skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
int main(){ puts("Hello World"); }

This doesn't work in Windows. The standard entry point to Windows is "int CALLBACK WinMain(
_In_ HINSTANCE hInstance,
_In_ HINSTANCE hPrevInstance,
_In_ LPSTR lpCmdLine,
_In_ int nCmdShow
);"

C never really "ran" on Windows. C is built on top of abstractions to even run on Windows. A SegFault in standard C is supposed to be passed to a signal handler (in Linux/ OSX).

A SegFault in Win32 is passed to the SEH exception handler, to the __except{} statement in some function as the stack is unwound. (Oh yeah, __try{} and __except{} don't exist in "normal C", do they?)

--------------

The "OS Language" of Windows is C++ (through COM and COM+ interfaces). The "OS Language" of Linux and OSX is C.

The sooner you realize this, the easier programming on Windows is going to be. Windows never really supported C as a first class citizen. C code cannot easily call core Win32 libraries like DirectX. (It can, but it is significantly harder than just using the C++ COM interfaces)

C# works very closely with COM interfaces in Win32. And thus, C# is the second language of choice of Windows. The only reason C# hasn't overtaken C++ in everything seems to be politics.

Mind you, Microsoft fully supports C# Device Drivers. The lowest level hardware interactions in Windows can be done with C#.
Yes, especially for comments like this.
Or just press the power button, which actually does make a lot of sense.

There are a lot of things about Metro that I dislike, but killing the "don't touch the power button on a computer" idiom is one that I do like.
I actually like "Metro Start Menu" better than "Start Menu" for the keyboard. Put simply, "Start Menu" is a tree. Lots of diving into nodes and scrolling up and down. Conceptually convenient and easy with a mouse, but the 2D grid in Metro is more convenient with just a keyboard.
Isn't BBM ephemeral?
> The technology behind the syncing is not a competitive advantage. The existence of dozens of these services should tell you that.

I'm not sure your argument applied at the time. As technology makes progress, today's competitive advantage is tomorrow's commodity.

In any case, consider the people who pay for Dropbox today. What proportion of these people don't use integrations or services on top of the basic sync service?
When people ask me directly, I tell them to avoid Cryptocat, in a spirit similar to the one I used in the 90s when telling people to avoid Sendmail.
This is GREAT to see Novena make it to this step. A truly awesome amount of work by bunnie and xobs it exciting see them make this far!
When I want a calculator, I type:

Windows Key -> "calc" -> Enter

Viola, the classic Windows calculator.
The idea sounds reasonable, although I think I'd struggle with the whole "actually getting up when the alarm goes off" problem.

I found a linked article on his page which addresses this problem, with a solution I'm going to have to try:

> This is going to sound really stupid, but it works. Practice getting up as soon as your alarm goes off. That’s right — practice. But don’t do it in the morning. Do it during the day when you’re wide awake.
I think this is awesome. I hate articles that have catchy headlines just to become as viral as possible. Stuff like "Follow these 5 tricks and you'll become rich and famous!!!" Just because the numbers go up doesn't necessarily mean it's a better user experience. I've become a firm believer over the past few years that user sentiment is far more important the pure number of users.

This lets the writer focus on writing a quality article rather than a popular one. Those are two very different things and I strongly prefer the former.
I don't know what it really looked like but I randomly had 99% of the accounts follow 100 people and 1% follow 5,000. I don't know how many the average account followed but apparently when a single user followed a few thousand it was giving them issues if the user rapidly refreshed the page.

PS: I did not keep old messages just there ID because that was not going to fit in RAM. My assumption was using Redis or other key value store would be fine what they needed was an internal index so you would only need to look up messages that would be displayed.

