skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Counter point: Dirk Hohndel explains how the Subsurface team was able to implement a much cleaner and simpler GUI in QT than in GTK: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ON0A1dsQOV0

(I've already posted this link in another comment, but here it is again just for relevance)

Maybe people don't make that many complex GUIs in GTK cause it's just too hard?
Any reasoning about TeX being able to do things that HTML can't is irrelevant. TeX -> PDF can be done without an intermediate DVI stage using pdftex. There could therefore be a similar "htmltex" which could directly convert TeX -> HTML.

In the same way that pdftex has the advantage of knowing its output format (and can e.g. write pdf metadata), this hypothetical "htmltex" would know that its output is html, and could do things like allowing paragraph re-flow and embedding maths using MathJax.

Of course, this wouldn't be easy, you'd likely need to fork TeX to implement it correctly (or only support a subset of LaTeX features like the current TeX->HTML converters), but it's far from impossible.
The short film is very much worth a watch, if folks are wondering.
From what I've seen, debuggers are a last-resort for most Go devs. GDB sorta works but it's not a great experience. The Go team is working on ogle[0], but it's a very early prototype at this point so who knows what they intend with it.

Most Go devs use logging/printing to debug. Mainly because of the prolific use of Goroutines, properly debugging an app can be very difficult.

[0] https://code.google.com/p/ogle/
You can use your Clipper Card on most transit systems (Golden Gate, BART, MUNI, VTA, AC Transit, Sam Trans). You can load generic cash that can be used on all the systems, or you can load the Bart "passes" (the $40 for $44). Some monthly passes will get you monthly passes on other transit systems, like a 2-zone Caltrain includes a VTA monthly pass.

So yea you can use a clipper card everywhere but its still complicated. Also, if you load your clipper card online it will take days to actually appear on your card.
College savings accounts, no matter how small, increase chance of enrolling
It's not. But nobody ever got to use it, because IE6 and IE7 didn't support it, and now it's only useful for supporting IE8, IE9.
NearFar (http://getnearfar.com) for chat and project planning; GotoMeeting for video conf, and Drive for docs.
As a consumer, I care about price, quality and convenience. But I'm agnostic as to how the editorial and advance are delivered.
It's not wholly unreasonable, for example, for some form of crowd funding model to turn up; you publish an outline to a site and folks bid on it.
Similarly, an editor matching service doesn't seem that far fetched.
Or to put it another way, we have perfectly serviceable replacement models for most of what a mass market publisher now does. That's not to say that publishers can't add value but, as with distribution and delivery, it's not too hard to foresee this turning into a niche product.
Fitbit Joins the Smartwatch Race
There doesn't have to be some limitations of choice by default, plenty of services provide paying extra to ignore ads, books would be no different. The model you're describing opens up options and I suspect the majority of people would rather pay less and have ads on their books.
HDR+: Low Light and High Dynamic Range Photography in the Google Camera App
I guess initially Gtk was preferred because of the licensing confusion around Qt while Gtk was clearly GNU open-source. Maybe Firefox for Linux would be based on Qt if it were started today; it would probably help for mobile. I doubt anybody would really be interested in moving an old code base like LibreOffice or Firefox over to Qt, so since they started out with Gtk, they will most likely stay with Gtk.

The last years – since Gnome 2.0 I guess, but definitely Gnome 3.0 – Gtk and Gnome have had an enterprise cleaning broom going through it, which has made them feel more restricted but also more uniform and less as if a bunch of hobbyists have each added their own pet project and preferences to a common code base.

I personally think Qt is great, and with a stronger corporate backer or design team KDE could be polished a bit better without taking away what makes it KDE. Gnome probably has a lot more corporate backing (for desktop) and paid developers than KDE, and I guess consistency and polishing of rough edges are helped by corporate backing and paid development work.

Qt is doing well on mobile though (Sailfish, Ubuntu mobile). It'll be interesting to see how this will influence the desktop side of things.

