skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Somehow the HN crash removed my comment.

The MacOS X drivers are written in C++.

Windows kernel code is being made C++ compliant given that C is a legacy language from Microsoft's point of view. Many new APIs since Windows XP are being made available only as COM objects.

As of Windows 8, the DDK officially supports C++ and many of the samples have been updated accordingly.
The PhoneGap Tips
It was just a bit slow for me, but not down
Specification Clarification: The display is a low-power LCD. Pebble insists on calling it "e-paper" in the specs, likely to make people think it's related to the more advanced e-ink display you'd find in ereaders. It's just a low-power gray-scale LCD that loses image whenever power isn't applied to it. Still a cool product. Just a disingenuous spec listing.
Reddit's take on HN being down
Snapchat users receive suspicious "emergency broadcast message"
I was pleasantly surprised to see my Pebble work out that I'd crossed a state border into a timezone with no summertime on a roadtrip over xmas/new-year, within 5 or 10 minutes the time on the Pebble updated to "local time".

Interestingly, not being able to _rely_ on whether or not my technology is going to get things like that right reliably might be worse than requiring manual updates to reset stuff like summertime. I always _knew_ the dumb old clock in the ~20 year old car hadn't changed timezone, I was never quite sure which of the phones, tablets, or laptops we had with us were displaying "local time" - every now and then I'd bump into two showing times an hour apart and be confused for a few seconds while I worked out if the earlier or later time was "correct".
If anyone saw the movie "A Serious Man", you may remember that the protagonist's employer received anonymous poison pen letters regarding himself. I know someone that happened to in real life. His name is Louis Proyect. He was a student in the 1960s and got involved with the anti-war movement, and then became a programmer at Metropolitan Life still active in the anti-war movement. The FBI used to send anonymous poison pen letters to his employer, Met Life, in order to try to get him fired.

Actually he got his hands on some FOIA documents after a lawsuit, he has some of them on his web page:

http://louisproyect.org/2007/08/19/encounters-with-the-fbi
Very. You'd be looking at months to sync, if it managed to at all.
rant

I switched to Feedly when Google Reader closed, so it made me a bit depressed because I figured Feedly would be fucked like it was last time HN went down. I had to unsubscribe and resubscribe to get it to start showing new items.

And indeed it is.

I want to get my feed from news.ycombinator.com/rss. That's what I had in Google. That works in Digg Reader. It works in NewsFire. Not at Feedly. Feedly insists that there is no RSS feed there.

Last time, I was able to find something that was close among the feeds that Feedly offered. That was http://feeds.feedburner.com/hacker-news-feed?format=xml. (I got that from Feedly's exported OPML).

So this time, I unsubscribed and resubscribed, but it was unclear which feed was right from the 9 that Feedly says are available for news.ycombinator.com. Adding all and looking at the OPML, it looks like the one that corresponds to what I was using (http://feeds.feedburner.com/hacker-news-feed?format=xml) is now http://feeds.feedburner.com/feedsapi/BwPx.

But I'm not sure. It doesn't seem to match news.ycombinator.com/rss as well as the old one did--but maybe there is some delay because Feedly apparently is going through feedburner, so I'm not actually sure whether or not I've found the right thing.

This isn't the middle ages. This crap [1] should not be happening.

/rant

[1] "This crap" solely refers to Feedly, not to HN going down. Sites go down on occasion, so I have no complaint about HN in this regard.
Way back on the original Xbox and PlayStation2, the framebuffer and the textures were in the same memory space. And coincidentally, because you had complete control over the machine, you could construct a texture using any memory address --including that of the framebuffer! This was very not recommended. Both the internal memory layouts and the order-of-operations of memory reads and writes from different pixel operations were explicitly undefined in every hardware graphics API ever so that different GPUs could be free to have wildly different implementations. Here are some examples: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZJU_CO6gRfs and http://www.g-truc.net/post-0597.html

On the consoles, the memory formats and layouts were well defined, but the order of operations were not. And indeed, if you tried to draw anything that wasn't a pointless memcpy(src, src, sizeof(src)) while using the framebuffer as a source texture, you would get random, rectangular and z-shaped (morton order) glitches because of out-of-order operations stemming from the aliased source and dest buffers.

