skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I sometimes contribute to Emacs. On X11, we use XFT to render text. On Windows, we use Uniscribe. I suppose we could be using DirectWrite instead, but Uniscribe produces pretty good results.

What specific improvements would you like to see in Emacs text rendering? What is Skia doing that these very common system text rendering interfaces are not?
A) Most users will never open their computer for any reason, including upgrading RAM.

B) Apple wants to capture the cost of upgrading their hardware in the future.
I'm guessing that the reason you resort to vi is that scrolling through the editing buffer is slow.

Have you tried visiting the file with M-x hexl-find-file?
I completely agree, Cygwin has real OpenSSH, well you can even run Gnome on Windows if you want; even as your main shell or I was doing that back in 2002 not sure it would work these days. Overall Cygwin can't be beat. If Gow has enough utility for folks who want to use it; that's cool but for me when I'm stuck using Windows for anything, Cygwin rocks.
How Discovery Fuels Corporate Growth
The basic suggestion is to define x.f(y) and f(x,y) to be equivalent

Am I the only one who thinks this is terrible from a semantic point of view?
Named arguments would be lovely. It's quite exciting to C++ adopting all sorts of modern conveniences relatively quickly, after a decade or more of stagnation.
I work on Android at Facebook. I write a ton of C++ and Java for that environment. I use Emacs to do it and have no problems aside from the occasional cc-mode bug.

Then again, I don't care much for autocompletion. I started on a IntelliJ Emacs integration a few months ago: the idea was to run Rhino in an IntelliJ plugin and have IntelliJ and Emacs talk to each other using JavaScript. I got as far as getting completion working, but decided I didn't need it. If there's a real need, maybe I can dust off this "bad-idea mode".
What is Julia?
I think some of your examples are iffy, COM and WMI are sometimes wonderful but sometimes definitely not. Windows is not perfect and POSIX is better for some use-cases, vice versa.
19 Insanely Cool Car Tricks
simply does not care about whether finding API's to be copyrightable hinders interoperability or cloning of software.

That is exactly why a legal professional is the wrong person to decide the issue. I've written plenty of APIs myself, and when it comes to interoperability, anybody should be free to reimplement the same interfaces, no matter how creative my design. Anything else would destroy competition in the software industry and promote a virtual dystopia of vendor lock-in.
A programming language, aimed mainly at the scientific communities and at replacing e.g. R, Matlab, Scientific Python packages, … http://julialang.org
It's been a while since I looked at this article. What are your updates to this classic list? And, what terms have you searched for lately that raised suspect results; not blacklisted terms, but terms that you would have expected a whole other set of results for? While many of these are fairly banal and humorous, there are expectations of Google search users when doing serious research on human rights issues or political and big business wrong-doing that they are resulted current and relevant data. Share your anecdotes...
World's First Solar Road Opens in Netherlands
From marijuana.oregon.gov:

Q: Can I take marijuana into Washington where they also allow recreational marijuana?
A: No. You can not take marijuana across state lines.
US courts (at a state level) have occasionally ruled similarly, it is a worrying trend.

> The court ruled in the case of Noonan v. Staples that truth published with “actual malice” gleaned from the context of the statement can give rise to a libel lawsuit.

http://itlaw.wikia.com/wiki/Noonan_v._Staples
Redick – An implementation of the J programming language in s-expressions
A Few Books That Have Changed My Life
Conservancy and FSF announce copyleft.org
Presuming the market for Macs is relatively fixed, and that soldered RAM was the "status quo" configuration previous to recent iterations, it's plausible that the change to user-upgradable RAM to impacted sales for other, higher margin Macs in a noticeable, provable way.
While others have mentioned UI changes, I want to highlight recent core improvements. Emacs Lisp is now a much better language. In particular, we have:

* lexical scoping and fully correct lexical closures

* cl-lib integrated into core

* a package manager

* Common-Lisp-style generic places (i.e., setf support)

* A much better advice system (add-function and advice-add)

* A very good testing framework, ERT, and a test suite that uses it

Emacs is a much nicer development environment than it was ten years ago.
Such odd language in those release notes. Git is being "taught" things or the various features are "learning". It's like they really do think of it as an actual git.
Am I right that this thing has ECC RAM? Could this work as a (relatively) inexpensive ZFS NAS?
Living in Middle Europe was not less surreal at all in this times. While the US people thought, that their Minuteman, other missiles and strategic bombers would give some protection, in Germany many people knew, that a third world war could not only start there, but also be the main place where it would be fought.

When in some era (I think, it was in Reagan's era, maybe a little later), the Generals where thinking, that a third world war could be limited to some territory (meaning: Middle Europe/Germany) and thus would not be the end of the world -- it was a void feeling for many people, that knew, what that could mean for Germany -- to be the designated place of nuclear destruction for the bigger nations.

