skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Over a decade ago, I wrote something similar (but not as advanced) that I still run on any Windows machine I use - http://chime.tv/products/hotchime.shtml

When I switched over to a Mac as my primary machine 4 years ago (Jan 2010), I tried Quicksilver, which was the closest replacement to my app. It was ok but never really felt as snappy as my Windows app. After a few months of trying to make Quicksilver work, I was on the verge of porting my app to OSX when I came across the newly launched Alfred.

I have been a very satisfied user ever since. The moment a family/friend of mine gets a Mac, the first thing I tell them is to install Alfred. I'm so glad the Pepperrells built Alfred. They saved me a lot of time I would have spent (1) porting over my app to OSX (2) manually launching apps in the meantime.
Yup. I found it interesting after a co-worker pointed it out to me because it looks and works kind of like RSpec. We are currently considering using it for a new project and it seems mature enough to give it a go.

I'm currently toying with writing a JSONReporter so we can use that as an additional test result output format and I agree, so far it seems to be a really well done project.
nice simple approach!

And despite the previous commenter I don't see a problem with publishing a neat solution to a fairly cursory attempt to prevent automated submissions. If they care enough they can fix it, but the rather simplistic nature of their capcha implies they don't care much. shrug
As someone who's from India, but lives in the Palo Alto area, this is an especially astute comment. America's still clearly the innovation leader in many markets, and I think it's fair to expect that many young people (if not governments) look to these corporations to do what's right.

It's hard to know what's right, especially in a global marketplace. But this is certainly a good option.
I know this is oversimplified and there are unintended consequences I haven't considered, but:

Seems like a tax holiday, structured with the right incentives (ie X% must be invested in US-based stuff .. Real estate, jobs, etc.) would be a win for everyone. Politicians get an economic stimulus that doesn't directly cost taxpayers money from the budget/treasury, and the companies get to bring back that foreign $$ at a reduced rate.
It's fine that you use the default. But when you seek more power, it's always available.
Well, If you're going on the definition of download as mentioned above you could write a javascript program to do it and run it on the webpages while they're still in browser.
Regardless of fairness, in a time of high unemployment, the US government should encourage US corporations to repatriate the money and invest it domestically, since that's good for our economy.
It's more impressive they got the executive's flight diverted. Wonder if it just took a tweet.
What incentives do shareholders have for doing this? How does getting a company to bring money back to the US and paying taxes on it benefit them?
They aren't, you are just being American-centric in saying they should pay tax in the states rather than invest abroad.
I prefer to be safe. Can I be safe while browsing porn?
What disturbs me is that you're arguing from the opposite extreme. Airport security does stop security threats - it raises the bar considerably. There's definitely an argument that current security is way over the top in the US, but the opposite extreme is even more silly. The moderate path is the way forward - it does not follow that all security measures are security theater.

All the arguments about 'what about blowing up trains/buses/whatever' also miss vital points - namely, that the passengers on a plane cannot escape, and small damage to a plane can doom it. This is not true of trains or buses. Combine this with the point that the public, rightly or wrongly, are more significantly affected by a plane crash, and it becomes clearer why planes are better targets for terrorism. Similarly, the demographic that uses planes are largely middle-class. Those who use public transport have a much larger proportion of working-class people on them, who have less political power, and the media also cares less about them.

You also still have to face the issue of running your own terminals, because any international airport has its sterile zone, which is connected to every other international airport in the world. Until you get them all accepting your citizenry carrying weaponry, your local international airport is going to keep its sterile zones. And running your own terminals is going to cost you more than $5 extra/ticket...

Because I trust that on average, by and large, my fellow passengers are competent and well-meaning people.

'On average' is the problem here. The general public includes all sorts of idiots, terrorist or otherwise. Anyone who's had a job facing the general public will be aware that there are plenty of people who fuck with you just because they can. Particularly in an enclosed environment where people sometimes get heavily inebriated.

And regarding the skydiving, light aircraft have only rarely been used for terrorism. The same is very much not true of heavy aircraft, which have a long track record of terrorism.

The specific threat that modern "airport security" is designed to stop is essentially nonexistent.

Ultimately, this is a chicken-and-egg problem. Hijacking has been made extremely difficult by the current measures, but even before 9/11, hijacking was much more difficult in the 90s than in the 70s due to increasing the bar for security. The threat is there, but higher security means you have to be better-resourced in order to defeat it.

Perhaps put another way: if there is actually no threat, then why do you say you'd feel safer if your fellow passengers were armed? Shouldn't you be saying it'd make no difference?
It's a dick move to be a griefer / enable grifers to a bunch of nice people. Lots of us knew you could do this; nobody else was a big enough ass to give script kiddies code.
I agree, but I may have a biased POV. I would prefer to see "How to Get People into Engineering? Let Them Build Toys."
What about the German, Chinese, Indian economies? Besides, do you know how hard it is to hire programmers in the states? Why not take advantage of programming talent in other countries by opening up R&D centers outside of the USA. Google also does this to a huge benefit.

