skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You seem to be the only one in this thread calling them losers. I'm not sure where you're getting that from my comment.
Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy is sufficient to explain this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jerry_Pournelle#Iron_Law_of_Bu...

Along this line of thinking, your confusion comes from thinking the Powers That Be in those long existing forums actually share the goals the forums ostensibly exist for. Of your cited examples I can only speak about Wikipedia, and I assure you that's not in the least true anymore. For that matter, in response I changed my approach to it, from improving it to simply firmly defending two articles I find of particular importance, and occasionally related ones. Plus general good stuff so I continue to look like I good-willed Wikipedian (which I am, but besides the problems of Wikilawyers and biased areas (wouldn't dream of touching a page on Islam), http://xkcd.com/386/ is always relevant, and with the original goal of Wikipedia stone cold dead...).
Is there any new information regarding the future plans for Bing? This article from a couple of months ago had it looking ominous:

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-11-08/microsoft-ceo-candi...

"Besides emphasizing Office, Elop would be prepared to sell or shut down major businesses to sharpen the company’s focus, the people said. He would consider ending Microsoft’s costly effort to take on Google with its Bing search engine, and would also consider selling healthy businesses such as the Xbox game console if he determined they weren’t critical to the company’s strategy, the people said."
I don't think it's somebodies fault that he has psychological issues or that it turned out that he is prone to addiction to drugs.
The likely outcome of this is that Rand Paul will be called out on his partisan motivations (and there will be some truth to it, I admit) in the media, and the courts will ultimately throw out the lawsuit and thus protect the surveillance state. We know that the president won't do anything about this. The legislature won't, and neither will the courts. The most we could expect is a token piece of legislation that promises oversight, but will have stealth provisions that end up making everything worse, or provide clemency for the NSA's various crimes.
Were the 178k URLs that they scraped on 178k unique domains or a very few domains?

The tool they wrote looks like it would have been a DoS attack if the latter were the case. There appears to be no thought or consideration for the sites they scraped that had linked to them, no attempt to read robots.txt and see whether they should fetch the pages.

What they did was wrong in the first place, but they could try and do things better in their attempt to repair things. Instead they continue to act in a way that externalises any cost to them and continues to treat their service as somehow privileged enough to deserve such breaks.

How many of the 53k failures to pull and scrape pages were to do with the fact that the servers in question were under a DoS attack by RapGenius?
I agree the way things are set up now the for-profit sector cashes in big time. (Quite a succesful lobby, I suppose). But would the costs not rise if attending college became free? Wouldn't everyone want to get in?
I noticed that too with IntelliJ IDEA on Windows 7 :(

IntelliJ IDEA should run such background threads with lower priority! All common OS support that, and also Java supports this: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1617963/setting-priority-...

Can someone file a bug for it?
We're Buying More PC Games Than We Can Play
Office 97 did not have italic title bars. Office 95 did. And I am not sure if Excel ever used fibers.
This confuses costs. Tuition costs are only part of the cost of attending college...
Yes, it's very old fashioned (K&R era).

I think the reason for doing it this way rather than putting the type declaration alongside the parameter is then it would also demand also adding an int declaration for the BX parameter which would then cause the code to be longer. That is to say with:

main(BX,char**nE){

.. it would throw an expected identifier error on the char. So you'd be putting the original:

main(BX,nE)n**nE;{

Against this error-free alternative:

main(int BX,n**nE){

.. but that's one byte longer.

If I got any of this wrong, I hope someone will correct me though :)
Just because everyone wants to get in doesn't mean everyone will get in.
" I then email the audio file to have it transcribed by a virtual assistant and Booyah! I have my first draft."

Q: is there software to transcribe instead of sending it to a virtual assistant (e.g. on the mac?)
This wasn't an algorithm update.

