skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You're a couple indirections from the reality. It seems that you've fallen for the democracy delusion, assuming that your individual opinion should be congruent to governmental framework while hoping for vice-versa.

1. The scope of the NSA is what it is because yes, every government spies to the extent they can fund and get away with it diplomatically.

2. The reason you're seeing this turn into such a publicized political issue is that the reality of the digital panopticon is a mortal threat to the business model of Google, Facebook, et al (aka the datamining companies). This business model would have never become popular if people exercised a modicum of forethought about which technologies to adopt, but knowledgeable techies ignored their reservations when they saw a chance for social acceptance by making software easy for "normal people". So the datamining companies really wish to promote the idea that the NSA has transgressed rather than let people realize their business foundations are fundamentally anti-user.

3. Governmentally, nothing is going to actually change. Perhaps we'll get some resignations, specific named-program decommissioning, more laws to be skirted by individual analysts, and other such feel-good surface changes. But the critters deciding anything know that this is just the ugly business of how spying has worked and will continue to work, and that the NSA was just unluckily exposed.

4. The only avenue of meaningful change is for people to take their electronic destiny into their own hands. If you aren't in control of the software running on your "computer", then it is no longer yours (I've elaborated here - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6607303). Yes, many CPUs probably have bugs that lead to root exploits and crypto sidechannels. But how can there be any demand and focus for solutions to this when the tech zeitgeist is to freely give up control of your computational device by regressing it into a dumb terminal?
Recent Court Decisions Should Sober Apple
> This is what is so disturbing about Obama and his supporters. He told them bald faced lies about his fundamental views, and is fairly unapologetic about it.

Can you give some examples? Seriously. I can't recall Obama giving a definitive opinion on anything. (e.g. his evolving "views" on gay marriage.)

His detractors keep calling him a leftist, socialist even though he doesn't seem to have a strong (or passionate) opinion on any subject.
Yet pretty much every real estate tech is the same "search for properties" in a slightly new way.

How about someone builds a new unified modern MLS?

The vast majority of real estate startups are unimpressive and quite frankly bringing nothing really new to the table.
Technology can help to a certain extent, but only if open source and handled client side. No amount of encryption on Apple's (or any company's) end will matter, because users can no longer trust them.
I certainly wouldn't design a new product for ipad 1 users but - and, admittedly, I don't know how much effort is required - I would consider supporting them. In the same way that I wouldn't design a website for IE8 users, but I would certainly support them.

How old do you think it's reasonable to support tech for nowadays? Bear in mind that the iPad1 was released just three and a half years ago, and was then updated a year later. iOS 6 has only been around for just over a year. So are you suggesting that the maximum life span for a $500-800 piece of tech should be 2 years? Or 1 year? I'd protest at even 3 and a half years, personally.
Wow, I've learned even more about VLC (and programming in general) and I'm even more impressed. Thanks for this little insight!
Anything specific on F# applied to Web API?
"Users don't care whether you use J2EE, Cobol, or a pair of magic rocks. They want their credit card authorization to process correctly and their inventory reports to print. You help them discover what they really need and jointly imagine a system."

Damn right!
just donated 0.10 btc. really easy with bitpay integration. would rather not give paypal or my cc the fees.
http://www.fleapay.com - full disclaimer: I'm a founder (and we're hiring).
It must be so wonderful living in your world where there are only a dozen frameworks to choose from. Does money grow on trees there too? Are the streets made of gold? Do people fly their cars to the beach everyday and swim in cherry flavored cola? Please tell us more.
There is a VLC for iOS, but if you want efficient hardware accelerated video playback (which you do on a battery powered device), you'll have to settle for mp4 and the built-in CoreMedia framework. As a bonus it will also play seamlessly in the system browser and any apps with a native UIWebView component.
Thanks for the suggestion, we're adding to our list
Its not confusing. hkmurakami clearly states he wants to know how he can ease the transition to Linux for the average user. The average user isn't going to bother with the steps you mentioned. Just because it can be made to work doesn't mean its an acceptable solution for the average user.