Is Hackernews USA only? Some of these posts are confusing, like everyone is posting from and about the states.
Mark Karpeles, former Mt. Gox CEO, started a new company
No, it wouldn't be a win for everyone. What it's really saying is that once every decade or so, large companies that do not immediately need capital during that period, are free to repatriate their earnings at a reduced rate.

Meanwhile, smaller companies and companies that are less profitable (and need those funds to stay in business) are forced to repatriate funds at a higher/normal rate.

And that difference amounts to a subsidy to large established multinational businesses OR a surcharge to their smaller competitors (depending on how you want to look at it).

If the rates are so high that we need a tax holiday, then they are simply too high, and need to be lowered or restructured.
Epic List of Marketing Tools
Something similar could be done for Go. Since most of Go programs simply import the standard "flag" package for their command line parsing, you could have a pretty large coverage.
A coworker of mine is working on something similar: https://github.com/Kosta-Github/cute
toys...
If it's a calculated expenditure, what's the calculation? Something concrete please, not platitudes.

We can reasonably assume that the cost to attract and educate a student from a family with a college-going tradition is minimal compared to that of a first-generation student.

This means we get the most bang for our buck if we focus on the good students, and only consider devoting resources to the bad ones after we exhaust the supply of good ones.

That seems to contradict your idea of a "calculated expenditure".
India’s Maiden Mars Mission One Month Out from Red Planet Arrival
> In Microsoft's case (for Windows, Office, and other products) there are no alternatives consumers are willing to switch to

Woa woa, when did you last visit a computer shop? OSX is a very viable alternative to Windows and consumers are very much willing to switch to it.
Immanuel Kant: What Is Enlightenment?
What do you think of embedding a semantic version field in your format, so that you can make backwards-incompatible breaking changes down the line?
Don't they have to bring it back at some point if they want to pay that as dividends? (i.e. if the shareholders want that money?)

Or are they counting on an eventual tax break on repatriations?
I have also been in the industry for about as much and noticed:

* Sometimes, the time it takes to build something in a statically typed language is much longer. Long enough that by the time it is built it might not matter because somebody would have built it in node.js, ruby, or python. I really depends on the market.

* Type mismatches in a Python program are not the biggest and deadliest bugs. Unit tests and integration tests (that should be there anyway) should catch those well.

* Often static type languages that have pointers (C, C++) hide much deadlier and dangerous types of bugs -- pointer bugs like "wild pointers".

* Static type language that don't offer protocol checks also can't easily detect bugs where you open a file handle, close it, then read from it. It knows it is a FILE or some iostream but it doesn't help much there. I've heard other more advanced languages have something in place to handle that.

* The above point coupled with being able to use the REPL on a production system and code has saved significant debugging time. In a complex system there could be an interaction that is hard to reproduce and this one system is in that funky state. Can log in via SSH into it, edit the code to add some debug statements and reproduce it again.

In summary, I would like Python to have a standard type annotation syntax that good linters will be able to check for and IDEs will know how to read and use. But it would not be at the top of the list of features I would like Python to have next.

EDIT: (sorry, last sentence should have said "it would not be" instead of "it would be")
I was happy with my iPad 2 until I upgraded to iOS 7. iOS 7 has slowed down my iPad 2 to a point it is barely useable. I bought a new iPad Air only because of iOS 7, otherwise I didn't need another tablet.
i heard only that he took advantage of families struck with unexpected inheritance taxes. All this other stuff is wicked interesting. Great post!
"I associate Home Ec (from Middle School) with cooking lol. I know thats not probably the only focus of it but thats what comes to mind."

That's falls in the category, certainly (well, "cooking for the home", which differs somewhat from "cooking for a restaurant", which wouldn't really be Home Ec), but it stretches much further.

"What about stuff like http://www.handybook.com/? "

Falls in the broader space, and might be part of a broader solution, but probably most people aren't going to outsource most tasks so there's still a lot that doesn't cover.
>or just get rid of them all-together

We should, indeed, eliminate taxes on foreign corporate earnings. Most of that money would wind up back here, in the relative safety of US banks & investments. A substantial portion of that money would go to paying dividends, which would directly generate capital gains taxes, and much of the rest would wind up being invested here in the US.

We would be doing what we should be as a center of innovation: importing cash from the rest of the world and using it to improve the US economy. Considering that today this money not only generates $0 in taxes, but does not benefit our economy in any way in terms of investment etc, this seems like something that even politicians could wrap their heads around. Yet, it is unlikely that it will ever happen.
i LOVE this. i want to hear this everytime I write code.
This looks very intriguing. Right now I am using Google Test for my projects, but a single header file for creating tests is awesome :-)
Well, I'm a engineer and I've been into girls since forever. I say its high time my interest is reciprocated.
I think that is a pretty big overgeneralization, to be generous.
Back in 1999/2000 I had a friend in Castro Valley call me in the morning to ask me if I was feeling the earthquake - I said nope, and then 5 seconds later - it hit me in Sunnyvale.

