skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
There has to be a fluke somewhere in the system. If nobody is perfect, I think AI is too..
Yes, this definitely happens. I live in Australia and have gone out to north-west Queensland many a time, when you do your battery life is halved compared to being in the city. You'll even find the same thing catching a train from Gold Coast to Brisbane. Basically, anywhere there is spotty coverage, you'll see your battery life drop dramatically, this is because the phone will increase power to the cell radio to keep you connected when there is low signal. I've always found it fascinating.
The 25 Best Email Marketing and Newsletter Apps
I had to use download.com recently. More than anything the experience solidified to me that using Windows is unpleasant. Finding and installing software is a bit like going on an episode of "the dating game" knowing that 2/3 of your bachelors keep a rag and a bottle of chloroform handy in the glove compartment.
Indeed.

The comedic value of the IBM PC architecture and its myriad of cautionary tales cannot be overemphasised. From the keyboard controller controlling a short to the A20 line to the rather questionable choice of using a programmable timer to generate audio (BTW, what was used in the cassette port?) and the 6845 sync frequencies that would ruin (if not set fire to) an MDA monitor, all the way to write-only EGA registers and the TSRs that were needed to keep track of which video mode the screen was on, the list and its hilarity, is enormous.

I assume the IBM engineers who came up with these ideas had a lot of fun.
The Android app store?
For me, the iphone 6+ has been the first iphone with a truly confortable battery life. It lasts 2-3 days on average for me when my iphone 5 often didn't even last a single day.
I'm sure if they survey the poor, they'd have something to say about the rich people. The real problem here is that there is a huge gap in between. And what are we doing to bridge the gap?
Does it feel futile because you get distracted or because you don't feel like you have anything to say?

The cure for the first ailment is discipline, or perhaps writin in a distraction free editor. The cure for the second is living.
This is really interesting. One or both of you all should write a blog post on it because I'm eager to learn more.

I love C. Love Go. Love the idea of Rust though I've never tried it, and I just want to know more.
That, of course, would be a leading question. Most people would probably tend to assume that you're asking "in the environment in which we're programming, what happens if you dereference NULL?" which is not what you meant.

I didn't poll my coworkers either, but at least I think the answers would be different if I asked "what does C say should happen when a NULL pointer is dereferenced?".

Perhaps that's just wishful thinking on my behalf, though. :)
Unchecky ( http://unchecky.com ) should be auto-installed by Windows.
Back in the day, I probably would have made use of that - instead they made developers bid to have their products higher in the listings.
Mastercard Hackathon
I can' imagine whoever wrote this ever having difficulties landing a job in the security space, unless the prospective employer is really dumb.

Then again, it has happened to me that I didn't have the security clearance necessary to check out the code I was working on from a repository (this caused me to make a second repository on the laptop I carried back and forth, which more than defeats the point - dumbly enough, they were fine with this).
http://www.anandtech.com/show/7903/samsung-galaxy-s-5-review...

The galaxy s5 charger pretty quickly compared to most phones.
Well, in the real world the same user meets a lot of similar dilemmas, like acquainting himself with people with the same name or encountering cars of the same model and color (and what happens then is that one starts to pay more attention to distinctions). Why does it have to be any simpler for data labels? Does that poor user have to be necessarily guarded to such a degree from the reality itself?
UAC 2.0?

I don't think there's any way to get there from here, as it were. Win32 apps running on the same desktop by the same user can't really be protected from one another. The only way is a migration to a new system; Metro, Android-on-the-desktop, or iOS-on-the-desktop.
Europe is wrong to take a sledgehammer to Big Google
I don't have any hard data about the effect on piracy. But a couple of users wrote to us that Pinegrow was the first software they actually bought. It is hard to steal from people you know, especially if you think they are nice.

Thanks for the review!