Look at it this way - lets say I made, for example a fingerprint scanner for Windows, and you wanted to use it for Linux. I could say "yes! it works on Linux! You just have to write your own C driver!" You can clearly see this isn't an acceptable solution as writing a driver is needlessly complex especially if you don't have the proper documentation.

Now you might argue that writing a driver and searching Google for pipelight are in way two different leagues - but to the average user, asking them to do that might as well be the same as asking them to write their own driver.

Even the instructions you gave are confusing. Follow the instructions for your distro? Wait, you expect the average user to use the command line? What distro am I using? Linux? Should I follow AV Linux?

Because you most likely work with computers everyday on a professional level, you are vastly overstating the know-how of the average computer user. So yes, Netflix does work on Linux - if you are a wiz enough to get it up and working. The average user? No.
>No, you don't really get to complain about it when you are asking them for large sums of money.

Attitudes like this are a big part of why I am far happier to run a for-profit business at near-breakeven than I am running a not-for-profit or cooperative enterprise.

$20K is... rather less than what my RHEL bill would be if I was using RHEL and not CentOS.

I mean, I'm a pretty small shop, and $20K is a lot of money for me (thus I'm using CentOS and not RHEL.) - but by the standards of a whole operating system? twenty grand is small potatoes. Hell, /my/ power bill is rather more than $20K a year.
Rethinking Blogs at the New York Times
To the author's credit, the article consistently says that "Japanese culture" is risk-averse, not that "Japanese" are risk-averse. If you have two cultures A and B, and A has rules or conventions that reward risky behavior more than B, then I think it's fair to describe culture A as more risk-tolerant and culture B as more risk-averse.
Man, thank you so much for posting this. For a while I have been pondering on a few real estate based ideas, sadly I even half-assed a mobile cms for real estate, collected prospective agents and then let it all go.

Time to get moving!
> I won't pretend to have a solution.

See, here is the thing. At the end of the day, hypotheticals are worthless, concrete solutions are all that matters. It isn't anglocentricism that we picked the solution that is actually fleshed out and works over the vague hypothetical solution. It's "get-shit-done"-ism

> I guess you would like to have some compression scheme, since I'm guessing it would save space over having 2-4 bytes (however many there are in the Chinese language) for every character.

You are forgetting the pigeonhole principle: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pigeonhole_principle

You can of course compress a text[1] after encoding it, but that really is an unrelated topic. You can't get 10k possible characters into 8 bits, you need to go multi-byte.

> Pragmatism ũber alles, chants the American.

"Un bon mot ne prouve rien." -Voltaire

[1] _most_ text that you will see in practice. No lossless compression algorithm can compress _any_ possible text.
Come now. The Star Trek movie curse is somewhat true, at least for movies two through eight. Each odd numbered movie (in the set) has a worse all time domestic ranking than the following even numbered movie (in the set). There is at lease some true.

It kinda breaks with nine, because it did so much better than ten, and all of them did a lot worse than eleven and twelve (but we don't count those, they're different...)
CSS keyframes animator
Thanks for the suggestion... we're working hard to get auth up and running!
Now, all the advice in the Windows section - don't do this, don't do that, only and always do third - is lovely, but if you happen to care about app's performance, you will have to carry wstrings around.

Take a simple example of an app that generates a bunch of logs that need to be displayed to the user. If you are to follow article's recommendations, you'd have these logs generated and stored in UTF8. Then, only when they are about to be displayed on the screen you'd convert them to UTF16. Now, say, you have a custom control that renders log entries. Furthermore, let's imagine a user who sits there and hits PgUp, PgDown, PgUp, PgDown repeatedly.

On every keypress the app will run a bunch of strings through MultiByteToWideChar() to do the conversion (and whatever else fluff that comes with any boost/stl wrappers), feed the result to DrawText() and then discard wstrings, triggering a bunch of heap operation along the way. And you'd better hope latter doesn't cause heap wobble across a defrag threshold.