That's another way of earthquake advance warning - taking advantage of the latency between the epicenter and the surrounding area.
Turns out twenty-somethings in the City are an extreme minority. Huge amounts of mfst lock-in comes from the enterprise world. To move work between work and home virtually requires Office. I fought it for years until my IRB got delayed because the tables "didn't look right". At some point, $100 is worth less than just getting the damn research started.
Things can change fast. My husband was alone until he met me at 35. 11 years later he had found the family of four small children, the suit, and the church (at least on Christmas and Easter).

If you want a different life you can find it change pretty quickly.
TLDR; Humans have traditionally eaten almost everything. There is no one ideal human diet. Paleo diets focus too much on meat, which kills you and gives you cancer, particularly if your ancestors were adapted to plant-based diets. Processed foods also kill you, but today we can’t survive on raw, unprocessed food alone. Eat more local fruits and vegetables, a little meat, fish, and some whole grains (as in the highly touted Mediterranean diet), and exercise an hour a day.

Annoying formatting but a great article: I joyfully went through every little image caption. Thanks for sharing.
This is pretty cool, but something about the notation confused me. Say we have an object called "foo":

var foo = {};

Is it really necessary to define properties on it with this notation?

Object.defineProperty(foo, 'bar', { value: 'baz' });

Since foo itself is an Object, wouldn't it also have this method? Why can't I define a property on foo like this?

foo.defineProperty('bar', { value: 'baz' });
Five minutes later the argument would be "why should we pay taxes on US earnings but zero overseas? Why discriminate against US consumers? Why are US products cheaper overseas?"
I attended a talk by one of the developers of this system, and since earthquake warnings are so short (tens of seconds), it's unlikely that traditional alert mechanisms can be delivered to the general public. As such, the primary consumers of the device will be places like nuclear power plants and major industrial operators who are willing to install special alarms.

The other example he gave was giving doctors performing surgery time to step away from the patient, so that they dont turn things into a real life game of surgeon simulator, an example I personally find to be extremely horrifying and nightmare inducing.
I wonder how to get girls into coal mining?
If you think I'm "trolling" you would first have to explain on what logic does *equality" means to balance the gender gap only in the top grossing jobs.
If tax laws are changed such that economic activity transacted within the US, among those present in the US, are taxed as being within the US, rather than using Double-Dutch, and Irish loopholes, to avoid taxation, then there's no need at all to reduce corporate tax rates. Rather, they can be raised to levels more consonant with where they were in the 1950s.

Taxes are a transaction fee. The benefits of corporate profits accrue most decidedly to those who own or participate in that profit stream: stockholders and banks, principally. Among whom you'll find an income and wealth distribution skewed remarkably upward from that of the population at large.

Consumption taxes are inherently regressive: the poor spend far more of their money on purchases. Without an offsetting credit, VAT only exacerbates the underlying inequity problem.
Thanks to time, only bad things all happen at once.
> Yeah, all of this scrap-the-TSA talk makes me wonder how much people have flown internationally: in places I've been, security has been very similar to the TSA with minor variations. It seems like for every policy that had something a little less strict about it there was also something else it was a littles more strict about: some care about liquids, some treat iPads as laptops, some make you remove your shoes.

In my experience when traveling to south asia, once I was outside the US, they didn't care about liquids or shoe removal. The security scan just involved sending one's bags through the scanner and going through a metal detector. On the way back, though, it was much like the US with the shoe removal, taking the liquids out of carry-on bags, etc.
Or acquire overseas companies. Microsoft has already done this with Skype.
Project SPAN: Ad-hoc Networking for Android
I'm not a C++ programmer but this looks really neat and tidy. How does it work?
Are you really arguing that because you got the perception that it was a border control, Germany's borders are not open? Even when it was made clear to you by multiple people that it doesn't commonly happen like that?

That, or you just want to complain on the internet about the bad police men being not nice to you. That's all right, but that's not what this discussion was about.
We are using uservoice ( https://www.uservoice.com/ ) for the whole customer-support and KB part, and we like it...
It's an alternative, but they're not commodities. MacOS and Windows are highly differentiated and even have their own ecosystems. The situation is very different than that of two manufacturers of baking soda, for example.
Perhaps this is another incentive to start/incorporate companies in countries where larger companies have large cash piles and low taxes where a higher priced acquisition might happen compared to what would happen in the United States. I'm not sure, but Skype could be a good example here.
Show HN: Get notified on new version of Python packages in pypi
And yet, at least once, the alert on the phone specifically (rather than a newscast or highway signage) appears to have saved at least one life[0]. Of course, we don't know what would have happened, and it did wake up the whole state, too. But I think the argument in favor is that the probability of success for these searches decreases quickly with time, so there is substantial value in getting word out quickly.

