skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> The word "alternative" implies a certain quality and that you can actually switch.

It implies that to you maybe, but I don't think you can say that's the universal understanding of the word and how it should be used.

Google "define alternative" and this becomes clear:
- adjective 1. (of one or more things) available as another possibility or choice.

For me, SharpDevelop is a great alternative to Visual Studio. Sure VS has a lot more features and the latest versions look pretty sleek (I love the dark theme). But I have used SharpDevelop very recently (not just in the past) as the IDE of choice on many professional projects too (emphasis on 'choice' because it's a choice you can make to use it, as per the definition). It is a genuine alternative, in that it's available as another possible IDE you can choose to use.

I would argue that an alternative doesn't even have to be that good (think alternative medicine); so it doesn't imply "a certain quality" either. However, in the case of SharpDevelop, I do believe it IS a quality tool made available by the open source community.
Hmm, I hadn't thought about them using cloudflare. I wonder what the costs are at that scale.
That page doesn't appear to have a thing to do with SRV.
Is this astroturfing? It reads like an ad.
Intergenerational social mobility is basically invariant across human societies. See The Son Also Rises, Gregory Clark.

Sweden, Britain, China, almost identical. Note, China, communism, cultural revolution and all didn't have any lasting effect on social mobility.
I feel about the same. Looking around me I see I am maybe top 25%. There are a couple of really smart people, and a fair few that I would classify as below average.
Is it just me, or should they have given him more than $120 for exposing this major flaw?
Is normality testing 'essentially useless'?
I think the new ceo has been appointed through the course that Microsoft has been taken the last years.

People internally has been pushing Microsoft the open source way (some evangelists of MS and .Net). They have gotten greater influence into the firm, because of success and a allround positive influence (and Microsoft didn't had any appeal to a great group of developers because of closed source and patents).

The similarity between the new CEO and those people where greater then with Balmer. So it's a logical step into it's evolution.

It doesn't mean that Balmer hold them back at all, they could thrive under Balmer, but perhaps he hasn't had any experience with this business direction or couldn't grasp the concept of it. And as a result, someone else was more fit for the job.
Show HN: Remote control you Mac from your iPhone's lock screen (No Jailbreak)
Why I rank my friends by income, IQ and hotness
Who's downplaying the impact? The impact is small. It's not like he needed that job to feed his family. Better people lose more important (to them) jobs for worse reasons all the time.

This whole thing is a tempest in a teacup. I don't understand why people are so outraged at a $1000 donation from years ago (I don't think it's good, but it's not all that important), nor do I understand why people are so outraged that he doesn't get to be CEO because of it.
Seems like a fairly typical coop board problem and not a police intelligence conspiracy. But then I guess that's what they'd WANT me to think, eh?
Interestingly, I've made the opposite switch. And I can't even compare the difference between the slow, unreliable ScalaIDE, with the the hardly understandable compiler errors, and the much quicker, leaner Xtend IDE, where you can see, what's the compiled code, which I really enjoy.
That's a reason to deny people the right to procreate with near family members but that doesn't prevent any sexual actions (because for example abortifacients could be used).
It's called "fiat", not "real".
We are using VS2012 at work and it works like a wonder. Am I missing something?
In this case there is only one physical copy available, the bids for which approach $5M; that's kind of the point here.
Spaces, really? Can someone speculate what might be happening under the hood?
I imagine $1000 ends up buying multiple votes.
Wow, facepalm. I wish I could downvote my own comment now. I swear, I thought that I read "Vatican Secret Archive" in the original article. Yes, the BAV (Vatican Library) is a separate entity, and I've also researched there. AFAIK, none of the BAV is digitized. Unlike the ASV, there isn't even a microfilm copy of the BAV (about 10% of the ASV's collections were photographed in the 50's and are available in St. Louis, MO). This is actually a monumental step =) Also unlike the ASV, the BAV actually has decent catalogs, meaning that people will be able to actually use the digital collection.
If you use Cygwin a lot, you should check out MobaXTerm:

http://mobaxterm.mobatek.net/

The Pro edition is pretty sweet.
We're very worried about contaminating other worlds. But in this case, the plan (as I understand it) is to collect samples from the plumes of water that Enceladus shoots out into space, without ever landing on the surface.
are you only targeting users from outside of US/Canada?
See: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6120530

There's absolutely nothing "intellectually gratifying" about this story.

