skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
>>Lots of people are still using Microsoft products [which are really good/important].

And lots of people are using Kalashnikovs e.g. the LRA, so they must be good?

Please don't just write simple opinions like that on HN.

Let me take a simple counter example:

Microsoft had(/have?) a monopolist strategy. This meant they needed to have software/api/data formats hard to clone and be compatible with. this means they had to be over complex and varied in incompatible ways over time (then replaced regularly with new over complex implementations).

That results in lower life quality for me and everyone else that had to use their stuff.

The lack of better implementations, because of the monopoly, was a waste of money, blood pressure and time for at least tens of millions of people.

I do agree about the charity, as a philantropist Gates has a serious attitude with setting goals and trying to reach them. Afaik, that made an incredible difference compared to e.g. the foreign aid of my country Sweden, set at 1% of GNP.
Scala: Maybe referential transparency is a good thing, but Haskell is scary.
The Startup That Won 2013
I remapped CapsLock to Control, but I kept the Control key unchanged because hitting Control+Alt+Command is so convenient this way on a Mac.
Well put. But I think this is only half the picture. What happens when you do NOT have these habits, and are on the verge of being labelled the most incompetent/lazy team member, even though it might be you doing the actual work. Won't such a person, seeing that his work isn't being appreciated, get down to actually following these habits to be appreciated?
This deal was probably made pre-Snowden revelations. I doubt any of the world's governments are so eager to deploy US-controlled machines in their institutions and schools, especially if they are "cloud-only".
This is very useful information, thank you. One concern though is that, from what I've read recently, a lot of the data brokers refuse to let citizens view their own records so I would be unable to know what they say about me.
I would, but caps lock is not an issue on the Kinesis Advantage.
The Google bait in the lede and the failure to address it at all is wonderfully classic Yasha Levine. Here is the link from the article on the event that caused this- it's slightly more succinct:

http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2013/12/19/data-broker-removes-r...
I map Caps Lock to Escape. Makes using Vim much nicer for me.
Yep. Williamson County. Come on vacation, leave on probation!
It's a little hard to tell from the article what the goal is. If the goal is just to use the computers as a means to some other (non-tech) educational end, e.g. as browsers for accessing online information, then Chromebooks seem like a reasonable method of doing so. If the goal is computer education, then I agree they're suboptimal; even something like a Raspberry Pi might be better for that kind of education.

One lingering unease I have about the first use-case, though, is that it forecloses some unplanned exploration. I largely got into tech by fiddling around with lightweight programming on machines that weren't explicitly bought to teach programming. Perhaps web-based dev environments will fill that gap, though; someone with a Chromebook can still experiment with anything from Codeacademy to jsFiddle to sketchpad.cc.
I find a decent amount of fault with this article, but it's not all bad. It starts off with a really cool premise and then goes on to equate "programmer culture" with using the command line. I think the author is spot on when he describes how user's think about software/apps, but obviously the command line is not the be all and end all of how programmers think about software, it's just (a very important) one of many tools.

One group of people have no idea what programming is, the other group do. It's not that complicated. There is no user/programmer culture divide, it's simply a matter of understanding a complex topic or not.

I think a lot of "programmers" use apps and other software like "users", but when something goes wrong we like to hunt down the solution and fix it, and I think that explains why it is not uncommon to hear programmers complaining about how stupid the people who wrote the software they use everyday must be; because it can be frustrating and annoying when it ends up being something really obscure.

Programmers have a better understanding of how software works, but just like everyone else we get frustrated and annoyed when our app's crash. We can complain in more elaborate and accurate ways than the average person is all.
Remapped to have the control key positioned where God and Digital Equipment Corporation intended it to be (and the Apple II, Amiga, Atari ST, ...). The position below the shift key is the product of a malevolent conspiracy by the suits (IBM!) to keep programmer productivity in check and cause RSI.
That's a dated, but sticky image of us you have there. Fortunately, our leaders are doing their utmost best to rid ourselves of it, so it shouldn't take long.
Remapped to Ctrl. I use ctrl+a/e/n/p/b/f constantly instead of arrow keys.
I think the responses to this poll will be quite self selecting, with 'yes' vastly overrepresented.
My family hired a lawyer for me. Unfortunately, it was a "good ol boy" lawyer who was more concerned with her relationship with the prosecutors office. They told her to accept the plea bargain, and she told me to take it since it's the best that I'll ever get. I was young and impressionable and didn't even think of getting another lawyer.