WordPress support will be ready soon. In the first step we'll have a solution for converting statis HTML page to a WP theme. A bit later we'll add support for visually editing WP theme PHP files.
Yep, I downloaded it 3 days ago and felt that confusion.
Only 8% of the prisoners in US are in private facilities according to DoJ: http://www.bjs.gov/content/pub/pdf/p13.pdf -- where is your source for the claim that every prison is a "profit center" ?
Pretty much, yes - if there's a buck to be made and the law isn't being broken (in a way that will be meaningfully prosecuted), someone will do it.

To answer your first question, someone from HN should surely about this given: http://www.istartedsomething.com/20130115/y-combinator-is-fu...

Extensive commentary at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5059806
That app store is for Modern apps.
Don't bother with the typical UK-expat landing zones: Australia, New Zealand, Santa Monica. These spots are already usurped by the fascists alas...
Block heaters are always in the mains of course, a battery wouldn't do any good there.
I think you mean Unity. And that's what I use on my computer, but the rest of them are running lubuntu.
What a pity they've decided to take a political position rather than a technological one .

Not sure if that really is the case - to me it reads like "I spent so much time getting this thing to work and it still doesn't work properly now, so I just give up"

Yeah sure, the underlying reason for this might be that he doesn't know how to properly do it (and the reason for that in turn might be that it is hard), but how is not wanting to spend any more time on it purely a political position rather than a technological or business decision? Especially the latter, which is also explained again by Eric:

I cannot afford to spend weeks at a time just trying to install Linux, get it to boot, and get a development environment working. I simply don't have the funding to justify letting the engine stagnate while I mess around with an OS that should just work. It's extremely wasteful and unfair to users who are waiting on new features.
A Proper Solution to the Linux ASPM Problem
As far as I can tell, working in the AWS teams is perhaps the best software engineering place to be at Amazon (e.g. note Tim Bray's joining the Vancouver office.). The positivity from there I've seen echoed by other diverse sources, so unlikely to be just kool aid.

Everywhere else, stay away, unless it is something you have a very very strong passion for. (Perhaps the Games teams might be another AWS like atmosphere in the making, hard to say yet). Don't get bait-and-switched with AWS buzzwords, make sure it is AWS doing the hiring.

From my experience working for Amazon, they seem to grind engineers down, so they are regularly churning through a constant supply of graduates to keep employee numbers up. So a large chunk of engineering is new to 2 years.

Stack Ranking (the cross-over of staff between Amazon and Microsoft in Seattle means the same people drawing up employee performance processes. They may insist it isn't stack ranking, but looking at how the review process works is inescapable that the nastiness of stack ranking is present)

Edit: there are a handful of genuinely good engineering teams at Amazon, but their ability to make a positive impact is tainted by the volume of garbage that surrounds them.
I actually didn't know about this (was out of France when it happened). Reading on it, it seems according to some articles by people familiar with the situation that part of the reason for this is that there was an internal conflict between the editor and Siné who used this to fire him.

In term of drawings, there's been a few offensive cartoons of jewish as well as christians (but then again, their caricatures and drawings have traditionally always been more offensive than their columns). See for example: http://www.jewpop.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/ROD0070417....
or http://www.jewpop.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/antisemitis...

I haven't read it that much (I read it a bit more when I was a student) but I definitely never associated that journal with racism in that they've always seemed equally handed in their offensiveness.
Ninite is quite good; I've been using it for years. At one of my old jobs (a local PC repair shop), we were even in the process of switching our custom install script to a Ninite package.

Chocolatey used to mostly be OSS stuff, but it looks like they've expanded with some nerd-favorite proprietary stuff now too. The list is also moderated, so that's a good sign.
It's more of a "I don't have the mental resources to deal with all this stuff" position and, as a Linux enthusiast, who has been running almost exclusively Linux for the last 8 years (I've tried SuSE, gentoo, ubuntu and currently settled on arch), I support his decision. The only way to really develop is to keep up, sometimes intimately, with the way things work and are built. I've had to do things like manually set up workarounds for buggy BIOSes (that are worked around via the drivers on Windows), patch binaries so they request a different sampling rate from my sound card and dump the initialisation sequence for my soundcard from the Windows drivers (another driver workaround for a buggy/incomplete BIOS).