(For what it's worth – I have both Gnome and KDE installed, and use KDE most of the time.)
Fitbit announces Surge fitness 'superwatch' and two new fitness bands
I'm trying to get my head around it but one thing looks particularly confusing.

The article says that "If the second blockchain has agreed to be a Bitcoin sidechain, it now does something really special… it creates the exact same number of tokens on its own network and gives you control of them."

Does "the exact same number of tokens" mean the same exact amount in Bitcoin?
Therefore, does it mean that there's no exchange rate and you always move coins 1:1 between Bitcoin and a sidecoin?

This doesn't make much sense to me. How does the actual currency amount get converted from BTC to a sidecoin?
True, but without Amazon we likely would not have any eReaders with much support. Any of the large publishers could have stepped up early on and became the dominant e-reading platform. Instead they have fought e-reading every step of the way. The publishers hate e-reading. IMHO, the complicated rules around DRM and ebooks is proof that publishers want to make it so complicated to read an ebook that people simply give up.
Are your devices Apple devices by any chance?

We had a similar bug reported at work recently, and it turned out that Windows browsers will always show scrollbars but the ones running on OS X/iOS will hide them until you start scrolling.

To turn them on in OS X, go to System Preferences > General and set Show scroll bars to "Always".
Looks like Prime Members can get it for $19 for the next 2 days.
Fitbit Charge, Charge HR and Surge
Obviously you know 1000x more about this than I do, so I'm interesting in your take on: "CAs do not provide value".

Is it really the case that anyone can get a CA to issue a certificate for "Wellsfargo.com?" Doesn't the CA provide some level of value to the consumer, that they really are connecting to someone who was able to prove they have control over the "wellsfargo" domain, or at least their DNS server? And, likewise, doesn't the CA provide some level of value to the Bank, who wants the nice "Green Lock" appearing in the URL bar?

Nobody is arguing that the system is bulletproof, that all consumers are educated to watch for a "green" HTTPS connection, and that 100% of certificates have always been assigned to the proper party, and only the proper party - but, by and large, isn't the job of a CA (and the value that they offer), to provide some level of assurance that you really are connecting to the website that you think you are connecting to? And, haven't they provided a lot of that value over the last decade or so?
When they mention LiteIDE has no modern interface, is that just colour scheme and icons? I've created my own modern theme for it. Should I share that?
It shouldn't bother you. It is just how moderns systems are.
>These authors saying white employees are bad? Or that a 60% white force is bad? I'm sick and tired of the "white people" bashing for no good reason.

They're saying that hiring based on merit, from the top universities in the US, which happens to result in a lot of white male employees, is bad and that Google et al. should be essentially watering down their talent pool in favour of diversity.

It's a narrative that has polluted the tech industry over the last few years - mainly pushed by people not even in the industry and who are just writing about it - and I'm really growing weary of it.

Yes, we get it, tech is cool and has status now and everyone wants a part of it. Well sorry, to get into the best tech companies you've to be the best, and unfortunately for a lot of people that will be the generation of young white guys who were at home tinkering with their computers from a very young age and who pursued it through third level, over people who saw the salaries in technology when they were graduating HS and decided that CS was for them.
A Dashboard with Hoplon
Am I alone in wondering why neither Amazon, Roku, nor Apple have tackled the OTA DVR space? I know there are some options out there like Tablo and SimpleTV, but their implementations are not very good. This would seem like a big differentiator for these set top boxes, b/c they are all kind of the same right now.
Show HN: Monitor.io – remote monitoring and debugging for socket.io
For $20, this was a no-brainer purchase, even if my primary use ends up being streaming to hotel TVs.
Sounds like something that could be added to http://httpbin.org
I dont understand why these things can't browse the internet
Likely "Cowboy" is a transparent proxy added by your mobile service provider. I had a similar thing happening a year ago when the mobile provider used by most of our barcode scanners decided to add a transparent proxy into the loop (without telling anybody).

