skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I cannot agree more.

Apple's stab at Excel with Calcs is the way Excel should always have been. A blank sheet to which you can add tables
or charts, not a single grid. You only need to add an index by which you can query these tables (instead of VLOOKUPs), and you have something as simple and flexible as a spreadsheet and as powerful as a database.

Microsoft seem to be keen to observe and take inspiration in what is done outside, but somehow the office team seems to be an exception. Apart from re-shuffling around the buttons, I can hardly tell the difference between Excel 2000 and Excel 2013.
Strangely enough, Windows Phone 8.1 is a great option for this demographic. The typographic is big and bold. There are very few "places" in the UI.

The OS is pretty efficient with battery, and IE 11 is a reasonable browser.

Outlook syncs well with gmail and I guess access to the latest greatest games is not a concern.
A police officer peaking around his blindfold at an ostrich with its head buried in the sand?
There's an interesting thing called "The Bechdel Test". A work of fiction "passes" the test if it has 2 named female characters who talk to each other about something aside from a man. It's a simple little thought experiement, and it's shocking how many films don't pass it.

It was first mentioned in a web comic, and Aliens is the example given.
C++: Towards better error reporting with Fit and Clang
Here are a few points:

(1) From the perception of most people, mainstream filesystems such as ext4 and NTFS are pretty reliable. I've certainly had mainstream filesystems get damaged but I've been able to repair them or copy data off without a lot of trouble.

One reason mainstream filesystems are reliable is that they privilege reliability over performance.

(2) In my experience, new file systems are dangerous. I've pretty frequently experienced data corruptions within a few days of trying a new file system. I've frequently been on projects that tried the latest thing, like the Linux filesystem that was written by a murderer, and after experiencing problems, we've gone back to mainstream file systems.

(3) New file system advocates believe filesystems and disks are unreliable, so they're willing to tolerate a higher level of failures.

(4) Most terrifying, look at all the discussion on this thread about options you can choose that might mitigate this problem or that problem. Every configuration choice is a decision you can make wrong, is a reason why your system can wreck in the middle of the night. If you know your stuff or hire somebody who knows his stuff, maybe you'll get good choices, otherwise you are playing Russian Roulette with Vladimir Putin.
> The early birds to got into the system are the ones that will have HUGE profits. So I want to create my own currency and be able to get an advantage also.

That is in most part due to a bubble caused by people thinking of Bitcoin as an investment vehicle.

> Technical people have advantage over non-technical people. It remembers me Nietzsche when he tells something like:

Explain?
Probably depends which college you go to, but Macs are pretty popular on a lot of campuses: http://askmeboy.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/college-class...
This requires rooting, which (unfortunately) comes with all sorts of strings attached and ugly rough edges. I'd rather have the idea of a flexible permissions model built into the OS.
Yeah, IRC is a good place to ask too. The obvious problem is that not all developers hang there all the time, so for longer discussions the mailing lists are better (and you can just attach test cases, for example).
I toyed around with a dev phone a few months back, and in general I found that the Firefox OS environment has a lot of drawbacks that can be tough to push through as a modern developer. You're working on a platform that targets low-end hardware, is limited to browser-based technology, and lacks the community-generated frameworks that exist on iOS and Android.

I found it took too long to get anything done when compared to other platforms, and overall was just a mind-numbing experience.

I don't know that Firefox OS will ever catch up to the other devices in the US as far as developer tools and community go, but I'd certainly take another look at it if it did. Right now, I don't have the kind of time to burn on free projects that I did a couple of decades ago.
better way to conduct challenge/competition http://www.codingame.com/home golang is officially available language..
Well a vector version of that image (A big B in gold coin) is the first thing you see when you go to bitcoin.org so you can't really blame the media for following their example.
> Bitcoin gives you two currency exchange transactions to do where previously there was only one

What? Only if you don't treat bitcoin as a currency. If bitcoin is used as its own currency, and both you and the seller hold bitcoin, there is no exchange, or at most one: When you buy in from your existing currency.
> I'm still convinced that the power of facebook is there is one url for everything an everyday person needs from the internet. People want one website that has everything.