To this day, I do everything within my power to avoid that County. Anecdotal evidence among my friends indicates that I'm not the only one that avoids Williamson County, the county just to the North of Austin, because of a fear of the unchecked legal system there
No, it's the best possible reaction (not for US, obviously, but they deserve it). This sends a message to US and US companies.

Also, in case you haven't paid attention the US government was hacking into one of the biggest US companies already - Google and Yahoo, while they had deals to get pre-encryption data with Microsoft and others.

Also, NSA themselves said all encrypted data is captured, regardless of where is coming from, "just to be sure".
All those apps uses the native GUI of the platform, which means they have to use the SDK. Why FB would even consider using the NDK is beyond me, as the FB app is simply a frontend over a web-api, and since you already have a HTTP library in the SDK, the NDK holds little value.

The only app on the list that could benefit alot from the NDK would be Adobe reader, but even Adobe uses the native UI to a great extent, so it uses the SDK as well. The other apps are (I assume, as that would be easiest) simple clients to a backend server. There wouldn't be much benefit in using the NDK for these apps, as they mostly are a combination of UI and TCP/HTTP which are included in the SDK anyway.

Btw, any source that these apps actually use the NDK?
Perhaps programming should be taught with smaller programs, if it requires syntax highlighting to "[break]down code into units".

(Personally, I hate syntax highlighting because it looks like "like a clown vomited all over the page"; I find it incredibly distracting, especially when different colours have different contrasts against the background. The only time I find it a little useful is to match opening parentheses with their closing ones, and even there I prefer shades of grey to colour.)
Think of the hundred of millions of kids who've been hooked onto Microsoft's products. Why shouldn't kids have a choice?
Like a lot of folks here, I've remapped to CTRL.

I'm a vim and tmux guy, so that's my motivation.
Useful, yes. Fundamental to soundness, proof, etc? Not at all.
This is exactly what I was thinking. How does one go about deciding whether he has impostor syndrome or is highly overrated because of his "7 habits"?
Using the Win key often on my Linux laptop gave me an achy left thumb.

This fixed my thumb:

localectl set-x11-keymap us pc104 altgr-intl lv3:ralt_alt,caps:super,lv3:lwin_switch

So, US-International, LAlt=Ralt, Caps->Win, Win->AltGr
Give us a bit

We are busy putting together a new batch of perfect people

This is what I am getting on my first attempt just now.
Haskell: ML is eager.

Go: callback hell is hard to manage, but threads are too expensive.
My SO is a teacher. We have a similar amount of experience, my partner has more degrees. I make exactly twice as much money.

It's not like I'm working harder or what I'm doing is more important. You just can't convince Americans to spend money on public schools.
If it's time-based (one year of XXX) it makes it very easy to remember.

I don't disagree with your notion, but I think a lot of people reflect on themselves and what they'd like to accomplish when the year is ending, set their goals, and it perpetuates itself.
Exactly. If it's important, you'll want to start right away. If it's not important, you'll probably fail in the commitment.
I respect your opinion, but as some other commentators have pointed out, there is nothing wrong with people knowing their own weaknesses. In fact, my core strength isn't development. I'm good at it, but I'm not great. The 100% guys are great.

My core strength is systems administration and building resilient infrastructure. That's my 100% skill.

The development stuff is just what I'm doing for my side projects.

