skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I got tired of it and looked up the best Linux laptop available, which seemed to be the Dell XPS 13 developer edition, with a handful of contenders.

The trackpad is laughably horrible. I wonder if anyone at Dell ever tried using it. Or maybe my fingers are weird or whatever, but I just cannot for the life of me make the goddamn cursor go where I want. I feel like I'm arthritic.

And I haven't managed to get suspend to work properly. Amazingly, the side effects of the brokenness is that some random subset of font characters become garbled or replaced with other characters. I truly have no idea how that happens but I'm very curious! Maybe there is some obscure kernel patch somewhere, but whatever, I just shutdown and reboot...

I also haven't found the right Xorg settings to make smooth scrolling look actually smooth, which is psychically distressing.

The sound quality is kind of crappy, since the whole chassis resonates, like the equalization isn't set properly and/or again nobody tried using the damn thing.

I still appreciate the laptop. Aside from these inevitable quirks, I love having a fast Linux machine with me.

But every time I get out my MacBook, I feel relieved. I don't buy into any magical notion of Apple, but I'm pretty grateful that the basic components of their hardware feel like someone tried them for at least a whole day and incremented until it was usable enough.

There are complex reasons for all of this and so on... but I really just wish some person with a bunch of capital would just make a simple functioning laptop that works with a plain Linux kernel. I'd pay a month's paycheck for that.
90% of what startups recently provide is not complicated technically, but only from legal or business standpoints.

Dropbox and Uber, just to name a few, are technically very simply implemented, and had many competitors before and after them.

Especially in the startup scene no hard theoretical issues are solved anymore.

You don’t see a startup develop mpeg-5
Requiring a battery can be a design decision. Let's say a computer uses 10W on average with a 40W peak for short bursts. If you've got a 20W power supply, it won't be able to supply those bursts. But add in a good battery and it will be able to. Of course, you could just make the power supply twice as powerful, but it will weigh more, be physically bigger, and become less efficient.
What I have learned about Roadmaps (as a developer)
Thanks for your comment. I've flip-flopped a bit on that issue, you may be right.
What a lot of people seem to forget is that there are some for profit schools that are regionally accredited. This includes DeVry.

Unfortunately all of the for profit school hate lumps them all together which makes people biased towards any for profit degree regardless of accreditation.
If you try again, try to see if you can get a client with a decent sized mailing list. Warming up is usually done with progressively larger sendouts. So you'd start with maybe 500 sendouts, then a thousand, then 3000 etc.

But anyway yeah the barrier to entry has risen really much. It's much harder these days than just a couple of years ago, and it probably won't get easier either!
Depends if you are buying a business machine. If you buy, say, a Dell, you can buy three or four years of next-day on-site support for a relatively small charge. This isn't complicated -- it's a check-box item -- and it really works (in my UK-based experience).

Incidentally, it turned out that on-site didn't mean a specific site. My son got on-site service both at home and at his student digs, 200 miles away.

Dell also offers 24/7 phone support.

Apart from that, there are independent third-party support services that will handle PC laptops, and most cities have both large and small shops that will repair PCs.

Repairs are, of course, much less of a problem with desktop PCs, which sensible businesses use for ergonomic reasons (as well as for their superior price/performance and greater longevity).
Sidecar – embed Gitter chat in your website
Once the battery is completely dead the CPU will throttle however.
The registration is because there exist clever amoral people.

If they didn't require you to register the warranty to a particular machine while that machine is still under its original warranty period you could buy one AppleCare and wait to see which of a number of machines broke, then register it for that one. Better yet, buy a bunch of AppleCares each month then sell them a year later on a secondary market to people with broken computers.

If Apple accepted a receipt as proof of co-purchase, then people would print receipts.

Maybe Apple could have a refund program for people that bought AppleCare and failed to activate it? Their computers must know how many AppleCares go unactivated. Perhaps it isn't a widespread problem. I suppose they have no way of contacting the people that bought the AppleCare-in-a-box products and didn't activate.
One such startup is Roadster.com. They aren't taking on the dealers yet, just making the process easier on the customer. Lots of dealers want to move more sales online and reduce spending on their sales staff.
> Most people just take their laptops back to the Apple Store when they want anything changed.