It all makes you realise that computers aren't really user-friendly in the least, it's a lot of smoke and mirrors set up just right so one given platform will boot by god's grace and appear to work with stability. Linux won't make inroads until someone manages to write an advanced distributed AI to probe the hardware and automatically receive workarounds, i.e. do the thing that the hardware manufacturers do on Windows.
Windows store is not a real store which you can download regular windows apps. I think they only want to use it for metro apps and I think their functionality are far from native apps.
Coding helps people in all fields
Thanks. I'll add language filter, although the basic info that GitHub provides isn't very accurate.
Why not for Android too? This looks like the kind of weather app I'd start recommending to other people... problem is, all my other people are Androids.
An Interview with Marie Poulin of Digital Strategy School
UK to ban encrypted apps like WhatsApp, iMessage
The was a DOS pinball game that played amazing music and sound effects (at the time) over the PC speaker.
Maybe their populations are dying of something else before the effects would become clear.
That's exactly my case. I needed a way to (really) quickly browse my stars. Instant filter can save a lot of time. I hope GitHub will add something like that in the future.
The first time I saw Greek letters in a code was d3.js source code.

https://github.com/mbostock/d3/blob/master/src/geo/area.js#L...

It's a pure pain for me to type these letters. How do you write them besides copying/pasting?
How #Hashtags Changed the Way We Talk
Hackers and Painters on Kindle $3.99 today only (USA)
Unchecky is a useful defense against this. Uses about a megabyte of RAM and runs in the background, blocking most offers.

http://www.unchecky.com/

Install it on all computers that I get given being the family/friends 'IT guy'.
Reminds me of the scene from Contact

- they're alive
Apple are quite happy to trash another company's OS. The Windows iTunes experience was terrible: it ate resources, was opaque in operation, didn't always sync properly and could occasionally wipe your devices. It used to be required for OS updates.

The "nailing shut" is an increasing problem for anyone that believes in a free market in software. Which isn't helped by all these sites shipping value-negative software.
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Just pressed left shift five times to enable sticky keys on my Macbook running Windows 8 (native, no virtualization) and got no beeps. does anyone know if this has changed since Windows 7? I'm sure this generated a beep sequence in older versions of Windows.
> I feel your pain. Whenever family ask me to look at their computer I spent an hour deleting spyware and such. The worst bit is they do have antivirus and Windows defender, but they do nothing to stop it :/

Once I installed Linux for my folks, all these problems magically disappeared.
Hi Matt,

Great job you're doing. Would be really interested in seeing the Wordpress product when it's out. Haven't found anything for perfect conversions as of yet.

You're currently using Paddle that takes 5%, in my opinion this is far too much, you could save 2.5% a year by going to Stripe or even more by going to GoCardless. Besides the clump sum you get at the end of each month, what is your motivation behind using Paddle compared to other, cheaper services?

Thanks
Seconded.

Having been a Senior Engineering Manager in an Amazon business, I can confirm that the stack ranking process is the single worse treatment of employees I have ever experienced. Furthermore, it is not based on an honest and truthful assessment of individuals, but rather who is best at standing up in a room full of managers across one division and arguing that their developers are better than someone else's, even if they've never met or seen the output of the developers they are arguing against. In fact, I've even seen people judged on the _amount_ of commits they've made (not the quality) and the _amount_ of wiki edits they have published.

