skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> I find it bizarre how the code examples provided on github use λ. I know JavaScript allows this, but I can't imagine myself switching to a greek layout to type λ

Like someone else mentioned you can use the compose-key, or if you use an editor like Emacs, there are commands to insert Unicode symbols. If you're a lisper, you might also have a macro for inserting those :)
The question I have is why it's turned in by default -- and why it's there in the first place? If it's there for revenue, then Ubuntu really isn't free.. You're paying by essentially leasing your computer to this revenue generating 'stuff'. Your 'payment' isn't monetary, but it's still a payment. Why can't we just buy stuff with actual money instead of going through the illusion that it's 'free?'

I honestly don't have much experience with Ubuntu or this sort of thing, so I really don't understand it.
Ship Your Enemies Glitter
I've noticed that battery life changes dramatically on where you are.
When I visited the US, I bought a local SIM card and my 4S died long before the day was over. The same in Japan. But in Denmark I have no problem lasting a day.
Oui, je suis Charlie. But I am Edward Snowden too
Ironic, considering that Apple did exactly the same, when you installed QuickTime on Windows. They tried to trick you into installing iTunes and Safari and set them as default apps.

Also, it stinks that Apple has nailed iOS that shut that even as a knowledgeable user you are not able to bypass it. They did not yet dare to do the same on Mac OS, but who knows when that comes.
> And nobody (read: very, very small percentage) is willing to type the credit car number on some unknown site to pay for some utility. So shareware died, and shareware authors went to the dark side.

HAHAHA. Oh, jeez... /wipes a tear. You clearly have no idea how the shareware model actually works.

Shareware is very very far from being dead. Yes, some of the devs take the lazy path of bundling crap, but it is an absolutely common knowledge in shareware circles that doing so will essentially kill your product, the goodwill and any hopes for any natural growth. It will also create problems with Google ranking and a headache with antivirus positives. With few exceptions only very desperate devs do that and typically only with throw away projects.

There are, of course, companies whose entire business model is based on scamming and scaremongering people, and generally treating them like a gray mass of idiots that always click on Next. But this has very little to do with the validity of the shareware model, and much more with simple "get rich quick" appeal of the bundleware.

The matter is not whether or not shareware model is dead. The matter here is that CNET traded its past reputation and ethics for the affiliate fees from the scamware vendors. Don't over-extrapolate, it just looks ... ridiculous.
IA is not new
There might be some room for something somewhere in between download.com and Apple's app store.
Collection of 50+ social media blogs by Lilach Bullock
I wonder if this is in part due to the transition to open plan offices. It's hardly a great depiction of reality but the TV show Mad Men shows people regularly sleeping/napping in their office. The lack of privacy in modern offices is probably a prohibiting factor to napping.
Thanks Phillip. Good idea, we'll think about it.
This reminds me of a talk by two of the Nobel price winners in medicine this year (Moser couple). They, together with O'Keefe, measured brain activity in various parts of the brain. Before computer loggers and visualization was very viable, neuroscientists hooked the sensors up to speakers. So they sat and watched mice move in a maze, and listened to various parts of the brain "fire".
Peaceful folks in Indonesia only killed thousands of Chinese descents and rapped hundreds, in 1998.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/May_1998_riots_of_Indonesia
There was once an AdBlock extension that replaced ads with lolcats instead of removing them. I think it was an April Fool thing, but the code is probably still out there to be used as a starting point.

Another good option for replacing the ads would be to put appeals in place, things like the recent push for funding for the ebola hit areas in Africa, the appeals that followed tsunamis, famines, and other natural/humanitarian disasters, and so on.
In case it wasn't obvious: yet another case of shooting yourself in the foot with your amazing C skills... Will people ever learn to avoid this, since 99,9% of all C programmers simply aren't good or meticulous enough to write network-facing code in a safe manner?
For a while you were actually able to mmap the memory at address NULL under linux, which is usable for exploiting (you can pass arbitrary data to kernel code that you can bring to dereference null pointers)
Still no mention of Pattern Recognition, poor William Gibson.
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Google itself pays to have Chrome installed as bundleware. I for got which, but it comes with either Adobe Reader, Flash or Java in some geographical locations.
But if you add 'download' or 'install' the first one is usually one of those mafia downloading pages.
I'm not judging the Ubuntu stuff, I .. don't use that.