If the folks at Google can figure out how to detect this sort of gaming more reliably, that may end up in a future algorithm update, and no amount of pleading will matter for anyone affected by it - they'll have to fix the problem or continue to suffer the consequences.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crack_Baby_Athletic_Association
Google attempts high-profile "moon shots" to appear innovative.
> is DDG viable competition for Google? Will it ever be?

For search? Absolutely, it is today.

However, Google figured out a long time ago that they could lock people in by offering a hundred other services too. DDG has no maps, no mail, no image search, no video search, no drive, no docs, no news, no book search, no academic paper search, no patent search, no stock graphs, no language translation, and so on. For some of those, it can link off to other services, none of which are viable competitors to the Google equivalents.
So your answer to the question "Why do you assume .. ads?" is "because everything .. ads". How do you not recognize that as begging the question?

And then a few sentences later you say "Google is desperately searching for other sources of revenue", which is utterly inconsistent with "because everything .. ads". Your comment does not make any sense at all.
I think vertical search engines are part of the answer too. For general search engines Google have such an advantage in data and R&D that only Microsoft can afford to compete.

On the data side I think http://commoncrawl.org/ can help with creating vertical search engines. Their crawl is much smaller than Google or Bing but it is web scale (2 billion pages of 2013 data). Data recency is still a problem but it can help with finding which sites belong to a niche. Some smaller scale crawling of these sites would then be a much more achievable task.
Well, Amazon sure tries, and I've certainly benefited from "People who bought/looked at/whatever the book your're looking at/bought also liked" selections.

And if I have a topic I want to come up to speed on, I've found it pretty good for that, when combined with its invaluable reviews.

And echoing user crucifiction in another reply to your posting, I can make the very best book recommendations for the friends I know well. If word of mouth, amplified to the Nth degree by the net, is still powerful, then a simple "what fraction does what" metric may not tell us very much, except for methods with negligible share.
Unrelated:

You do know that pypy also uses GIL.

CFFI is to call C functions from Python. It won't allow you to run C extensions for CPython (something should implement Python C API).
I went fiction and told a story that's been rattling around in my head a while... not making a fortune by any means, but some sales, and as they say, ebooks are forever. Self-published to Amazon, etc. with some of the smaller outfits through Smashwords, which takes a cut from sales in exchange for the hassles of the vendors.

Open Gate - SciFi

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00GV0BFNE/ref=as_li_ss_tl?...

Rachael Johnson is soon to graduate from college and begin the rest of her life. Today her biggest worries are dirt and bugs as her friend James drags her underground to go exploring. What she didn’t expect was to find an abandoned city on another planet.

It’s the chance for the human race to leave Earth and have breathing room. A place for the explorers at heart to blaze new trails.

But Rachael is torn—does she call the police or block the cave? Will James agree? How can they keep this secret? How can they not?

And what about the original owners of this new-found world? Where are they, and are they wanting visitors? And don’t forget about the universe of other planets a few short steps away.

Now government is breaking down, there is rioting in the streets and there are roadblocks everywhere. The authorities have decided to arrest them on site. Their decision just might be made for them.

Influenced by Heinlein’s juveniles, Open Gate is a Science Fiction adventure that will appeal to all ages from teens to adults.
It appears there's recent decision to go this direction for this specific prison/company but keep in mind this is probably not a sign of a sea change:

"Recently, board chairwoman Robin Sandy said she opposed the idea because she didn't want to grow state government."

If she's being quoted correctly, that means the chair of the state prison board has a rather, shall we say, flat idea of good policy, and would still put prisoner safety (and therefore several important constitutional principles), recidivism, respect for law and order, and possibly even cost effectiveness all below the idea that the state shouldn't do any more things itself instead of paying private parties to fulfill its obligations poorly.
I don't have downvote power on here, but I think you should re-consider your comment - as it's snarky, doesn't add anything, and doesn't really follow the ethos of HN.
yup....99 games purchased and I only play like 1 or 2 extensively. once a year I might venture out to a different genre that I bought in the steam summer sales of 2012 but I always end up not playing for more than 30 minutes. Never again will they hear from my wallet.
High baud rate founders
About self driving cars: I just want to know if you gave serious consideration to the idea of licensing the technology, and making piles of cash that way? If you did, then I assume you concluded that the advertisement possibility is an even bigger revenue source? Or you don't think that, but you believe that google has a company wide blind spot for that solution? I don't want to put words in your mouth, just want to understand deeper your reasoning.