In deed, it was a surreal time for the whole world it was. That is also one reason, that many in the 90s believed now humanity would rest in peace ....
Model A consumes less power than B, because it doesn't have the ethernet chip or port, does not have an onboard USB hub, has a single USB port and has less RAM.

A flatter profile is an advantage, when trying to tuck it into those narrow altoid boxes along with other circuits and battery packs.
I work mainly with front-end JavaScript developers, who generally speaking got into programming through HTML and CSS and see testing as something someone else does after they've built the thing. (Which also perfectly describes me up until a year ago.)

I don't have a reference for start-to-finish automated testing, but I like the way in which Justin Searles explains the difficulty of such a thing here: http://blog.testdouble.com/posts/2014-01-25-the-failures-of-...

I gave a brief presentation about testing a few months ago and felt like it didn't really connect. I think it's genuinely hard to break the preconceptions about testing, and also there's a fair amount of incidental framework and library minutia that can be hard to isolate from the big picture ideas.

Subjective experience is a huge factor. Trying to rationally explain the advantages or conceptual underpinnings of testing doesn't always work. (In hindsight it didn't work for me either.) It really takes sitting down next to somebody and walking them through a process. I've had success in showing a test I wrote from some unit that I wanted to exist, deleting the implementation, walking them through a re-implementation, and then passing them the keyboard to implement another deleted implementation.

Make sure that the developers actually experience a cycle of red-green-refactor.
> copyright the laws

That's an excellent point. If you run a service, you can use someone else's TOS and apply it to your customers. It is the outcome of intellectual work, for instance a lawyer's work, and it is under copyright. However, it is not clever to reuse someone else's contract anyway and you'd better use a lawyer to check its terms.

Therefore I don't think the wording of contracts, norms, standards and laws should fall under copyright/patent.

Think about a US law writer prosecuting Germany for "a law which proceeds the same way as one which was established in US" under patent infringement.
"Idiomatic" might have been the wrong way for me to put it, but it seems like one of the biggest advantages and fundamental design decisions of Julia is that it makes numerical computing through side effects _very easy_. Most performance-conscious code doesn't just look like C in other languages, it is C! So I see your point, but I still wish there were a better way to convey exactly the mix of high and low level code that Julia's aiming for.
Racket is a scheme derivative, actually it consists of several languages including some domain specific ones, that all are compatible with each other. It also has a _very_ nice C foreign function interface (much better than Haskells for example).
How the People Are Taking Over the World
Actually people who compulsively buy things can have an identifiable mental illness.

Why would people who compulsively believe the world is about to end then spend all their money on emergency shelters, food and guns not?
KDE Frameworks 5.4.0 Released
Ask HN: Are HN Mirrors allowed?
What's the official opinion about articles like Another Unsolicited HN Redesign [1]?

Are mirrors/redesigns of HN allowed in a meaningful way? Can I implement the above mentioned design on my own fetching data from HN and share it?

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8574198
I think Randi has probably done incredible good in the world. Getting rid of ignorance is thankless work.
A Bitcoin mine went up in flames, affecting the entire network
This is strongly related to the Interplanetary Transport Network, so I've submitted a link to that in case people want to discuss the two topics separately:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8577596

The basic idea is that multiple moving gravity wells combine in strange ways creating lumps and bumps, and we can move around with much less effort and much less fuel than expected. The "Gravity Assist"[0] idea is just the beginning.

An interesting thing is that we can perform gravity assists around Lagrange points, effectively bouncing off (or around) things that aren't there.

[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravity_assist
I'm trying to push haskell for that too. But the more decent tools and choices, the better for everyone. :-)
Book Titles are not copyrightable, even though they are arguably the most important part of a creative work. While APIs are not a clear analog to titles, they are a huge exception to the copyright law, and it seems like APIs need this exception as well.
Of course. The systems have a lot to learn from each other, to be honest. One of my biggest gripes back when I worked on the Windows team was the lack of a pseudoconsole API equivalent to the Unix pty interface.

That said, using Cygwin is, as far as I'm concerned, the best of both worlds. Unlike some people, I like integrating the two environments as much as possible. I install Cygwin to C:\, for example, and I added support for using native win32 widgets to Cygwin Emacs. (Try the cyg32 package. You'll like it.)

Try the "injob" utility too. It gives you native Unix job control with arbitrary Windows programs. (That it's even possible to implement it is a consequence of NT job objects being much better abstractions than POSIX process groups.)
Plus you can run nmake and cl.exe directly from Cygwin bash and everything works just fine.
Using graphs to uncover insider trading schemes
It's the case in most european countries, and I am sure also in lots of other places.
I gave Gow a shot when I got a new Windows PC at work a while back. In my experience it is completely broken for anything but the most trivial use cases.