However... My goal was a blurry, streaky, screen distortion effect in the weapon trails --to look like the blades were so awesome they caused refraction by cutting the air ;) I found that by sampling the framebuffer from four locations along the weapon's line of motion, the glitches were blurred and streaked out to the point that they really were not objectionable :D

To do the effect according to the spec (and without glitches) I would have had to copy the whole framebuffer to a temp buffer. That would have been simply too expensive for such a small visual difference. What did ship looked great and the framebuffer-feedback feature added effectively zero cost. But, I felt kinda bad for future (now long past) emulator writers who would later try to support my out-of-spec use of the hardware which is simply not allowed by desktop APIs. (AMD's Mantle might expose it. We'll see...)
(Shameless self-promotion)
We just released the app as an Open Beta on Google Play:

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.shoelacewi...

and would love to hear any feedback from you.
Firefox OS on the desktop
That's an interesting insight! We're currently focused on serving the urban professionals in San Francisco...

We're hiring a Marketing person to help with this type of question: http://www.rinse.com/careers/
IIRC sometimes the "Create Account" section of the login page is missing, but can still be accessed through https://new.ycombinator.com/submit

That's not how it is right now so I'm not sure if I am remembering it correctly.
Quite true. I doubt Go would be as talked here if it wasn't for Google.

Just check how far Go's ancestors (Alef/Limbo) went.
Maybe there should be one umbrella corporation that owns all media sites, that way we could pay the umbrella corporation a monthly fee and be done with it.
I prefer this article http://semiaccurate.com/2014/01/06/linksys-wrt1900ac-spritua... since it give some hints about why this thing costs $300 — if it has an Avoton Atom and 4GB of RAM it's more of a home server being sold as a router.

I have been pretty disappointed by the hackability of routers since they usually come with hardly enough RAM and flash to even perform basic duties, so even though alternate firmwares exist you probably have to strip them down to almost no features which negates the point. This router should be one of the few exceptions, being designed with extra hardware resources that can be used by hackers.
If their plan is anything like similar startups (like the also-YC-funded Hacker School), the idea is that they can connect employers looking to hire with engineers looking for jobs. Maybe this means something like letting people flag on their profile that they're looking for a job, and giving companies tools to search, filter, and contact the users who've said they're looking (and vice versa).

After someone takes a job through CodeCombat, the employer would pay them some sort of referral fee. This sort of arrangement is common; a typical fee structure is around 20% of the new hire's annual salary.

Employers get a concrete way to assess the skill of potential employees, job-seekers get free visibility they wouldn't otherwise get (this sort of thing tends to benefit newer programmers whose limited experience doesn't accurately represent their raw skill and potential), and CodeCombat gets paid. Everybody wins.
There is the old quote about

"We can buy books but we can't buy the time to read them."
The article doesn't say which wireless chipset it is using (only that it's Broadcom).

> Yes it looks like Belkin actually understands what the word “open” means and why. Yay!

I will believe that only once I see that the wifi chip is using a vanilla kernel driver and not some binary Broadcom driver that will tie you to a specific kernel for years to come (as has been the case with the WRT54 for years until the b43 open source driver was matured).

And I would have liked to learn how much RAM this thing has. Some routers currently come with quite a lot of it, eg TP-Link WDR4300 with 128 MB (http://wiki.openwrt.org/toh/tp-link/tl-wdr4300) — that's one of my current favourites for building appliances with OpenWRT.
Chromebooks and the Cost of Complexity
Minneapolis Skyway System
Show HN: LaceMap - Discover your most beneficial connections.
This was all me. I probably should have thought about it more, but just wanted to make it clear we knew something was wrong and were working on it. Load was not a concern.

Though the article is correct, with everything else that was going on response codes and cache headers were the least of my worries.

I think the best takeaway is that you will go down at some point, so it's best to have a reasoned plan in place for when you do. Handling it in the heat of the moment means you'll miss things.
See also Umberto Eco's Anti-Library, c/o Taleb:

“The writer Umberto Eco belongs to that small class of scholars who are encyclopedic, insightful, and non dull. He is the owner of a large personal library (containing thirty thousand books), and separates visitors into two categories: those who react with 'Wow! Signore professore dottore Eco, what a library you have! How many of these books have you read?' and the others - a very small minority - who get the point that a private library is not an ego-boosting appendage but a research tool. Read books are far less valuable than unread ones. The library should contain as much of what you do not know as your financial means, mortgage rates, and the currently tight read-estate market allows you to put there. You will accumulate more knowledge and more books as you grow older, and the growing number of unread books on the shelves will look at you menacingly. Indeed, the more you know, the larger the rows of unread books. Let us call this collection of unread books an antilibrary.”
Haha I came here to say just that. Are all 42 of those words above the fold really important enough to be upper case? Literally this entire page is UPPERCASE COPY of different sizes. I'm imagining their designer looks like this:
http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_yodqvnVBUBM/TUs3JCu2glI/AAAAAAAAAq...
How did it even make sense in your head to compare an OLTP workload to a chat service?

