skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> I got the impression that far too few people working there actually, you know, liked cars.

These aren't startups. Are most IBM or HP employees so passionate about information technology?
The quantum revolution is a step closer: New way to run a quantum algorithm
I agree that Eclipse is a dog in terms of resources. On the other hand, it comes with a bazillion features that last time I looked are not standard in Visual Studio. Also, Ctl-Shift-T/Ctl-Shift-R, which are my go-to functions, are so superior to the Visual Studio search it's not even funny.
What's your take on Phonegap?
Because most people use their phones on a daily basis, it would be rather difficult to convince a jury that you don't remember, especially when most, if not all, members of the jury will have a smart phone themselves.
If you liked this article, you might also like the EigenMorality essay - http://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=1820&re=1
The patent issues couldn't really be sidestepped as you describe because nobody in jurisdictions which have software patents could use it.
Nothing. I think the author may be tossing that word around just a wee bit unfairly.

I liked Miguel de Icaza's measured, helpful way of saying 'get bent':

Exception stack traces are the easiest problems
for us to fix. But we need to get a copy of the
exception.

Would you be so kind of filing a bug every when
you get those exceptions? Whatever settings you
have or environment you are using is different
than mine, and I have not experienced those
problems personally.
Even if cloned, these birds won't come back as a whole. The instinct and habits of the original passenger pigeons are gone. It's like cloning a mammoth from a elephant, only to see it live like an elephant.
"Love your country, but don't trust your government."

the question is, why do we take Apple at their word here?

http://www.jwz.org/blog/2014/09/why-we-believe-apple/
The IDEs are generally a bit rotten in Java-land--though I feel you're underselling IDEA a bit, I find it pretty rad--but most of the JVM folks I know reach for Scala. I see more and more people going to Scala as the "big gun" when you want largely functional, primarily immutable idioms on the JVM. If you're comfortable with C# you'll find many features you're used to--like LINQ-esque functional modeling, though Java 8 adds some of that--in Scala. (You'll also find a lot of other stuff in it; at this point I have a good handle on it and use a lot of "fancy" bits of Scala but Scala would sure benefit from a Scala: The Good Parts book.)

(edit: JDK8 and the G1 collector have made my life a lot easier when I have to tune the JVM. I think you gotta cut it a little more slack these days.)
Browser extension for editing textareas with vi mode
Source re: fatty tissue?
> No it is not.

Yes it is. There is no question that it is evidence, so you can only be questioning whether the evidence supports the proposition. You want a mathematical proof? OK. Without knowing the percentage of approved warrants we can't exclude the possibility that exactly zero warrants were approved, which would be a hard disproof of the proposition that judges are uncritically approving warrants. Discovering that the percentage is nonzero eliminates the possibility that it is 0%, which increases the probability that the proposition is correct. Continuing by induction, with each warrant not approved the possibility that it was approved uncritically is eliminated, whereas with each warrant approved the possibility that it was approved uncritically is retained. So the higher the percentage of approved warrants the more it supports the proposition that they are being approved uncritically. QED.

What you're arguing is that it's weak evidence. It could be that there were many legitimate warrants requested and few illegitimate ones. But that's a weak argument unless you can present some contrary evidence for the opposite position. All you're doing is claiming that the proposition hasn't been strongly proved, not proving it incorrect.
I'm not sure that's true anymore. Some subset of .NET is supported for RT, but so is C++. WinForms is deprecated and it seems like everybody hates WPF, so there isn't a great .NET story around desktop UIs right now. It's a bit of a cluster.

(I like WPF. But I'm weird.)
> but I'm willing to accept that he's likely seen things about the day-to-day business of law enforcement that I just don't understand...that maybe we are the naive ones.

I'm sorry, but no, no, no. I'm perfectly clear on what exactly this move by Apple enables, which is that more criminals -- some horrible -- will go free.

But context is important here:

1. By the same token, more innocent people who never should have been charged will also go free.

2. Giving up many of our constitutional rights would also result in more criminals being apprehended, but few of us would do that, because we understand the importance of these rights for our system of government. Why is this any different?

3. Most importantly, many of us would be much more amenable to a compromise here if the government hadn't horribly abused their power over the past 15-20 years. Prosecutorial misconduct and out-of-control blackops agencies have become such a problem that almost any solution is worth consideration. You think Apple would have done this if our government had a reputation for fairly using its power?

So no, not falling for the "we've seen things you kids would never understand" ploy -- that's been pulled on us before. It's not working this time.
Of course from his perspective, not being able to access crucial evidence puts peoples lives in danger constantly. So it's not that unreasonable of a position to take.

But he has been exposed to highly unusual circumstances with a high bias.
> Preforking is still forking, for one. Under heavy load you're forking to keep up with new connections while existing processes are tied up very slowly serving responses to bandwidth constrained clients.