So, could you please elaborate on why do you think self driving cars will be monetized through ads?
That stuck out to me too. Of course, it could just come down to the particular people surveyed.
"...or find appropriate libraries."

But... finding appropriate libraries is generally simple. Due to C++'s ongoing ABI issues C is, to this day, still the predominate language for library authors who want their library to be nearly universally consumable (in C, C++, Python, Go, Ruby, node/JavaScript, etc).

That said, I agree with part of your point which is why I use Go when I can today (though it also isn't suitable to be a C-like universal library language for other reasons). Built in strings, interfaces, maps, etc remove a lot of the basic code level pain points without also introducing the overbearing level of language complexity of C++/stl/boost (and I say that as someone who spent nearly 10 years programming professionally in C++ and at one time misguidedly considered myself a fan of the language).

Go is not so big on the full spectrum of traditional object orientation or generics, but once adapting to OO solely by composition and duck-type interfaces I haven't found either of those to be a big issue for me.
Think bigger.
They aren't. And there are automatic tools for converting between them (2to3 and 3to2), along with those __future__ imports that Aaron mentioned: doing "from __future__ import print_function, unicode_literals, absolute_import, division" would give you most of the Python 3 syntax changes in Python 2. The "everything expects bytes" to "everything expects text" change is the biggest hurdle for a lot of projects.
I've discovered many interesting books by simply buying a large box of random used scifi books from ebay.
>>although I admit the groundwater itself has extremely high radiation levels<< Am I reading too closely or is this strange language to use when one isn't a spokesperson for the failed plant?
tl;dr Write down a list of the 10 things you're good at, and then a list of the 10 things you're not good at. (Avoid the word "good", though.) Compile a 10 item list from both with adjectives which resonate with you. Plan your improvements and enhancements accordingly, ignore the rest.
This is the major result when you Google "python download":

http://www.python.org/getit/

It is the same as this page:

http://www.python.org/download/

That page gives fairly equal weight to the two versions (I guess that could have changed over time).

Edit: It might make sense to have a warning about matching the interpreter version up with the tutorial, but clear wording for it is not obvious to me.
Hear, hear. Style is a powerful tool for ameliorating the difficulty of a subject.

Technical writing is particularly prone to being bogged down in dry, formal, jargon-filled prose -- particularly in documentation or research (anyone trying to glean insight from the MSDN documentation has probably experienced this). Sometimes a punchy, example-driven blog post can explain more than a formal essay filled with abstract reasoning.
Yes, there's as many ways to understand the term "effortlessly" as respondents.

Understanding the question as "how many programming languages I had used in the past to produce nontrivial programs and would likely be able to do this again with little to no refreshing my knowledge", my answer is 8: Pascal, OCaml, C, Java, Haskell, Common Lisp, JS, Clojure (listed roughly in chronological order of learning).
I also consider Amazon predatory and find my products elsewhere. Usually it is more convenient for me to shop locally (but I don't live in the sticks) and even when not, I try to get locally or else a smaller, specialized vendor. But I have friends who operate small businesses and use Amazon for fulfilment. Their shops appear integrated into Amazon, so this distinction is no longer clear.

With books, however, the distinction is clear and so if I do recommend a book to someone I ask them not to buy it online but instead to get it from a small independent bookshop.