The proxy servers are there to terminate the large number of persistent connections. Of course it's possible to do it using less servers, but given the Hipchat guys are smart (disclosure - I'm an Atlassian and know the internals) I would give them the benefit of the doubt rather than engaging in armchair architecture.
By taking no credit, they ensured the story would be about the documents and not the burglars.
Ah, there we go! It's working again. I have been having trouble accessing it for the past couple hours, so suspected the worst.
Yeah thats the last version.

I am working to convert them over to v2 of the SDK.

Tennis app is almost ready. Doing the squash one will not be too hard.
I'm 22 and never wore a watch while growing up, but I've been using a Pebble for about 3 months. I really like it.

It's been most helpful when I'm skiing, biking, or flying RC planes. Checking messages at a glance is awesome. I also use it for navigating music while driving.

Probably the biggest affect of using the Pebble has been having its function as a watch - somewhat ironic. If I forget it, I'm constantly looking at my bare wrist to check the time.

I wanted to see a microphone for Siri/Google Now integration in the next hardware revision. Pebble Steel isn't that impressive to me - but I see where someone might want a fancier Pebble, rather than just a fancier band.
I think that was actually caused by the incredibly high cache-control expire header, which claimed cached versions of the page should be valid for 10 years (!)
It's the familiarity thing, definitely.

I do a lot of embedded MCU work, which involves so much bit-twiddling (all IO is through mem-mapped peripherals) that it's spilling over into other work I do.

If I need to shove around a bunch of boolean flags, I'll probably use a int, because the boolean operations required to access the separate bits are basically autonomic at this point for me.
1. They are doing multi-digit recognition at once, which, as the paper says "To our knowledge, all previously published work cropped individual digits and tried to recognize
those". So i don't understand your issue with the 5 digit limit, when everyone else is sticking to "1 digit at a time".

2. Spotting the building number, as the paper says, is taken care of by a different algorithm.

I'm not sure why this is also a big deal, since spotting the building number is "not the hard part" in most cases.

3. Your assertion that they could have used something off the shelf seems directly contradicted by the fact that the paper says nobody has ever published a multi-digit simultaneous recognition paper.

So i'm very curious what this "off the shelf" thing would be.
Could you elaborate?
This working group has failed
"Here, there are services that make life easier but not necessarily better, and that lose money every time they do business but exist thanks to their deep-pocketed investors."

It sounds like Prim did exactly what it was supposed to do: test the market. If there was indeed a strong enough market, they could work on creating a more efficient business without the need for outside capital. Investors are not in the business of throwing money away so people can get their laundry done, yet that seems to be exactly what the author is trying to say.

"Perhaps that money could be better spent helping people in need, and maybe so could the founders’ time."

Startups are incredibly capital efficient at testing needs. Even if there is nothing there, a lot of experience and knowledge is attained. Could such capital have been better allocated elsewhere? Probably not when you look at the potential upside.
YAHS - Holographic Touchless System Project
Counterpoint: Snowden vs Manning. It's not that simple.
Another point to make is that, even with a lot of data loss, it at least would be good in the future to skip a bunch of post identifiers (potentially even just saying "well, we certainly didn't use 100,000 of them, so I skipped up to 7100000") in order to try to not cause data that used to be there, and may have been archived by various sources including Google Cache or in the various reader clients people use on various devices , to suddenly have been swapped out by different posts leading to wide-spread cache corruption (and further confusion or loss). I mean, even just for the sake of people who may have posted links to this content in various places: maybe they wrote an article or posted a tweet/comment somewhere referencing how great/horrible a post was, and now suddenly it is saying something entirely different and potentially quite awkward ;P.

As a quick example, for those still not sure what I mean: what used to be an article about Python 2/3...

http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:9368SwV...

...becomes a comment with numerous references for how to learn arduino hacking.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7015438
TeXLive.js
the WRT54 was awesome, i loved mine running tomato firmware. For $300, i would never have considered it though.
Autodesk acquires circuits.io
I'd recommend you decouple the ADSL requirement, shunt that into a bridged modem. It's not a native router function and if you move to VDSL or DOCSIS then you'll need a separate modem anyhow.

