skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> You might do well to look at https://puri.sm if you're a Linux user, they seem to make pretty good machines with free software down to the BIOS.

Purism must have great marketing, because I keep seeing this fiction repeated. Their BIOS is not open.

The only big difference between a Purism laptop and other laptops (Acer, Asus, Dell, etc.) is that the CPU has been fused to allow running unsigned firmware. Unfortunately, since we still don't have free firmware to run in place of Intel's, Purism has no present advantage over buying most any laptop and installing Linux yourself.

Purism loudly trumpets their roadmaps[0] and plans[1] so as to suggest a trajectory towards totally free software, but until they achieve it their product is not worth a premium compared to installing Linux on an ultrabook of your choice.

[0] https://puri.sm/posts/roadmap-to-a-completely-free-bios/ Here they outline many things that need to be done. But note the language- "Purism’s goal is to publish a Free Software implementation ... as soon as an implementation is available." But who is responsible for implementing it?

[1] https://puri.sm/road-to-fsf-ryf-endorsement-and-beyond/ Note that the FSF hasn't actually endorsed them yet, although this page is supposed to convince you that they're awful close. Why not wait until they're actually endorsed?

I did buy a Libreboot X200 from minifree, and I am quite happy with it.

Alternatively, you can replace a Thinkpad X200's firmware yourself by following these steps (hardware required) http://libreboot.org/docs/install/x200_external.html
For those who don't know much about non-Apple PCs:

The only laptops worth considering are the enterprise lines from dell hp, and lenovo. They are night and day differences from the consumer products, because they are usually entirely separate divisions. Within this, certain lines are better than others. For example, with lenovo I would only really consider a t-series, w-series, or x-series. The p-series looks promising, but that just came out, so maybe don't rush into that if you want to reduce risk.

If the laptop doesn't have the RAM or harddrive soldered on, it's probably cheaper to buy from newegg and install an upgrade yourself than it is to upgrade through the product configurator. This does not void the warranty. The support pages from the website have explicit instruction manuals for doing this yourself as well as full disassembly instructions.

The enterprise laptops have support pages with crapware free drivers. If you don't feel like surgically removing crapware from a new installation, just nuke it from space and install the OS fresh. Heck, most time you don't even need to install those drivers, because the base windows drivers are fine for most things (there's probably a performance bump to using the drivers, and some things, like the fingerprint reader, will need a driver), so you could just skip the driver install.

Since these are enterprise laptops, you can still get 7 and 8 preinstalled (thank god for corporate compliance policies, am i right?! ;). MS call it "downgrade rights". Much like Apple, the best MS OS is the one released in 2009 (windows 7), so splurge for the "downgrade" to it if it's offered for the laptop you want.

If you care inordinately about crapware and don't want to spend time nuking a fresh laptop, then buy a laptop (again only enterprise laptops from lenovo, hp, and dell) from microsoft directly, since those don't come with spyware: http://www.microsoftstore.com/store?SiteID=msusa&Locale=en_U...

You can also get warranties that last much longer than 2 years (some go up to 5), cover accidental damage, or cover the battery, but the specific policies offered depend on which company you go with. I have taken advantage of the lenovo accidental damage warranty a few times, and it was great. The default warranty requires you to ship the laptop off (lenovo overnights me a box with a prepaid overnight shipping label inside it so all I have to do is pack my laptop and drop it at the UPS store) and then they return it within a week, but you can also get an onsite repair warranty where someone will come to you to fix the laptop.

Trust me, it's worth dealing with a website that isn't as shiny as apple's website.
It's not even close, owning wins under most existing market scenarios by pretty large and unambiguous margins. There's online calculators available since the math appears to be beyond you.
Working On-Site Not Considered Harmful
6 hours is not bad at all. (on Linux!) :) I'd be pretty happy with that.
> voters are morons who will be swayed by easily purchased propaganda.