No, that's not strictly true. If you have min & max servers fixed at the same value and the max requests per child set absurdly high, you won't fork much if at all under heavy load. Pre-forking can result in a lot of forking and requests being blocked while you fork if a) you have a surge in traffic and b) your min servers isn't set high enough to cover the surge or alternatively c) your max requests per child is low enough that you are constantly having processes exit.

> I never claimed forking is expensive. I said it's expensive compared to an event loop.

Agreed, although that's kind of a meaningless statement (an event loop is something you go through on a per-request basis), and misses the real problem with the multi-process model: virtual address space for each process.

> It's not a technical argument but a religious one. Nginx is good enough. Apache is not.

Umm... that sounds like a religious argument in its own right. Apache is certainly good enough for plenty of people, and more importantly with all the dynamic content on sites, the web server tends to be a pretty unimportant factor in the performance of many sites. Apache brings other things to the table which are often valued for projects, and there is no reason that needs to be considered a "religious" decision.
Isaac Newton, Leonhard Euler and F =ma
Alex Blumberg of This American Life and NPR's Planet Money has created this fantastic podcast on his personal experience on starting a startup.

It's a very interesting listen. Check it out!
Orin Kerr is definitely a lawyer, and has been working and writing on digital crime and civil rights for years. For example, he was part of the defense team during weev's appeal of his conviction.

I do think he thinks beyond the technicalities of the law. And I think he's correct that there are legitimate reasons to pierce device encryption. If a victim is murdered, and their phone is locked, it sure would be nice too see if there were some evidence on that phone that could help catch the killer.

That said, he knows better than most what the law does say, and I think that makes this an op-ed worth reading carefully. I found two of his points interesting.

1) A passcode is probably not covered by Fifth Amendment protections. Thus a phone owner who refuses to lock their phone could be punished by the court anyway.

2) An encryption system strong enough to thwart legitimate and legal police actions could lead to a legislative "backlash" (my word, not Orin's) of increased consequences for failure to unlock. This is the "game" in the title of the op-ed. Technology and law are often in tension and an escalation from one side could trigger an escalation from the other.

But I disagreed with his state that "The policy switch doesn’t stop hackers, trespassers, or rogue agents. It only stops lawful investigations with lawful warrants." That seems wrong to me because it's not just a policy change, it's an improvement in how the OS encryption actually works. Seems to me that could help keep out some bad guys too.
> If a client insisted on one code-base for iOS and Android I would choose Xamarin.

Have you considered Ruby? With Ruboto for Android and RubyMotion for iOS, I'd think you could get a pretty good single-codebase solution. I ask because as a Ruby dev who may one day branch out, I'd like to know what I'd be getting myself into, and it sounds like you might have gone down that road.
Integrated libraries cause one of .NET's biggest problems, though: the "if it doesn't come from Microsoft, it doesn't matter" effect. The Java ecosystem's openness provides you a lot of choice and has created a lot of innovation; Coda Hale had a good article on the topic[1]. I don't feel like there's a ton of non-Microsoft innovation in the .NET community--there's some iteration and a lot of (often poor--hello, NuGet) porting and adaptation, but there aren't many people doing something like Scalaz Streams on .NET.

Even setting aside advancement and research, it's hard to really create a real competitors to Microsoft's existing solutions even when they're terrible. NHibernate is the "best" one I can think of and it's kind of trainwreckish. Outside of that--like, NancyFx has been around a long time at this point but hasn't really made a dent, whereas the JVM application server is rapidly losing ground--and it literally cannot come soon enough for my liking--to frameworks like Dropwizard or Play. You can fight the Man on the JVM and win; I'm not sure you can do so on .NET.

That isn't to say .NET doesn't have some significant pluses. If you stay in the sandbox and can stomach having to deal with non-Unix command line tools or Cygwin (haaaa ha ha ha), it is really really nice. But the second you go off-roading, bring a helmet.

[1] - http://codahale.com/when-formality-works/
> Detroit already lost carmaking - manufacturing was outsourced outside the city long ago. Now all that is left are a bunch of offices. So yeah, they are at risk, especially so because they have failed to innovate from their offices.

Detroit may not be as dominant as it once was, but it is the center of the American car industry. There are many manufacturing plants for cars as well as for components, as well as major R&D facilities, etc. Also, there are the world headquarters of GM, Ford, Chrysler (now a Fiat division, but I think still hq'd in Detroit), major suppliers (which are Fortune 500 companies themselves, I believe), as well as the US headquarters of some foreign manufacturers.
I think Orin's point is not that everything should have a backdoor (which would not comport with his many previous writings on tech and law), but that Apple's shift, and in particular the public way in which it has been done, could trigger unintended consequences from the courts or Congress. Hence the "dangerous game" title.
MAVEN Enters Martian Orbit
Grade 10 computer class. We spent the first half of the course cranking out programs on the CARDIAC (second half in BASIC). I had been playing with various languages without much guidance for years before this, but it wasn't until this silly little cardboard computer that the mechanics of computing became clear.
I'm not sure where you heard it, but your your statement regarding flashbacks and "crystals dislodging" is simply incorrect.

