skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Is Duck Typing a Type System, or a Way of Thinking?
That's exactly what my startup is trying to address - how do you help users navigate 100, 1000 or even a million search engines? Ultimately, you need a way to browse search engines by topic and bundle them into custom lists for your specific needs. It's early going, but check Nuggety out if you're interested: http://nuggety.com/
Oh it's defined in the makefile... never mind.
I know nothing of Rand Paul's history. When I see someone talking about an issue (the NSA) and using it to paint an opponent ("Obama's NSA"), then I think it's safe to say that the point is as much that opponent as the mere paint.
What's ridiculous are sync services without history. Just blowing away data blindly and hoping for the best is beyond stupid.

Sadly, both Evernote and iCloud follow this "strategy". If you've never experience the joy of watching iCloud blow away every contact in your address book during a sync, consider yourself lucky.
For Excel 2007 (on Win8.1) you 'just' middle click (wheel-click) on Excel if it is pinned to the task bar (which is how I happen to have things set up -- same thing as opening two instances as mentioned elsewhere). I agree, not very obvious, but I think multi-mon puts you in the 'top' 5%* (so you won't get as much help from a scenario point of view).

*can't find a reference for that, so I may be off.
Use GObject[1] from GLib.

[1]: https://developer.gnome.org/gobject/stable/
Whenever I encounter a spinning progress indicator, I try to spin my mouse in sync with it.
Ask HN: How do you retain knowledge from books?
What do you do to implement the lessons you've learned?
Ubuntu Will Add Torrent Search to Embed Free Culture Into User Experience
Given the dramatic nature of that statement, can you back it up with more than just a one-liner? You're implying an extreme cascade of things.

As one example in that huge cascade of implications, you're suggesting they're spending ... a billion dollars a year to look good and that Sergey Brin has no intention of creating anything ground-breaking with his life & time (while he stares down the looming parkinson's while having $30b in wealth; ie there are other things he could be doing with his time, but his goal is to appear innovative, rather than be innovative).
Strangely, visiting that Gist, GitHub asks me to log in. When I visit in a private browsing window, the Gist is displayed. Wasn't Google doing something like this, preventing registered users with an old cookie from seeing public content without signing in?
Show HN: Social location-based messaging app [android]
Hey everyone,

I created an app that allows you to create location-based messages for yourself and friends. I think it's useful in many everyday scenarios, and it can also provide entertainment value. Let me know what you think!
Why? The app's been discontinued, and based on previous Apple acquisitions the integrated version will probably only be available for the iPhone 6 even if there's no technical reason to limit it in that way.
Webstock '13: Mike Monteiro - How Designers Destroyed the World
This publisher was selling books at a high price point to schools and a low price point to Amazon. Then, when the school discovered this, they bought them through Amazon. Umm, duh?

Alternative title suggestion: Amazon made it hard for us to fleece schools.
I would suggest Java. It has a really clean object model, is statically typed, and if you use Eclipse it will compile-as-you-write to highlight errors, suggest fixes, and autocomplete a lot of useful stuff like methods you can call on an object.

While you are at it, read "Effective Java" by Josh Bloch--it's full of excellent advice about OOP, and applies way beyond Java itself.

My biggest epiphany about OOP was realizing that just because you can use inheritance, you don't have to use it everywhere. You read a lot of toy examples where you have e.g. a shape, then you have children like square, rectangle, etc. and try to do everything this way in your projects. But it's actually often a really bad idea to overdo it, and Effective Java has some good explanations on the tradeoffs.
I think the answer is simple - the Governor of Kentucky took an active role in the project and assigned someone that you can actually pinpoint to be in charge of it. Contrast this to the federal site, where it's difficult to tell who was really managing the project.

Talking Points Memo did a good write-up of the Kentucky site [1] back in October [2], and in the last half of the article, two things stand out:

"Testing was undertaken throughout every step of the process, said Carrie Banahan, kynect's executive director, and it was crucial because it allowed state officials to identify problems early in the process. She laid out the timeline like this: From January 2013 to March, they developed the system; from April to June, they built it; from July to September, they tested it."