That's not to say it's not possibly important, just that it's not the right place for it. Reddit and many other sites offer discussion of this kind of thing. Very few sites offer quality discussion of hacking/startups, and if this one fills up with politics, there'll be one less.
I'm afraid I don't understand what you're saying. When he was asked if he would donate more money to these causes, a savvy person would have thought to himself, "You know, I've already said how I feel about the issue at hand. However, clearly my donations are causing some very bad press for the company I'm supposed to lead, so it would be unwise as a leader to repeat that action however I personally feel," and honestly answered, "No, I'm not going to donate to those causes anymore despite whatever my personal viewpoints are." No lies.
Very Cool,
I don't want to spend much time here now as I am at work......, but I love the concept. I have been using C for almost twenty years, and I think this would be a fun check.
I always tell people that if it's worth memorizing because you use it a lot, you'll probably memorize it because you use it a lot anyway. If you have to make a point to memorize something, it's a hint to consider if it's worth the time.
Who is going to break the news to Slashdot?
As others here have alluded to the powerlessness of the MEPs allows them the freedom to do the right thing.
Probably; who else could it be?
That isn't true. http://blog.codinghorror.com/preventing-csrf-and-xsrf-attack...
People lose jobs all the time. Jobs they need to feed their family. They lose them for utterly trivial reasons.

Why should I bother with empathy toward someone I never met who is, right now, after being fired, still a wealthy and successful person?

I like your "San Francisco chapter" remark, since I don't live anywhere near.
How To Find Pairs That Equal To A Specific Sum In An Array
There are a variety of sites where copywriters can work on a per-word basis, if she enjoys writing. I believe that pays better than mechanical turk, although it's still not a lot.
Properties, lambdas (thought they have it in Java 8, but it is still too late) to start with.
I have such fond memories of SharpDevelop. In 2006 I was reaching the limits of the MS Access form designer for an internal database I'd created. I requested VS Express be installed on my machine but the request was ignored - enter SharpDevelop, a dream because it didn't require admin rights to install.

Soon I had a VB.NET (shudder, but at the time...) app up and running and using an Access DB as the backend. I compiled it and distributed in a shared network folder for the rest of the team.

Utter hack, of course. But the company was working on a SAP-based system that was going to replace everything, so it didn't matter. I spoke to an old co-worker last year and what do you know - the SAP system still isn't working correctly and my old app is still in use. I almost feel guilty...
And there are probably lots of anti-gay people as CEOs of companies that don't make equality and openness a core value of their mission statement.
Really? I guess this means that this is the first time DuckDuckGo actually has more relevant search results then Google.

http://i.imgur.com/HHngy0Q.png

(This comment is tongue in cheek. I use DDG as my main search engine but sometimes it can just be... frustrating.)
Yes and not, you surely can develop successfully with mono on linux, but .NET is not "write once, run everywhere", is more a "write once, run everything" framework.
It's heavy tangled with all the Microsoft and Windows technology and promote the reuse of code in that ecosystem.
It would be interesting to see what conversations might happen if lots of people from lots of universities clicked on these traps.
So he couldn't support a gun lobby and keep his job; or support abortion and keep his job (assuming there are some people in Mozilla who oppose guns/abortion)?
What do people do when they're unsure if they're "depressed enough" to be depressed? What about people who are "used to it" and consider themselves good at "dealing with it"? Go to a doctor anyway? Where do people start? With their regular physician? How do people find a therapist that won't jump at medication unnecessarily, and won't ignore you if you think you need it?
There's an interesting anti-parallel to ancient mesopotamian history. From the superlative book Brotherhood of Kings ( http://www.amazon.com/Brotherhood-Kings-International-Relati... ):

