skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
>>In 1950s India was actually called "Hope of Asia", even by the Colonialists who left them.

Truly so, We didn't have the great famine like China(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Chinese_Famine) where close to 45 million people died. We didn't remain like Bangladesh, which is still a peasant economy. Nor do we have internal troubles that Pakistan has currently. We have refused to be proxy states to USSR and USA. And we are quite progressive economically. True we haven't eradicated poverty and hunger yet, but neither has any country of our scale.

>>But under the auspicious of Nehru and then under Indira Gandhi, India aped Soviet style planning and top down approach for a country that is a "natural confederation"

Why wouldn't they copy USSR? It was a economic model that is paying off Russia till date. Russia went from a peasant state, under Tsar's control to becoming a unchallenged super power in half a century. Heck there is no absolute free market anywhere, the only question is to what extent do you allow it. Even countries like US, have a central planning where they decide budgets.

>>RD Tata was correct, if you want to read the counter vision to Nehru, read up on JRD Tata. He was proponent for free market capitalism, which would have had far better results.

If I were the Prime minister of a new independent nation, with no sizable skilled population, and a agrarian peasant ecomony. My priorities would be way different. I would be looking at how I can build the next generation engineering colleges(IIT's), management colleges(IIM's), the best administrative cadre(IAS), I would be looking at building irrigation infrastructure for farm lands to end drought and famine(Dams and reservoirs), I would be looking at energy generation(Power plants, hydel power), I would looking at bringing internal peace and harmony(Police force), I would looking at building in-house skilled labour(Government polytechnics), manufacturing capabilties among my fellow citizens(ITI, BEL, BHEL), my own defence manufacturing, research and developement(HAL, DRDO, ADE etc), I would looking at building my future space program(ISRO), my own nuclear program. All this in a hostile neighbourhood. Without any of these, simply thinking that a smal policy change is over simplification of a very complicated problem.

This is how governments think. Priorities of a business family would be way lower on my list.

Nehru has already done more nation/institution building work, than any Prime minister will ever do.

>>counter examples for not following Nehruvian Socialism, makes me feel that intellectually we are in two completely different dimensions.

No, we are in the same boat. I support hard core free market capitalism. But a child needs to crawl first before it can think of running or beating Usain Bolt.

You can't build a F-16, when you don't even know/have skills to repair a bicycle.
Product plug post is disguised as a Twitter-feedback post.

Meh.

I found the twitter analysis to be great up until the nonsense that is "help us get paid" (not completely irrational, but weak IMHO). If you're launching a product, just say it!
Spot on. There are sufficient players operating at comparable scale to Apple in these markets that we must conclude that trends like this are significantly driven by the demand side.

That's not to say that this trend isn't convenient for the supply side, and that this doesn't play in, it's just to say that it's self-evident that you are correct - the average consumer does, in the end, prefer hard-to-repair and therefore shorter-lived devices, with the advantages they bring, to the alternatives.

If this wasn't the case, there's a HUGE amount of money on the table, and one of the other players would certainly have grabbed it from Apple, instead of mimicking their approach.
With 56% of population agrarian, India is not as modern as the Urban Middle Class wants itself to believe.
Colorado to other states: sounds like a you problem.
Yep, agreed, it's a bit of a worry. But as another commenter pointed out, these $2000-ish laptops are costing us around $2 a day over about 3 years, so I use my MacBook as my primary machine and replace it around the 3 to 4 year mark, and have a couple of Core2Duo laptops (one running Windows and one running Linux) in the house also. It's less than the price of a cup of coffee, here in Australia you can't get a coffee for less than $3.50.

I put a 128GB USB3.0 SanDisk Ultra Fit[1] in my MacBook (these things are tiny), to supplement the SSD. Currently on sale for AU$74. Plenty fast enough for storing media, and I'm wearing my SSD less now too.

Not to sure what to do when the SSD wears out, probably boot of the USB stick, but that's a while away and I'll sell the laptop before then anyway.