[0] http://www.charlotteobserver.com/2013/08/30/4275356/amber-al...
I don't really see the advantage of Catch over http://unittest-cpp.sourceforge.net/

UnitTest++ was written by Noel Llopis, is small, tasteful, fast, and supports fixtures (and nested fixtures) via structs and struct inheritance.

Honest question: Why would I use Catch instead?
Talking exclusively about PCs worldwide, in the last five years OSX has grown more than 100% from 3% to over 6%. However, also note that the dip in the Windows market share has been a mere 3-4%. In other words the parent's point is valid.
FORTH definitely seemed to be a kook amplifier. It tended to attract personalities who were unhinged and not very disciplined.

The episode that most sticks in my mind was when a cow-orker of mine at Atari tried to write a game in FORTH. He blew all his ROM space with runtime and framework and static bitmaps; game play was going to come later, as soon as he got his great FORTH-based game engine running. Ten months into a six month project, 20K into a 16K ROM and with frame times on the order of 5 FPS (utterly unplayable) he basically stopped giving his manager any status, and was fired. All this time, good performance, great game play and small code space were "just around the corner, like next week, maybe" because the magic of FORTH was going to save the day.

That was a near total failure of management, good engineering practice, scheduling and hiring, all at once.

At nearly the same time, a friend of mine was writing some great process-control stuff for another company, in FORTH. We had many conversations about the Atari programmer in question. My friend was pragmatic, conscious of his own faults, and probably the best FORTH programmer I've ever known.

"Not everyone can handle this stuff," he said.

A few years later I asked him if any of his FORTH code had survived when he left that company, and he smiled a little and asked me what I thought.

"They threw it all away, right?"

"Right."

I don't know how much that cost the company in question. Probably a lot.

In another case, there was a hardware bring-up engineer who wrote a bunch of tests and exercisers in FORTH. This was an initial win because he taught the hardware people FORTH, too, and they wrote a lot of their tests in it, and they were pretty productive. This was unarguably good stuff. But when it came to write native code drivers for the platform's OS we found all kinds of cycle-level timing issues that had been masked by FORTH's inner interpreter overhead, and I spent weeks chasing some of these, inserting magic NOP instructions to work around glitches.

So am I utterly negative about FORTH? No, it's a tool. I get really skeptical that you can ship a real product in it, though, and I think that FORTH's successes are in very specialized niches and not very visible.

Color FORTH made me laugh, though.
> A few seconds warning seems like it might be kind of useless for humans [...]

One of the things mentioned on the USGS site is doctors in surgery. Knowing even a couple of seconds in advance that you should pause the procedure could save lives.
> Any such bizarre behaviors need to be treated as a bug, and eliminated in the next release.

Going back in time (sorry for the long story).

From what I observed, there seems to have been a split in the community. The split is between the importance for PyPy and its future vs the "core" CPython.

When PyPy was making very fast progress there was a feeling that maybe in the next big release PyPy will merge into CPython. So maybe if you downloaded python 3.0 you'd just get PyPy with it. There was a lot of hype and hope. And I think at some level the old guard (Guido and some other core developers) saw that as bit of threat and they made public remarks that I understood to mean: "CPython is not PyPy", "it won't be merged in any time soon", "CPython is fast enough".

So why all this background? Well that might explain why there would be resistance to modifying CPython to "help out" PyPy.
Typical. Government organizations think IT security means having strongly worded statements and reams of bureaucratic rules and procedures. If you look closely though the strong words often aren't backed by any meaningful action. In a government official's mind if the 50 page IT security document was filled out and is on file that means the system is secure. It's all a big joke really.
Steve Jobs’ inspirational commencement speech is hidden in Pages for Mac
Thanks for the extra information.

With only 1k users and many direct competitors you would probably find it hard to find a buyer. It's not the 400 hours you have invested that is the issue, it's the number of hours required to add the requested functionality. That same effort could be, in principle, applied to any of the competing platforms to increase their functionality.

As learning experiences go, you learnt your lessons very cheaply.
Friends don't send friends automated emails.

Unless you're trolling, in which case automate away.
> * Static type language that don't offer protocol checks also can't easily detect bugs where you open a file handle, close it, then read from it. It knows it is a FILE or some iostream but it doesn't help much there. I've heard other more advanced languages have something in place to handle that.

You can fix catch these errors with a suitably advance type system; but often a simple construct like Python's with-statement works well for most cases, too. (If you have higher order functions or macros or RAII, that kind of construct doesn't need to be build into the language, even.)