I dev to 95% minimum-viable-product state and then launch and look at the reaction and shake out the bugs. If the service has no traction, I move on. If it has a customer base, then I slog through the tedious 5% (that takes just as much time) to try to perfect the product... but if I don't need to do it, I won't, because I find it too mind-numbing.
> I would prefer a more powerful local city and state government and a far weaker federal government.

Exactly right. Some people don't seem to want to understand the genius in that simple idea. Not sure why.
Maybe you just aren't paying attention:

http://www.cnbc.com/id/101291247

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/sep/09/nsa-spying-braz...

http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2013/10/nsa-busted-conducting...

There are a lot of things that we thought it would be "outrageous" for NSA to do, and yet we found out later they're doing them. If anything, NSA is more interested in spying on corporations for the purpose of economic espionage than anything else. Why else would Germany be spied upon by the NSA as much as China is?

http://www.theverge.com/2013/6/30/4481670/nsa-spying-in-germ...
I find caps lock useful for both typing CAPITAL_CONSTANTS and YELLING AT PEOPLE. I have remapped other keys, such as the the menu key to compose, and I usually use the super key to trigger custom key shortcuts.

(Filed under ⌨.)
First read that as "Operation Vulva". Oops.
We're not sure Facebook "fatigue" per se will affect conversion.

The Facebook login is simply a tool to sign in regardless of your activity level on Facebook.

The response has been pretty terrific so far. Over 95% of sign ups have returned to rate their batch every single day × 4 days consecutively so far.

Give it a shot and mail us your feedback to rajat@krushapp.com

Cheers :-)
Remapped Caps Lock to backspace. Using "jj" in vim for escape.
At the moment, I am surprised by how even the votes are. (~10% more remappers.)
The talent is the same caliber across the board with the only exception possibly being new acquisitions.
"politically incorrect" is one way to describe your apparent belief that men are owed sex slaves, yes.
How do you know if a number is constructible? It is described by a computer program. Although the set of computer programs can be enumerated, determining if a program it will print out any digits is not something that cannot be determined. So yes, Halting Problem. :)

So you cannot list all constructables in a constructive manner because the list itself is not constructible.

A related concept

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaitin%27s_constant
Thanks! I wasn't sure why he missed including that in his post.
I'm using a TypeMatrix[1] keyboard, the Caps Lock key is not at the same place that usual keyboards. therefore I didn't remapped that key.

[1]: http://www.typematrix.com/
I agree. I don't know how that number was reached, but if the potential for losses is $180 billion already, then the long term losses might reach $1 trillion, maybe more. There are so many companies that change so slowly. They probably won't give up on the US products and services within 6 months. It might take them 2 years, 3 years, or even 5 years. So there are probably many more foreign customers thinking about dumping US companies, but they just can't do it yet. But that doesn't mean they will get their future contracts if nothing (radically) changes until then.
That's incorrect. It's when you're over 500.
> As people in Tech industry we should be very proud of Bill Gates and what he has done with Microsoft and his charity work.

Yes, but they won't be because a bunch of neckbeards are still bitter about OS/2 and Netscape dying or Apple being reduced to desktop irrelevance, or what have you, to have anything like a reasonable perspective on these things, which is a shame.
Oh, so since me and my company are _physically_ outside of the US, we're fucked then?

But your point, of course, stands. Maybe avoid sending the data to the US and in addition punishing providing access to the NSA as treason? (I know. Won't happen.)
There aren't that many professions where we ask you to trade an intimate act involving your own body.

Maybe the military, but you know, conscription is also kind of a big deal for that reason.
Apart from the good points that other folks are making, this isn't necessarily targeted at engineering students.

A decent screen, a decent keyboard, comes with a word processor, is low maintenance, doesn't get viruses (theoretically at least) and it can access the web. That sounds pretty good to me.
I’m competing with myself.

It's good to know that I am not crazy reading this. It was very encouraging, knowing that there is path to hustling and this road is not walked alone.
Given that NSA tapped the phone of the Chancellor, it's not unlikely.
That's why EU and everyone else is waiting for US to pass strong laws that prohibit US gov doing that, and for them to acknowledge the EU laws for data protection, before they can trust US companies at all.

