skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
After a year of using Win 8, it still takes me a few tries to get the charms menu to display (it pops up all the time when I don't want it to). I hook a 2nd monitor to my laptop a lot, and trying to get the mouse in that "charm bar sweet spot" without crossing over to monitor 2 is a complete pain. I was really hoping that 8.1 would fix these usability issues, but it doesn't seem like Microsoft was really listening to users' complaints.
In light of a recent HN discussion on the incomprehensibility of many product pages and "Show" posts[1], I think it's worth noting that this is a very clear page that lets me know exactly what the product is, how much it costs, and how to get it.

:-)

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7489870
I'm looking forward to the Mooshimeter Bluetooth multimeter, which will have an SDK: http://www.dragoninnovation.com/projects/34-mooshimeter

There's also a Seeed Studio one but it uses the serial port Bluetooth profile, so no iOS support: http://www.seeedstudio.com/wiki/Bluetooth_Multimeter
I know there are sizeable number of people who support giving gay couples all the property, legal, etc. rights under "civil union" umbrella but oppose calling it "marriage" under religious or cultural or any other notions. I personally think governmental sanction on marriage is a problem here and as soon as people are ready to do the right thing - meaning, take government permission out of this voluntary contract and leave the government only to be notified that such contract happened and not permit or deny it - all the problem goes away. But I certainly can see that these people I describe above is not for limiting legal rights of gay people in medical decisions, property rights, etc. but they object to that being called "marriage". This is their position, and denying its existence does not really help anybody.
If it is an April Joke, that would be ironic.

They think people would not take seriously, but as everybody knows, SVN is increasly being replaced with Git and that doesn't seem illogic even for them to use Git.
IBM & TI can also bring a microprocessor to market, and have pretty extensive experience with x86. To be fair, their last stand-alone x86 were i486 contemporaries, but it's not as though they don't understand the innovations that lead from i486 to i7 (see: Power7). If there was a market demand, either could probably produce an x86 compatible, depending on licensing issues. If you go back to 8086 and i286 then NEC & Fujitsu made x86 chips and still have formidable chip design capabilities.
This is breaking bad. This is big. this is hilariously un-funny.
For me, the answer is "just don't use Metro". I have 3 computers running Win8, only rarely do I use anything in Metro.

Why use Win8, then? Well, it has some nice small core OS improvements over Win7, licenses were cheap, and it will be supported for longer going forward.

If you ever get lost or stuck with a mouse&keyboard, all you have to remember is to hit the "Windows" key on the keyboard until you get to the Metro home screen. From there, Desktop Mode is one click away. Also, Alt+Tab works in Metro, and can take you to any process- metro or desktop.
I didn't have an opinion on basic income before (though a while ago I came across http://philip.greenspun.com/politics/welfare-reform.html, which seemed interesting), and I didn't come away from the article and comment thread with an opinion on basic income, but I was very pleased to see a proposal for modeling ideas with computation.

It's also very nice to see an adjustment on that proposal with some new information. It wouldn't have occurred to me that making a chart look hand-drawn would be effective in implying less precision, but now I have a new idea I can try out for graphics demonstrating rough ideas.

I think Chris's tone can be blunt and read as unaccommodating, which may be distracting from the his points, but I think I prefer it to the overly casual tone many adopt when stating an idea. That tone isn't great for customer service but it's very helpful when trying to understand an idea and whether or not to accept it.

Also, it is important to base comments in fact. He accused people on both sides of innumeracy: "Like most political arguments, the discussion of a Basic Income borders on innumeracy. So I’m going to take the opportunity to launch into a far more interesting mathematical tangent, and illustrate how to use Monte Carlo simulation to understand uncertainty and make business/policy decisions. I promise that this post will be far more interesting to python geeks than to policy wonks. I’m just picking Basic Income as a topic to discuss since it showed up on hacker news yesterday and it’s a topic where I see basically no numbers whatsoever."
It is not reassuring to see the level of compromise, the cost of disclosure, and the abuse of antiquated protocols rising faster than the institutions that depend on them can respond. In particular there was a lot of resistance early on to using credit cards on the Internet, now it is nearly compulsory, and yet many of the fears that banks and others raised in the early days of e-commerce are coming to pass.

