skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The Internet democratized the entire software industry by allowing developers to sell direct to customers. You would no longer have to beg CompUSA to carry your boxed software in store. Before the rise of the App Stores, you could use Kagi or eSellerate to sell your software for 8-12%, or you could use PayPal, WorldPay, 2Checkout for 2-4%. Things are even cheaper and easier now with Braintree, Stripe, etc.

Apple charges 30% because they can, just like how CompUSA could charge whatever they wanted and make you pay for boxing and associated costs, because the software you spent a year writing cannot be sold anywhere else except on their platform. And if you want to sell by yourself on the Mac, without using the Mac App Store, you are a second class citizen because certain APIs like the iCloud SDK are not available to you.

If the $99 is a nominal amount, why even charge it? Why $99 and not $49? Or $199? Again, it's a number they came up with which they felt a certain demographic, let's say teenage programmers could afford, or younger kids could get their parents to pay for. I'm open to better reasons if you have one.

Being experienced in many languages does not make one a good programmer. You can be the jack of all trades and master of none. You think someone can just pick up C++ in a few weeks and become an "expert"? It takes years to become proficient in not only a single language but it's associated tooling and ecosystem.

I have no doubt that there are many developers out there who have spent years of effort learning Apple's proprietary stack and are now regretting it and kicking themselves because a decade has passed and Apple, as a friend to developers, has regressed and gone backwards.

Finally, Cocoa is a nice enough API, but have you ever had a problem and then tried to resolve it? Good luck going to the sign-in Apple developer forums where everyone shouts "ssh, we can't talk about it, it's under NDA" or having to file a bug report on Radar where nobody even responds and when they do it's to say it's a duplicate bug filing or, or opening a DTS incident and having the person say "Yep, it's a bug on our end, not sure when it will be fixed, in the mean time try a workaround". How is this better than having an open roadmap with discussion in public forums regarding language/SDK features, bugs, fixes etc?
Microsoft Shows HoloLens' Augmented Reality Is No Gimmick
Dart Today and Tomorrow
My understanding of this is you set up a monthly allowance with them and they save your surplus for the months where you don't make as much.

This doesn't seem like solving a problem, rather they are creating an illusion of solving a problem. Essentially they are parenting. Which some people might need. But what a better solution might be is to teach people to create a savings account and budget themselves. And not surprisingly there are plenty of apps that do just that.
Human smugglers offer discounts for introductions to desperate migrants
> who sets these expectation numbers, how do they get it and why can't normal investors arrive at the same numbers?

I'm not quite sure what you're asking here: "Normal" investors can and do set these numbers. Every time you buy or sell a share of stock at a given price, you're adding your (tiny) signal of what you think the price should be (and nudging it a little in that direction as well). The price of the stock reflects the aggregate of the millions of these little guesses.
$100 Android TV game player features PC streaming
My guess: for backwards compatibility. I bet you also still get that oh so useful "Windows made this file for you" text file if you use a traditional Windows solution template.

For those unfamiliar with this issue: if you include Windef.h (directly or indirectly) you get what the platform provides. That file by default defines min and max macros. To prevent that, define NOMINMAX before including the windows header (in the source, or as a command line argument to the compiler). (https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/kb/143208)
I used to work at the new york times though :)
Yes, bear in mind that MSHTML (and presumbly EdgeHTML) are tightly integrated with core Windows.
I understand your point. But that won't solve portability issue, because I bet their pthread API will be available on VS2015 (if at all). No portability for VS2013 or less.

For my code I simply just wrap the native threading api - posix or win32. It's not a big deal.
And they do that explicitly to confuse people. What they do isn't open, it's smoke and mirrors.
I like how someone struggling to make it on an unpredictable $700-90 a week turns into an advertisement for an app.
Doesn't Netflix run on Silverlight? Or did they change that?
I see a pattern here. People were excited about JVM, then came along CLR. And it is now getting attention as MS is porting it to Linux/OSX. Next cool thing will be BEAM (Erlang's VM) based languages, i.e. Elixir, Lisp Flavored Erlang etc. Reminds me of the hype cycle. So lets get hyped!
TextSecure has encrypted group chats. If there's any downsides there, I'd be curious to hear what they are.
In the article, it says they made this decision after much discussion with the board. The board is the investors, so the investors are probably OK with this.