At least if US passes such laws, they know that instead of risking losing all of its foreign customers, Cisco would rather sue the US government next time, backed by those new laws. This is why this reaction is such a good thing. It's exactly what's supposed to happen to end forced backdoors by the NSA into products bought by foreigners.
Schools will need to teach this instead of core performance indicators.

Unlike reading, math, and science, there exists no relevant metric for measuring 'computer science' proficiency.
If you are a vim guy, you are missing a lot by not remapping Capslock to Esc (system wide). I've even nnoremapped ; to : (from vimrc)
محرك البحث جوجل تحتفل بالذكرى 442 لميلاد عالم الرياضيات والفلك الالماني
Shucks. Sorry to hear that. It's probably one of few things:

- You have too few friends/friends of friends of the opposite sex

- Available suggestions don't meet your criteria because they're listed as married on Facebook

- Your Facebook friends are primarily in a different city

- Or a few other possibilities

Tried tapping the orange "Retry" button at the bottom?

Thanks for the alert :-)

Cheers
That's annoying. How do Mac users use capitalized Greek letters as part of key combinations!?
As a political statement it has power, that is one aspect I definitely agree with. However, I don't think it's a security measure, and in fact could decrease security.

You make a good point that encrypted data is retained longer by the NSA, and even domestic encrypted communication is kept without any nexus to an international person of interest or 50% confidence that at least one party is not a US citizen. But as we know well, the encryption is the absolute last thing which is going to fail or be broken independent of some other action.

NSA can fill their hard drives with all the cipher text they want. If that ciphertext ever somehow becomes valuable on its own -- for example, without getting a warrant for the key - then the crypto-apocalypse has arrived and the whole discussion about which data center the server runs in is completely pointless.

We haven't seen any Snowden leaks indicating NSA is walking into US data centers without a warrant and busting servers. On the other hand, their entire modus operandi is to do exactly that overseas. Wait, or is that the CIA... Generally speaking, if you have something they really want and it's on a US server, you get agents at the door with warrants. If you have something they really want and it's on a non-US server, they just hack or steal the damn server.

See my earlier reply about the Google packet sniffing, done only for data which left the US as far as we know. There would be a much stronger case that such packet interception was illegal and unconstitutional under current US law if it was happening to traffic running within US only WANs.

By the way, there's nothing you can do if the service provider decides to just accept the warrant and provide the data, regardless of where the server is colocated, which is why I think self-hosted SaaS is so important. You might not be able to stop them getting the data, but if it's on your server, you probably will know they have taken it, or otherwise you'll have a great case to argue in front of the Supreme Court (as in, an EFF pro bono spectacle, not necessarily that you will prevail).

The people that put these surveillance systems in place don't give two fucks about the economic impact, and the people that do consider the economic impact aren't invited to the meetings.

tl;dr People should be really screaming mad angry about what the US government is doing, but foot shooting is perhaps exactly the response they are looking for.
Were I work you can get a bonus on the order of 40K for getting a grant of about 2M.
Show HN: LightPaper for Mac – Free Markdown editor
I'm not the author of the app (nor i have any connection with them, just a random user). iA Writer and Writer Pro aren't well suited for me as a developer. They feel quite "strange" to me. Mou is a good option (free too) but still missing some features. So far this, this editor is the most complete user-friendly. Hope it helps!
The governments of yore were truly visionary, to provide public funding for science before the concept even existed.
It seems everyone else here has it mapped to Ctrl, and here we are with it mapped to Esc... is there something I don't know? Esc works wonderfully with Vim, even better than Ctrl-[, but perhaps there's some other reason?
Even better is wiping the chromebook and putting linux on it!
You will love the 32" monitor especially with such high resolution. Finally one have enough pixel real estate for the monitor to serve as a desktop. Now you can have your documents arranged on that desktop without having to maximize their windows to do anything useful.