Note: there current setup once they worked the bugs out handled a peak of over 100,000 tweets per second in 2013. https://blog.twitter.com/2013/new-tweets-per-second-record-a... Which is well beyond the target I was shooting for.
I seriously doubt they "rank" applications by KLOC, they just want to see if you have enough for a decent demo/prototype. Something that shows some implementation effort. And I suspect there's nothing wrong with zero if it makes sense in the context of that particular application.
So with the old start menu, users were looking at the start menu when they opened it. That makes perfect sense -- why else would you open the start menu if you didn't want to look at it? However, it also took up a smaller section of the screen, so you could more readily find what you are looking at. With the Metro screen, I have to play Where's Waldo whenever I want to find an app (I have the same problem with Gnome 3 shell, trying to find an app icon in that massive wasteland).

But that's just me -- I also didn't like the sliding start menu design either (Windows 7, KDE 4), where submenus open in the same space as the folder icons -- I'd rather, when clicking on a submenu, have it open into new screen real estate like any of the traditional menus.
I actually really like how full-screen works in OS X, in principle, and on one monitor. It's nice, isolated, you can navigate quickly via keyboard (ctrl+left/right, alt-tab) or 3 finger swipe. But it all falls apart on multiple monitors. It's better on Mavericks, but still isn't quite right.

I do love the keyboard extensions brought into play with Windows 7 for positioning windows, windows+left/right to align to exactly half of the current window, keeping hitting right or left over and over again to keep moving across monitors. Windows+up toggle maximize. It's ridiculously quick and simple and you can go from a bunch of maximized apps to comparing two things side by side without ever leaving the keyboard.

I can do this on my mac as well, but I have to install a flaky extension of some sort to make it happen.
I was heavily involved with the Fit project for a while. (Fit is Ward Cunningham's predecessor to Cucumber. It used HTML tables rather than ASCII sentences.)

I find it interesting, if not surprising, that the Cucumber community is discovering exactly the same issues that we did with Fit: namely, that it encourages brittle integration tests, and that people don't use it for its intended purpose of collobaration.

I've come to believe that these problems are unsolvable.

I worked on and promoted Fit for several years. Eventually, after some deep soul searching, I concluded that Fit (and by extension, Cucumber) is solving the wrong problem. The value of Fit (and Cucumber) comes from discussions with domain experts. The tools encourage a certain amount of rigor, which is good, but you can get that rigor just as easily by discussing concrete examples at a whiteboard.

The actual automation of those examples, which is where Fit and Cucumber focus your attention, has minimal value. In some cases, the tools have negative value. Their tests are fundamentally more complex and less refactorable than ordinary xUnit tests. If you want to automate the examples, you're better off doing it in a programmer tool.

Some people got a lot of value out of Fit, and I'm sure the same is true for Cucumber. They got that value by using it for collaboration and focusing on domain rules rather than end-to-end scenarios. My experience, though, was that the vast majority used it poorly. When a tool is used so badly, so widely, you have to start questioning whether the problem is in the tool itself.

Ward and I ended up retiring Fit [1]. I've written about my reasons for abandoning it before [2] [3].

[1] http://www.hanselminutes.com/151/fit-is-dead-long-live-fitne...

[2] http://www.jamesshore.com/Blog/The-Problems-With-Acceptance-...

[3] http://www.jamesshore.com/Blog/Acceptance-Testing-Revisited....
Microsoft Announces New Opportunities at Build, Along With Windows Phone 8.1
This seems like the wrong solution to the problem. Merging the start menu with the desktop as a full-screen launcher was a great idea - the start menu is effectively a modal interface so it only makes sense to make it fullscreen, and the old "icons on the desktop" thing in Windows has always been a misfeature.

My problem is its terrible integration with old Windows apps, drawing a hard line between "Metro" applications and "Windows Desktop" applications.