The solution for this problem: Use SSL.

I mean: There are already many good reasons to use SSL, but whenever you need to send any kind of mission critical data over the mobile network, you practically must use SSL if you want any kind of guarantees that the data you send to the server is what actually reaches the server (and reverse).

Here's my war story from last year: http://pilif.github.io/2013/09/when-in-doubt-ssl/
Accelerate uploads and file transfers
The Top 5 Books That Made Me a Better Developer
It seems odd that just like the Fire TV they have tech as the number one item to try to sell you on the product

"Powerful performance—4x the storage and 2x the memory of Chromecast, plus a dual-core processor and 1 GB of memory."

The above tells me nothing about how it will entertain me.
On the chart Amazon provided it is blank. I found it interesting they would show that.
Oh, he's facing the consequences... maybe not the consequences that certain groups would want him to face, but consequences nonetheless.
Superstatic – Static Web Server for HTML5 Applications
What happens when all Bitcoins are mined?
Bitcoin is designed so that there are only 21 million bitcoins to be mined. What happens when they are all mined? In particular (1) what will happen to the price of a bitcoin (my naive mind says the price will grow and grow) and (2) what will happen to bitcoin usage? (will people still use them now that the mining rewards are over (since mining is over))?
Especially when you have display technologies like HTML that will actively compress whitespace... As happened in your last example.
The big elephant in the room is the intermediate certificates; conveniently unaddressed in this glib "everything's fine" piece.

Everything's not fine. We're only just beginning to tackle deep-seated problems in TLS and improve things, but we're probably stuck with some of the most regrettable decisions, like x.509 and the CAs.

We need Certificate Transparency most of all for intermediates. The roots may be small in number, and many of them a little outdated, but the number of still-unaccounted-for intermediates worries me. How many have no path and/or usage restriction? Who has them? Are they all regulated? Because they should be. Some are likely in the hands of attackers. We should be accounting for them all.

The CA model, as it stands today, is inferior to DNSSEC for DV. Yes, under DNSSEC, those above you in the chain of authority can fake DNS responses, but at least no-one else can. If the DNS root is removed from the control of a potential attacker (not that they'd ever get away with it, but still) then I view DANE pinning as strictly superior to DV certificates (although still not perfect, but nor is DNS). The CA model may still have use with EV.

The problem of a transparency equivalent for DNSSEC remains unsolved, and is under tension with it being considered a bad thing to be able to enumerate domains and hosts (although it is in practice very practical to do so anyway).
This disparity can be addressed, but its not by the Soviet solution of fixing prices or quotas. Its by doing diligent hiring, looking hard for the good candidates of minority descent. And since there won't be enough to go around (that's the premise after all) then agitating at the secondary school level to get Everybody included in the tech revolution.
>How can Google and its competitors consult the data source at the scale they deal with?

As insinuated by the author of this article, by overlooking the best and brightest at the country's top universities in favour of pulling in more non-white people and women into engineering roles.

Sure, it might be extremely unfair to those who've been into technology since a young age and worked their arse off to get into the best universities, the best internships, etc. and come out the otherside as the best candidates, but they're most likely white men, and in today's tech journalism narrative, being a white man is wrong.
I think the example is apt enough for the situation of "repetitive tasks which humans are terrible".

I agree that additional more complex examples might be interesting, though.

It seems that there's always going to be a sliding scale, depending on how complex the task is. Some software will provide fairly straight-forward mechanisms for performing some tasks (such as find and replace) and some things will end up being potentially more difficult (maybe, say, find and replace with a regex).

In an office setting I think there's a good case here for having someone that's IT/programming/automation savvy working with people to improve their day to day process.