> Mari holds the key to much of our knowledge of this era. The site of Babylon has physically sunk over the years so that now the palace and archives of Hammurabi are below the water table and, presumably, reduced to mud

> As in the case of Ebla, the vast archive of thousands of documents from eighteenth-century [BC] Mari is preserved because the palace burned down. [...] Because of this, it is possible to read, in some of the letters baked and buried in the conflagration, about Hammurabi's relations with Mari in happier times.

Our documents from that period come from conquering kings who, in their zeal to raze enemy cities, forever preserved those cities' records. Literature wasn't as much of a presence then as it is now (tablets run to accounting and correspondence), but it (and history) existed; cf the epic of Gilgamesh.
Unions have a (mostly undeserved) terrible reputation. First, they're most often associated with strikes. A strike is a breakdown. No one wants a strike. If people associated them, instead, with a strong middle class, they'd have different opinions. Second, many unions are corrupt. That's a real problem, but most corporate management is far worse.

Add to this the fact that there are a zillion clueless 20-year-old engineers in the Valley who think they're going to be VC-darling CEOs in five years, and cashed-out billionaires in ten, and you get a culture of clueless and foolish self-reliance.

I don't want something as corrupt as the pilot's union, or as mediocrity-protecting as the teacher's union. I do think that programmers need some protection given the volatility of this economy, and the increasing importance of reputation (which requires having full-time professionals to manage it).

To me, the biggest negative of a union is that it risks commoditization of labor. (But, for some hope, see: professional organizations and the unions for screen actors and writers.) However, since we're already being commoditized (JIRA, Scrum, closed allocation) we really have nothing to lose in most shops.
Yeah, I don't get it.

Is this some sort of rent-control problem? Where his parents lived in a rent-controlled apartment and passed it down to him improperly? (I have no idea how rent-control buildings in NYC work, this is the only that makes any sense without details)
You don't get a lot of the more advanced/business/enterprise-y features like advanced debugging features, very little code metrics, only the more basic unit testing things, no MSDN subscription benefits, no Azure credits.

You can still still use Nuget, write unit tests, debug, all of the basic stuff you need to write programs for .NET. The Unreal Engine 4 source works just fine with VS 2013 Express. Xamarin Business and its Visual Studio plugin works just fine in express. You can still connect to TFS, Perforce, or Git repo.

edit: to clarify that this is for VS Express compared to VS Pro/Premium/Ultimate not compared to Sharp Develop.

edit2: removed that it supports add-ins like Resharper.
The point is to be able to sleep with your eyes opened; it's difficult but certainly feasible when no mgore light enters the eyes.
I did not bookmark it, but there was this fun blog post about writing a number crunching HW assignment in Scheme (much against contemporary wisdom). But It ended up other implementations in C. The trick was to write it in CPS and keep hand transforming it iteratively till it was efficient assembly in a different syntax. I would still argue that that you are really writing in a high level language/abstraction and the rest is mostly tedious transliteration with special attention to keep the FPUs busy, efficient memory loading and register allocation.
For anyone working in the creative industries in the UK there is http://nabs.org.uk/ They offer exactly this kind of support. From grants, to advice and help, they are a body supported mostly by the big agencies AFAIK that has been around for over 100 years. They even run a nursing home for retired media workers!
Improve Your Software Skills by Reading Fewer Books About Software
Only my own anecdotal study here. It's not total darkness, because I'm in a well-windowed cube farm (along a far wall that has no windows, though), so there's still a bit of ambient light.
Oh, you still haven't reached the point of pissing them off with your abuse.
I'm civil as long as the people talking to me are civil. Once that stops, I don't bother holding up my end of the bargain.
Right, but this is an issue that everyone is talking about; it's interesting to everyone including good hackers. I don't need to come to HN to see this. This story is/was on every news website.
Is the source of the text on GitHub or elsewhere? I'd love to send pull requests for some of the things mentioned in these comments, like magic numbers not being in constants.
People don't choose to have homosexual sexual relationships, or choose to redefine marriage to embrace non-hetero pairings?
Well, if his religion stated so, then I would have no reason to doubt him.