The other stuff is just mechanical problems with pretending that an 11" screen is the same as a desktop monitor. Give me an always-visible taskbar, one that uses words instead of pictograms. I've got 2 23" monitors - I've got the space to dedicate some of that room to a taskbar. Also showing multiple applications at a time.
One thing I don't see mentioned, do universal apps support C++11? I can understand why it's not as easy to support native code across platforms (i.e. need to do some kind of fat binary thing), but think it's a little sad to see all the work done to support modern C++ app development kind of abandoned. Really annoying if you have to choose between an app being universal or written in modern C++.
> To me, pressing the Start key on my keyboard and typing the first few letters of literally anything I want to do on my system is the most important UX component of Windows 8 & 8.1. Windows Vista introduced it, Windows 7 improved it, and now 8 and 8.1 made it shinier and faster. It's amazing to me how many people I see trying to use their computers without taking advantage of this functionality.

This is a great feature. I think it actually was introduced by quicksilver on mac, though - and has been around for a long time in various linux environments also. Gnome 3 and Unity (much reviled in the 'nix world) suffered similar criticism to Windows 8 in part because they got rid of the traditional start menu.
Here is a sample implementation:

git log --author=rav --numstat --no-merges --pretty=format: |
awk -e '{ a += $1; b += $2; } END { print a; print b; print a-b; }'

produces this output (sum additions, sum deletions, net line additions):

112529
85383
27146
I also doesn't exist on non-gooogle play devices, because the author thinks that getting software from somewhere else than walled garden is "repeating the desktop mistake all over again" [1]

There might be iOS version, but there very likely never will be web version, or FxOS version or desktop version or anything like that.

Which is really sad, because unlike Telegram authors, TextSecure's author is very good with crypto.

[1]: it's a long read: https://github.com/WhisperSystems/TextSecure/issues/127
This Open Source Laptop Helps Developers Gain Freedom In Hardware
My Surreal UberX Experience
For those of us without an hour to spare, can you explain who Leo is and why he would be crying? Vint Cerf I know, but Leo is kind of ambiguous.
The UX of going back and forth to do simple tasks wasn't the problem, forcing Metro without a Touchscreen was the problem.
First Images of the New Reversible USB (3.1) Cable
Unfortunately I forgot to grab it off my work laptop when I got laid off. I would've liked to have stuck it up on github...

It wasn't really all that tricky though, it took me a few hours to write. git-log has options for only displaying the status line of diff-stat for each commit, and then displaying the parents of each commit, and the author. You look to see that there's only one parent (so it's not a merge), parse out the X added, Y deleted numbers, and stick them in a dictionary keyed by name.

A lot of the script was just getting statistics like average/min/max/stddev line counts, and printing them nicely.
Sorry forgot to mention that idea is a hypothetical use case.
Lyft raises $250mm
Best digital marketing blogs broken down by topic
Please don't add your own commentary to titles. It's against the site guidelines.
I'm happy to see some sane crowdfunding pricing on these reward tiers. So many projects have their reward pricing set similar to retail prices. That's fine if you've already done all the R&D work on the project and there's little risk, but if you actually need net funding from the project then you need a significant overhead on every reward.

That said, I hope this is successful, these guys are consummate hardware hackers, it'll be neat to see what happens when they ship a project on this scale that ends up in a lot of people's hands.
So am I (well, not that much, that NPR would make a mistake biased towards their bias, or outright lie, would be nothing new). That's another "point source", of course, but per this (now slightly out of date) chart from the FEC: http://www.fec.gov/pages/brochures/contriblimits.shtml there would seem to be a limit to how much you could send to a "party leader".

Maybe it would have to be washed though 200 (!) "political committees" to allow for 1M in 5K max chunks ... which would seem to be a bit obvious.

Although that would be a loophole the Congress could close up, assuming it exists. E.g. a limit to the total to a "party leader" or PACs he controls would fly with 8 of the Supremes.
The government should not be your enemy. If people want privacy, they ough to just tell the regulators that, and those regulators shoud work on making it so.

If the real situation isn't like that, it's a different problem, requiring a different kind of action, and just developping some new tech won't help.
Microsoft plans to bring to Windows to 'Small Devices'
Creating a Top 5 iOS Fitness app for Fitbit with PhoneGap Build
Prof baffled by cryptic messages found in University library
It's unfortunately not an exception rather than yet another indication that they need to spend some energy on polishing things and fixing bugs. At least critical one...