I have to believe there are some seriously rich criminals out there. What do they expect to do with their ill gotten gains?
Fargo is quite nice http://fargo.io/
You disagree with what? I never said anything about practical applications. And you'd better bet that complexity theory (and the world of topics that basic familiarity with complexity theory opens) has more important applications. Cryptography, combinatorial optimization, approximation algorithms, communication complexity, machine learning theory, need I go on?

All I'm saying is that automata theory doesn't give the glimpse into theoretical computer science that every "introductory theory" textbook ought to.
> Amazon won't tell you my name. Netflix won't tell you my name

If you want to sell something on Amazon, Amazon will tell other people your name. I sold some apps there to experiment with the whole process, and they attached my real name to it.

There is never a need for anyone to know your name from Netflix. However, with Coinbase, there is a need for other people to be able to recognize who they are doing a transaction with.
Some others have already mentioned that "mind mapping" software is similar, and I'd agree -- just see this image[2]. That image was created with Mindnode[1], which I really like (I've only tried the light version, but that seems to be discontinued).

[1]: https://mindnode.com/assets/images/screens/iphone-1-1136x640...

[2]: https://mindnode.com/
That's how the graphs in the article were generated. A bunch of people played with it here:

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/12675147/how-can-we-make-...
I totally share the author's view.

If those stop-and-frisk are really needed, then, in my view, they should be applied to different cohorts in the same proportion as those cohorts perform crimes: maybe it's 60% for ages 18-30 and 30% for 30+, could be 90% males and 10% females. Only for population groups where crime rates change significantly, of course. (Race may or may not be one of those.)

Would that make sense?
The feature I find the most exciting from this write up is the Actionpack Variants.

I work on responsive web application all the time, and my biggest pain point is tablet fitting.

9 times out of 10 I have to manually write the tablet areas and hide the other content in tablet width. Bandwidth wasted!

With this I can create my tablet views easily. :D
You might like Flying Logic (flyinglogic.com) .
The author's examples -- proofs and ASTs -- provide a hint at the reason.

If you need a tree, it's most likely that you want some custom operations on that tree (e.g. parsing text into the tree, pretty-printing the tree, traversing the tree in various ways, etc.)

At some point, the tree is just a data structure and what you're interested in are full-blown, non-trivial algorithms/programs for fairly domain-specific tasks. In these cases, a library (or even custom implementation) for a general purpose programming language is more useful than a tool (a la Excel or vim).

Viewed in this light, it's not unsurprising that we have many domain-specific tools for manipulating trees. Most of the proof assistants have a GUI based on Gentzen-style sequents.

LaTeX has styles for type setting proofs which look like the ASCII ones in the article.

Tools for generating parsers often have tree-based UI's.

And so on.
There is already a way to communicate imprecision of results.

Error bars

Error bars

Error bars

Error bars

Got it?
Ask HN: My house was robbed.
Nothing of consequence was taken. A couple iPads. MacBook Pro but all my client files are in Dropbox. We may have lost a few family pictures. My MacBook called home but myself and five officers couldn't narrow down the apartment that it was in(or they didn't think we could get a search warrant for all 10 possible units).

The most valuable thing that was taken was my wife's feeling of security.(and mine too if I'm trying not to be too macho)

So here's my question: what do you all use for home security? I've been screwed by ADT's long term contracts before and while I have att uverse as my ISP, I don't have a landline and that used to complicate monitoring. I'm hoping the world has progressed.

Ideally it would be something with cameras that upload to the cloud so that if a burgled takes the hosting unit it will be to late and I'll have them on tape. If I could get alerts of movement on my mobile when I'm not home, that would be awesome too. Monitoring is not a must because I think it is pretty much worthless but LOUD NOISES would be nice.
> I don't think there was a single Republican candidate that campaigned on the issue of gay marriage and nothing else.