I strongly disagree. Take SourceForge as an example. A compelling case can be made that part of the reason it died is that it tried to do everything all in once place. On the other hand, when companies like Github popped up, they did code hosting, and they did it really well. Sure they later added stuff like wikis and web sites, but Github is still 99% focused on hosting and interacting with code.

Another example is AOL. A big part of the reason the web won out over AOL is that people had choice. You could get your email from Yahoo! (back in the day their email service was excellent), your news from CNN, host your web site on Angelfire, and use Lycos for search. Sure, you might get benefits from using two services that were owned by the same company (I personally use Blogger because it makes it so easy to pull in pictures from G+ which are synced from my phone), but you could use them in isolation just as easily.

Even Facebook is splitting their app into discrete apps on mobile (http://www.idownloadblog.com/2014/12/30/facebook-will-contin...). Maybe they're just idiots, but it seems like the smart money is that they know what they're doing.

Another example is Google Drive. They tried to integrate Google Docs into Drive and call the whole thing "Google Drive". Why would my file syncing service have an office suite? That makes no sense! I want my file syncing service to work with documents created by my office suite, by I don't want them to be the same product. It was a nightmare, now they've split them back out.

And a final example. What you're talking about is basically the concept of a "portal" from the late 90s. It was tried, Yahoo! bet big on it. Google won with its white page and a single text field. People wanted a search engine that rocked, they didn't really care about having a unified experience. The web is messy, that's what makes it powerful! Google had its own portal for awhile, it wasn't all that popular so they dropped it.

People want products that work together at the points where it makes sense for them to work together, but they don't want a single product that does everything under the sun, because that makes it annoying to use just one of them (even if you use them all you only use one at a time).
Things to fix:

Need a richer text/post editor that also allows inline images & albums.

Need easier post/comment editing (a la Facebook).

Android/G+ photo autobackup is great, but god help you if you ever want or need to access those photos. The current method of manually moving a max of 500 at a time into other albums is a non-starter, especially if you had set auto-backup to also backup other local image folders from your mobile devices (Whatsapp/Telegram, photo editors, etc).

The client is waaaaaaay too heavy. G+ is unusable on a Chromebook if you have Gmail and more than one or two other tabs open.

The half-assed merging of Picasa web albums into G+ was aggressively user-unfriendly. There are a lot of us who still use the quite excellent Picasa desktop app for light photo editing and album management. The G+ album viewer/browser is horrifically bad.

Photo commenting is pretty much broken. You can comment, but it's pretty antisocial, unlike imgur/instagram/facebook.

A lot of content houses & brands don't publish to G+, or if they do, it's half-assed secondary crap that seems to just be bots posting links. Very few seem to interact with the G+ community.

The Hangouts integration is heavy & crappy compared to the nice and light fb chat integration, and almost no one seems to know about video chat, much less the ability to (in some countries) dial phones via Hangouts.

The idea of Communities is a good one, but it operates as sort of the opposite of Usenet. If someone leaves a community or deletes their account (granted, this may be a bigger problem for Google Apps for Work customers) all their content goes with them.

As other commenters have noted, G+ seems to have been created with the mission statement of being everything to everyone, but in the process it has alienated many and broken a lot. I suggest focusing on fixing the discrete parts and only then deciding whether it makes sense to integrate them.

I, for one, am thankful to at least be able to use my Google/G+ credentials to login to a bunch of common sites now, so it has that going for it.
PayPal pulls services from Mega over legitimacy concerns
Friend of mine who lived in Germany said: "If you can do it, the Germans have a way to do it naked". Naked hiking, naked sports, whatever
Might be worth remembering that OOP was born out of a need to model the real world (SIMUlation LAnguage). I don't think it's a surprise that functions are a good way to work with mathematical models (that is, after all, how we do math).