I've actually done that before at my job, in an informal capacity. I occasionally go sit with the folks on the operations side of the business so I can learn more about what they do, and more effectively build things for them, and often times I end up telling them a lot of tricks in excel, or word, or whatever else, that make there job easier. In a few cases I've managed to create quick tools for them that substantially reduce their workload with minimal effort on my part. In a strict cost-benefit analysis, it's probably not worth my time, but it pays a lot in inter-department relations. Of course, my working environment allows for that, but I mostly mean it as an anecdotal example of what I'm talking about. ymmv.
Let's just say I went with the flow :].
An example -- HN clone in Chinese language: http://news.dbanotes.net/
The Twelve-Factor Front-End App
Looks like luxury to me :) All you need to launch a startup is a computer, an internet connection, coffee and a phone to order pizza
Google has made many decisions in the past that have made the advertising product worse while making the search / adwords product better for actual users. They've made these decisions knowing that advertisers would be annoyed, and went ahead with them anyways -- because in their culture, all revenue originates at the user, not the advertiser.

Yeah, the advertisers are the ones paying the bills... but if there aren't any users, there won't be any advertisers either.
>You have to graduate from specific places and have a specific background. It's a general problem.

It's only a problem if you believe that these places are being favoured over others with merit being thrown to the way side, and I'd be interested to see any evidence of such a thing.
This is a bit silly, it's going to become so huge so quickly, and the information is going to start to rot. At least something like http://react-components.com/ has a bit of focus.
>Drive down the prices so the only way to make any money off books is to plaster the end of every chapter with full color ads of Kim Kardashian?

I feel that is a silly premise. I was unable to find any cost breakdowns of how much it costs to produce a dead-tree $8 US paperback, but I wouldn't be surprised if manufacturing & shipping is at least $4 of that cost. Lets just assume that after everyone else takes their cut, the publisher gets $2.

Now, with ebooks, you don't have that $4 manufacturing cost. No grinding up tree pulp, etc. No shipping boxes of heavy hard-cover books to stores. If publishers wanted to, they could sell ebooks directly from their own online storefront for $2 and, for the purposes of this argument, make the exact same amount of money.

Your grim future only happens if people stop seeing a $2 book as worth the money. Like mobile games- developers found out that even a $2 purchase price is too high a barrier of entry for many people, and free, ad supported games could make more money. If anything, cheaper purchase prices of books would help prevent this. Deciding between a free, ad-supported ebook or paying $8 for the same thing is a hell of a lot easier decision than deciding between free-with-ads or spending $2.
That is their problem. It isn't an impossible problem, it's just that some people don't want a solution, just a patch.
Sure! If one is a guy and the other a girl, they would guess pretty quick.

Just kidding. But in my experience, parents of identical twins go in for the "isn't it cute lets dress them the same and treat them the same and tell them they are just the same". That has to be a strong influence. I'm not sure the twins-identical-or-not goes near far enough to untangle the nurture question.
> you publish an outline to a site and folks bid on it

I'd be very skeptical about that...

> an editor matching service doesn't seem that far fetched

This seems a lot more reasonable. I agree with your overall point that publishers are unlikely to be the best way of doing things, and there's no need to preserve the status quo for its own sake. I'm just not sure Amazon is going about it the right way, and I think reducing the perceived value of books is a dangerous game. That all said, I don't want to be too down on Amazon. They've made reading more convenient for many through the Kindle and the Kindle Store, and that alone is worth a hell of a lot...
At least it is honest. But, the main reason I keep buying Roku is that they seem to support everything.
It would be great to see namecoin become more popular. It would mean we could just use self signed certificates and store the fingerprint in the namecoin record.
I must be confused, but where are you seeing this for $20?

EDIT: I figured out that it is $19 for Prime members. Leaving this up for anyone else that may be confused.
What's OS? Android?
"Hi, we're an association of all the people making money from x. Let us tell you why the highly appealing x, responsible for saving the world from evil daemons, should remain in widespread use despite extensive evidence to the contrary."

"Those of us providing x are really doing it well, and have to pass stringent checks, but those are too complex to go in to so please accept my hand-waving in lieu of actual evidence."