It was the single worst employment period of my life, resulting in depression and stress that was off any scale you'd care to mention. I cannot recommend enough that you avoid at all costs.
The Real End of the WWWild West
It's "Currently" not "Actually" and "founded" not "found".
I don't know about SF proper, but there's a pretty sizable charter movement in the Bay Area.
See:
http://www.kippbayarea.org/
http://www.rsed.org/bayarea/
Those are two off the top of my head, but I'm pretty sure there are others...
I hate to admit but graphics part of Linux is really a big mess. I hope Valve will not abandon their efforts and succeed in making useable 3D platform/API running on Linux.
Unchecky fixes that.
geo-licensing doesn't work in the modern age. Who knew.
I'm not sure how well this renderer handles arbitrary scenes through. Pieces of broken glass are very suitable for GPU raytracing, because rendering them is not a "branchy" task since there is no scattering, only definite reflection/refraction. The reflections also make it look like there were a lot more triangles. With Monte Carlo sampling you need 4x samples for .5x error, which means that a lot of samples are needed for scattered indirect illumination in a typical scene (I think in the order of 100 to 1000). In VCT you only need 7-13 samples but a lot of preprocessing.
17-year old makes browser plugins to show sources of politicians' funding
"making do" -> "making due" seems to be relatively common among US English speakers, too. In British pronunciation dew
also sounds the same as due but both differ from the US "do"...
Business (NOT) as Usual. Three Big Business Intelligence Predictions for 2015
Is there a possibility that this will have a positive effect of a) pushing the issue to the forefront (because it affects everyone) where it can be easily disputed in its current form; b) making services like Tor / VPNs a necessity for regular people and thus moving everyone towards a safer internet not governed by states? This has already happened with the block of thepiratebay: regular people have been pushed into a position of regularly using VPNs.

Say Cameron get this passed. Technically it is unfeasible because they can't realistically ban foreign companies from using encryption, and because some of the protocols are (for the sake of argument) unbreakable. So if you want to stay anonymous, you still can, and more people will. Furthermore, the privacy argument goes mainstream when it is WhatsApp / Google vs. the UK government, with regular people suffering immediate consequences, vs. a bunch of programmers / cypherpunks. I can't see how this would be a positive for the government in any way.
his own graphic says that the 3G has 7h while the 4S has 11h. This is a huge difference. It only looks like small changes in battery life because the 6+ was included in the graph.
ShipYourEnemiesGlitter.com
Daily comics aggregator
Add http://scoop.sh/ to that list.
DrRacket (the default IDE for the Racket language) has a keyboard shortcut specifically to insert this symbol. I use it a lot!
I can't find my InDesign icon... where have you put it?
You can get your desktop app listed in the store and point the customer to your own website for installation and purchase. It's obscure, but yes.

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/14944527/non-metro-app-fo...

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/windowsstore/archive/2012/06/08/list...

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/dn37...
My custom keyboard layout[1] has a third and fourth level (Alt+[Key], Alt+Shift+[Key]) containing various useful Greek and mathematical symbols, e.g. λσγδ∀∃∈⊂∞∅ℤℕ←→↓↑

[1]: I used Ukelele on Mac but there's also Keyboard Layout Creator for Windows and manually editing xkb files on Linux
This seems like someone Apple can address themselves and if you're not buying Apple accessories do Apple even care?
To me, a 2-3 day battery life wouldn't be worth much. I did like having the old dumbphone weeks worth of battery, but believe it or not, that thing was without battery way way more often than my smartphone is. Why? Because smartphones you charge every night. It's a habit. You brush your teeth and charge your phone. So actually, unless they make the battery life substantially better, I'm going to take Apples side here: it's better to make the phone slightly cheaper/lighter/brighter/faster/..., than to make the battery life slightly better.

Of course, this may vary with location and usage pattern and I can see how someone in an area where battery drains in less than a day is very frustrated. I'm nowhere close to draining my battery in a days worth of near-constant use.
A couple HN posters contacted me by email, and here's some additional info I sent them in response to their questions specific to the Hudson River VFR corridor.

FAA Safety course required to access the corridor:
https://www.faasafety.gov/gslac/ALC/course_content.aspx?cID=...

Cockpit reference material:
http://www.faasafety.gov/files/gslac/courses/content/79/776/...