That would imply that it would be acceptable to associate with dirty anti-gay marriage types if they were otherwise politically useful, would it not?

And if that's the case then I do not see how you could logically then "boycott Mozilla" as a consequence of Eich's appointment as CEO, since Mozilla actually does tons of good for people.

> Donating money to Prop 8 was a simple and straightforward move to try to block gay marriage, and absolutely nothing else.

Be that as it may, the vibe I'm getting from Eich's opponents is precisely that "you're either with us or against us". And moreover, that commingling good deeds with foul ones is no excuse. After all I would hope that it's only a very few that think "Mussolini made the trains run on time" was an excuse for all the rest.

Given that we're tying Eich to a stake here he must have done something really bad, and if it's that bad it's the kind of thing you don't outweigh just by going "Well I also voted against Obamacare!".

Again, no single political group has done more to oppress homosexuals from being able to marry than the GOP, however you dress it up. If opposing gay marriage is automatically a bad enough crime to warrant Eich's treatment then it should be bad enough irrespective of other, "nicer" opinions.

After all, Eich himself surely has "good" opinions we'd mostly agree with, would he not? He may even be on the whole good for the community, but no one has accorded him the opportunity of a trial or even thought very hard about whether his "goods" outweigh his "bad".
I did that once to rip zelda's entire map.
With one java app, I ripped all tiles (fixed size). With the other, I just compared the grid tile by tile with my sprite-pallete and then created a map file. Pretty straight forward if you use a single layered map.
I have been working on http://educatornews.net. It's just getting off the ground, so if you like what HN offers and would like to see something similar for the education profession, feel free to get in touch.

EN is written in django, and the project is on github: https://github.com/ehmatthes/educator_news
Unfortunately he was unwilling to reply to my proposed NOPTransferPayment, which is a system in which each person pays himself or herself a transfer payment. If the payment is large, his preferred model indicates that the cost of the policy is very high, but if the payment is negative, then his preferred model indicates that the policy creates a very great amount of value out of thin air.

It is remarkable that someone would stick to such an obviously broken way of modeling the costs and benefits of transfer-payment-like policies (or of policies which have large transfer-payment-like parts, like Basic Job). He even goes out of his way to call attention to his continued insistence on this method months after the fact.
You're right, apologies. My number is outdated.
Study Shows Flawed U.S. Encryption Standard Could Be Broken in Seconds
can't believe nobody has mentioned org-mode yet.
The article was staying completely focused on why "I" am not going to buy a smart watch, but snatched defeat from the jaws of victory when he started extrapolating to the market.

He may be right, though. People have up on watches as functional items when they got phones, even though checking the time on a phone takes a little longer. There doesn't seem to be a big appetite for putting something on your wrist that isn't jewelry. Smart watches will either need to do amazing things, or be embedded in jewelry watches the same way a moon phase indicator used to be embedded.
Absolutely, yes. I arrived in 2001 from Australia. Chinese internet was so fast then, faster than anything we had back home. The phenomenon you describe is due to particularly high packet loss, seemingly far higher on Google-related IP ranges: though routinely 20-40%, Google seems to be a bit higher, up to 60%. I have no proof of this other than personal observation across multiple devices and locations, but honestly it seems like a soft play by the government to punish Google. The best workaround is to use an out of country proxy over an SSH tunnel, or the same over OpenVPN over an SSH tunnel (I started seeing frequent disruption on OpenVPN links a few years ago, probably also due to packet loss. SSH handles this better).
but we do: basic emacs org-mode file format is simple, intuitive, text-based and human-readable.
Balsamiq is great for this.
That seems to be an overstatement. I find myself visiting Detroit every two months or so (my SO is in Macomb working) from the Bay Area and although there's more companies starting, the tech scene is still very small (even when compared to places like Seattle).