1. https://www.sandisk.com.au/home/usb-flash/ultra-fit-usb
Maybe not important for you but crucial for me; the M3800 has dismal battery life. And probably with Linux that is even worse.
I could be wrong, but my impression is that Tim Cook is trying to position Apple as a lifestyle/fashion brand that happens to do consumer electronics and maybe a bit of software, and not as a consumer technology company that happens to be so cool it became a lifestyle/fashion brand by default.

His idea of better seems to be all about size and superficial design, not user satisfaction. Which would be good if size was all about the user experience - but it's not.

Jobs fucked up regularly (who remembers OS X 1.0?) but he still had a laser-like focus on the overall experience and he could rely on that to keep Apple on track.

Cook doesn't have that, and it's not clear that anyone else at Apple does. He's had five years of significant product launches now, and most of them have been okay-I-guess sidesteps - smaller, thinner, bigger, a different colour - or outright duds.

Also, U2.

Opportunities have been missed. Apple could have opened and owned whole new markets - user generated music and video, health devices, home automation, the power user high-end. Instead we got a watch and a a TV hardly anyone cares about, the promise of a car that will probably be late to the party, a music streaming service that streams music just like all the music streaming services do, and AI something something something maybe one day.

The money may still be flowing in, but the stock is going to get hammered if nothing changes soon.
Exactly... I'm looking for the rhymes! :D
Only if global civilization survives the looming catastrophe with sufficient records of these times, preferably in a durable medium that doesn't require high-tech devices to decode when the remnant bands of short-lived hunter-gatherers originate their myths of how the gods humbled their coast-dwelling ancestors.
For me, the lack of an ethernet port is a dealbreaker, because most of the on-site work I do at clients requires it. The last thing I need is to forget a dongle.

I myself gave up on Apple after my 2011 MBP bricked itself last year.

That was too bad, because I really liked the discontinued unibody form factor. If I was spending money on a new laptop, it wasn't going to be a two year old 2012 unibody or one one of the newer thinner, less user-serviceable models.
I run OS X on a ThinkPad T420, and this unholy combo is an experience I am honestly enjoying a lot.

I like having a 9 cell battery, I like having >1TB of storage, the ThinkPad keyboard and TrackPoint, and I like being able to take the thing apart.

At the same time, I also like OS X. I get UNIX underlyings, yet can continue to use software like Photoshop. And there's just a big bunch of subjective things that IMO OS X just does better, like scrolling and font rendering.

Still, the device is growing older, and I honestly have no idea what to replace it with once the time finally comes. The strange combo I have doesn't really have a modern equivalent. Do I sacrifice modularity to stay with OS X? Do I go to Windows or Linux to keep modularity with a modern ThinkPad (which are getting too close to the way modern MacBooks are, sadly).
Assuming one did such a thing, would it be possible to take them to court and get a summary judgement that the clause of the contract is unenforceable and to be removed, so they can't use that as pressure against your new company as in the instance in the article?
Is it even technically allowed to smoke inside those apartments?
The retina ones are $199 in the USA: https://support.apple.com/kb/index?page=servicefaq&geo=Unite...
I don't you need to be particular smart using manual memory allocation to beat GC. You just need to free your memory once you're done with it. Consider:

for (size_t i = 0; i < 100000000; ++i) {
size_t* val = malloc(sizeof(size_t));
*val = i;
free(val);
}

Decent memory allocators will just keep reusing the same memory location over-and-over. All 100 million calls to malloc and free will be fast-path calls. GC-based schemes will most likely not be 100 million fast-path allocations. Yes, this is a contrived example, but freeing memory as you no longer need it is common in languages with manual memory allocation. It is also harder, more error prone, and quite often leads to nasty bugs, but it's usually faster.