Judging by your submissions[1], you are not a fan of many drugs. While this position is understandable, I think it is mistaken. Drugs such as LSD, MDMA, and psilocybin allow us to achieve mind-states that would otherwise require years (if not decades) of dedicated meditation. Most of the people who have used psychedelics (including myself) are better for it. I can't say the same for nicotine and alcohol.

Psychedelics benefit humanity much more than they hurt it. It is comically inconsistent to jail users of psychedelics while merely taxing nicotine and alcohol addicts. The harm caused by the latter is much, much worse than the harm caused by the former.

1. https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=imperio59
> I vaguely remember reading that $3000 of the cost or producing a car in Detroit went to the union (pensions I believe) due to agreements made in the 60's to keep salaries down. That's a huge competitive disadvantage.

It's a point that is often made, but a few considerations:

1) How much do labor costs impact overall profitability?

2) There may be advantages to paying workers well in salary and benefits.

3) You weren't addressing this aspect, but certainly there are advantages to the workers, who I have no reason to be less sympathetic with than management, and in some ways to society.
A ton of very compelling stuff. I hope it all works nicely; I have found the Firefox dev tools to be weirdly clunky of late and keep going back to Chrome, but this may drag me back.
I haven't really used it but I guess I would classify it the same as Titanium. If you're building content apps then it might be really good. I guess it all depends on what you're trying to achieve.
The only feature in Firefox I miss in Chrome is the view that shows the stacked layers of a website. I dismissed it when I first tried, but it can be surprisingly useful. It's no reason to make me switch to Firefox though.

https://developer.mozilla.org/docs/Tools/3D_View
Over time I've become convinced that the two really viable options are dynamic typing or really good static typing; TypeScript occupies a middling and very rudimentary spot compared to F# (or Scala, which I have more personal experience with; ScalaJS is interesting but I have some pretty huge reservations about that).
Is Congress now going to legislate away the fourth amendment?
I'm up-voting your post for it's amusement value impereo.

A nice long belly laugh is good medicine indeed!

Edit... the down votes indicate I'm coming across as snarky. Not my intent. It's just that ill informed and over the top sensationalistic propaganda has always amused me. I'm just trying to imagine a rash of baby dropping and unexplained auto accidents due to flashbacks. Apologies for the public display of mirth.

"A mind that is stretched by a new experience can never go back to its old dimensions." - Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
> iOS versions prior to 8 all had a backdoor and he's lamenting that Apple has closed this backdoor.

iOS versions prior to version 8 didn't have a backdoor - I believe the difference is just that less content was stored encrypted before.
Turns out, quite annoyingly, the package on Arch providing vlock, and an older version at that, is kbd, from the Keyboard Project (http://www.kbd-project.org/).

FYI to everyone on Arch, for a current version that makes this work, you need the AUR package vlock-original, and then invoke that as the executable name in the terminal. I already replace xscreensaver and got rid of it. Thanks for the tip!
I have not had the time but heard good things about it.
Ed Tech Funding Report 2014
Well that's an unsatisfying ending. No mention of trying to use larger areas, or more sensitive areas like the tongue, just "isn't sensitive enough".
I don't understand the passage I quoted to be sarcasm; he's advocating that iPhones have a backdoor under the justification that it would help the government prosecute evildoers.
I might get some flak for this, because while I respect the hell out of Miguel we've never seen eye to eye when we've talked (he's called me a troll twice, I'm very proud of that), I think that's a huge cop-out. I chafe real hard when Miguel says "file a bug and we'll look at it", because...Xamarin's taking money. When you're taking money, it's no longer "we the community," it's "you the profit-seeking organization." It's their problem, not my problem. Xamarin (and Novell before them) have not done a good job of managing a Mono community, even aside from hiring a big chunk of the community and wondering where the community up and went. They've burned the community at times (and don't get me wrong, I understand why that happens, but it does still happen) and they're clearly spending most of their effort on their commercial stuff. Which is cool, but you lose a lot of the "please file a bug" pull.

Expecting people to go sign up for your bug tracker and blah blah blah about a bug in your basically-commercial software is such a fundamental failure to understand people that to me it's pretty much a statement that no, you don't care. If you're seriously interested in fixing bugs people kvetch about on Twitter, get your developer relations people (you have developer relations people, right? (if not, why not?)) to send an email and do the legwork around a bug.

And frankly, I feel like "file a bug with an exception trace" is a method of symptomatic treatment rather than the fairly core auditing and testing that most of the Xamarin software I run into on a semi-regular basis really needs. From the outside, a lot of it feels rotten. Picking off an exception here or there doesn't seem likely to cure the disease, it just lances a boil or two.
How  to Boost Your Online Business
What a mindless rant.