Yep, and this would still be true if the laptop was more serviceable. Most people don't change the oil on their car either even if it relatively easy. In fact most people don't even put air in the tires and instead rely on getting that done during quarterly oil changes!
I'm actually still using a 2009 MacBook Pro(core2duo+4gb ram), I put in a Kingston 128GB SSD and the machine runs El Capitan without any problem. I keep it permanently on as a kitchen PC, for looking up recipes and stuff.
I saw a talk a few years ago by a German company that was essentially trying to do the same thing. I forgot the name of the company, but I remembered they said that expressing the proteins is the easy part. Spinning the proteins into a thread was the tough part. Apparently spiders have special excretion structures/organs that can anneal the proteins to the right conformation extremely quickly as they are ejected. This is why a spider can basically just jump off of anything and shoot out his "bungee cord" while falling which is incredibly fast if you think about it. When the researchers tried to replicate this by simply shooting the concentrated protein solution through a tiny capillary they weren't able to achieve the same molecular structure for their thread nor at the same speed. They noted that their thread was strong, but nevertheless significantly weaker than a spider's. I'm very interested to know if these other companies managed to overcome these challenges and how exactly.
It is an inherent issue with the industry, demonstrated by the strategy of adding more people to a project and expecting productivity to increase on a linear scale. Although, intuitively, people surely understand that writing software is a complex task it's surprising how many people seem to just assume it's just banging away at keys on a keyboard.
I am on the same OS X install since like 2009 that I have gradually updated and transferred. Whereas my windows pc seems to need a new install every time there is a major hardware switch.
> Most people don't need to buy a car overnight

Simply not true in America, at least the poor half of America. Perhaps most people don't need to buy a new car overnight. But a car? They do. Cars break down, get in accidents. You need to drive to your job or you lose it. You need a car.
Right, but how is Trenton relevant to the story depicted in the article? (I live in Princeton so definitely curious about this)
After the coup in Chile killed their probably-democratically elected leader Allende, they got Pinochet. How is that a win?

And how about the US support of Mujahadeen Afghanistan during the USSR's invasion?

Or South Vietnam? Or the monarchies in Saudi Arabia or Iran?

It's not such a simple dichotomy. The US and the USSR have both fucked up a lot.

--

(Also, it was the support of the Chinese in Korea that swayed the outcome, not the USSR.)
Well, at an airport security check I got interviewed before boarding and the guy asked me how I got here. I thought it was a weird question to ask and I answered I got here by airplane (I was in a foreign country visiting).

He was totally non-plussed by the answer and said, "No, how did you get _here_?"... I was actually confused by the way he said it and he added, "What did you do this morning to get _HERE_?". I said I got up, packed, got on the train, transferred to the airport bus, and got here. He just paused and moved on to a few innocuous questions. It was kind of comical. I was waiting to be led to some back room for further interrogation, but in the end he just said 'enjoy your trip". :)
I don't know anybody who uses Safari, and everyone I know is a Mac user.
I seem to remember seeing somewhere that it wouldn't be allowed. I'll need to research it further to get a definitive answer - it would seem sensible to make an app version if it was allowed.
Playing Defense Against the Drones
It reminds me of printer sales or high-fee consumer credits.. they benefit from consumer myopia about the future. There's even a lot of literature about that:

https://dash.harvard.edu/bitstream/handle/1/4554333/Laibson_...

In this case, I'm guessing many people that are not that well-off still buy macs but don't really realize the future repair costs..
Hard to tell. I hired many people on Upwork, and i can say that there are quite some mid-tier ones. Charging about $15 an hour and in general, worth their money - for example, overally good but with English so poor they can't get high paying customers themselves.
Yes and the reason for this is that paren't "park" their kids in school and make it the responsibility of the school to not just educate their kids but to be responsible for their personal growth.

No matter what it's not a money problem. No amount of money will solve that problem. Only a shift back where parents are as responsible for their childrens education as they paren't will solve this.
This appears to be a re-creation of X509 and certificate transparency, but with a custom format in place of X509 and the block chain in place of CT.

The problem is that the existing infrastructure, though a little ugly in places, is very well thought out and has a vast ecosystem.

I can (and often do) simply plug in a USB stick that stores my private keys and then sign a PDF in such a way that the document is timestamped, signed, and bundled in such a way that clever tricks like swapping out an external font to change what a message says don't work.

The certificate has a verified identity in it, so I can accrue reputation under my own legal name if I want to, or I can create a self signed cert and use a pseudonym.

The CT logs are a blockchain-esque structure for logging of all created certificates, except searchable, and actually designed for certificates. It gives the same advantages as the blockchain does in this design, and then a whole lot more.

X509 is ugly, but still better than "append a signature after some lines of text", and it has the advantage of being widely supported with libraries in most major languages and frameworks. Usefully, web browsers know how to create a self signed cert and upload it to a server for signing, meaning the process of MIT issuing a university certificate can be easily automated.

Most of the problems of the existing PKI boil down to lack of UI polish. They aren't something you can fix just by throwing a block chain at it.
There has to be a better way of doing this:

numbers = append(numbers[:2], append([]int{3}, numbers[2:]...)...)
what about the commission the dealer makes off each sale?
> establish that the product has broke under reasonable use

This is incredibly tough to prove. Also, in some countries, the burden of proof is with the consumer as soon as 6 months after purchasing (Netherlands).