For the front end, it's my understanding that event-passing systems are still used quite heavily -- which can also be considered OOP (message passing).

Modelling a car as a sub-class of vehicle etc -- makes most sense when you're modelling real-world objects.
People are working on other storage types for PostgreSQL. That's all I can say at this moment.
Zuckerberg Highlights Widening U.S.-Europe Gap
The Nexus 4 and even more so the Nexus 5 are really nice devices. I switched from iOS to Andriod and liked the switch. My wife did the switch too and liked it.
> People don't walk naked in the streets

They do in Germany.
Design and Development Trends in 2015
There is on-going research on more modular frameworks that allow for faster implementation of optimizations. One of them is [1]. I worked on that project and implemented (and proved correct) several optimizations within just weeks. This is not industry-ready stuff, though.

[1] http://www.mpi-sws.org/~neis/pils/
Building Waze for the Boston subway: my first adventure in civic hacking
I think it is interesting to note here that there are a number of people who are well regarded as computer programmers who have degrees in philosophy. I wish I could remember who they were at the moment.
"If I had a nickel for every stupid leftist quote falsely attributed to Thomas Jefferson on the internet, I'd never have to work again." -- Thomas Jefferson
A Bitcoin bot has already been created, it predicts 90% accuracy on future tradings.

What I'm concerned with is, if this made public, would it devalue the worth of Bitcoin?

And, how will Bitcoin deal with quantum computing?
Although it is a good start, I wonder if the effect of IR LEDs can be solved by filtering? I mean, can someone develop a firmware or use color filters to filter out infrared light?

I think the filtering may be done using better Bayer filters to filter out infrared, but I know almost nothing about digital photography.
Citizen superheroes saving lives with NKU app
I haven't seen a Retina MacBook Pro, but you can walk into any bigger lecture hall and you'll see plenty of MacBook Airs.

(My observation is in Germany)
Those tools could use tooltips...
Wouldn't this all be undone by an ~$50 IR filter attachment on the camera[1]? No need for new algorithms or computing power to fight the ultra-bright sections, just limit the camera to the visible spectrum and the "anon light" is defeated.

[1]http://www.bhphotovideo.com/bnh/controller/home?O=&sku=23078...
Not everyone needs to be coding since they are 10 and end end up as a top software engineer in some hot tech startup.

But I definitely agree that basic programming and database skills would be beneficial to almost everyone following any professional career.

Take my mom as an example: she's a very skilled doctor working with kidney transplant in Brazil. There are lots of software programs written to help them, but she's always ahead of time and trying to do some magic with the massive data she has access to, playing with graphs and spreadsheets.... and I sometimes (little time) help her to put some little tool up..

I can only imagine where her ideas would be if she had basic programming skills...
You can also study there via a math department and have a more obviously rigorous path.

Edit: to be clear, I didn't mean to imply the philosophy dept isnt rigorous, but instead, merely, that nearly the same classes would be offered in each dept and math, unlike philosophy, suffers from the perception of being too formal if anything.
Sounds like fun, let's write one!
The mechanism for paying is on a par with credit cards, if not slightly above.

Was it really easier than taking out your credit/debit card and "beeping" it against the card reader? (i.e. PayPass/payWave).

Whilst I'm all in favour of pushing new technologies, I simply can't imagine that paying by bitcoin was easier than that!
Textin - Remote sales manager - Comission: 4 months MRR per sale - http://textin.io

Textin helps companies cut employee slack by generating timesheets with simple worker sms checkins.

This is done by placing "Clockers" - tiny digital time clocks that keep changing 6-digit code every 30 seconds. In order to check-in, all the worker must do is to send this code as an SMS within this 30 second timeframe. Timesheets are generated automatically and are available instantaneously in the textin.io web dashboard.