I think you're reasoning about just the cost of the frees versus garbage collection cost. But by ignoring the extra memory required on the heap, you're also ignoring the extra slow-path allocations.
America’s favorite coffee trend may be coming to an end
That's what I feel, the frontend development movement is a very weird place right now, I like it but also fear it.
Hackers Get Employee Records at Justice and Homeland Security Depts
Wi-Fi is crappy because Apple cuts lots of corners as a way to save battery life. Roaming can be a huge drain on the battery, so disabling or reducing the frequency of certain wireless functions is a quick and dirty way to improve battery life. It's so easy to pass off wireless problems to access points, so I imagine Apple had been doing it for years before anyone noticed.
>> If Steve were alive...

Well, if he was alive, a lot of weird design choices would not have been made. Like the pencil sticking out of the iPad, that weird battery pack, the magic mouse with the charging port on the bottom, etc.
Hello ploxiln, to see systems with clocks jumping is indeed possible, I'll make it more clear in my blog post, but basically it is possible with some effort to prevent this in general, but more specifically the Martin suggestion of using the monotonic time API is a good one and was already planned. It's very hard to argue that the monotonic time jumps back and forth AFAIK, so I think it's a credible system model. The monotonic API surely avoids a lot of pitfalls that you can have with gettimeofday() and the sysadmin poking the computer time in one way or the other (ntpd or manually).

About the ad-hoc logic, in this case I think the problem is actually that you want to accept only what already exists. For example there are important distributed systems papers where the assumption of absolute time bound error among processes is made, using GPS units. This is a much stronger system model (much more synchronous) compared to what I assume, yet this is regarded as acceptable. So you have to ask yourself if, regardless of the fact this idea is from me, if you think that a computer, using the monotonic clock API, can count relative time with a max percentage of error. Yes? Then it's a viable system model.

About you linking to Aphyr, Sentinel was never designed in order to make Redis strongly consistent nor to to make it able to retain writes, I always analyzed the system for what it is: a failover solution that, mixed with the asynchronous replication semantics of Redis, has certain failure modes, that are considered to be fine for the intended use case of Redis. That is, it has just a few best-effort checks in order to try to minimize the data loss, and it has ways to ensure that only one configuration wins, eventually (so that there are no permanent split brain conditions after partitions heal) and nothing more.

To link at this I'm not sure what sense it makes. If you believe Redlock is broken, just state it in a rigorous form, and I'll try to reply.

If you ask me to be rigorous while I'm trying to make it clear with facts what is wrong about Martin analysis, you should do the same and just use arguments, not hand waving about me being lame at DS. Btw in my blog post I'll detail everything and show why I think Redlock is not affected by network unbound delays.
Could you please express your opinions without using the term "brainwashing"? I think Safari and iMessages are vastly superior to Chrome and Hangouts and that doesn't make me an idiot.
For me it always 'syncs' but in a very original way; I get 3-4 copies after a sync on all devices. Not even sure how you make a bug like that. Not complaining though it is better than no sync.
They didn't pass any, but they passed all.

In any case, Rich Hickey probably had more context for his words.
You would have called 911... on a box?

What the fuck?
Does Weave still have atrocious network performance?
There are some Google products that I like, but I don't think I've ever had a good experience with Hangouts. Maybe it's rose tinted lenses, but it seems like multi-person video chatting with screen sharing has been getting uniformly worse ever since iChat AV.

More recently, there are online alternatives like https://appear.in/ that I've been happy with, and which don't require you to install a browser plugin like Hangouts.
There might still be far fewer bugs.
True that.

Plus using third party services is just smart in that it avoids vendor lock-in and makes it easier to switch out of the platform(s) should you choose to do so.
It'd be great if they could get https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judith_Faulkner to participate in some way.
You can run it in a virtual box VM and ssh in. Works fine, at least as long as you have lots of RAM & a fast HDD. It does suck battery though.
There's always at least one type checker, the one running in your head. Some languages provide another type checker to help offload some of this cognitive load.
> "as long as you could source the new one"

Thats the most difficult part. Original battery costs a fortune (some of them cost almost half of the new basic laptop). And if you decide to get a third party alternative - its basically a russian roulette, you never know what you gonna get, most of them are just terrible and barely last couple months
> The philosophic burden of proof is on you as you're making a statement counter to user "audessuscest"'s claim that meritocracy is important and the ideal is to make solely skill-based hires.