When I've looked at opportunities at Google or Twitter in Detroit/Birmingham, it's really all sales and account management jobs targeted at folks servicing the auto makers.

Don't get me wrong, I like parts of Detroit but I still don't feel safe when driving around the "wrong" parts of town. It's getting better but by no means is it there.
You're right of course -- to a certain point. Half baked products will not succeed. Still, law of diminishing returns is in full effect here. When to launch? When is the MVP ready? I don't know the right answer.. Some say earlier than gut instinct would compel.
A joke or not, this makes SVN look bad.

As a SVN user I don't appreciate the message here. Every piece of technology is a platform that needs mindshare to survive. If it has no mindshare, it might as well be an excellent piece of engineering, but it'll still disappear.

In a perfectly rational world, with perfect communication, and universal understanding of everything, it wouldn't be a big deal - SVN and Git have different best use cases.

But in our real world, this action gives excellent bullets for the anti-SVN people to use now in any discussion bringing Git vs. SVN.
I think tons of companies battle with the limitations of "we should eat our own dog food." It tends to be a general rule, even when you as an organization have only marginal overlap with your target market.

I applaud Greg Stein's response (Stein is the founder and VP who was against the move):

> The short of it is: the Apache Subversion project chose this. We want to get our stuff coded and released. For our backend, we don't need the super-huge repositories that Subversion supports. Our project stores some binaries, but we can make Git work for us. We have no need for Subversion's fine-grained authorization ... shoot. We allow ALL ASF committers access to our repository. There are no barriers to the migration here, and some of the stuff that Infra has done for integration with GitHub? Pretty cool. Positives, and only little negatives.

I love seeing this commitment to the community and developers.

Edit though for completeness on the whole "dogfood" issue, this is another comment Stein made:

>So I'll be able to use the svn client to check out from the ASF git repo? Awesome. (...) We can dogfood svn against our own repo.
Some people understand subject matters just enough to make a statement but not well enough to analyze others' statements. Economics in particular seems to be full of these people
I've been looking forward to the conversation moving beyond phone records. In California, for example, it's mandatory to collect blood from newborns. Makes you think.
There's a difference. Swapping out a horn for a strobe, or horn strobe device is non-structural. Automatic doors and additional hand rails are structural modifications. Within the unit they are probably not required. Contacting the Federal Fair Housing staff might be a next step.
http://www.policymic.com/articles/86369/11-colleges-that-are...

Also the downvotes must be from Harvey Mudd alum.
Another project related to the one propossed in this article is a diff-diff3-patch like program suite that can be used on trees. It would fit in a great way with version control systems and make them (more) aware of structural changes in changesets.

Imagine being able to dump plain-text files for real trees when diffing-merging. The way differences are shown to the user could be like a project i did a few years ago to show differences in graphs (applied to basic-blocks graphs). Here is the link: http://corelabs.coresecurity.com/index.php?module=Wiki&actio...
>You are comparing 'vulnerability' of a service meant for people to connect and find each other to a service that handles millions of dollars of users money.
Ridiculous.

So you are saying that this somehow endangered customer funds?
I considered talking about the idiomatic angle, but I know very little about Clojure, and not much more about VimL, so I erred on the side of not listing that.

I am curious how much optimization TimL has. I haven't had a chance to actually look at it beyond the README (and I don't know if I'd understand anything if I did). Does it leverage an existing Clojure compiler, complete with optimizations, and treat VimL as a target architecture? Or is it closer to an AST transformation with all optimizations being hand-written for TimL?
Because those were bogus.

In retrospect, it should have been a huge warning sign that the entire thing was bogus. At worst (for Coinbase), they have someone reporting a legit security issue with a bunch of jokes at the top.
His other posts lead me to believe he he is more capable than that.
It is as much the militarization as the police as out and out corruption...
Honest question: why is it a slap in the face to developers?
Search Engine prototype
I filed a Freedom of Information Act request to the FBI about Coinbase, and they replied that they have no documents. https://www.muckrock.com/foi/united-states-of-america-10/coi... Of course, the FBI is explicitly allow to lie in response to FOIA requests if it will protect an ongoing investigation.