I love my 2560x1600 30" and will certainly by a 32" with bigger resolution. However that 30" is just big enough for two a4 documents side to side. So higher resolution is very welcome.
"Worst possible knee-jerk reaction. Data outside the US is the easiest for the NSA to access. It's only data that never leaves the US which in theory you can argue is subject to warrants."

Nonsense. If they're even talking about keeping data out of the US, they are probably non-US citizens. Under NSA law (the parts that have been publicly leaked), NSA feels perfectly free to seize their data when it is stored in the US, or makes transit into or through the US. A non-American sending their data into the US does not thereby protect it from US spies. (Really, that's common sense). The only data that is maybe safe is that of clearly-identified US citizens communicating with themselves in the US. These can still still be intercepted and stored, but the leaked secret laws say that the NSA does not allow its analysts to read it.
But it's free!!!
Spend time with family. Work on stuff. Read.

Pretty boring answer.
There's history to support the Ctrl key being to the left of caps-lock.

http://www.redgrittybrick.org/terminals/keyboards.html

I guess without another key to the left a lot of people remap caps-lock to ctrl. I never got used to that for some reason. In general terms I tend to avoid remapping in order to maintain a consistent UI. the only exception to this that makes sense to me is that all of my Macs have always had their keyboards remapped to match a PC. As closely as reasonable and possible. For example, ctrl-c and ctrl-v do exactly the same thing whether I am running a Windows, Linux (GUI) or MacOS machine.
mapped it to ESC because im using a mech keyboard who's ctrl is reachable by my pinky. I tried remapping it to ctrl, and mapped 'jk' for esc in vim but it didn't work that well for me
It certainly isn't the only way and I'm not sure it's the preferred way.
Your Christmas Tree Lights are Headed to China - then back to you.
I remember going through the majority of my primary education in the 2000's and being dismayed by the gap between public school education and the resources of the internet. It was such a weird, and unfortunate, period of denial. Maybe we're still experiencing that chasm between the way that society functions and the power of the internet to enrich our lives, but it seems like we're definitely inching closer to my childhood idealizations.
If the lockstep payscale were double or triple the present rate you wouldn't need to fix the union.
Windows is just as inconsistent with closing, with the added bonus of also being inconsistent with minimizing behaviour too. How do you get an app to go to the systray? Close it? Minimise it? Who knows.

While I do agree Windows has a better keyboard story, most of what you describe are just differences, not worse.
> Little did they know...

I'd argue that a company that explicitly agrees to work with the NSA, for example by handing them over Windows security holes to be exploited by the NSA (and potentially other hackers), knows exactly the kinds of things that are going on.
Not speak badly of anyone. Not because I'm worried it would get back around, but because I want to try to not be in a mindset like that.
Introducing Sotokit: A Social Activity Kit
Me too.

I also map Escape to Caps Lock, for the very rare occasion that Caps Lock is actually needed (one a year, maybe). Escape is actually really useful for things other than switching modes in Vim, as it's often the default 'cancel that' binding that closes windows and cancels something you've started.
I think Linux (Ubuntu or Mint) would be great, so students can help build what the big corps are trying to crush and the fact that it really is an outstanding platform to learn from. I wish people would see how these proprietary boxes are not only crap but undermine the open-source community.

The comment "I really don't want to deal with OS upgrades...", does not make sense, as I would think a student (at least when I was one) we wanted to upgrade our OS and for free made it even better. You can also customize a Linux REALLY easy, and that is something as a student I was looking for. So low cost and great power is what at least a tech student would be looking for.
> That's why EU and everyone else is waiting for US to pass strong laws that prohibit US gov doing that

Thing is, neither the Constitution nor the law was respected, as we've learned. So why should anybody have trust in some politician or President who declares a new law? For agencies like the CIA and the NSA, there is no law.
I used to think that, but I've found there's way more to gain with Ctrl and using ctrl+[ instead of escape (or imap jj <Esc>)
Cntrl when pressed with another key, Esc when pressed and released on its own. Perfect.