Let's just... ignore the larger societal angle of harassment, denigration, fear and uncertainty that plagues women and some minorities in STEM fields or finance, okay? Let's say, "It exists but let's not discuss it here."

I really don't wanna do this conversation AGAIN but the contention is that right now "whiteness" and "maleness" are implicitly part of the meritocratic process as positive traits. That happens in 2 ways:

1. Young, single, white (and Asian!) men are targeted by recruiters because of a perception of a "work ethic". This ethic is "I expect people to prop up my life so I can work 80+ hours a week, which is not sustainable if you have ANY responsibilities at all outside of basic sustenance". Historically, they has been a safe bet.

2. Subsequent "pattern matching" be it implicit or explicit, kind or cruel, expects that kind of commitment and education and ethos. That this wasn't ever reasonable is lost because people are just trying to recognize someone who can likely work in the same way they're expecting or have worked.

You can argue that people should work that hard and that it's fair, if you want. But what actually happens is that people find that there is a specific profile of people most likely to be willing and able to commit to that kind of lifestyle and then they optimize for selecting that. Therefore, Meritocracy is not a hedge against racism or sexism. Indeed, Meritocracy may be selecting "merit" based on attributes which explicitly reinforce sexism or racism.

So when you say, "skill-based hires" I can't help but hear, "people like me" every time. Because if anyone actually gave a shit about skill based hires they'd be blinding their recruiting efforts, doing pre-filter tests and desperately trying to remove every drop of bias from the industry to identify them.
A little shameless plug, but someone can find it interesting.

I wrote a very tiny booklet about writing highly scalable, fault tolerant, distributed system. The source and the compiled PDF can be found here: https://github.com/siscia/intro-to-distributed-system
I am not sure these performance results are true any more.
I honestly think explicit scopes, even though unorthodox, should become more of a thing. I personally do it in my C play projects to emphasize particular parts in a function as being independent "subordinate clauses", and with variables that only have a limited scope, but not being independent enough to be factored into a function--for example when the clause needs to be within reach of a label.

In C++ with RAII, the "emphasis" makes even more sense, to the extent that it doesn't make things ugly.
If iPhone was just able to be mounted as a flash drive, roughly 90% of the itunes complaints would have been nonexistent. Getting content to the iphone is absurdly, needlessly complicated.
Yep—Airdrop from iOS to Mac is still a mess, even with new hardware and latest software. And don't get me started on how iOS 7 broke BT from my iPhone to my car, and then Apple told me to get my car's firmware updated. Really Apple? You release a software update, it breaks connectivity with my car, and you tell me to get my car fixed?
What I really hate is that Googling for problems brings you to Apple Forum discussions from 2014, 2013 and sometimes even earlier. If they are not fixing serious bugs that have been around for a couple of versions now, just how much cruft are they accruing. Worse, issues that were fixed, like my iPhone playing a random song at a random loudness instead of returning to Audible, have returned.

My Fall 2015 Mac Book Pro has already crashed more often than my Fall 2013 did in two years. Apple support claims the logs show it is software, not hardware, so I'll take their word for it.

Our UX guy summed up the other serious issue with Apple software, they are focusing more on design now rather than UX. There is a great article on FastCompany about it http://www.fastcodesign.com/3053406/how-apple-is-giving-desi.... Stuff may look fine but it no longer functions in a natural, intuitive fashion; it no longer "just works". The font selection in iOS is a great example, it's almost like it's picked specifically to be hard to read. Killing misbehaving iOS apps has become a pain, the current app is never in focus, swiping is clumsy and swipe up to kill will often swipe left or right instead. iTunes as a whole is another example of this. It was never great but it's become increasingly difficult to find what I'm looking for and make it do what I want.