But your comment could be equally applied to the crapware installers? Most stuff could be opted-out of - if you're actually careful and ignoring the UX dark patterns (like small print, grey skip buttons etc).
They seem to be. I successfully used them a few times to get rid of that annoying kind of malware that tries very hard to not let you uninstall it (includind even automatically killing any open cmd.exe and regedit.exe window).
Meaningful Growth vs. Metric Manipulation
Somehow the vast majority of code is written in broken languages?
Are you sure these are not prisons worldwide? I don't know, but that seems like a lot of prisons to be just in the U.S.
I don't buy networking gear so this claim that it's getting more expensive over time really caught me by surprise. Anyone know why?
I've noticed the same. I get the impression that the stronger the network signal, the better the battery lasts - I assume because the radio has to increase the power with which it communicates with the tower when the signal is weak.
Because I am a father?
Thats an interesting observation, and is line with what I have seen.

We develop various GSM products, and I have noticed network packets delivered to our products at various times of the day, different for each GSM network. On one network it was every morning 08:00 a packet would be sent from the network to our device. (I could see it by seeing the modem would exit it's low power mode). I have not yet tried to do a capture of the packet, as it might be something destined for the modem baseband or sim card.

Anybody care to venture a guess? Perhaps a network ping or something?
The corresponding loss to Rust's gain is language complexity.
Apropos - does anyone have suggestions for good Android apps for things like this? I'm looking for something pretty for my kids, that lets you look at some different things, like how the moon goes around the earth, night and day on the earth, seasons, and maybe some of the other planets too.
Google penalizes sites for SEO negligence, but CNET is a prominent result? If these sites were deindexed, this problem would be substantially improved.
Not everything belongs in the compiler. Go's "vet" tool might be the place for something like this. But, honestly, I have been writing Go code for 5 years and I can count the number of times that "didn't check the error" was the cause of a bug on one hand.
Correct, the GSM modem do indeed vary its transmission power depending on the RSSI (received signal strength). Also with low signal strength packets get dropped, so needs to be retransmitted, which also drains the battery more.
I think there is a hidden lesson there. Jeb spent months working on the drill press, he knew exactly what his job was, he'd probably come up with most, if not all of the downsides to his suggested improvement.

Too often someone with an automation mindset will see an task and decide that it can be automated without actually understanding half of what the task involves.
Thanks, I think I'll look for it after work.

Yes, that's also an excellent idea. The point is to allow people, per the quote I linked, to adapt the ad space to their own taste. Humanitarian appeals could be a good default. This could also solve the problem that some people complain about, that some pages have layouts built with ads in mind and become "uglier" when ads are blocked (not that I ever saw this actually happening).
A lack of evidence that a substance is harmful does not corroborate the claim that it is safe. Personally, I'd rather not buy any products containing these relatively unknown substances, and completely avoid the risk of them being harmful.

I think people are generally hesitant when it comes to filling their bodies with unknown chemicals.

Animals avoid this by instinct (rats only eat small amounts of something they've never tasted before, in order to test its reaction in the body), humans mostly use science to try to gauge which chemicals are detrimental to the body.

Of course, as with all activities involving the human mind, sometimes it can get out of hand (eg. parents not vaccinating their child because they believe it causes autism). But, all in all, I think the fundamental resistance to filling our bodies with unknown substances is quite healthy.
This is about babies, but I think it's interesting how topics somehow relating to productivity and productive envrionements environments usually circle back too complaining about office layouts and culture. Open plan. Naps. Working hours.