I don't think that's the sentiment Citizens United opposition boils down to. Instead, I think a more accurate sentiment is that easily purchased propaganda sets the tone and content of available political discourse, severely limiting what narratives and ideas reach the eyes, ears, and minds of the citizenry to only those which are best-funded. That people are then swayed to certain positions, especially when they are in opposition to people's own best interests but couched in manipulative terms that hide this fact, is not a product of people being morons, but of there being no viable alternatives in political discourse as a product of being silenced by lack of money to pose them before citizens. By allowing unlimited spending, the playing field for the hearts and minds of citizens is inherently unbalanced in the favor of moneyed interests.
It could really stand to suck a little less. Based on this thread I went to checkout the Elitebook line and the "View all notebook products" link from the Elitebook line page just goes to a promo for some new one that isn't available yet, and when you go to the shop it just takes you to search results with 217 results for "elitebook"
> It was a piece of proprietary SanDisk crap.

you mean it was not a standard SSD ?
The Pomodoro technique as a means to reaching flow
apt is not the only package manager on Linux. At least you have abundant choices as to what you can use. As always on Linux, for about everything, there are tons of ways to do it.
Also, Touch ID measures the blood flow and so doesn't work with disembodied fingers: http://www.engadget.com/2013/09/16/why-a-disembodied-finger-...
Note also that we've released v0.7 of Tensorflow today - more details in the release announcement: https://groups.google.com/a/tensorflow.org/forum/#!topic/dis...
Most of these things are considered features of homebrew, not bugs.
I think this is said every time Milnor is mentioned somewhere, but I'll repeat it anyway: the first few pages of _Morse Theory_ is some of the nicest mathematical writing I've seen anywhere. (The rest of the book is very good too.) _Topology from the Differentiable Viewpoint_ is likewise very clear and accessible.
Email is communication between two people, and is a complete different matter to if a person wrote in their iOS Notes "Feb 17, I've been fantasising eating BWStearns dog. He looks yum. Should I or should I not?".

And if you dog really got murdered, that note will implicate whoever wrote it, even if they didn't do it! Thinking about performing a criminal act is not a crime. Conspiring to do it is.
Apple will not do that. It's a slippery slope argument - yes, these shooters were very bad, but if Apple sets a precedent of breaking the backdoor for this crime, why can't other courts implore them to use the same technological means for lesser crimes?
> Apple has great design, but they sell things that are locked down, both physically and in software. You're not supposed to open them, you're not supposed to replace parts, and if they break you're supposed to take them to your nearest "Genius Bar". Not my style.

It was addressed in the first full paragraph. He's one of the ones that cares.
* Ooops, as drivers are tiny.
5 Enterprise App Trends for Manufacturers
HN has specifically mentioned using the downvote option when you disagree with something.
There are many developers who value high several OS X features, such as well-implemented HiDPI mode with custom resolutions, super-easy backup solution, solid energy saving & suspend & resume functionalities (no conflicts with crappy 3D drivers), etc, etc. Those features wouldn't mean much without the possibility to easily¹ run FOSS on unix-like system.

¹) The differences between various package management systems are not significant in this context.
Personally, I use far too much mainstream software to be able to run Linux as my only OS, and I hate dual-booting. Sometimes I'll run Linux in a VM for convenience, but Linux is so broken with respect to so much hardware, I'm not interested in running it as the main OS.

And running Apple's OS as the top level OS would drive me insane. So unless you're suggesting I try to run Windows 10 on Apple hardware, I agree with the article that the world needs a better hardware options.

Until then I'll stick with my Toshiba. I'm pretty happy with it, all told. I don't see it as "better" in an engineering sense than Apple, but I get an i7 with 16Gb of RAM and a 1Tb SSD for about 1/2 the cost of the equivalent Apple hardware.

