect it to run windows. Linux on the desktop will not happen in a traditional desktop form factor because people don't want it and/or don't see the point. The one possible exception are chromebooks, because a laptop that only runs chrome and is therefore cheaper / lighter is something people see the point of.

Besides, linux as mass market OS has already happened, it's called android.
It's more about attracting people with an easy barrier to getting involved. Granted, it's not really that big a deal (IIRC there are github mirrors), but it is an obstacle.
Some of the Google ones are ambiguous or duplicated.

I revoked everything anyway.
Is it reliable?
I'm sorry the Rothschild's have the monopoly on time travel for the next few millennium.
This is pretty silly. The ``paradox'' only arises because of a confused notion an apparent incongruity between the second law of thermodynamics and the subjective perception that complex "things" in the universe (rivers,trees,people) are highly organized. The second law makes a precise statement about the evolution of closed thermodynamics systems. The latter observation is only a vague sentiment without an exact statement, and is at any rate concerned with open systems to which the second law of thermodynamics does not apply. So there is no paradox.

Addendum:
So I made my way through to some of the references, where one can find all these papers by respected cosmologists (I am not a cosmologist, but I have heard of these people and get the sense they that are the real deal). Anyway, it would seem that the term "Boltzmann brain" refers to a technical problem associated with the growth rate of the creation of metastable states from fluctuations during inflation (an actual particle physicist should feel free to chime in). This article appears to hijack the associated buzzword to advance a philosophical discussion around the ``paradox''. It is worth pointing out that none of these cosmology articles are referenced inline in the text. Who are these people and why are they writing this?
SEEKING WORK - Remote

Jonathon Frampton
jonathon [dot] frampton [at] gmail
---
looking for part-time remote web analytics work, have years of experience (www.linkedin.com/in/jbframpton/) and looking to bolster it with some diversity.
---
Omniture (Adobe Analtics -> Reporting API / Discover / Implementation)
Google Analytics, Coremetrics etc...
---
MySQL, Oracle, Netezza, DB2
---
PHP, Jquery, HTML, VBA (learning Angular, Python, R)
Holy guacamole - 110 applications have access to my facebook account. ...removing...
I've noticed this, oddly, while my workplace is transitioning to git from Mercurial.

A lot of developers using .NET tend to go for Mercurial because a while back it felt a lot nicer to use on Windows. It's why I always preferred using Mercurial. A few .NET shops that use TFP/VSO are moving towards Git for the Visual Studio support, but I've noticed a few Python and PHP developers making the switch to Mercurial.

To be honest, I rarely need to do anything more than the basics so neither has a huge benefit for me. Neither feels particularly faster than the other, and both have comparable GUI tools. Aside from when I am pushing stuff to GitHub I tend to use whichever one pops to my head first on a project. I reckon a lot of developers are probably the same.
Thanks for that. I've just acquired a new pet peeve: not only is "market share" not "usage share", but usage share is not the same as web usage which is all web analytics can measure.
There is no rise in Linux adoption unless you count ChromeOS.

I use Linux on the desktop but it has been a while since I have seen or heard of anyone making the move to Ubuntu or anything else install-yourself on the desktop. However I do know of lots of happy Chromebook users.

There is no headline story here as far as Linux is concerned. As I see it there is a very slow replacement rate for regular PC's - 10% market share in over a year looks to me like only 11% of PC's have been replaced in the last year. Given PC's are supposed to have an average lifespan of 5-7 years that means Windows really is not selling very well.
I took the survey while I was playing DotA2 on Ubuntu, but since taking the survey I no longer use Steam on Linux. The main reasons are that only 4/50 games in my library are available on Linux, and because graphics performance still sucks (Intel HD4400).

I'll try it out again whenever a new game is available or when there's a graphics driver update, but at the moment I'd much rather reboot into Windows than pull my hair out over how bad Linux is for gaming.
There never was a free version.

BitMoover Inc provided free BitKeeper licences to the Linux kernel devs. This was unpopular because of the non-FOSS nature of Bitkeeper. Andrew Tridgell [1] at OSDL became frustrated with some aspects of the software and reverse-engineered its network protocol to develop his own limited client. This caused BitMoover to revoke the licences used by OSDL, which in turn provoked Linus Torvalds (who was at OSDL) to develop the early version of Git. [2]

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Tridgell

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BitKeeper#Pricing_change
haha. I've actually spend time trying to read emacs's source code. I guess the downvoters haven't.
How Do They Make Money?
Funnily, this is one of the freedoms granted by the standard which neither gcc, clang, or MSVC actually make use of.
Cheque card sounds about right. Though the process seems to be entirely different for EMV cards.

e.g. Pin + Chip transactions can be stored offline and uploaded later so they don't necessarily go through in real time. Also, Swipe + PIN doesn't seem possible under EMV. It seems to be limited to Pin + Chip or Swipe + Signature or if you're down under Chip + Signature.
I haven't seen numbers about Snowden's approval, but the Bush advisor's statement was factually inaccurate for most of his second term.
A retrospective on (mostly) failure
There are at least three phases in situations like this:

1. Validating idea

Confirming that people will buy what you want to sell.