Ubuntu is really terrible at that.
Open source GPGPU IP core
But that's a failure of the split-experience, not metro itself.
People also leave dead code around instead of deleting it. That dead code is poison to the maintenance programmer because he's spend plenty of time trying to understand what role it plays in the system of tracing a complicated bug.

I'd say it is open season on commented-out code. If code has been commented-out since a few weeks it is good to delete it just as a matter of course.
New Look for Server Log Monitoring
I'm getting so sick of Kickstarter. It's stuff like this:

> if we receive enough pledges, we'll push the date several months.

You guys are paying for fairy dust.
Only marginally related to the post, but has anyone here lived with a pet goat before? Can they live with you in your home, or do they need to stay outside most of the time?
Well I find this logo to be excellent. Easy on the eyes,and the motto is to the point.
Hi all - creator here. If you have questions about how my Fitbit app works or how I leveraged PhoneGap Build, please don't hesitate to ask! The platform has really matured in the past year, allowing for real great apps to be created in HTML5/JavaScript.
"long-time Roku user."

How old is your box? I'm still happy with mine, despite it being a couple of years old. I was thinking of getting a new one, but if the new ones are of poorer quality...
Plugin developers are delighted - yet one more runtime version to support! Nice move Microsoft!
The Month of Bitcoin
Making Mahout Fast and Easy
Ha, nice, there's two options that definitely would've simplified my code (--numstat and --no-merges).
>Please guys. Use TextSecure.

Believe me, I would love to.

But I don't have an Android phone, and even if I did, not all my contacts have one.

The reason WhatsApp is so popular is exactly this, it just works and it works on all mobile platforms.[1]

[1] http://blog.textit.in/your-path-to-a-$16b-exit-build-a-j2me-...
Yes, this. It is really stretching it to say that you can effectively "game" on your TV when airshare'ing from your iPad /iPhone to your Apple TV. It sucks.
I think this is the first time I've seen a silverlight plugin.
Bitcoin Day 1
Yes, if I am using a word processor and want to pull up the calculator I don't want to lose sight of the document I am working on. Its nice that the old start menu didn't hide everything. Then when I get the calculator I want to see the number from my document -- don't want it taking up my entire 25 inch screen.
I do this all the time. Just right click the windows icon in the bottom LEFT corner. A context menu pops up with an option to shutdown, restart, log out, or sleep.
Metro in itself isn't a terrible idea. Especially the idea of having a reduced runtime that can work across mobile/tablet/desktop. The poor idea was forcing full-screen on the desktop. Now that they're going back on that idea, by implementing the Start menu, allowing Metro apps to run in windows, and more properly integrating Metro with the desktop, it might actually be usable.
Yeah, the "windowed metro apps" thing is way more interesting than the start-menu.

I stubbornly insist that the idea behind a unified tablet and desktop OS is sound, it's just that windows 8 screwed the implementation with its Classic/Metro schizophrenia instead of focusing on the nature of the user's screen real-estate instead of the nature of the applications.

On a desktop I have space, so use my space for an always-visible taskbar and windowed apps. On at tablet I don't have space, so make the apps always-maximized and auto-hide the taskbar. But that doesn't mean unifying the OS was a bad thing - I'd want that auto-hide always-fullscreen tablet-oriented OS on an 11" ultrabook, even if it was the "desktop" form of the OS. And likewise, give me windowing on some kind of monstrous 23" tablet thing.
I live in San Diego and reading this brings me joy.
Gandhi, though the claim may be exaggerated.