People think that the EU law makes them incredibly powerful. However, if you are arguing with a well-informed employee, the outcome might not be what you expect.
Brightwork is a data API aggregation tool. When you're done building whatever mobile application you've built you likely want to collect data (usage, demographic, etc). Most Developers use more than 1 data API because not every tool collects everything someone wants to collect. So they use multiples because they want to fill in the gaps where they exist.

Brightwork allows Developers to hook in one API ours, and then funnel that information through it to a dashboard where all that data can now be combined, better collected, and better understood.

Once you have the data you want, you can just hit the "Export Tool" which will then output your report in a very easy to use format. Brightwork takes all the heavy lifting out of data collecting.

Hope that helps clear it up.
Honda as well: http://www2.epa.gov/sites/production/files/2014-06/documents...
My ancestors for thousands of years have drank everyday, and they managed not only to survive but reproduce. I think the same goes for every person of European descent. We can drink an awful lot and be fine.
A basis for all cryptography
You are not alone. It's just that Hacker News suffers from some extremely myopic forum sliding and public relations tactics, as well as groupthink among industry insiders who have rationalized perfectly sensible reasons to never cross the party line on topics regarding the things that make them money.

Partly, they don't want to bite the hand that feeds them. Partly, they know damn well that they're screwing people over. True believers that actually buy the Brooklyn bridge are rare birds.
IBM to Acquire Weather Channel's Digital Business
> If you want easily swappable batteries, get a different machine.

Apple doesn't make a different machine.

Obviously what you mean is to buy from a different vendor, which is what I expect to do when the time comes for a new laptop. But how is it good for Apple that they got my money last time and won't get it next time?
It was earned in the same sense that any income or salary is earned. It's agreed upon payment exchanged for an agreed upon service. It was just as much a part of his compensation as his base salary.
Sales Leads
I almost ran into this issue myself. I purchased a MacBook Pro in 2012, but didn't buy AppleCare at the same time. Later in the year (Apple allows you to purchase AppleCare up to one year after your hardware purchase), I decided to buy AppleCare in order to extend my warranty from one year to three years.

I bought AppleCare from Apple's own online store, but didn't realise I had to additionally register it. By chance, I had a Genius appointment at one of their stores a few months later. When I mentioned I had AppleCare, they gave me a blank look and said it wasn't on their system. They asked if I'd gone to the website to enter the serial number (which I hadn't), so I did it when I got home with a few days to spare. It was my mistake (technically), but I wasn't impressed.
Apple isn't making any attempt to hide the fact that its batteries are non-user-replaceable. And I think it's clear to any reasonable person that the engineering of these devices isn't intended to generate revenue for the service department, but to create an extremely slim but solid laptop. Now, I think it's very reasonable for a consumer to decide that the'd rather have a replaceable battery than a slimmer laptop, and therefore they should avoid Apple laptops. So to answer your question, I think many would agree with you that it's a bad thing, but not too many would agree that it's unethical.
We can fight sham reviews, If everyone gets to start making reviews on products and services purchased. The power of consumers is huge.
If car companies "do not want" to sell direct, why did the dealers in so many states lobby for laws which guarantee that the manufacturers cannot sell directly to consumers?
I don't expect to be able to pop a switch, but there is a difference between integrating the battery with the chassis and gluing the battery, keyboard and logic board together in a way that makes the laptop extremely difficult to service.

From what I can tell, to replace the battery on my year old lenovo ultrabook, you need to remove 16 easily accessible cross screws and disconnect a single ribbon cable. That shouldn't take more than 5 minutes. I guess there could be glue hiding under there.

Not to mention it continues to last up to 10 hours on a single charge.
This is great!

I often end up with close to 100 tabs open, so I'm super happy about this!

However, I spent a second thinking about: how do I get to this point? And the answer is I click on a pile of links and plan to get to them later. It might actually be better if I had a way to easily just turn the links into some form of bookmarks without holding open a tab for them.
Caps are used to emphasise burdensome terms. It often reflects an attempt to accommodate legal precedents requiring such emphasis for term(s) to be enforceable.
No they don't really. Same problem most places with public school system. Even a country like Denmark that spends quite a lot on education these problems exist.

Canada, Finland, Singapore and South Korea are some of the exceptions as far as I remember.
Thanks Captain.

And as I said, I don't personally have an issue with the site.
Where I live it is very ususal to just hire an architect and then a general contractor. So the party that commissions the project (has the "idea") really has little knowledge at the start of the project. But of course they depend on their partners to handle all the project management.

Which all is just to say: I think it is very reasonable and common to only bring the idea and then hire someone to do the work. The problem with what is mostly called "outsourcing" in the software industry is not the fact that you want to hire someone, but more in how careful you select your partners.
Wow! As a previous AWS engineer I found the default CloudWatch web client terrible. This is a nice alternative.
Before Osama Bin Laden Raid, Obama Administration’s Secret Legal Deliberations
1) Graft is common, with charter school administrators sometimes taking home ludicrous salaries ($500k+ for schools with ~1,000 students)

True for public schools.