As an equally (un)valuable counter-anecdote: I spent about 9 months developing a set of apps for Android and iOS with Xamarin and didn't encounter many of these problems.

We did find one bug in the toolchain. We reported it, Xamarin responded with a workaround in 1 day and a fix in 7.
>We insisted that the local team follow Yahoo reporting, systems, and governance requirements.

they could have just shoot them, it would be more merciful.
I've taken acid upwards of 50 times, and my life isn't "fucked up", funnily enough. Come on now, I'm not going to sit here and tell you any drug is "safe" (because that's a silly claim, everything has risk and every drug is different -- blanket statements are laughable in their uselessness), and I'm not going to convince you to give up your personal opinion on drugs, but flashbacks due to fatty tissue drug residue is entirely disproven. It's a myth, nothing more.
>It may very well solve the problem better for some people than others. Which is one definition of 'subjective'.

That's like saying a hammer's effectiveness is subjective because it doesn't work well with screws.
Your position is circular. You are defining 'critical-ness' with the sole criteria being the approval rate. If we accept that as the only criteria, then sure the proposition stands, but then it loses meaning and becomes nothing more than a rhetorical device.

Generally speaking, we mean 'critical' to involve the weighing of a decision against an ethical standard. Assuming the standard isn't changing, we would expect an equilibrium to emerge where the parties involved would come to understand the standard, especially given that the warrant process is not adversarial. So there's no reason not to expect the approval rate to settle at close to 100%, with the few denials being law enforcement attempts to skirt the boundaries.

Anything less than a very high rate would indicate that the standards are inconsistent or are being inconsistently applied. The only reason I can see to be inconsistent is to game statistics like this one that seem to mean more to certain people than they actually do.
How often did you need to do the pathfinding in Robokill? I've tried making a game where I did pathfinding with A* every few seconds with 20 enemies tracking a player and it locked up the browser for like a second every time.
DDoS brings down Destiny and CoD: Ghosts servers
A great idea, thanks. A suggestion: If you could post it someplace that allows user reviews, I'd be much more likely to download it. It's hard to tell if it will cause performance problems, installs/uninstalls well, false-positive/negative rates, identifies advertorials that I wouldn't find on my own, etc. I could try it, but there are many, many add-ons to try!

That said, I hope it works well and becomes widely used. The publishers should be putting that alert on their pages themselves.
An Efficient and Provable Secure Revocable Identity-Based Encryption Scheme
Perhaps you would be interested in Stali, the suckless linux distro, a fairly recent project considering their work.

http://sta.li/

It seems pretty interesting, but very much in early stages.
New technique gets pure hydrogen out of splitting water
I've taken MDMA twice. Both were awesome experiences, but I reverted 100% to my socially anxious state within 48 hours of the roll. I was never able to carry the lessons and mental state from my MDMA trips into sober, waking life. Also, the second trip's good vibes were greatly diminished from the first.
Show HN: Xray: N-D labeled arrays and datasets in Python
A right to silence and a right not to incriminate oneself.
Reaction to Proposed Software Testing Standard
I played that game on PC. Recently I ahem got ahold of it again and it was still fun, but way too easy. And too repetitive.

I don't remember it that way. Especially since I'm a terrible player who usually loses every game on "normal difficulty".
Gimme gimme gimme: how to increase your willpower
I don't think it's incorrect, see http://www.popsci.com/science/article/2013-08/fyi-can-acid-t...
Creating a game on urban design and happiness
It's good to see someone standing up to Yelp's questionable ways in which it runs its site. It's ironic that Yelp tries to extort businesses into giving away free food and drink, as well as paying for advertisements and placement on the site, but a company offering discounts for one star Yelp reviews is in breach?

I am coming over to the states in a couple of weeks and will make it my mission to go to this place and give them my business because I respect what they are doing.
TypeScript's types are way less powerful and expressive than F#'s. The comparison really doesn't fly. It's even less powerful than C#'s, and it doesn't even come close to adequately supporting a whole range of JavaScript patterns (such as generating "classes" - constructor functions - at runtime).

My experience has become that TypeScript is really only suitable for classic OO domain programming, with many nice little classes and mutable state. I work on a project where our model layer (MVC) is made like that, and it works like a charm.

Interfacing with other libraries tends to work ok, but you'll have to forget about using --noImplicitAny (and hand in a whole bunch of safety guarantees with that). Doing non-classical-OO stuff quickly becomes a pain. I recently spent many days making a nice Om-style immutable model layer with TypeScript and Immutable.js, and it just doesn't work. The generics simply aren't powerful enough, and I spent days (and many worthless lines of code) fighting it. This saddens me.
Also can you tell anything about Kivy?