"We've been providing x for so long, obviously we're great at it and it's something that needs to keep being provided."

"We have different flavors of x, by the way: choose from vanilla, rainbow, or secure cookies and cream!"

"We go to conferences and sometimes talk to people. This makes us really important and stuff. Are you impressed yet?"

"Despite there nominally being 600 providers of x, in practice only 65 are 'in the club', and 7 of us have formed an international cartel!"

"Some of us somewhat recently twiddled some configuration bits, therefore we are clearly on top of this x-manufacturing technology stuff."

"It's true! Our reputation, as x providers in the lucrative cartel, is of critical importance. We've even paid someone to draft this drivel. Are you convinced yet?"

"It's not true what those people say - 'Once you take x there's no going back' - you can vomit, have your stomach pumped, or induce psychosis or hypnosis for the duration of the undesired effects. Of course, you can't get anything done for that period of time, which may occur at the worst possible moment: when booking a plane ticket, making a critical banking transaction, or communicating about the human rights abuses of your government. But that's OK, because there's clearly a way to turn off our pervasive control of your 'highly secure' communications... right?"
I think, if you stop to look past the extremely popular books and look at what people read in between great works of literature, the sorts of things they read err on the side of quantity, not quality. And I'll even go so far as to grant you a conceit that "popular = good", so you can take the entire Stephenie Meyer collection out of the equation as a mere drop in the bucket.

There is a huge market out there. Publishers don't prevent bad books from getting to it.

And they don't really pay authors to write books. More often, all different types of authors, good or bad, have to shoulder the risk of their first few manuscripts on themselves and hope a publisher picks them up. If their first published book does well, then the publisher pays to have more books written. It's a system that is useless to the most popular, breakout authors--they have essentially bootstrapped a book-writing company--and disadvantageous to the anyone who doesn't write a superawesomebestseller on their first try--as the publishers often design the contracts to leave no residuals for the writer.

Books can be--and often are--just as empty and vapid as reality TV. We just tend to put books and the people involved in their production a pedestal in our culture.
How the modern world arose from the North Sea
Here's why Apple rejected your iOS app
u have to wait for 24 hours to active the invite button.
I think my favorite two examples of getting more out of my computer lever are Sikuli Script and Sublime Text multiple cursors.

Sikuli Script lets me script almost anything that has a visual element/gui. I've been able to automate just about any task that has a gui and is repetitive, in some fashion or another, and at this point I have a backlog of scripts for working with some of the esoteric software I encounter day to day. Definitely worth checking out if you haven't before.

The multiple cursors (which are getting prominent in a lot of text editors) are awesome for small text munging and manipulation. by and large, everything I could do with multiple cursors could have been accomplished with some other tool, such as regex's or whatever else, but the multiple cursors end up being really intuitive and powerful for me. I never have to rethink how they work because they work just like my normal cursor but... with more of them. Combine them with ST2's ability to do a search and place cursors at every found location, and I can get a lot of weird stuff done quickly.
Thank you, at least for showing me Miame Vice wasn't all fiction, after all ;)
I am a one-man shop and sell software in the enterprise space. I also have competitors and while I see my product as very different, a lot of my work goes into educating my market about why.

Most of my customers are household names and they're not averse to dealing with my one-man shop. It doesn't even come up. Their staff wants my software and they work their process to buy it. That's it.

I have not had to answer any of these objections (thankfully). I'd probably pass on the customer if they came up.
I always assumed that was Apple's ultimate goal: Record (essentially) everything in their big data centers and offer live-TV-on-demand as a service. But the licensing issues for something like that are daunting, unless you want to take a chance on the courts giving you a pass because you're "just like a remote VCR".
No. I had similar thoughts when Fire tv was introduced. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7516646
For $20 each (for Prime members), sure, I'll buy two - I'll find a use for them somewhere even if it's giving them to friends as gifts.