Religion can have any arbitrary rule. No marriage for X group. No priesthood for Y group. That doesn't necessarily mean that it also sees Y group in a specific light otherwise.
Ah yes maybe glasses with eyes painted on it would work, but it would have to be super realistic...
No, I don't think they're invalid, I just think such strong visceral reactions are counterproductive. Prop 8 supporters and/or fence sitters are much less likely to have an open mind when someone is screaming at them that they're a bigot.

Prop 8 supporters are wrong. Not Evil.
Almost a meta comment, but Microsoft seems to be knocking their BUILD conference out of the park this year. I think we've already seen more notable announcements and improvements than we'll see at WWDC.

Just the fact that there was a talk about developing iOS apps by the founder of Xamarin is telling. The fact that he was wearing Google Glass is another...
An Introduction to Matrix Completion
Oh no, I totally see how horribly oppressed we men are, especially in technical fields. It is so hard to have all these minority groups fighting back against our millennia of dominance, trying to take a tiny sliver of the pie.

I see now that I'm speaking to one of those men's rights nutballs. Open your mind and try to see from another person's point of view. Our conversation is finished.
Yes. I'd like to have EU institutions which look more like "normal" democratic systems, and greater power for the EU parliament. But it's still a lot better since the Lisbon treaty.
It wasn't very difficult, and the code I wrote was much better than what gcc could produce.

This is at least partially because a lot more work has been put into gcc's x86 backend. If the compiled code was that bad then presumably you saw quite a bit of low-hanging fruit in terms of potential improvements to the optimiser.
Not hiding. But definitely many, many fun things that I could spend all day telling you about =) Some things just silly (one of my colleagues found a sixteenth-century property document involving a certain "Castel Cazzonelculo" outside of Rome--Google Translate is your friend). Some things more...subversive...
It passed with 52% 6 years ago with an allegedly confusing ballot paper. You can't extrapolate from that to what might happen if you repeated the vote today.
Seriously, is this true or a late April's fool?
Example downsides of regulation:

- compliance costs and higher barrier to entry which skew the game away from small startups and freelancers and towards large companies with sizable legal departments,

- higher incentives for lobbying since there is more to gain from it in highly regulated environment,

- reduced predictability of business environment due to the danger of unanticipated regulatory changes,

- costs imposed by enforcement due to increased number of hours spent filling forms, undergoing inspections and arguing your case in the courts.
This all looks OK to me but my first worry would be ease of debugging. I eyeballed the doc but couldn't see anything specific to debugging. Anyone has some experience they could share?
The reason you're wrong is because the semantics of C restrict what compilers can do. Humans know the actual semantics they require, and thus, when writing assembly language, can retain only those semantics, dropping everything else. Thus, "ingenuity" as you put it is a real advantage that humans actually posses over what a compiler can do—even if we gave that compiler an infinite amount of time.

This is quite unlike chess, where the rules are known up front, and are the same for both the computer and the human.
I was thinking the same. If you value a video game at $50, it comes closer to $300 but that still seems paltry for a vulnerability that seems to give full access (from the console at least) to a user's account.
Crowdfunding still has a trust problem?
If you don't provide a safe way to temporarily disarm a smoke detector, your users will find unsafe ways to do it.

So providing a wave-to-disarm feature could literally save lives, if it discourages people from removing batteries or placing tape over the speaker.
It may have just been a way to get into local accounts, which I wouldn't consider "major". Also four games, one year of live, and $50 is more than $120.
Linux Mint programs for Windows XP users
Most likely not. The skills to program can be taught but what I think that these goldrush devs would be lacking would be either the creativity and appreciation for the nuanced aspects of design.