Amazon: a moment of convenience, but a lifetime of regret.
While I agree that a 2D API doesn't sound like something that needs to be in the standard library, it sounds to me like they're just basing the API on Cairo's and not necessarily forcing everyone to use Cairo bindings. Individual standard library vendors would be free to implement that API any way they like, just like video card vendors have their own unique, yet consistent OpenGL implementations.
I actually like COM. Sure there are historical accidents like STA. But if you are free of that legacy and keep it simple there are some nice features: reference counting, QueryInterface, consistent error codes across components, abstraction away from linking, not having to worry about which allocator an object uses. (Though last one is only important on Windows since different DLLs can end up using different heaps.)
Compare and contrast with Norway. Also from the Grauniad:

http://www.theguardian.com/society/2013/feb/25/norwegian-pri...

Includes this idea that has not been thought of in U.S. prison policy:

"...justice for society demands that people we release from prison should be less likely to cause further harm or distress to others, and better equipped to live as law-abiding citizens."

Note how the Norwegian system treated the Oslo bomber, by giving him a decent prison existence rather than treating him as the worst of the worst. This has denied him notoriety. He can't 'pay' for his crimes by being cruelly treated.

In Norway the re-offending rate is a fraction of anywhere else. So, for the Norwegian taxpayer, the deluxe facilities make financial sense.

It would take strong leadership and a generation to move the U.S. 'let them die by lethal injection' to something more like what there is in Norway, however, as Idaho illustrates, moves in the right direction can be made by individual states.
Germanic words do not originate from French or Latin. They are usually shorter, carrying the same meaning without sounding scientific. So, prefer "eat" over "digest" and "child" over "progeny". I google around (without luck) for a good source, but I think I first heard of this technique in Strunk & White.
I recently came across similar behaviour in Linux - if you are waiting in XNextEvent on one thread and you call glXSwapBuffers on another, it never returns. If you move the mouse, XNextEvent returns with a MotionNotify event and glXSwapBuffers can grab some internal X11 lock and complete. It then gets stuck on the next frame. The result is that you have to keep moving the mouse or nothing is drawn.

X11 is supposed to be multithreaded enough to allow this and it worked fine on older versions of Xlib, before the libxcb transition.

Fixed by using select() in the event loop for the curious: https://github.com/lcrs/6ilk/commit/d5c39abde09e0467a8a4d17d...
"The demand for our facilities and services could be adversely affected by the relaxation of enforcement efforts, leniency in conviction or parole standards and sentencing practices or through the decriminalization of certain activities that are currently proscribed by our criminal laws. For instance, any changes with respect to drugs and controlled substances or illegal immigration could affect the number of persons arrested, convicted, and sentenced, thereby potentially reducing demand for correctional facilities to house them."

-- Corrections Corporation of America SEC filing.
Apple acquired the company

http://thetechblock.com/apple-acquires-rapid-fire-camera-app...
It would be ok, if started from the beggining with this.. maybe people would use it.. and then when ios and android happen, its would be adapted to work on them.. but now?

people that have C++ or already have they own toolkits, or use some provided by the platform.. i think its just too late for this..

its different with a network stack... its badly needed! and you use it in every way... (backend, frontend)

i think people just wont use it.. because of the points i've made earlier..

A better proposition for graphics(because its futuristic) would be to focus on what LLVM are doing for instance... like the ability to compile directly to gpu instructions..

In the direction of Opencl, cuda.. heterogeneous computing..
something that can make graphics AND vectorized computation
..than it would be just a matter of creating 2d graphics kernels, and wrap a api on top of it, C++ has a unique position here!

they need to think looking forward.. not backwards..
That's very interesting, thank you for clarifying. Those are pretty great rates, even despite taxes and all. Something to look into for sure.

Even more, I like your attitude, I think that's key.
I hate to be the guy that copies the HN guidelines (just because it seems to get done so often), but it feels especially appropriate given your choice of the word "interesting".

> On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find INTERESTING. That includes more than hacking and startups.

(Capitalised emphasis added by me.)
Everyone wants to get in today already, and if they look low enough, they will get in. After all, student loans are readily available.