2. Implementing the idea

This is where your programmers come in. You need them after phase 1.

3. Selling the solution
I think it's rather unlikely that we will find time travellers among us, for two reasons:

We don't seem to be anywhere close to inventing time travel. If time travel is invented, say, 10000 years from now, our moment in time might not be interesting enough to travel to.

All the funny paradoxes caused by time travel suggest that time travellers could fork a new branch in the multiverse, but that would not change the future they were coming from and they would never be able to return to that future. Hence, the interest in travelling back in time might not be that great, even if it were possible.
Ask HN: What are some practical steps to improve ones security?
In the light of NSA revelations, I'm wondering what are some practical steps to improve ones security. I do realise that I won't be able to defend against NSA/other spying agencies, however as they create so many vulnerabilities in products I use, it's only a matter of time when ordinary criminals will start to exploit them.

Is OS X considered secure enough, or should I switch to Linux?

Is FileVault secure? How does it compare to TrueCrypt?

Which mobile platform provides better security? (I do realise that it'd be best to ditch mobile devices, but it's a rather drastic step for most people).

What software use for IM? Is there any secure solution?
I'm sure we don't mean to press it...
Yet another website that offers vast set of online courses
It seems that most .NET devs prefer something baked straight into Visual Studio and my experience has been that this is part of the problem in getting those teams to migrate to Git, which is most powerful from the command line.

Personally, I greatly prefer my source control system to be separate from my development environment or IDE.
It's Asimov's (and my) birthday today! :)
Here's a Sean Carroll article on the subject: http://www.preposterousuniverse.com/blog/2006/08/01/boltzman...

here's another one, linking the higgs field to the cosmological entropy problem: http://www.preposterousuniverse.com/blog/2013/08/22/the-higg...

(that second one is a bit whacky...)
Buying a Dell with Ubuntu preinstalled is a PITA because you have to purchase it as a business which apparently means you lose all your consumer rights. I found this out the hard way when I was told that returning my XPS 13 would cost me a 15% "restocking fee".

Besides, they're preinstalling 12.04, and upgrading to newer versions (in my experience) requires blacklisting kernel modules and setting kernel params.
Emacs has a package manager, it works fine. I particularly like that I can script it to install my packages on first run.
Also Mr Clapper probably has the goods on just about anybody who might want to bring charges.
I Respect all entrepreneurs, and it seems to me the 'attention' the 'mythical' female hackers gets perpetuates the stereotypes we are trying to break. It is fairly obvious it draws attention on the fact that generally we don't 'expect' this type of person?
Please explain why this fine young person is getting any attention besides her gender?
Luckily I manage this on a monthly base. Only 23 on Facebook and none of those can acces information I do not want them to see. Good link though, we need more awareness for third party apps accesing our social media profiles.
Point is wealth in a deflationary currency is increasing, because of worth of things, without things currency is just useless numbers. If all items on world stayed the same, the value of currency would stay same too.

My point with computers was that hording currency will not affect the markets, same as computer market is not crashing because everyone is waiting for better computer for same price next year! Essential expences must be done and environment factor comes in and is important, because inflation currency lose value all time so big merchant is less afraid to just stock himself with huge amounts of items, even they get outdated he still will make profit selling them cheaper, compared to if he had just stored value in cash and lost that value to inflation.
UTF-8 Everywhere Manifesto http://www.utf8everywhere.org/
>make a working modern package manager

package.el works great.

>integrate the browser

That may actually be possible in the future, see http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/EmacsXWidgets

>perhaps rewrite emacs from scratch

That is just silly. The current Elisp interpreter might be replaced with an Elisp implementation on top of the Guile VM. That would be quite the big upgrade, technically speaking.

>unfortunately lighttable is staying closed for much too long

I agree, I don't have much faith in the "it will be free eventually, just trust us" development model. If the project really wanted to be community friendly then the source code would have been free from the beginning.
Just visit Snapchat.org or GS Lookup, type in your Snapchat username (or phone number) and the website will tell you whether your information is part of the leak.

To delete account go to https://support.snapchat.com/delete-account and log in using your existing Snapchat credentials.
I used Mercurial with a hg-git plugin back in the day as we were a Mac-only shop and I was the only schlub with a Windows machine (I was in charge of fixing IE issues). Mercurial was very good back then, when Git performance was subpar on Windows.

Git on Windows is now blazing fast enough that msysgit will get you by. I still favor the Git workflow even when I am using other SCMs (like right now, where we have a Subversion dependency)