However, I was also told at a party by a Coinbase employee that this is not true (which is why I filed the request to begin with.)

I am certain that they have a relationship.
Which relevant banking law? AFAIK Coinbase is not a bank.
Oh, the stupidity, it burns. What sort of righting do you think they could do, several years past the fact? Gandi refused to respond to their web form for a period of about four weeks or more; they let my domain expire and be deleted (if I recall, the only problem was that my credit card expiration date needed to be updated in their system and the charge processed). Besides the immediate hassle and serious annoyance of having an uncontactable company ignore their support form, it ended up costing me a few hundred dollars to buy the domain back from a domain speculator who snatched it up.

What price should I put on that? What price is it worth to Gandi? Are they going to offer me a year's free domain registration with them? That offer has negative value to me; I wouldn't take it unless paid a lot of money to do so. Are they going to offer me a pile of money (no they aren't, it's not worth it to them). So what exactly are they going to offer here to right the wrong?

The point here - which the top of this thread made, but maybe it wasn't explicit enough for you - is that services such as domain registration can easily have effects disproportionate to the cost of providing them. If all of Google's domains were deleted tomorrow, the cost to Google would easily exceed ($10 x number_of_domains). So a poor service experience can easily do more damage than the sum total of all revenue ever received from a particular customer. Thus the commenter looking for companies which try hard to provide good service. Gandi.net is not such a company, in my experience. (Hint: companies which provide good service have email addresses and phone numbers to contact them.) That's my only comment.
Relationship Science: Harnessing Big Data for Power Networking
Although this is cool, the ultimate scraper would probably need to be somehow embedded in a browser and be able to access the JS engine and DOM. Embedded as a plugin, or some other extension depending on the browser.
You're right that most of the time we need non-trivial algorithms or visualizations for trees for it to be useful. If I ignored that it would be like wishing for a "general binary editor" because it would be so "powerful" and all data can be represented as binary.

I think, though, that there's enough common ground between the various domain-specific tree editors that some kind of useful intersection exists. Then the domain-specific tree editors would simply be plugins.
Pretty sure that's why Balsamiq mockups look they way they do. Same principle.
You got me. OkCupid's hypocrisy in this matter is clearly the most divisive issue in our society today. You should devote your website's front page to calling them out on it.
This is the thing I had been hoping for more than anything else for Windows 8.1. And yeah, I will forget all my objections to Win8 after that, because when you get down to it that's really my only objection to Win8.

I've got no real complaint with Metro apps, as such. What I've got a complaint with is that they don't behave like every Windows application I've used since approximately 1990. Not because there's anything broken about the existing desktop PC interaction model that Microsoft had been incrementally refining for decades, mind you. No, it's really just that Microsoft : Captain Ahab :: iDevices : white whale.
You actually have something here.
The effect doesn't seem to work on iPhone 5. Animation runs fine but no parallax.
Pocketbook (https://getpocketbook.com) - Sydney, Australia

Hi all,

We're a 5 person startup here in Sydney, Australia. We are changing the way people manage their money.

We are funded and have a small 5 person team working from Surry Hills. We are growing fast but need some help - we need more developers. Our server stack is a typical java stack and we have strong focus on mobile - both iOS and Android. If you're a top-notch iOS guy who wants more - I'ld love to get in touch with you.

Send me a quick note at alvin@getpocketbook.com and I'll be in touch.

- Alvin (Founder)
The possibility of this being misinterpreted as valid is rather high. I think your point could have been made well with a single explaining sentence up front and without the name substitution in the actual content.
That's the libertarian stance. If the gov't had nothing to do with marriage and people were free to enter into whatever contract each party agreed to, we wouldn't be wasting time arguing about gay marriage.