Basic things didn't work, like "ls -t|head" (broken/missing SIGPIPE implementation IIRC), and "(g)find -iname '*.txt'" (I could not for the life of me stop it from expanding the glob).

I gave up after a couple days and went back to cygwin.
> but what exactly would be a reason for putting a power saving CPU in something that's plugged into the wall?

Devil's advocate, but I imagine it'd do huge things to the country's energy bill if everyone's computer was as energy efficient as new Core U-based computers.
It is interesting that in future versions of C++, object.method() is an active area of discussion:
http://www.open-std.org/JTC1/SC22/WG21/docs/papers/2014/n416...
It doesn't support any video files, at least for now.
I'm sorry for picking this out from an otherwise great article (though I disagree on a few other minor points), but I can't let this slide:

> That said: is racism a bigger problem in Japan than e.g. in the United States? Oh, yes. Unquestionably.

I disagree. I disagree so very much I don't know if I can even put it into words.

Being the "wrong" race in the US can be a matter of life and death. It's not even fair to compare racism on that level to the kind that exists in Japan. Do I really need to talk about how pervasive racism is in the US? And how extreme it is? Pick your poison: income, education, prison sentences, violence, etc. This should be common knowledge by now. Please, please don't downplay it. It's huge.

It's interesting nonetheless. You really can see a difference between whites and non-whites when they talk about racism in Japan. There's a reason why there's such a difference of opinion. Growing up having the race advantage all your life and never giving it much thought, only to move to country where it no longer applies is a huge shock to many people.

Really. Ask non-whites what they think about racism in Japan. I think you'll find that most people will tell a very different story. It's usually something along the lines of, "The amount of ignorance is astounding sometimes, but I haven't really felt hatred/hostility directed towards me because of my race, which is refreshing." The ignorance is certainly bad, though also isn't all that surprising if you've had no meaningful conversations with someone of a particular race all your life.

Yes, if you're talking about anti-discriminatory laws, there's a world of difference. They're almost non-existent in Japan. Anti-discriminatory laws didn't come about in the US overnight. A lot of people suffered and fought a long war before we even saw a positive change. Again, not exactly fair to compare the two countries here. It doesn't make it right, but let's put it in perspective please. The US has a very, very dark history regarding race, and it's not even close to being over.

There's also one other important difference in my opinion. In the US, you're dealing with extremes on both sides. People who absolutely abhor you for being a certain race or having a certain sexual orientation, and others who will loudly defend your rights and speak out when they see injustice. In Japan, you don't have much of either. Which is worse I guess depends on your perspective... but it shouldn't be too surprising why a lot of people think the former is worse. Hostility is a very difficult thing to deal with.
I'm not sure where I learnt of it now, but here's what I believe to be the email that started it all: http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.linux.drivers.video-winput-inf...

If I remember it correctly, Realtek made this board as something to market as capable of receiving public digital TV waves. It was widely manufactured, likely as part of the big U.S. digital switchover, so volume was high and costs accordingly low, saving passed on to the consumer in the form of cheap hardware. As far specs, using for "just" digital TV was like putting a Ferrari engine in a Prius. But it lay mostly dormant because the chip's API wasn't published except to the handful of vendors who likely paid millions for the spec.

But curiously sniffing around the simple device, in true hacker style, someone found traces of something far more awesome and dashed off the above email to a public mailing list. From there, the a community of software radio enthusiasts together reverse engineered enough of the API to make the extremely low cost (~$20) consumer hardware usable with open software such as the software defined radio (SDR) application Gnuradio. For a lot of the cooler applications of SDR you need two radios - one to transmit and another to receive - and previously the cheapest options were USRP brand radios from an outfit that did wonderful engineering but whose hardware was prohibitively priced for amateurs.
What I dislike about most of these proposals is that they make C++ even harder to parse. It's important that tools other than full compilers be able to make sense of program text.
> In UK truth is no defense for libel.

What?

http://www.senseaboutscience.org/data/files/A_quick_guide_to...

> Justification: a defendant must show that the substance and fact of what they have written is true. However, a judge decides what the words meant, and therefore what a defendant must prove to be true – sometimes not what a defendant expects.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_defamation_law

> Allowable defences are justification (i.e. the truth of the statement),

Edit:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defamation_Act_2013

> and introducing new statutory defences of truth, honest opinion, and 'publication on a matter of public interest' or privileged publications (including peer reviewed scientific journals),
Or you might be doing it for religious reasons:

https://www.lds.org/topics/food-storage?lang=eng

(Devout Mormons are supposed to maintain a stockpile of food. I suspect Costco get much of their custom for this preparedness pack from members of the LDS ...)
It's based on The Conversation (or vaguely related to it?). I remember being mildly entertained when Gene Hackman turned up partway through the movie.
I recently started a project in Julia and, excited by the prospect of a smart JIT compiler, wrote everything in a declarative function style with maps, reduces, and filters. The result was slower than than equivalent Python code. I swallowed my aesthetic sense and rewrote every function imperatively, with for loops updating some mutable array, and now it is quite fast. But I am no longer enjoying coding as much. I switched to Julia for speed, but that speed seems to come at the cost of having to write very imperative code.