Your job is to prospect, generate leads, engage potential customers, handle inbound leads and, most importantly, perform direct sales of:
1) Textin platform subscription (monthly reoccurring payment)
2) Clocker devices (one-time cost, shipped worldwide by DHL)

As sales, your commission will be the first 4 months of reoccurring payments from the deal you close sent to you monthly for 4 months after each payment from the client.

The end-price of a single Clocker device to the client is ~10$ (depending on amount). Shipping is included. We sell them at cost or loss.

The platform subscription starts at $5 per worker (discounts available). So netting a company that tracks 100 workers nets you $2000 during 4 month period (51004=2000).

Our clients are in Construction, Cleaning, Delivery, Hospitality, Real estate, Telecommunications, Transportation, Travel &Tourism.

The main pain-point Textin addresses is temporary or outsourced workers, as it requires no additional equipment or training. The worker must use their own phone, and simply text (send as SMS) a 6-digit number they see with their own eyes to a number. All the manager must do, on the other hand, is simply enter the worker's phone number and name to Textin dashboard.

Apply at info@textin.io
As to your last point, it always surprises me that an argument for Bitcoin often is made in the style "remove the oppression/control by central banks". To be replaced by what? Oppression/control by early Bitcoin speculators [1]? No thanks.

[1] http://www.businessinsider.com/927-people-own-half-of-the-bi...
Yes, almost all cameras above the dollar range will include filtering for this frequency. You can find out by pointing a TV remote at your phone camera and seeing what the impact is. My iPhone can't see the IR emission at all with it's rear camera, the front camera doesn't have a filter and gets absolutely blasted. It would be devastatingly effective against monochrome CCD cameras, where the same LEDs as used in the article are used for invisible illumination of a scene.

https://i.imgur.com/zkI5p0B.jpg

https://i.imgur.com/BfRWTbq.jpg

If I remember correctly, a cut piece of floppy disk does a reasonable job of being a blocking filter for nearly everything that's not near IR, though that's less of a handy thing to know these days.
The skeptic says that currency is a security because its issuer will pay you face value for it. What will the Federal Reserve pay me for my dollar? This seems like an outmoded view of what a currency is.
How to extract Feeds from TripAdvisor
Lock-in. If you go Android you lose all your apps and stored data.

Apple are in the business of providing services that happen to use Apple hardware. They also generate some of the world's best marketing and industrial design, and understand that a brand is not a technical spec.

Samsung and Team Android have never understood this in the same way.

So you have to compare like for like. A GoPro is a closed unit. It has no ecosystem to speak of.

An iPhone is a gateway to the Apple ecosystem. It's really a service and marketing experience, some parts of which you can hold in your hand.

Now, you can debate if the Apple experience is as good as it claims to be. (I don't believe it is.)

But still - IMO that's why Apple has a planet-sized market cap, and Team Android are perpetually playing catch up.
There are also ecosystem effects. Apple vs Android is Apple ecosystem (iMessage, FaceTime, history of app purchases, etc.) vs Android, but at a price premium that (a) is only 1.5-2x and (b) is generally better hardware and software. If it is worth 1.5-2x is arguable.

GoPro vs a competitor is a 3-5x premium for something that is nearly completely interchangeable.
I think the Motorola and Xiaomi effects are more severe. It is one thing to compare a $500-600 Samsung S5/S6 vs $600-800 iPhone 6/+. It is a whole other to compare a $150-200 Moto E/G vs $600-800 iPhone.
I think that if you're using JSONB for data that can be easily stored in a proper tabular form (aka relation), you're doing it wrong. No doubt there will be people using it this way, though, and maybe there are cases where it really makes sense.

What JSONB makes much easier is storing data that are not a good fit for relational paradigm. For example if you don't know the exact structure (e.g. if you don't know what keys to expect), you can't reasonably decompose that into relational schema.