It's likely the investors were investing in "the next big social network". When it became clear that this wasn't going to be successful, they were faced with the choice of get 80% of their money back, or to "invest" (as it were) that money in the remaining team.

Maybe the remaining team had an idea, but the investor didnt want to invest in that idea. Or maybe the team was tired and didn't want to continue, and the investor would prefer their money back then try to force the team to continue.
Thank you. That worked really well.
What are the major projects that are built in Mono? I only know opensimulator.
> Are you doubting the ability of the model trained on thousands of classical compositions to reproduce a fully structured classical piece that sounds well and has a few leitmotifs?

Yes, I am. It turns out to be immensely difficult to do basic compositional tricks, like writing acceptably good classical counterpoint, or harmonising simple chorales.

Writing a full scale piece is a whole other level of difficulty. Writing a full scale piece that's going to be played over and over is a level or two beyond that.

David Cope's EMI is probably the state of the art:

http://artsites.ucsc.edu/faculty/cope/mp3page.htm

Listen to the Bach and Chopin. If you know anything about music you can hear that they sound like what they are: randomised cut and paste mash-ups of elaboration techniques and motifs that lack the musical narrative logic that the original composers were so good at.

Basically they're competent but mediocre pastiche, glued together out of little bits and pieces, lacking any overall form or drive.

Now - you're supposed to learn this stuff at composition school, and getting a computer to do it to this level is certainly an achievement.

But it's still some way short of being interesting and memorable music.

I don't think pop is any easier. E.g. trance and progressive house sound totally formulaic - until you try to copy them, and realise that getting something good is harder than it sounds.

So no - it's in no way a trivial problem. And a naive Markov approach is in no way a good enough answer.
//Nadya should have done any amount of research

Oh... when will I learn what they say about making assumptions?

Thanks for pointing that out. The cat gifs still make me happy though. :)
When getting minimum wage is enough of a baseline to have a great and worry-free life, anything above that is cream.
In fact, VS's STL has to defend itself against those macros. Since the user might have already included windows.h without NOMINMAX, what we do is parenthesize all mentions of min/max, which inhibits preprocessor expansion of function-like macros. Look at our declarations of std::min()/etc.
Do you work for the New Cat Times now?
Would be nice if you fixed your login so you could get to the download. Still the same old Microsoft. Seriously can't you just have a simple link to download? Tsk tsk, should've hired me for that I'd position
case class Fruit(name: String, variants: Set[String])

val fruitJson =
Json.parse(
"""{
"name": "apple",
"variants": ["cox", "braeburn"]
}""")

val fruit = fruitJson.as[Fruit]

Doesn't seem to be too painful to me.

I agree that F# is syntactically closer to ML (though Scala is closer to ML with its module system which F# gave up completely).
Funny, but VS2013 has <thr/xthreads.h> header that pretty much is C11 <threads.h> implementation. Just with a bit different naming of symbols. And not sure if it is 100% compatible.
Today is the first day of the Build conference, which is Microsoft's main developer conference. Their new dev toys were announced today.

http://www.buildwindows.com/
Of course it didn't fix itself. "The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing." -Edmund Burke

Too many of us are doing nothing. We need to do more. We should actively demand that our representatives fix this problem, or vote in people who will. I'm doing this. Please join me.
Are slide-rule-and-wheel style mechanical flight computers still in use? they've got to be in the ballpark.
After a quick search, much of the TA-65 commentary seems to be well-placed SEO-optimised junk. Some of it seems like it could be 'affiliate program' stuff too. If you can add to the debate sensibly, consider contributing here or upvoting: http://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/8967/does-a-mole...