Then you've much more choice as the market offers many capable routers ( like the one we're discussing ) that can terminate PPPoE.
For your device domination question: Yes - Android is around 80% of the world's smartphones now. Also, latest news published a few hours back says Android has beaten iOS in US too this year, with iOS market share falling to 43.1, whereas Android's share rose to 50.3 from last year.
Source: http://www.latinopost.com/articles/2814/20140106/ios-vs-andr...
If a regex is required to only match x if p(x), is the regex required to match ALL x such that p(x)?

Although this is probably just pointless nitpicking on my part.
> The “domain” registrations will be Bitcoin authenticated,

Wasn't there recently an outcry that Bitcoin transactions are identifiable, at least if your adversary collects enough data?
I hope that you're joking...
I could upvote this a hundred times... Its so damn good. I want to be the kid who learns to code, again.
IntelliJ IDEA Minimal Survival Guide
Basically these are just PC manufacturers and the Steam Machines are just PCs. So for them its more or less business as usual, and many of them (like Alienware) already had quite similar systems on sale. With the possibility of the Steam Machine brand resulting in more sales for products they would be selling in a similar form anyway, it was an easy sell i guess.

It could potentially be a huge business to sell the best steam machines on the market.
Why Women Aren’t Welcome on the Internet
I thought the steam machine would be more console-like in its uniformity but it seems to be more a case of "Limited compatible component guaranteed to work with Steam" sets of PCs.

Sounds like a good place to look if you want a normal desktop Linux PC which is almost guaranteed to be compatible.
Help us fight online fraud. Lead product marketing at Sift Science
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Ask HN: What resources do you provide to someone who wants to learn to code?
A friend is looking for a new line of work and we're going to discuss software development as a possibility.

Personally, I learned from “C for Dummies” (Dan Gookin) some years ago. My first inclination is to recommend this book: It was very fun, a great way to dip my toe in the water, and helped me begin exploring the world of computers from the inside out.

Still, I realize that today there are lot of resources available that I just don't know about or haven't paid much attention to. I code a lot in Ruby and it strikes me that it or Python might be a better place for a beginner to start these days. Perhaps something web oriented (HTML/CSS/JS, on its own, even) would be a good place also. I just don't know.

I'm wondering if anyone has any suggestions or thoughts, especially if they have either learned from scratch in the last few years or have helped another to do so.

Also, I'm planning on starting him off with two of my favorite quotes:

"The programmer, like the poet, works only slightly removed from pure thought-stuff. He builds his castles in the air, from air, creating by exertion of the imagination. Few media of creation are so flexible, so easy to polish and rework, so readily capable of realizing grand conceptual structures....

"Yet the program construct, unlike the poet's words, is real in the sense that it moves and works, producing visible outputs separate from the construct itself. [...] The magic of myth and legend has come true in our time. One types the correct incantation on a keyboard, and a display screen comes to life, showing things that never were nor could be." - Fred Brooks

"If you want to set off and go develop some grand new thing, you don't need millions of dollars of capitalization. You need enough pizza and Diet Coke to stick in your refrigerator, a cheap PC to work on and the dedication to go through with it." - John Carmack
Two books on the way down to my Kindle and three more on my wish queue. Fine taste.
I dunno if calling a pre-implemented solution is quite the same as writing one yourself.
This happens because most sites are still optimized for desktop use, with little or no testing on iPad. You'd be amazed how broken layout or JS on vast majority of websites are, but few mention this because modern browsers do a decent job of working around say, JS bugs. IE is especially good in this respect. So people test their site on say, IE, Firefox and Chrome, and fix bugs until it works fine there, not mentioning a lot of bugs they still left which were worked around by the browsers, then you open it on your iPad on which they didn't test -> epic fail. Which doesn't say anything bad about iPad's hardware or software really.
This is the first release to ship clang-format, which is a really nice code formatting tool. Hooking it in as part of your source control is an easy way to ensure a basic level of code formatting compliance and reduce code review noise over formatting!

I'm pretty excited, and am going to look into using this release on my codebase at work soon!
If it's due to more SW bugs in iPads than in laptops, can this be due to iOS being relatively immature as an OS compared to OSX and Windows?

Or are there some HW restrictions in tablets that make the SW more difficult to be made stable?