In terms of day-to-day programming, I'm not sure what makes Julia a better functional language than Python or Ruby. From my limited experience, it isn't speed.

I understand that work is under way to speed up anonymous function calls and to improve type inference on arrays resulting from `map`, etc. Once that is done then I will consider Julia a nice functional language.
IntelliJ and all its relatives (PyCharm, WebStorm, PHPStorm, etc) have a plugin called "IdeaVim" which fits pretty well with all the usual Vim muscle memory while giving you the toolset of a rich IDE.
How we built an app with 20M downloads
MIT Issues First Bitcoins to Undergrads
Octave occasionally runs faster than Julia for transliterated vectorized vector and matrix operations. Julia then runs much faster when those operations are devectorized or replaced with builtin functions. But that's a pretty common source of these issues (at least on the mailing list.)
I think this is why I enjoy working on personal projects late at night.
I got a Zotac Zbox a while ago instead of a mini and was wondering if anyone else has seen any nifty things in the micro ATX world?
I know at least one fellow who's entire group is employed because the company got a phone call from the government that their network was exposed. In that case, it was also known to be actively exploited by a state actor, but the point stands that management takes phone calls from Uncle Sam quite seriously.

If a house is on fire, don't be a hero. Call 911.
We'd been waiting to replace our '12 minis with new ones in the office, but have instead just gone for MBP retinas. Can't see any reason to go with the minis now they're not upgradeable at all, other than price.
There are two main types of meditation: concentration and observation. Some of the commenters have referred to the former when they discuss focussing on breath. Observation meditation (Vipassana) is about becoming very aware of what is happening to you and around you.

I learnt the Vipassana technique by attending a free 10-day course run by S.N. Goenka. The course began with the basics and moved on to more advanced techniques. It had a full timetable of activities and asked participants maintain silence. This structure was incredibly helpful in making progress in learning the technique and seeing immediate benefits. For example on the first day I was barely able to concentrate for 1-2 minutes before my thoughts shifted, but by the end I could sit for 1 full hour without moving or losing focus.

The course is run according to a Buddhist technique but is not religious in nature (in fact they ask all participants to remove any religious identifications prior to the course). There is a daily talk about the spirituality behind Vipassana but there is no imposition of any religious practice.

I had received recommendations from friends for it and now I highly recommend it as a really solid way to learn the technique. It's definitely intense but totally worth it.

There is more information at http://www.dhamma.org/ but I'm also happy to answer questions. Email in my profile
The Java class/jar file formats are inherently slow and Dalvik's dex code fixes that problem. I don't think the licensing hack would have worked since you can't escape patents by making syntax changes.
> I can see the difference too. For whatever reason, text in Sublime with the same theme looks sharper than Vim (Yosemite).

It would help if you would send a comparison of screenshots to bug-gnu-emacs@gnu.org.
I get what you're saying about i18n in the alternate approach. It's harder to do those things there.

But isn't "designed for Chrome and Firefox" just a marginally better thing than "designed for Chrome"? It's still tailor-made for specific browsers, just 2 instead of 1. That's very un-"webby".
Yes. I did a V-I curve of the wall wart and it was fine. I inspected the ripple under load with my scope too. I also had it hooked to a TTI bench PSU at 5.000v and it still had problems (I have a large selection of proper test gear at my disposal).

They didn't like those facts.
Virgin Galactic pilot defied the odds to survive crash
> Still, it's pretty amazing what Windows doesn't include by default in this day and age

It includes the majority of stuff you'd want as part of Powershell, just under different names, and not available as separate executables on the filesystem. If Powershell is lacking something, you can access any .Net class on the system. Once OneGet is released with the next version of Windows and people start packaging stuff for it, you'll be able to grab additional utilities for pretty much anything.

Windows isn't that far behind. It's mostly just not UNIX. Most things are there, just done in very different ways.
This is not a new format, the result is still the same format as before.

If there were any benchmarks, they should compare this to other minifier/optimizer, not other format.
Power=heat. If you want a tiny box without a lot of fan noise you need to watch your power.

I think the point of the Mini is "good enough for many people". And great for them. No sense buying RAM sockets you will never use, solder it down. That's a cheaper and more reliable connection.

Most people who purchase a mini never upgrade RAM or persistent storage. Remember that if you are posting on HN, you are an anomaly and live surrounded by similar anomalies so you may not realize it.
Yes, this case is highly relevant to Mono/Xamarin, although in practice I think it would be suicide for Microsoft to start suing people who clone their technology. Note that Miguel de Icaza is a signatory.
Not in a public forum.