While trying (perhaps unsuccessfully) to avoid an ad-hominum attack, here's some other info on the author:

Positive, perhaps: https://lifeboat.com/ex/bios.joshua.mitteldorf

Negative, perhaps: http://www.scientistsfor911truth.org/mempages/Mitteldorf.htm...
Cross-platform WPF did exist. It was originally called "WPF/Everywhere" but eventually branded as Silverlight.
The point of this post is to call attention to the fact that while Objective C is actually a 30-year-old language that is the foundation of the entire Apple development ecosystem, some journalist misunderstood Objective C to be something that Microsoft had produced, and his or her mistake propagated wildly across the internet.
They also will provide interest free loans if the user hasn't yet built up enough savings. So, in that sense, it is also a bit of an insurance program.
Investors motto is "Go big or go home"

Here they are going home and saving some money too. Would you have the same view if Secret went on to make billions and require the Investors to pay the equity back to the founders. 6m could have been a billion there.

The only negative is if investors think the founders lacked imagination to put the money to use with a innovative Pivot.

Maybe there was no pivot in sight and then the best option is to return the rest of money and keep the 6m money the Investors gave up earlier for their big bet.
Welcome to my personal hell. Samsung used to be the worst but HTC may have usurped that position.

- Cordova-based Android app developer
When a person is in a no-win situation, is it better to do some good, or to try to do the right thing? This is a difficult question. When you can't win - you should work to change the rules. I don't agree that this bill has no chance of passing - we should not endorse regression to the mean.
or maybe the source is wrong, or it was a throwaway line about what's next, or...

it's very easy to believe the worst of others. but it's beneath you.
Typing every column of a matrix is not sufficiently general. Each element of the matrix can have its own type.

While this is true, letting every matrix element have an arbitrary type is too general. The matrix' determinant should have a well defined type to be invertable. In your example mA/Pa * kg/V/s and mA/V * kg/V/s are compatible, so it works out.
Norway tests out 'animal rights cops'
This was what excited me the most about Ubuntu's Edge smartphone (2013):
https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/ubuntu-edge
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EtNhlVn3ETQ&t=1m56s

Happy to see someone copied it.
You're conflating valuation changes with cashing out. There's not problem, ethically, if a valuation swings rapidly either way. But cashing out ahead of a massive failure is a totally different move.

That sort of thing in the public markets would prompt an SEC investigation for insider trading (despite it being "their money"). In the startup world it comes down to, these are not folks investors should be trusting.
Strange. Even though Canada strongly supports multi-culturalism, our public is equally opposed to letting illegal immigrants stay (and we certainly make it more difficult for illegal immigrants to stay).
AWS Rolling Restarter
> View Selection Source in the right-click menu

AFAIK, Chrome has never had "View Selection Source" in the right-click menu. Firefox does, maybe that's what you're thinking of?
Show HN: Dshb – OS X system monitor in Swift inspired by top and htop
The issue the article is talking about is the whole not getting minimum wage every month. It's the uncertainty.

Minimum wage in California is $9/h. That means that if you work minimum wage full-time (160h/month), you get $1440 per month. You won't have luxury, but I imagine that managing your money when $1440 appears on your bank account every 5th of the month at 3pm isn't that difficult.

But when the deposits look like this:

- Jan 10th: $800
- Feb 4th: $2500
- Mar 15th: $1400
- Apr 29th: $1060

Managing cashflow is hard. But the average monthly income in this example is still minimum wage.
C99 and C11 support plans.
> Even’s purpose is hardly to change the distribution of wealth in society. It is simply to redistribute one person’s own limited wealth across time. People in Silicon Valley may believe there’s an app for everything. That’s their hammer. But improving the lot of the poor will require other tools, including an old one the valley often wants to wish away: politics.