... and ...

"From a design standpoint, Kentucky made the conscious choice to stick to the basics, rather than seeking to blow users away with a state-of-the-art consumer interface. A big part of that was knowing their demographics: A simpler site would make it easer to access for people without broadband Internet access, and the content was written at a sixth-grade reading level so it would be as easy to understand as possible."

[1] https://kyenroll.ky.gov/

[2] http://talkingpointsmemo.com/dc/how-kentucky-built-the-count...
Or, you know, they can just license the technology to literally every automotive company in the world, for tens (hundreds?) of billions of dollars of recurring annual revenue.

This is technology that is only possible through their insane lead in all the work on Google Street View. It will take years or decades for people to catch up. Then again, there is only one Google, so perhaps nobody ever will. They have all the PhDs and the patents. They have all the ground-level data about every nook and cranny on American roadways and beyond, and a system in place that keeps this up-to-date. They have a huge economic moat on this. Who else can do this? It's a $1t+ projected future cash flow imho. You think they really give a shit about the secondary increase in advertising revenue from people surfing their web in the car, enough to give the golden goose away for free?

What you say sounds clever but really it's pretty simple: Google will have a product that everyone wants, a product that will provide a massive ROI even at a high price, and nobody else will be able to duplicate it for a very long time, if ever. No need for higher dimensional chess here. If they pull it off it will eclipse anything you or I have lived through in terms of upside for a single company.
Show HN: Git-today - Fun facts about your code slinging
I wouldn't expect that someone who attributes the differentiating power of the machines to SVM would be able to beat them on any kind of bill.
Wow, very cool: http://play.golang.org/p/1X6UljMqpD
Thoughtful comment, but I want to point out that your basis is misleading. His essential point goes beyond eschewing formula, to specifically recommending people use a spoken voice style.

The rationale that I infer is that when people sit down to "write", they enter "writing mode". Writing mode is laden with dogmatic baggage. But the ultimate goal is to communicate, not perform ritual. And since people communicate successfully all the time through speech, it makes sense to suggest that when people write, they don't enter writing mode. Instead, enter "speaking mode" and simply transcribe their speech.
Even if the intent is actually enhance user experience, I think by making these decisions manually instead of algorithmically that a pretty reasonable assumption could be made of human bias inadvertently coming into play.
People love C because it's simple.

Figuring out what some C++ code does can be very complex, depending on what particular features the previous developers decided to use.

C is also the lowest common denominator, making it better for certain development tasks (I'm thinking of mainly lower level shared libraries.)
I also don't get it.

When I got to learn C, back in 1992, I was already doing system programming in MS-DOS with Turbo Pascal.

A language with support for OOP, proper modules, blazing compile times, strings, vectors that don't decay into pointers, safer while offering the same low level features as C.

C looked stone age to me, luckily I got into C++ a few months later and saw a language which gave me back most of the features Turbo Pascal had, with the advantage of being a language in the process of being standardized.

I only used C when forced to do so during university assignments and on my first job.

Sadly C's compatibility is what helped C++ to become widespread, but also the cause of many of its issues in terms of security. At least with modern C++ is possible to avoid Cisms as much as possible.
How random workarounds are reminds of a joke that made the rounds on the internet more than a decade ago: "If Cars Were Built Like Computers" and the best line is:

> Occasionally for no reason whatsoever, you car would lock the door and refuse to let you in until you simultaneously lifted the door handle, turned the key, and grabbed hold of the radio antenna.
Some people think that C is a better language than C++, and may disagree with you on standard library being a "benefit".