The issue is slightly different, the real task is to discourage those who won't finish their degree because they aren't cut out for it early on, so that the student and the university won't waste their time. When I got my degree back when in Europe they did just that. The attrition rate in the first year was high - 30 %, but whoever had passed the sieving exams usually came out at the other end with a degree.

Unfortunately one of the metrics US unis are judged by is retention rate. This will have to change.
Bringing the Power of Bing Knowledge to Webmasters
It's tough because, at least early stage, you're always on the brink of dying as a company, so you're hoping that by putting in crazy hours you might have more shots at survival you otherwise would have.
I've tried the disavow. Seen no indication that it had any effect.

There were 31 thousand new backlinks added on December 31st (Holy shit, I just noticed that. WTF!). Another 1300 added on the 1st of January. It's normally 100 or 200 a day. Not sure how I'm supposed to manage the disavow process when I get that many new spammy inbound links a day.
Let's assume that you're right, that the main reason for Python 3 was Unicode. I've dealt with Unicode both with and without language support (in Python and elsewhere), and this is a pretty important feature. I think that the world in general, and the Python world in particular, is better off with Unicode support in the built-in str class.

That said, other languages -- most recently and notably, Ruby -- have managed to make the Unicode transition without leaving much of the existing user base behind. I realize that Python is often used in larger and slower-moving organizations than Ruby, and also has a more conservative philosophy. Even so, perhaps they could have announced Python 2.8, identical to 2.7 in every way except that strings are now Unicode. Then, after 1-2 years of everyone getting their Unicode house in order, we could have moved onto 2.9 or 3.0, and/or used the "from future" syntax.

There is no perfect solution, but it seems to me that by breaking so many things at once, we're in a situation where everyone wants to upgrade, but no one sees the overwhelming benefit from doing so, and thus puts it off even further.
The algo is meant to detect such manipulative links and devalue them.
I think injunctive relief against the NSA is a goal, a "something" that most civil liberties advocates and Rand Paul can agree on. Let it not be said that liberals took yet another opportunity to miss an opportunity at bipartisan reform of our executive branch's powers.
"The problem with the 5 paragraph essay, is that it's a rule-of-thumb. It's a good guide, but isn't necessarily appropriate."

The problem with the 5 paragraph essay is that it isn't a rule of thumb, it isn't a good guide, and it is never appropriate. Except maybe as a brief skeleton to build a student's understanding of longer-form writing on, to be discarded in the next assignment or two, but to be grading outgoing seniors from high school on it (and so rigidly!) is an atrocity.

Try to find one in the wild, one that was never a school assignment (so no published student homework or anything). Go on. Try it. Find one on HN comment page. (A different page. I'm sure someone will at some point float a 5P essay here as a response to be funny... the thought crossed my mind to try to do this exact criticism in this style, but ye gods is it a worthless style to communicate in and I didn't feel like sacrificing my point for the meager humor that would be produced.) Find one in a newspaper or magazine. Find one in a blog post. Find one in a well-regarded historical work on philosophy. And remember, it's not just a mere "it has five paragraphs", but a very proscribed schema that is at least:

1. Thesis paragraph, 5 sentences
2. Support point #1, 5 sentences
3. Support point #2, 5 sentences
4. Support point #3, 5 sentences
5. Restatement of thesis, 5 sentences

and in the worst case, every paragraph must also follow that exact form (topic, supports 1, 2, and 3, restatement of topic).

I won't guarantee you can't. I will guarantee that you will be looking for a long time.

There is a reason for this.
I am disappointed by the shallow analysis of the article. It doesn't consider the monopsonistic effects that would result from 100% government-paid education.
Not to mention the fact that you have to use the Federal or a state exchange if your situation changes, e.g. you lose your job, and you're now due a subsidy. Depending on who I believe (this is all incredibly complicated), if you got your plan outside of an exchange you may be SOL, or in difficultly to jump through the hoops to get a Special Enrollment Period as I think they're called.