Sun n Fun (conference) presentation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h3u_x6qhut0

An acquaintance of mine manufactures a reasonably-priced gyro mount for in-flight photography and videography and is based out of NY. He has some excellent sample videos on his site as well: http://www.aerialexposures.com/video3.htm
Free software vendors make so much more money by bundling other software than they do by selling subscriptions that it’s pretty much the only business plan that anybody can consider using. At least Avast is bundling something good, so we can’t really argue with it.

Because when the product is free the real product is YOU.

His use of the term "free software" kinda bugs me here. Yes, "freeware" are harmful, but just because something doesn't cost anything doesn't make it bad. Because his article is intended for a general audience, I think he should offer links to legitimate free software vendors. Instead of going on a crusade against "free (and open source) software" he should go on one against "suspicious free (of cost) software sites".

KMplayer does have an option to add an Ask toolbar, but it doesn't have Search Protect. I really don't think that a lot of the big-name software containing trojans on Download is uploaded there by the project developers, but that's just the dreamer in me talking. On sites that let people upload executable files with little-to-no moderation, or on sites that are in and of themselves harmful, malware is unavoidable.
Everyone knows that I guess. A computer can only let you win if you follow the tricks to win. But a game is no fun if it does not make you win right? I mean winning makes you go for more but if you already know this poker game wont let you win, then why play? Where's the fun in that?
Less ironic when you consider that all of those Apps are from the same reputable company and not malware, nor do they have any hidden purpose beyond trying to assimilate the WinClones to the Appleborg (although it seems to have given Apple such a bad rep among some Win users that it backfired).
Absolutely! Mandatory reading (very long but VERY worth) "Good sleep, good learning, good life" [1] by Dr Piotr Wozniak

[1] http://www.supermemo.com/articles/sleep.htm
How to Efficiently Utilize Metabox in Wordpress
First Development Release of the Muen Open Source Separation Kernel
Here's a discussion of these results by an Australian lecturer in Pharmacology: https://theconversation.com/a-fishy-story-zebra-fish-bisphen...

He covers a few points, but here's a key one:

> The concentrations of BPA in this study, while low, are still much higher than humans would be exposed to. It is a bit difficult to relate the exposures of the fish to those of humans, as humans typically do not swim immersed in solutions of BPA day in and day out, but let us look at it from a variety of perspectives.
An acquaintance of mine manufactures a reasonably-priced gyro mount for in-flight photography and videography and is based out of NY.

He has some excellent sample videos on his site from the NYC area (Statue of Liberty, GW bridge, Rockefeller Center ice rink, etc):

http://www.aerialexposures.com/video3.htm
Relevant discussion about YC-funded "InstallMonetizer" from 2 years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5092711
My favourite story about file formats and recording; Sufjan Stevens recorded his album Michigan on a little digital 8-track. He hadn't realised that there was a switch to set it to 32khz or 44.1khz. So he recorded the whole album at 32khz, then dumped it into Pro Tools two tracks at a time via the 1/8th inch jack and lined up the tracks by eye. It's not some grungy, lo-fi album, but full of complicated orchestrations and it still sounds great. (source: http://www.tapeop.com/interviews/70/sufjan-stevens/ - paywall)
> Has anybody in HN worked with a company which does this crapware bundling, let alone creating?

If anyone here has worked for Adobe (Flash included crapware for a long time), Oracle (Java updates used to or still do include crapware), Google (browser toolbar was crapware), or Apple (Quicktime for Windows attempted to install iTunes and Safari), then yes.
Booting Ubuntu 14.01 in memory card for Beagleboard using Linux platform
The Art of Engineering by David Kirkham (2009)
What does download.com have to do with this? Anyone in their right mind will figure out that it's terrible. I don't think the App Store really competes with download.com. It competes with independent websites that use PayPal downloads and license keys. Download.com, macUpdate, softpedia, download.cnet.com, and the like don't give anyone an excuse to lock down their platform this tight. The cure is worse than the disease. If there are fifty green download buttons on a site, which button are you going to click? Hopefully the red X in the top corner.
Have everything ready for your BIG Investor Pitch?