Is your code as sublime as it gets? Check. Does it look like it's written by over-enlightened purists? You bet. Just look at this "advice" from the page -

::SetWindowTextW(widen("string litteral").c_str())

This marvel passes a constant string to widen() to get another constant string to pass to an API call. Just because the code is more kosher without that goddamn awful L prefix. Extra CPU cycles? Bah. A couple of KB added to the .exe due to inlining? Who cares. But would you just look at how zen the code is.

--

tl;dr - keeping as much text as possible in UTF8 in a Windows app is a good idea, but just make sure not to take it to the extremes.
Howso? Windows 8 is objectively worse than Vista. How is that not clear? On any measurable metric, the author is right.
Come on now. He's still a Democrat, with Democratic views, hardly pursuing the agendas the Republicans were pursuing before (for example, trying to get rid of social security; do you remember all the Bush town halls on that?). He's not going to suddenly oppose abortion.

First and foremost on his platform was bringing back bipartisanship in Washington. And he sure tried his damndest to do that, trying time and time again to compromise with Republicans, trying to get them on board, trying to meet them halfway. That was him keeping that promise, and it's one I think he fundamentally believes in. He's always trying to build a consensus, not trying to be a firebrand. If others chose to ignore that repeated refrain in his campaigning, then too bad.

He also expended nearly all his initial political capital on health care, as promised. And reformed health care. Please let's not forget this, as it's skewered the Democrats more than once in the last 50 years.
Congress (all of it) should be briefed on the overview. The details (some of which are, rightly, classified)? No way. That's pretty much the established way of dealing with classified information - all of Congress does not get to know the details.

> ...the NSA can't be trusted with the secrets it has.

Very true.
> I believe the ZIL (ZFS intent log) is used to cache during writes, and the L2ARC is used during reads.

I think the ZIL (zfs intent log) is an intermediary for synchronous writes only. My understanding is that it effectively turns the sync write into an async write (from the standpoint of the zpool) -- this is why it requires a faster device than the pool it is used with. If it is absent, the pool itself houses the zil.
NSA sure love their double forward slash and smiley faces
Could not have said this any better myself!
What's really funny about GWB is he did a negligible amount for the pro-life crowd. He dangled that fish in front of the rabid pro-lifers but did nothing for them except lip service. I don't want to get into an abortion debate. I'm just saying that the pro-lifers hardly get anything from any politician and it's just funny how they vote based on whatever the lip service is. The politicians have an incentive to never settle anything because those single issue voters would just move on to other issues and weaken their power base.
The more transparency there is, the better the legitimate charities look and the less likely people are to throw money at what turn out to be obvious scams.

Transparency is critical.
The Looming Payment Liability Coming to American Merchants in 2015
wouldn't be surprised to see someone buy these guys up pretty soon.
I've found some (arguably minor) things to be kinda messy. Maybe the result of a one-person language that grows too much before getting some feedback.

1) Everything is (strangely) called a procedure, and then there's syntax to differentiate arguments that will be modified in place (proc myproc(myarg : int, inplacearg : var int)). Kinda weird, and a lost opportunity to have checking for pure functions at compile time.

2) import vs. include. Why have include at all to shoot yourself in the foot if you have cheap namespacing?

3) If vs. When ?

4) varargs feels kinda unnecessary

5) Case-insensitive. Oh... why?

On the bright side, I like how OO was implemented.

I disagree that it's a middleground between C and Python though. I see it more like an evolution of Pascal, it has the same niceties (ALGOL-like, static types, builds executables) and some things added on top (no VM, but GC'ed, metaprogramming).
You also re-watched Enemy of the state (1998) last night?
We do! We haven't committed to a timeline, but you can track progress at these two links:

* https://github.com/balanced/balanced-api/issues/23

* https://github.com/balanced/balanced-api/issues/294

Also, we can accept credit card _payments_ from anywhere in the world. It's paying money out that's the hard part.
Off topic, bluekitten it seems you've been hellbanned and your message show as dead. Looking at your comment history, I can't imagine what triggered it, so if you see this it might be a good idea to send an email to pg.
https://support.balancedpayments.com/hc/en-us/articles/20013...