Sorry, did you read your own article? The whole idea is that by lightening the load of uncertainty, SOME people will be able to pull themselves out of poverty with nearly zero net spending increase. Are we to fault Even for not trying to solve EVERYONE'S problem so neatly?
Just use zoom, most of the major browsers let you do that. Some even let you define the minimum font size.
I'm glad this article exists, mainly because calling any and all optimization work a "micro-optimization" has become highly fashionable among the lazy. For every 1 developer who actually understands what Knuth was saying, there are 5 more who think that concern for performance during implementation is "premature", and will take any opportunity to criticize others, loudly, so that they appear intelligent.

I recently had someone chastise me for micro-optimising, before even seeing the code, understanding the use-case, or knowing that my load-tests already established this as a bottleneck. I'd barely said more than "I'm looking for a more efficient implementation of this" before being shamed as a micro-optimizer. It's out of control.
No company is going to waste thousands of $ to hire an intern. Most H1B go to those fake Indian companies and Google etc.
OSX (and FreeBSD) was done by the OSS community not by MSFT.
Or Internet Explorer (for Mac).
Google Connectivity Services
marketing. brand positioning.

people filter out the products that are not good enough on their own. they decide which ones of the remaining products they will buy based on how they feel about it.
Bum Trumpet, a wearable that tracks your farts
Famous quotes sharable to the book page
He directly referenced Linux which is famously under GPLv2. You can argue with this wording if you like, but his observation is spot on and it's obvious to those are not unduly biased that he was speaking about the GPL and the licenses that were similar to it.
"After a year and a half of public consultation, thousands of comments, and four drafts, version 3 of the GNU General Public License (GPLv3) was finally published on June 29, 2007."

https://www.gnu.org/licenses/quick-guide-gplv3.html

Regardless of what one thinks about GPLv3, Ballmer could not possibly have been talking about it in 2001.
Yes, it's a content farm.
Ask HN: Am I searching for jobs wrong?
Hi peeps:

I'm a senior in college (graduating in about a month) and I still haven't managed to get a full-time position. I'm starting to become confused to what areas I need to work on.

First, I thought my resume was bad, but then I got interviews at most places I applied to, so that's good. Then I wasn't getting through the first phone interviews. I developed myself some more and now I'm getting onsite interviews, but still no offers. Clearly with this trajectory I should become employed soon, but I'm wondering what I am doing wrong.

I'm applying mainly to places I see on Hacker News, is this a mistake (they don't hire junior developers) or do I just need more experience (I had a late interest in computer science and blasted through the entire major in 3 semesters)? I'm starting to wonder if I will get a job by the time I graduate. If I don't will this hurt my long term career prospects?

My email is in my profile, so if you would like to help out email me and I will give you a copy of my resume for your review. Also, if you're an employer looking for a junior developer please email me, I have 2 internships and several projects under my belt.
Apple seeks to expand its new Israel R&D center
Show HN: Change iOS table-view form declaratively using NSPredicate conditions
LeadsGate Payday Loan Affiliate Program Review: All the Perks in One Place
The layoffs come at a cost to the people who lost the jobs, not as much as a cost to Nadella or Microsoft. In fact, layoffs are usually a positive for the company. Of course, I'd also argue that in the longterm, layoffs are a positive for most of the people laid off.
It also has a reading view feature.
VC's offer this deal only when they are desperate to have an entry.

So yeah some VC's may use this argument but if the startup isn't desperate its the VC who will have to make the concession.
Netflix now use HTML5 where possible (they need Media Source Extensions and Encrypted Media Extensions) but they do fall-back on Silverlight with unsupported browsers[1] (Firefox and old browsers).

[1] https://help.netflix.com/en/node/23742
Discoverboard ( https://discoverboard.com ):

An online community focused on quality, thought-provoking conversations about a broad range of interests. It's a significantly different experience from other online communities:

-Most members choose to use their real identities on the site, and this information is only available to other members.

-Each member pays a small subscription fee, which helps keep out trolls and spammers. The fee also pays for moderators and serves as our members' commitment to quality and respect.

-Discoverboard doesn't display ads to subscribers or sell their data.