I find myself cursing my computer and my phone on a regular basis now instead of the once in a blue moon I used to.
I've used Apple products since the early 90s. Replacing the MB is the only option since almost all components are on the MB (sound, GPU, modem, network). In contrast PCs had everything highly compartmentalised according to the PC/AT spec. Sound was ISA/PCI, video was AGP/PCI, modems were ISA, 10/100baseT PCI.

While I agree I know very few people that actually replaced their battery. Usually, when the battery died is about the time they replace that laptop anyway.
Thanks, that's a cool approach! I'm wondering if a free monad approach would have any advantages over this.
wow! still haven't understood how your business works, but really going to read up the blog.
you seem to be getting ready for winter alright! :)
Isn't PG's life story along these lines? IIRC, he'd program for a while, quit to paint for a bit, then go back to programming when he ran out of money. I think he started Viaweb in his early thirties, which he sold to Yahoo and became financially independent after the sale.
Firstly I apologize for making semi-snide remarks without having read the book. It does seem interesting and I appreciate your comments.

But I think you misunderstand my concerns. I'm not really concerned with woo detectors. It's not that I think the word "sacred" implies some delusion or some new age nonsense. The concept of the sacred is indeed well established in theology and anthropology etc (I don't claim expertise in these subjects but I am somewhat familiar with what the word means).

There's no way to sincerely apply the word "sacred" while remaining in the sphere of secular discourse, as far as I can see. Scientists can study the function of sacrality, but I don't think science can make claims of sacrality.

Psychology is not religious studies... Maybe there is something about the framing I am missing here.

I think science is divorced from claims grounded in mystical insights. I think it cannot involve itself with normative/aesthetic/spiritual stuff like saying something is sacred.

And in any case, I do see problems with psychedelics and entheogebs related to all this. Namely how can we take the insights and thoughts and feelings that they tend to generate, and understand those things in a robustly secular way?

I don't have an answer. I've looked around. Lots of the people decades ago who got into the stuff, as far as I can tell, went kinda nuts. Like professor Tim Leary. Huge amounts of people end up in the meditation scene and go onto Buddhism or Advaita monism. That's fine for them—and I'm personally very interested in Buddhism, and to some extent a practitioner of the religion (taken refuge vows; meditate; love the culture; etc), and but still I'm not satisfied, from a scientific and psychological standpoint, with saying we need to bring in concepts of sacredness or mysticism.

That has to do with claims, arguments, reason, the public sphere, and the function of secular science.

I'm probably not expressing this very well.
What is "it" and why should you be afraid of losing "it"?
> yes, cases where you need very consistent runtime performance

Though, if you need hard real time, even C can be tricky.

Haskell can be written for soft real time things, but it's also tricky. Rust might be a better bet?
Based on the idea discussed in this original article

http://waitbutwhy.com/2014/05/life-weeks.html

Additional reference data from:

http://people.math.sfu.ca/~idmercer/celebdeathsbyage.html

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_life_expe...
I can't believe nobody mentioned HFS
traveling during the bad times seems like the perfect plan
> It was there because you need apps to bootstrap a platform and attract enough users to attract developers. But you can't really expect a consumer electronics company to have the best application for a given niche once the niche has been identified and attracted companies that really want to make it their bread-and-butter.

I have a hard time with this. Apple products tend to lock you into apple software. If you want to develop software, then you are pretty much stuck with XCode. If you want to send email on iOS, then you are stuck with the built in mail app (at least if you click an address from Safari, or Contacts). If I ask Siri to play some music, it launches the built in Music player. So if what you say is true, then why can't I set a default app made by a third party company?
Wow. Many thanks! Such a dumb UI decision.
Awesome - thanks. I've been using this version of Music forever... like 6 months and never knew about this.
i guess it's hard to write large stable apps in ObjectiveC? I wouldn't like to. Maybe Swift will change things, but it'll take a while, given their legacy.
will a video be posted?
Although no one starts out wanting to have a truly parallel system. They start out wanting to solve a problem and when that requires scalability or redundancy a parallel system is a means to that end. Not every problem can or should be solved with no shared state, and when that's the case, you should know how to do it right.