+1 for not encouraging +1 to GitHub issues.
Couldn't agree with you more. And I think the effervescence of the Silicon Valley tech scene creates tons of events, roles and initiatives that are a complete waste of time (For example: some meetups, happy hours and incubators of incubators of incubators). The value is created by making and selling things!
tl;dr: The City of San Fancisco should prohibit Google buses until Google promises to magically repeal the laws of economics that rents increase when demand exceeds supply.

EDIT:

The paper specifically recommends that the city prevent Google buses from stopping to pick up passengers until Google enters into "Community Benefits Agreements" (CBAs), the purpose of which is to "foster changes" and "mitigate impact".

Unfortunately, it's obvious to any rational person that Google cannot change human nature via any kind of CBA. Hell, they can't even get me to sign up for Google+!

The thing that makes the paper super-funny, are the types of things the author be included in these CBAs would be agreements to "hire locally", which would require Google to open new offices in San Francicso, which would... further increase rents. Funding for parks, which would... further increase rents. Job training, which would increase wages and... further increase rents.

But hey, we could all live in a Marxist paradise if people would all just magically stop being humans who want what's best for themselves.
Yes. If I want to work with language and do some stringology, that's what I want. I might want to swap some characters, find length of words etc. To have vector of characters (as what humans consider characters) is valuable.
Why DevOps Matters To Developers
You know what else loses developers? Shutting down the project.
Feedback from webmasters is really helpful for us. We want to make sure we're making data available via API responsibly, so would love to hear your suggestions/ thoughts as we define a scalable solution.
It's more historical fiction than science-fiction.
3 Little Annoying Things That Sneaky WordPress Developers Do
I'm not sure what modules or tools you are talking about, but if you use Sql Server Integration Services (formerly SQL Servrer Data Transformation Services), you basically have a data processing pipeline which supports everything and all transformations on the planet.

And obviously it supports arbitrary text-encodings, although sometimes you will need to be explicit about it.

If you used the simplified wizards, all the options may not have been there, but you should have been given the option to export/save the job as a package, and then you can open, modify, test and debug that before running the job for real.

Seriously. SQL Server has some immensely kick-ass and über-capable tooling compared to pretty much every other database out there.

To even suggest it doesn't support UTF8 is ludicrous.
Go basically only has one modern feature (goroutines). Beyond that it's a throwback to Java version 1.
Increasing System Robustness With A ‘Let It Crash’ Philosophy
I think you're actually mapping areas where the market is being prevented from providing enough rental units for one reason or another.
That's fine, no embarrassment needed... I understand the act of the moderator but I also believe in taking the mystique out of random socialisation over the internet, which is an enlightening and innocuous pastime.
To be clear, I haven't attempted to argue against public education existing. (If it seems that way, it's a failure of communication on my part.) The State is not a contaminant whose influence on small children should be avoided at all costs.

But they're not an unmitigated blessing whose opinions should supplant those of parents in all cases either. So I think that it's really good that people have the option to send their children somewhere that isn't a public school system (including a private school or homeschool, possibly even with vouchers). That's a simple, useful check on its power -- and explicitly seeking to remove that check with the goal of changing the way children think is Kinda Creepy or worse. We don't need no thought control...
It's become funny to me how people who aren't professional web developers assume that the "pace of technology" means you must obviously be learning and using the newest cutting-edge tech at all times.

Aside from such a thing being irresponsible for those of us with clients who need fundamentally sound and stable groundwork, it's an incredible waste of resources. Unless it's actually your job to evaluate new languages and frameworks (which, by the way, would be awesome!), it rarely makes sense to be riding the latest craze just because it is the latest craze.