Full disclosure: I work for discoverboard. We would be very interested in hearing your thoughts about it. I've also created an invite code for free trials for people on this thread: https://discoverboard.com/code/HN
package main
import "fmt"

func main(){
fmt.Println("Hello World")
// Contributions welcome!
}
Except they are building the Play Services APIs on top of the Windows APIs.

> When we spoke to Microsoft about Astoria, the company would not tell us what proportion of the AOSP and GMS APIs would be supported, but it did confirm that it wouldn't be 100 percent; there will be APIs that Astoria does not provide, and accordingly, APKs that use those APIs will not run.

> On the flip side, Astoria will offer some integration points with Windows so that Android devs can, with minor alterations, support features like Cortana in their apps.
> I'm cynical about it ever moving forward.

So, what did you do to help it move forward?
It isn't even a workaround. This has worked by default in all browsers since the days of Netscape Navigator and probably before. You don't need media queries or even css.

1. Put a bunch of text in your body tag.
2. Open in a browser.
3. Resize your browser window.
4. Note the reflowing text.

This has been standard behavior for decades. I've never seen a desktop browser that doesn't work this way. Why should mobile browsers be different? (significantly worse, specifically)
Azure Service Fabric – scalable, reliable, and easily managed microservices
As part of BUILD the Azure team have released the Service Fabric framework at http://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/documentation/services/service-fabric/

Documentation looks quite limited at the moment, but the framework has some amazing capabilities:

* Reliable Actors
http://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/documentation/articles/service-fabric-reliable-actors-get-started/

Similar to Orleans (http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/projects/orleans/) you can obtain an Actor by ID and use async/await to speak to it with location transparency.

* Reliable Services
http://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/documentation/articles/service-fabric-reliable-services-quick-start/

Write scalable and partitioned services in C# .NET code with ease, often just implementing a RunAsync() method call for your code. You get to utilise distributed collections (List, Queue, Dictionary) that have replicas and automatic failover - you won't need Redis in this case.

* Cluster Monitor
http://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/documentation/articles/service-fabric-visualizing-your-cluster/

* Not locked in to Azure - you can run this on-premise
<thr/xthreads.h> is internal and unsupported; please don't use it.
Hey, VC++ Dev Mgr here. Our official statement hasn't changed which is that we will enable major libraries but we need to prioritize C++ over C. Let me know if there is a library that is blocked that we don't know about and I will see what we can do. I will also say that the requests for C99/C11 seem to be increasing and we are listening. :)
Maybe not no use, but if this means desktops are as locked down as phones, I'm not interested. If it means I get admin rights on my phone, even if only in desktop mode, then I'm interested.
Secret didn't have a mechanism to remove offensive posts that was as effective as Yik Yak's is.

Yaks can be raunch as all get out, but there has to be something for the average person to relate to. If you follow it closely, you'll see there are many posts made while the author has lost their mind with hormones, but they're voted off in about 120 seconds.
More Choices: Why iPhones Are Selling Better Than Ever
Policing in America: What the cops say
Yes, it is hilarious that even compared to gold, bitcoin manages to look unstable.
Immediately it means you'll see developers that use the Microsoft stack developing and deploying into docker containers running on Linux.
VC++ dev mgr here. I replied to a similar question above. please let check that out.
Distracting? You can't see the photo when you're looking at the 'resume' part of the page.

It's pretty a standard marketing format - big friendly picture of one or two people from the waist up, whether it's a support person speaking into a headset or a hard-working suit-wearer tapping into a computer.
In the startup world it comes down to, these are not folks investors should be trusting.

Or "trust these guys: if they fail, they won't bullshit you and just give you the money they have remaining back."

It's all about perspective. Luckily, most investors don't think like you. Ones that do don't survive that long in the business.
>>I can't answer the question directly, because as a web engineer I haven't once in my career actually had to do linear algebra in my code.

Wow, really? I am a web developer and I have to do tons of math. Not just the WebGL/VR stuff, but the CRUD stuff too. Reports and queries and, yes, unit translations.

Like, what do you do? What are you making that doesn't need math? I've never not needed math. I wish I knew MORE math.