Hard to find a good source, but here's something: http://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/2521/did-mahatma-ga...
I'm not sure this is something good though. Can you imagine if the things on your kitchen moved around from place to place without you knowing exactly what was happening? Maybe it's a good idea to let the users organise their apps their own way (or at least allow that for those that care about it).
comparing Wii games to phone games is a bit of a stretch. They might be more casual than xbox and ps4, but they are far bigger and better than than phone games. Mario, zelda, candy crush, which one of these is not like the others.
Got the same email, thought the same things.
I see... So NASA's already paltry budget has been refocused to serve the imperial objectives of the military and the intelligence complexes.

On the plus side - perhaps this is the only way the US government is willing to spend more taxpayer money on NASA. Enjoy your new cold war.
It's not actually clear whether Amazon Instant Video will stream at 1080p for any/all HD material, or if the device just supports 1080p for other services like Netflix. Does anyone know?
Google has universal apps? When will they get 'it'?
Thanks again, no need for the author in the title, who has seen his documentaries will notice his name instantly on the article, if not his style will be obvious in the first video.
There's plenty of new non-Metro-related functionality in Windows 8 that nobody ever complains about. Especially on the management side of things. Of course, people who'd actually use that functionality don't use Windows 8 because of Metro.
Could this be simple selectivity? I do not know how CIA selects analysts, but I doubt it is by having large pool of applicants that are evaluated on their predictions. On the other hand we have group of 30 people, selected for their guessing from amongst 3000 population. When put that way, I would expect 30 people to be consistently better.
This is actually one of my favorite things about version control. If I know it's been committed at one point, I can delete anything and breathe the sweet air of clean code.
Finally, it took Redmond two Windows releases.

It's good that the "metro" apps now run in window-mode too next to Win32 apps.

Though, I wonder if Metro apps will be around in Win9. They could shut it down like Silverlight and the Vista/7 desktop gadgets. Instead of metro apps, saving websites to desktop (links) like in Win7 and FirefoxOS would make a lot more sense (IMHO).
You should never commit commented-out code. That's what version control is for. If you need that code back, just fetch it from the repo.
Interesting service. The reporting and notification features are nice.

Several things make me hesitant. And may not be enough to justify these features (at least for me).

Current blockers:

1) Single point of failure. Let's say I use the Reddit API and the Facebook API. If one goes down I still have the other. If apitools goes down I lose both. And what's more likely? For either Facebook or Reddit to go down - or for apitools to go down?

2) API abuse. If an apitools user abuses an API, the apitools server will get blocked. And so other innocent users will also get blocked. Is there any plan to mitigate abuse? If that plan fails, how quickly can new IPs be allocated to get around any IP bans?

3) Security. PII is sent to APIs. How do I know this information isn't logged or otherwise accessible to other apitools users? The heart of the issue is trusting strangers running a new proxy service with sensitive info.

4) Security #2. SSL support? Looking at the following screen shot it appears that currently I'd be transferring PII and API keys in plaintext: http://docs.apitools.com/images/overview.png ("Apitools URL")

5) Price. How much will the service cost? If there's a free level, what are the limits?

6) Latency. Essentially doubles the number of API requests. Wouldn't this make my API requests twice as slow? More importantly, if apitools is under load and experiences longer response times, my site is going to run slower.

Even with these objections it looks like a great product. And these blockers may very well end up being irrelevant for most potential users. Best of luck!
I think this is a great move, but why not enhance the run dialog so it works like Spotlight does on OSX: minimal, you type and it automatically searches. I like the start menu because its smaller than the start screen, but I prefer my launcher to be as tiny and powerful as possible without fullscreen flashing. Also, it lets me use the launcher to type in things that I can see from other windows, eg: calculations, paths, etc...
Windows 8 - no start button or menu

Windows 8.1 - added the start button but has Metro menu

Windows 8.2 - merges old start menu and Metro menu

Windows 8.3 - Same as Windows 7 (hopefully)
Yup. It's basically just a Jelly Bean 4.2 (API 17) fork. Should be able to run anything JB can.
It's like XAML for the web. I can't wait to write some SPAs with it.
Not necessarily. I also thought of Atari Jaguar immediately when I saw this title.