It's good to have options. It's not necessarily good to try and use all of them.
Great article. Super important everyone knows these services. Steve Blank also has a TON of great free resources on his blog: http://steveblank.com/tools-and-blogs-for-entrepreneurs/
I wasn't able to sign up for an email account without one until I found this link http://e.mail.ru/cgi-bin/login?lang=en_US where you can use any phone number (but still require one to sign up).
For games, instead of ChromiumEmbedded I suggest "node-webkit" developed by Intel:

https://github.com/rogerwang/node-webkit
Love your idea. Would love to follow up on this with you
Just sent 50 USD their way. Its not much but it is as far as I can spend. I recommend everyone helping. OpenBSD is one of those projects that benefit everyone not only those using it.
I'm not sure if you understand. Bruce knows the top secret information because he read it in the leaks. The government officials can lose their security clearance for admitting to discussing top secret things with him.
Actually UT heavily distorts the rental market, since while the students are poor, their housing is being paid for via loans or parents. So rents usually run higher than market rates near universities. This is why Universities frequently have expensive housing, but are unable to keep nearby stores in business.
From the little I know about metaprogramming, it sounds analogous to doing string manipulations in a language, and then eval'ing it (which is heavily frowned upon, at least in python).

How is this understanding wrong?
They worked in Chrome Canary for me. The pictures did not load correctly, but the actual maps that are linked to worked.
You can collect the estimate of the units wanted + email address. This way you could both capture the HN's momentum and keep in touch later. I'd love to hear from you again when you have stock :-) (and I am in .be as well :-)
> Every study I've seen contradicts this common sense argument.

Can you provide some of these studies? I've never seen one that was written by someone who understood why its important to control for race/financial status/etc, which makes them fairly meaningless.
I totally agree with you about the spacing between methods. I've actually found myself putting a double-space between methods, but I do that in most languages so it hasn't bugged me as much. Thanks for posting the image!
...so you haven't actually read the paper
Growth Company Blogs You Should Be Following
There's a nice world where people aren't snippy about comments that aren't particularly offensive.
Great, let's start doing something about it instead of complaining. Here's my cynical take on a back of the napkin recipe for political change:

1. Call, write, tweet, and facebook your representatives, both local and federal, and tell them what you think- be sure to inflate your credentials and threaten to give money/votes/accolades to their political enemies. For bonus points, tell their enemies the same thing. For even more bonus points, run as a candidate yourself.

2. Write/speak/act out in the public sphere, make sure to get as much attention as possible and to be moderately vitriolic and abundantly populist in your rhetoric. Use only words, concepts, and rhetoric that a dim 9th grader would understand.

3. Join a physical protest- if there isn't one near you, it's your job to start one. I'd keep it nonviolent if I were you. I know that this isn't the cup of tea for most HN readers, but there's no way around it: physical presence matters, and the numbers of people who have protested surveillance thus far have been extremely paltry. We don't have the luxury of waiting for someone else to do it for us.

4. Convince your less-enlightened friends and relatives to do items 1-5, or at least be terrified of the government.

5. Start again from 1; repeat until successful.
You are complaining about bugs to fix, in particular typed arrays and indexeddb (I hate typing that). We did fix XHR vs. typed array bug here:

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=866431

but you have a point about indexxxeedddbbb :-D.

Smooth touch interactions are supported better by Firefox OS with touch events, do you have a particular bug in mind?

Fixing bugs and blogging about them would take all blogging energy for little gain. We fix bugs without enough positive noise, but I think the main thing is to fix bugs.

OTOH, Emscripten/asm.js work (which, silly exaggeration, is not blogged about every other day) is not a bug fix. It's a bigger deal, and it needs explication (especially because some FUD about how it entailed new VMs still lingers in the twittersphere).

Also, we're fastest on Emscripten output due to AOT. That is news, news! I say ;-).