While it's obviously true that workplaces dictate a lot about how we work. It's also conveniently out of our control. Somebody else's responsibility and fault. If you are power napping 3 days a day, trying standing desks, aggressively experimenting with diet and exercise ideas and otherwise pursuing productivity with cutting edge quirkiness I would sympathies. But, formats people registering the complaint it's the easy somebody-should-do-something.

Also :

Already someone trying to live well would seem eccentrically abstemious in most of the US. That phenomenon is only going to become more pronounced. You can probably take it as a rule of thumb from now on that if people don't think you're weird, you're living badly.
- http://www.paulgraham.com/addiction.html

While pg was actually talking about recent trends making eccentricity a necessity (or really a side effect) of doing things "right," I think it's just an old thing becoming relevant to a new area (avoiding addiction). People genuinely pushing for maximal productivity, creativity and such have always been quirky. "I CAN't WORK HERE" screams the painter. Snappy frustrated geniuses with quirky demands, writers insisting on isolation, a bedsit, drugs, carefully timed and controlled naps.

Maximizing is quirky. It's also individual. The benefits of maximizing health, productivity, creativity, or other things can be incredible so the people who do it insist that it's the obviously rational choice. But eccentricity is by definition something we are usually averse to.

I hope this comment doesn't read negatively. I am entirely in favor of people wanting to implement some of these things in their life. But, find wheyier you can implement it. Don't waste time lamenting that the world (or your workplace) isn't like that. Accept quirkiness as the price.
Repaints and Reflows: Manipulating the DOM
Except that this line "I don't care about thickness, give me better battery life!" is repeated over and over by geeks like us, yet people pretty much always pick form over function - ie pick thinner phones over the ones working longer. So companies keep catering to the needs of those people, because that's what sells.
The point is not to use this exact pattern, but to write code to handle errors in a way that works in your context. If the error check is many lines away or in a different function, you should use a different approach.
Zeroed memory should not be particularly expensive on modern machines, because we have a lot of parallelism available to zero it off working threads. There might be some constraint on memory bandwidth, but IMO memory latency is a bigger issue, usually preventing maximizing memory throughput, so there should be some spare.

The danluu link doesn't really support your argument. Yes, the checks aren't free, but they aren't very costly either in practice, and much of the cost is down to C compilers not being optimized for generating range-checking code.

I feel you're also possibly missing a longer term feedback loop issue. When software starts relying on things like overflow checks and zeroed memory, hardware manufacturers like Intel start building and optimizing hardware to make them faster.

The "prefer performance over correctness" bias that's existed in the C world has been responsible for a lot of damage. We need to get out of it.
How to Catch a Cat in a Trap
On Windows there's usually a option to remove the crapware, too. On both OS, this function is well-hidden.
Design the patient's interface to medical data with PicnicHealth (YC S14)
Nice! I can see Applingua using this often!
> That second-last example with errWriter destroys safety AFAICT

It is possible to make mistakes. Go isn't the kind of language that forces you to be safe and do the right thing all the time. Like all languages, it makes tradeoffs.
Why Marathoning Is Good for Business in 2015
>A compound is considered safe (by the Food and Drug Administration) until proven otherwise.

In contrast, in Europe, there is REACH

- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Registration,_Evaluation,_Autho...

- http://ec.europa.eu/enterprise/sectors/chemicals/reach/index...

- http://echa.europa.eu/regulations/reach/understanding-reach)

"REACH places the burden of proof on companies. To comply with the regulation, companies must identify and manage the risks linked to the substances they manufacture and market in the EU. They have to demonstrate to ECHA how the substance can be safely used, and they must communicate the risk management measures to the users."

Chemical companies in Europe of course are pushing for TTIP, to get rid of REACH.
The History of WordPress, Its Ecosystem and Community
While it sounds clever at first, giving the iPhone variable thickness would ruin compatibility with countless accessories. Cases, docks, armbands, wallets, etc. Everything would either fit poorly or come with caveats: "Fits iPhone 6s 6.5-8.5mm thick." Along with hurting economies of scale, this would confuse and annoy users.