I think the only measurable change would be the amount of clones would increase (like the Flappy Bird / Threes&2048 fads)
Perhaps you could suggest your favorite method as an alternative? If I get to know you, i might change my opinion, but from the little I know I would suggest you avoid a career in teaching.
Unlike GPL2, the Apache license has an explicit patent grant. When I first saw this announcement, I didn't realize what effect it will have on the patents used to bring up any chance they got: they join the patents already available under various approaches (due to C# standardization or the Communit Promise). And I believe you can now avoid the goofiness of all end users explicitly needing to accept the Community Promise.
Michael Lewis: shilling for the buyside?
Defending their members is the role of a union. Your post makes about as much sense as somebody accusing lawyers of making a huge strategic mistake in agreeing to defend people accused of murder who really do turn out to have committed murder.
..which is exactly why we have scala, groovy, etc!
Autocompletion in the Xtend editor is quite excellent, you might want to try a recent version. The last time I tried the Scala IDE (during the first Coursera lecture), Scala's autocompletion suggested may invalid proposals. It felt more like the editor was guessing about types than actually doing proper type analysis. If you happen to have a Java stack trace from Xtend code and click on a stack frame, Eclipse will open the Xtend file and highlight the proper line in your Xtend code.
... and in USA there should be no free right to political association? Are you going to have a vote on this or is democracy a no-no in USA now too?
Nah, I don't think your comment belittles my experience at all. You bring up all the points that people were talking about around the time of the tragedy (last October). The point of my comment was to show there are windows open when doors seems closed, if you know what I mean, rather than sensationalizing what happened to some random guy x I that I know. Good points!
> Isn't that what LLVM tries to solve dynamically?

No. And in fact, even writing directly in LLVM IR, there are certain kinds of code (high-speed interpreters like LuaJIT) that cannot even be expressed.

LLVM is awesome, but it's a language (LLVM IR) that does not support the full range of what can be computed efficiently with a particular CPU.
For those down voters: I am British, we have the NHS.

Over here healthcare is not just another business, it is a public service. We grumble about the NHS but we love it too. With the NHS you don't have to second guess whether that doctor is after your wallet, or even think about it, he/she isn't.

By comparison the American healthcare system is something that, with a British perspective, appears to have something tantamount to 'Münchausen syndrome by proxy'. With the British NHS you can end up on pills all your life but there is not a business case for it. Meanwhile, in America, if you can be signed up for a smorgasbord of uppers, downers and a few off-label side orders for the rest of your days then Big Pharma is happy.

Here is one of my favourite books that describes what goes on:

http://www.amazon.com/Blood-Medicine-Blowing-Deadliest-Presc...
Perhaps he grows marijuana out of his house, and the police tipped off his landlord. That could break the lease without missing a payment.
Async, lambdas, extension methods, linq and "the dynamic type" (late binding). Yes, many similar but older implementations for these exist, I know, but in C# they work in harmony - and that's a bit hard to explain for me =)
It was noted as a backdoor. Presumably that means it was purposefully programmed in for testing (and possibly even production), and made its way into the delivered software. So the under-the-hood speculation being a simple if statement allowing for all-space passwords to grant access.
Also (to those reading this) be careful to look up the fact(?) that for some psychological profiles, marijuana can actually aggravate existing tendencies for mental disorder. I have no idea of the rates, so maybe it's very rare, but I've heard of it happening.

One basic example: I've heard some with anxiety say it calms them down. I've heard others say it makes them freak out.
> The phrase "the right way" always makes me chuckle a bit

Here, outside Windowsland, we have been using package management for more than a decade and, after that long, I'd suppose we have it pretty much nailed down. There are still some different ideas and approaches (different dependency management schemes, pre-compiled vs. locally compiled, ports), but I'd guess we get it right most of the time. The "right way" is a tricky concept, but, seriously, this is all very mature by now.
Not ironic, I'd love to see it too. I like knowing how things were done originally. :)