This is the case with mail headers, for example - it's highly variable, every client/MTA can define their own headers, and so on. You could decompose that into EAV model (yuck), use tables with generic PARAM_1, ..., PARAM_N columns (yuck!), or you can just stuff that into a JSONB column.
I am digging their approach, even if not all of the data is perfect, it still gives you way more perspective than without it.
Tech changes faster than almost any other industry, which is great for premium brands like Apple as you can keep redefining the minimum baseline performance.

Remember computers in the hey-day of the PC? Every two years brought a huge tangible improvement. Programs made for new computers just wouldn't run on old PCs, or if they did would be unusably slow. That ended sometime around the release of the Core 2, except for niche users (gamers, developers, etc.)

It's the same thing for phones right now. A phone that is more than a few years old just feels like a piece of crap to use; it's slow, the screen is poor, and it doesn't support new features. Good times for manufacturers! (Though we are very rapidly getting to the end of this cycle, IMHO).

Same thing applies to AWS, brought up as an example in the post. The base price is not really the issue -- AWS prices fall slower than Moore's law and it is still more expensive that bare metal. It's the new toys you get every year that make AWS attractive. AWS keeps providing more and more pieces of your infrastructure at attractive price points with less admin overhead. At some point they'll have reimplemented everything the modern company needs and then they too will be subject to more serious competition.
PayPal Buckles Under US Pressure: Terminates MEGA Cloud Service Payments
I believe engineers over-rate the cost/feature-consciousness of consumers and under-rate brand consciousness.

People do want to shop on price, but they want a discount on the brand they know. That's why they'll buy a laptop for $20 less on Amazon than at Best Buy, but they probably won't buy a non-name brand laptop.

I don't even think his examples are compelling. There were action cameras before GoPro, there are alternative cameras on the market now. Some have different form factors, some are cheaper, some are better. At the end of the day, GoPro is plastered all over every action sport competition and their daily video email gets millions of views. That's harder to replace than the actual tech - especially when the product itself needs to be redesigned every 18 months.

Also note that "come in under the incumbent's price" is a bad startup strategy. The incumbent has economy of scale & bulk pricing advantages the startup can't match. The only way to do it is to build a different product that is so much cheaper to make that you can squeeze the same margins in a lower price tier. If that's possible, then it means GoPro has shot over what the market needs. In that particular case, I don't think it is true today. It might be true someday.

In AWS's case, I actually think the competitive play is on the higher end. Everyone is trying to undercut AWS's price (generally by giving it away for free). I feel that the last 20 years has shown trying to get under Amazon or Walmat's price is a bad strategy. How can anyone get under their price at smaller scale without taking a "strategic" loss or having 0 margins? I'd rather compete on the high side by offering better docs / UI & UX / support and not be competing completely on the price of hardware.
ZFS has ditto blocks, too. Surely having parity striping and ditto blocks both is better than just ditto blocks pretending to be parity striping.
Arduino and circuit simulator online
It can't be used for anything other than research for free. So you can't write useful systems and give them away without a license either. (You might of course be able to get a license for free, but it rules out using it as a foundation for a Free embedded kit, like writing something like the Arduino platform. Which is a pity, but quite understandable).
This sounds like an inverse information measure -- ranking sites highly based on their redundancy (repeated content).

And the people who are in the business of repeating their content in ever more inventive and adaptive ways are advertisers. So over time this seems likely to devolve into promoting the adverts and infomercials ahead of the content.

For instance rather than farming links, the spammers would switch to farming quotes or paraphrases. Expect "one weird trick..." to turn up a lot outside of just the advertising box, and the battle to be how then to stop the algorithms from classing it as truthy.
It's not 680px per se that's effective; it's the legibility of 60-80 characters per line.

Sadly, it seems like the new Wired article pages have the body type at a character width of around 50 on average, so it falls just a hair short of that ideal window. Removing the social share icons would likely bring it into that window, ironically.

As someone who's working on a major replatforming for another news media site, I feel Wired's pain on this.
Collecting details?

Ha. Nice try GCHQ :P /s
The Graceful Degradation of Decision Making
Surgical mask seems like more effective.