It really seems like your usage style is rare. I've never had an issue with my iPhone's battery life. It easily lasts two days without worry. On the other hand, I've never thought, "This phone is too thin." Apparently, Apple thinks that the best compromise is to keep the same dimensions and let others manufacture charger cases.
Whoa, blast from the past; I did a minor game design using this engine. I spent most of the time refactoring the demo game code to something a bit more OO / to my style though. I don't know if that was good for performance, but it pleased me.

But yeah, as another commenter stated, it just doesn't have the leverage as the bigger engines have (U4, Unity, etc), and those have very competitive pricing for hobbyist developers nowadays. Not to mention the financial means to have their developers also support Linux, with all the headaches that may incur.
Some people might remember from really old DOS games, but... You can even use the PC speaker as a "soundcard" (Actually as a 1-bit DAC. Here's the function called a few thousand times per second when using the Linux audio subsystem, updating the 1-bit output to the speaker (timer control of this output is disabled in this operation mode, kernel config is CONFIG_SND_PCSP).

http://lxr.free-electrons.com/source/sound/drivers/pcsp/pcsp...

"Say N if you have a sound card. Say M if you don't. Say Y only if you really know what you do."
> def toVector: Vector[B] = fold(Vector[B]())(_ :+ _)(_ ++ _)

> To a Scala veteran, I'm sure that's easy to understand; to someone who's been learning the language (like me) it looks like gibberish.

Compare what the same code would look like in Ruby; something like (hope I get the syntax right):

def toVector = fold(new Vector()) {|x, y| x :+ y} {|x, y| x ++ y}

Are the extra |x, y|s actually clarifying anything? Or are they just syntactic ceremony? Maybe it's just my scala experience talking, but I think the scala example is clearer; there's very little performance to get in the way, just the meat of what the function's actually doing

(You can think that's a good or bad function to have, but that's a library question, not a language question).

> simply because of the underlying api that other co-workers have built.

You can write bad APIs in any language; with a more sensible one that would look like:

client.post(args).map{
case Success(response) => response
case ServerError(ex) => throw ex
case UnhandledError(ex) => throw ex
}

Explicitly handling the different cases is exactly the kind of debugging advantage I was talking about; it takes up-front effort to distinguish between ServerError and UnhandledError, but the result is code where you can see all the possibilities and know exactly where any given failure might be happening. (And again, the language doesn't force you to do this; you can just write the happy path and allow any kind of exception to happen at any point. But you'll pay the price in debugging, as I have in Python, and as I presume you have in Ruby).
In my experience, those days when I need the extra bit of battery life are almost always at events, or while travelling. I can spot those days in advance, they're not surprises.

So I found a remarkably simple and obvious solution: I spent £50 and bought an external battery pack, something like http://www.amazon.co.uk/RAVPower-15000mAh-External-Generatio... . It charges overnight, weighs not all that much at the bottom of a shoulder bag, but on those crucial days when battery is getting slim, I can just pull a cable out, plug it into my phone, and bingo: the phone is charged.

It's capable of charging an iPhone several times over so easily solves the problem for you and even some of your friends.
Explicit permissions for desktop apps like mobile apps have would be a nice thing however.
Congratulations! You story is an inspiration.
Love the idea :-D
Unfortunately not in Aus yet...

I know at our office the receptionist primarily does the drink ordering, but isn't so interested in beer...
So pitching it at businesses is great idea to my mind :-)

It might be too costly... But some kind of sample pack might be a good idea as a way to get buy in from others in the office?
Definitely reminiscent, though it's even more interesting when you compare different cities, especially those outside of America... here in Europe the layouts look very different, you don't have the same "grid". For example, London:

https://oxfordschoolofphotography.files.wordpress.com/2012/0...
On Windows, Restore Point are (still) a good one-stop solution against this kind of crap.