You may try to look at "C++ FQA" at http://yosefk.com/c++fqa/ for an example.
That's great in the short term. In the long term, having consistent and harsh punishments (whether manual or algorithmic) for SEO cheaters is very much in the interest of Google's users, because it preserves the integrity of the search results.
Off all the dedicated note taking apps available, Dropbox + an iOS Dropbox-compatible text editor has worked best for me. Even if DB were to go down, I'd still have my local synced copies.
My technique was to use a "+spam" suffix on my email user with the idea that when the spambots got it, I'd just ban that address and change the web site to use "+spam1". That was over 10 years ago and I've never once gotten spam to that address. Turns out spambots aren't a problem any more after all.
The Timely app is absolutely beautiful and incredibly well-polished. This is great news for the Bitspin guys, but I'm worried about them getting the Sparrow treatment. I would love to see Google replace the stock clock on Android with Timely.
A search engine that didn't bury good quality results under vast amounts of recent ("fresh") blog spam would be a useful start...
I'm not so sure about it, but lossy compression algorithms are usually "non deterministic" and what I mean by that is that there is a target format to encode to, but you have some variation in how you're turning the original data into that

So there's a lot of room in optimising the process
I find Gruber tiresome because Apple doesn't need a cheerleader anymore. Back in the dark days when everyone was taking a dump on Apple he was interesting because of his ability to put his finger on what made Apple products special. Now that Apple products have proven their popularity the idiotic punditry that Gruber chooses to pick apart is mostly not worth the response.

This is the perfect case in point. What Gruber is saying is 100% correct as a response to Scoble's phrasing. That is, products don't sink or swim because the companies' employees choose to use them or not. Of course there's a correlation there since employees are also consumers. If pressed I suspect Scoble would probably concede that his phrasing was sloppy, and that he meant it more in the sense that lack of employee adoption is the canary in the coal mine.
That would probably be a good thing, along with doing away with legacy admissions.
Except Objective-C is Apple's toy.

GNUStep does not count, as it is ages behind Cocoa.
Nice try.

Removing 200 links out of nearly 200,000 links in a holiday week is not a lot of work. In fact, Google has told others waiting to be reconsidered that the wait time is multiple weeks.
https://twitter.com/Marie_Haynes/statuses/418734227228606464

Further, some sites which submitted reconsideration requests before RapGenius was penalized have not received a response. And in many such cases those other sites:

had far fewer links, removed a far greater quantity of links, disavowed a far greater quantity of links & were involved in something that was nowhere near as overt/intentional on the behalf of the webmaster (I've seen cases where the notices came after a payday loan hacker mixed in someone else's sites with their own links to create cover for their work)
The mandatory writing courses at top schools generally have some structures that are forced adversarially on first year students, like the "lens" essay. They're not bad but the students have to shoehorn whatever they're writing into the specified format, regardless of what the writing ends up needing to be.

One of the best ways to really 'get it' is to make outlines of things that are already written, to learn how it flows from one topic to another and back, and if it actually works. You can also reverse outline things you've already written and get a good idea of what's happening or missing and how it could change.

This is a decent resource, if a bit unorganized: http://harvardwritingcenter.wordpress.com/

"Lens essay" is worth a web search, if you're curious.
I use Evernote as well, mostly for researching o the internet.

However, I've found their Chrome Web Clipper to be remarkably bug-ridden and unreliable.

It's very annoying - as you can queue up a list of pages to clip, and you don't know if it's going to actually clip all of them. So you have to wait, and make sure each one is clipped.

See here for other people's reports on it as well:

http://discussion.evernote.com/topic/43399-clipper-hangs-on-...

If I knew of an cross-platform alternative, I'd seriously look into it.

Any good alternatives for web clipping or research?
Show HN: An IRC channel to help people find jobs
I had an idea a couple days ago and I went with it. Basically, the idea was to create an IRC channel to help people find jobs; computer related jobs, in particular. There would be a bot to display job listings. So I started working on a first take on the bot.

I decided to use Python because I love the language and I wanted to get more experience with a its libraries. TwitterBot (or JobFeeder on ##jobfeed) as I call it, uses Twisted (https://pypi.python.org/pypi/Twisted) and Twitter (https://pypi.python.org/pypi/twitter)for now. Basically, it gets the home timeline of the Twitter account I made for it, checks for updates, and sends them to the channel.