2) Funding often comes directly from the local school district, most of which are already severely cash-strapped. The problem here is that the cost of a single student attending a school district is largely buried in fixed costs: when the state takes $6000/yr from a district and gives it to a charter school, the district's costs do not decrease by $6000. This makes school districts worse, which accelerates flight to charter / private schools.

Open enrollment causes the same issues.

3) Educational standards are different -- Also, most states offer some sort of funding incentive based on test scores -- which just encourages schools to play the numbers game by finding reasons to suspend/expel struggling students, encourage cheating on tests, etc.

True for public schools.
Please see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Condor
I believe there's a US law that requires certain parts of the text be 'conspicuous' - that could mean making it bold or bright pink, but if all you have is plain text then I guess you end up with shouting :)
The problem with reified generics isn't their efficiency, but that they don't play nice with other generic types on the platform (which is the vast majority).

Every choice in Kotlin's design has been intentional with one idea in mind -- compromise on purity in favor of interoperability (to lower the cost of adoption). So, of course you can do more at the language level with Ceylon, but Kotlin set out to do less in that arena by design. OTOH, Kotlin has several orders of magnitude more idiomatic (or very nearly idiomatic) libraries than Ceylon.

There's a very clear tradeoff here, and Kotlin and Ceylon have been designed with very different underlying philosophies. The only point you can argue about is which language gets you more bang for the buck. Kotlin has intentionally chosen less bang for less buck, while Ceylon has chosen the opposite. Personally I believe that almost all language-level abstractions are relatively low-bang[1] -- or certainly have diminishing returns -- and therefore language purity should always be compromised for almost any other extra-linguistic feature (if it's a language designed for the industry rather than academia), and so I think that Kotlin has made the better decision and gives you almost as much bang for far less buck. But only time will tell, and arguing about this at this point is just a matter of personal preference. I can certainly see some people preferring the one and some the other.

Another way to look at it is that Ceylon was designed to appeal to Scala people, while Kotlin was designed to appeal to Java people :)

[1]: By that I mean that they're always useful for something, but in the end have a low impact on total productivity (which includes more than just writing the code).
The PDF document, "Inductive Programming Meets the Real World", is available from Microsoft research site:

http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/sumitg/pubs/ip...

The author, Sumit Gulwani, is a researcher at Microsoft. His home page is:

http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/sumitg/index.h...

and his publications are available at:

http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/sumitg/publica...
High Neck Beaded Dress with Open Back
That's a equivocation fallacy on the semantics of the word depreciate.

There are many different types of value that are reflected in the market price of a good. Cars that are no longer new lose value, thus by definition they depreciate.
Iconiq Capital Leads $85M Investment in Alteryx
This is seriously flawed for folks that suffer memory degradation under stress. tl;dr: the guy with amnesia is the liar.
Absolutely. I really don't have anything scientific but my really unscientific reasoning is that, even if my observation is true, the reason behind it are mass production and the ease of replacement. when you do DOA you usually get a replacement fairly quickly online. Unlike in 2000, you can get computer parts entirely online now, though computer parts are still very expensive (the good one).
Yes, and because of that, the entire design of the case is compromised, it feels like it's flexing all the time in use, it's far less durable, it contains additional cheap plastic mechanical failure points and extra connectors for said easily-replaceable battery, and all this for a part which, in the normal lifetime of most well-built laptops (aka Macs), will never ever need to be replaced.
Have you done any usability testing regarding the choice of a fixed non-scrolling header for search? It's a pet peeve of mine but along with the cookie info footer and my browser chrome, there's a big chunk of my vertical space wasted -- feels like I'm peeping in through a fence. If I want to search, your main page is all about it, and I really don't feel like I need the search thing present at ALL times while looking at what I've already searched for.
What's funny is that many on the right were convinced that abstract art was a communist ruse intended to upend American culture and thus weaken the US.

The article does make you ask questions, though:

>If any official institution was in a position to celebrate the collection of Leninists, Trotskyites and heavy drinkers that made up the New York School, it was the CIA.

Was it just a matter of proving to the Soviets that America could be even more cultured due to freedom of expression? Or was it the Trotskyites looking to show that Stalin's brand of communism was inferior to Trotsky's? It does make you wonder...
about the energy pane http://replycam.com/i/Pasted_Image_28_10_15_17_38_1BE13189.p...
what does the Avg Energy Impact number actually mean i.e.: what unit is it?
Hell, if Watson needs some weather data -- I offer the most precise weather forecasts already: http://mostpreciseweather.com/

Just send me a check.