The most annoying malware I've removed this way was one that automatically killed any instance of cmd.exe and regedit.exe that you opened.
This is actually only 14% of the total US prisons.

Read the 'about' page, and it explains the methodology, where the data comes from, as well as the percentage of prisons depicted.
Yeah, I'll allow that one to be honest. Also, the Malicious Software Removal tool is probably a good thing too, as it's real and from Microsoft, and will definitely help some non-technical users.
When I read the title I honestly thought this was an article on Unix permissions. Got pleasantly surprised by a great story instead.
These are cuties! But I still prefer getting tickets on-site than having these bands mailed to me. they'll take more space in my luggage and added worry if my kids forget to bring them to the trip, which means I'd have to bring them myself to make sure...
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Maybe they're looking for a trusted curator or the "user" reviews give them a sense of reassurance. As an exercise, try to find the right download button on Imgburn's own website:

http://www.imgburn.com/

Even during installation, you still have to navigate the "Uncheck spyware" minefield.[1]

[1] http://www.jdhodges.com/blog/safe-version-imgburn-without-op...
Being sent to war surely is a horrible experience. Most of these soldiers try their best to hold to the part of themselves and keep themselves whole.
That's just a problem with the application (and it just happens for that problem to be hidden by a case-insensitive file-system). For a solution, if you can't bend your application to your will, bend yourself to it and rename your "downloads" to whatever Firefox likes.
Emacs.

There are various code snippets for that floating around, e.g. http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/pretty-lambdada.el.
UK Prime Minister Wants to Ban Encrypted Messaging Apps
There are proper ways to behave in everything, be it a conference or a concert. But this article really helps get the message across. Knowing how to behave as the situation presents itself is important.
Food Vibrations–Spiders Are Total Virtuosos with Their Webs
http://thehumanist.com/magazine/september-october-2007/featu...

this article is very interesting
Yeah, sadly, it's actually only 14% of them (read the 'about' page).
Very cool! I particularly love your attitude to piracy. Do you have any data suggesting that's resulting in positive effects for Pinegrow? It's good to do either way, but data there would be particularly interesting.

I've been meaning to do a review of Pinegrow for one website I write for - will definitely get on that now.

Incidentally, if you come up with a simple Wordpress theme solution, as you're suggesting, then you move Pinegrow from "Hmm, interesting" to "OH MY GOD TAKE MY MONEY" in my book :)
> and that it's our own fault

Whose fault exactly is it?

Has anybody in HN worked with a company which does this crapware bundling, let alone creating? Or does anybody know anyone who's "in the business"? Because I, quite honestly, can't understand how or why people would be doing this. Is it really that "Well, I know this shit is going to infect thousands of machines with software which nobody would like to have, but hey, it gives me my salary, fuck yeah!"?

It's just sad that there are people scamming others like this, and people who jump into it because hey, paycheck!
Its important because you dont work alone. You need to collaborate other great minds too. And if you dont have a good work flow, a lot of things could collide, causing more commotion than order.
Awesome! Love your take on piracy. Maybe put off potential pirates by stating that customers that have purchased get put on a mailing list with regular software updates and pinegrow ready templates. A user submitted portfolio of templates for sale/free could be a nice addition as well.
I had to deinfect a adware infested computer of a colleague recently. In my oppinion, most adware is very eager to include some proper way of uninstalling, just to not be classified as a trojan/virus/... Even if this is completely leaning to persuade the customer NOT TO INSTALL it:

"You will loose precious functionality, your computer will get slower, the locusts will invade your country: Are you SURE to deinstall CrapToolbarAdMakeComputerFaster2000? [NO!] [NOT AT ALL!] (yes) [CONTINUE USING ADWARE]"

I guess it's done that way so that Microsoft would look like to impair a earnest software business' operation, would they choose to include it in their "evil monopolistic" antivirus software.