There is still plenty of work to be done before the bot itself is complete (though an open source project is never really done). I need to comment the code better or OldCoder (a good friend of mine) is going to point that out. Another friend of mine says that I should allow users to "register" for certain types of jobs and this is a good idea. If you have other ideas on how to improve the bot, please open an issue on GitHub or email me at: j.horne2796@gmail.com

If you want to have your own bot join the channel, PM JesseH on Freenode and ask me. If you have a Twitter account that posts jobs and want them to be sent to the channel, just /join ##jobfeed and tell me about it. I am pretty open minded to ideas.

I hope that this community continues to grow and that it might help people one day.

##jobfeed on Freenode

https://github.com/jessehorne/twitterbot
I had a long coffee with HandUp's founder Rose Broome, who's done a boatload of legwork in this space (and just had Jason Calicanis ask to lead an investment round). Was intro'd to her product by a homeless guy in my hood and immediately had to know more. It's the first piece of tech that really wowed me with regards to making some headway on some of these issues - I'd highly encourage anyone who thinks about the space a lot to connect with her team. They're pretty responsive @handup on twitter.
"She missed pointing out the hundreds of nuclear bombs that were detonated in the sea water around bikini Atoll in the 50's and 60's which didn't kill the west coast."

Specifically: nuclear testing released about 30 times more Cs-137 (in particular) than Fukushima, also mostly into the Pacific. An estimated 25 MCi [0] = 925 PBq, vs. 23-50 PBq [1].

[0] http://books.google.com/books?id=JLFX6EMPqBkC&pg=PA34

[1] http://www.pnas.org/content/109/16/5984.full

(copied from an older HN comment I wrote)
Sorry for my rant on the language. It's interesting what you did and definitely helpful for other people, especially if you implement the other missing parts you mentioned.
For those interested in the technical details, the original blog post is archived here:

https://web.archive.org/web/20131010012005/http://www.snappy...

I wonder why they took it down.
It was immediately obvious that search engines were worthwhile - that's actually the origin of Yahoo's name - "Yahoo, I can finally find stuff on the www!" Before search engines started getting really good, we relied on stuff like web rings and other indexes of sites.
"in 2003 when Denise Griffin, the person in charge of Google’s small customer-support team, asked Page for a larger staff. Instead, he told her that the whole idea of customer support was ridiculous. Rather than assuming the unscalable task of answering users one by one, Page said, Google should enable users to answer one another’s questions."
http://www.wired.com/magazine/2011/03/mf_larrypage/3/
There's no pressure for them to earn money from anything besides ads. Maybe this is cause for criticism from some Wall Street bean counters, but I don't see how it can be seen as an inherent negative for a technology company. They do a ton of interesting future tech stuff over there, arguably more than any other company in existence.
Winamp May Live On Thanks to New Owner
Best way to read the best HN articles.
you think Microsoft did this, huh? show me a large tech company that hasn't done this.
I disagree. We should not make life more difficult than it is already for homeless people. We should provide them a path to integrate to society (access to shelters, bathrooms, education, medical and social help). Some homeless might grab the opportunity to leave homelessness, but let's not fool ourselves, some will remain homeless. The remaining homeless would be at least healthier and less outcast.

That will attract more homeless in SF, sure! (actually, some cities pay to send their homeless to SF already http://thinkprogress.org/health/2013/09/11/2602391/san-franc...). But that is not a sufficient reason to not make what is right.

If every city in the Bay would do the same, there would less incentive for homeless to congregate in SF.
Cool, hopefully they open source this code sooner rather than later. Obviously they are probably going to keep it as a competitive advantage for the next batch of iOS devices but I hope they open it up shortly after that.
Vala is a nice C#-like language based on gobject. It also has wrappers for most popular C libraries.

https://wiki.gnome.org/Projects/Vala/Tutorial
The Unicode solution chosen by Python 3 required a major backwards incompatibility, but that wasn't the only possible solution to Python 2's Unicode problems. The biggest problem in Python 2 was simply that the implicit conversion between bytes and characters used the ascii codec and would fail if any non-ASCII characters were found. Python 3 chose to solve this problem by forcing the developer to specify a codec explicitly whenever this conversion happened. If instead they had simply changed the default codec from ascii to utf-8, many of the ubiquitous Unicode-related bugs in Python 2 code would have simply been fixed in a mostly backwards-compatible way. This wouldn't have fixed the problems for people who commonly use non-UTF-8 encodings, but that seems to be rare and getting rarer (in my experience; my understanding is that the biggest remaining exception is the use of UTF-16 on Windows).
> YouTube user SadowickProduction gives a step-by-step breakdown of how Daft Punk built the basic backing track for “One More Time,” using Eddie Johns’ “More Spell on You"

I think we can agree that overanalyzing a hastily-posted article is pointless.
It's much easier to go from html2txt than the opposite.
Reports coming in BitPay has been hacked. Over $80M worth of bitcoin gone?
To me, email address obfuscation seems like one of those things that everyone does because everyone else is doing it. However, I've had my email address public and unobfuscated for years and I get very minimal amounts of spam, largely thanks to Gmail's wonderful spam filter.
I think the point here is that this is only a complicated topic if you are trying to follow the letter but not the spirit of the guidelines.

So you can't figure out exactly how you can game the system... boo hoo.
Interactive video about making video games
> an apple fan boy, Gruber. What else one could expect him to say?

"This is such bullshit it hurts my head." [...] "The point isn’t about what Apple can do but what they should do. And they shouldn’t be doing this."
http://daringfireball.net/2008/09/podcasters_rejection

From an imaginary app-store reviewer diary: "Rejecting all of them, consistently, would in fact be no good at all. The feeling of being part of the monolith — of being the monolith — really only surges when I use my position to act capriciously. To act fairly would be to follow the rules. To act capriciously is to be the rules."
http://daringfireball.net/2009/05/diary_of_an_app_store_revi...

"Translation" of Apple PR into English: "We decided from the outset to set the formula for our bars-of-signal strength indicator to make the iPhone look good — to make it look as if it 'gets more bars'. That decision has now bitten us on our ass."
http://daringfireball.net/2010/07/translation_iphone_4
No You're right! I know you weren't implying that the homeless should LOSE out on OP's offer due to detrimental qualities like "psychological or drug issues".

Indeed, these are WINNING qualities!

That's why I think we should name our bum fighters after their winning qualities.

Find out which winning quality is the best!!

(But you know you would bet on 'Junkie' Bob over 'Lazy Hammock' Steve any day.)
If it has an effect on overfishing then we should welcome it. Sometimes paranoia can be useful. Or there will be no more tuna left for our grandchildren.

Nature does not care so much about radiation than we do. The wildlife in Chernobyl had fared better after the accident simply of not having humans present. Some like Stewart Brand went so far as arguing for placing nuclear waste in dry cask storage into nature preserves. Just to keep them pristine.
Pushinka: A Cold War puppy the Kennedys loved
You haven't addressed my argument at all. Replace bribery with favors, and my argument stands.

I used both interchangeably (see point #2), and I've edited for clarification.

If you want to keep going on the overly semantic line of argument, bribery = gifts, not just money.
One thing people often do, and it does help to a certain extent is to write/blog about the books you read. Summarize the essentials for your readers, it'll serve them as inspiration for new reading material and you as a perfect refresh of what you actually read and worked through.
If you think Google is impervious to competition, maybe you're thinking about the challenge in the wrong way. If someone beats Google it won't by being exactly the same as Google but better, but by solving what Google solves in a better way. A relevant Quora answer: http://www.quora.com/Search-Engines/What-should-a-new-search...
Because they want to drive traffic to their other sites while satisfying the segment of their users that want seamless identity integration.

The segment of users that don't like this (me and you) they do not care for. They made this painfully obvious with Google+ and YouTube.
You're probably thinking of Stac Electronics v Microsoft Corporation:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stac_Electronics#Microsoft_laws...