And the control key is in the right place (the bottom left corner of the keyboard) ergonomically. That alone kills all Apple hardware for me.
6 Ecommerce Trends to Watch in 2016
Why are all the gene-based cancer breakthroughs I've seen in the news for blood diseases? Is it easier to manipulate genes in blood?
The insured always winds up paying the cost of the claims, and then some, eventually. The premiums are based on the expected claims.
I am aware that it comes from C++. 'Excesive Marketing' is something that seems to pervade through software, not trying to single out Rust. I think 'zero runtime cost abstraction' would be a small improvement for the slogan.
I think the broker does make a number of attestations that if not properly done are fraud and render the policy void (as the insurance companies wrote the law).
Drowsy App Revenues: Make It Move
The comment is this close to being constructive, too. Drop a couple of the words that your keyboard makes loud noises when you type and it'd be fine.
Wouldn't that also apply to, say, a small paper notebook that the accused carries with him/her? Surely there's been plenty of people who used such paper notebooks as an "extension of the brain"...
38 free projects to learn Swift 2 and iOS 9 development
I say... can you show me the light? I love django...it's no bullshit and no frills yet has everything I need. Node.... is hellish. Callbacks haunt me. New tools come out every day. The JS dev process is so over-engineered.
Not being a part of the OS is a major issue, though.
Ok someone murders a bunch of defenseless people... Why is Apple dragging their feet? This is tasteless. I'm NOT for backdoors, but this is ridiculous.
I came here expecting the name to be a soccer reference. I guess this explanation is much better.
At a guess (and completely a guess), legal compliance. Insurance laws can vary widely, and subtly state-by-state. A licensed broker will understand the relevant intricacies and be able to sell you a policy that is compliant with them.

If you buy a policy from an unlicensed broker, and it turns out not to be in compliance, the carrier probably isn't obligated to pay out, whether you're paid up on your premiums or not. The carrier doesn't want to be at fault for not having to pay out, so they offload that onto the broker, and "protect" the consumer (really, though, themselves) with a licensure regime.

Insurance companies, being in the business of managing and mitigating risk, have all kinds of meticulous i-dotting and t-crossing procedure and regulation. This is — again, at a guess — just another example of that.
...pretty clearly demonstrates that reading your communications has a pretty high likelihood of turning up something useful in preventing future incidents.

It sounds like common sense, I guess, but has that ever worked, actually?

Similar "prevention" rationale is offered for governments to spy on virtually all telecom all the time, now. But this shooting happened anyway.
Additionally, dealing with persistent data structures without GC can be very tricky.
Marshalls were dispatched to collect a man who refused to appear before a federal judge. That was the crime, not the debt.
> The main reason seL4 was written in Haskell and again in C was to cross-verify behavior.

seL4 was modeled in Haskell, then written in C. Then they used tools to verify that the Haskell models matched the C code.
I ask because you seem to be acting like an expert. Have you based everything you said here solely on your interpretation of the Wiki article?
Does Gold Preserve Purchasing Power? (2009)
That's definitely true for me. If I'm writing a traditional web app using a language or framework I'm very familiar with then there the difference between 10% and 100% in cleanliness is nearly negligible. But those aren't the interesting projects. When I look at my code and it looks like shit and I've got notes and commented out blocks I feel happy because I'm working on something that my brain can't just spit out a complete answer for. It also feels even nicer to be near the end and see how nice it all looks once my thoughts have formed into a solution.
But let's say that I/you killed your/my dog is not in question. The killer's notes on dog killing are relevant to the case. Your iOS notes are no closer to being part of your brain as a dead tree journal is. Other than (as someone else brought up) a hypothetical brain scanning technology that claims to reveal thoughts[0] I can't think of a category of digital evidence that is so substantively different from analogue predecessors as to warrant folding the whole category into some protected class of information.

[0] I do think that precedent regarding the inadmissibility of the polygraph will probably protect us on that front for at least a while after someone pulls it off.
TOSHIBA, VAIO, AND FUJITSU TO COMBINE INTO a SINGLE PC GIANT
What if the world's most convincing liar goes around convincing everyone that climate change doesn't exist, and in 50 years the world can no longer sustain life? Does that mean free speech is wrong?

I don't think political spending should be considered an exercise of 1st amendment rights, but this argument doesn't make any sense.
It wasn't, no. The UX is too thin for 2.5in SSDs. I had to find a special adapter to attempt reading it when it died.

This is what it looks like:

http://www.pcper.com/files/news/2012-03-12/SSDR_Sandisk-SSD....

FWIU they went with a different brand on their newer models, might be better.
It would be really cool if someone could do a clean developer book.

Software:
Would love something that comes with a Debian distro installed. Something minimal and clean.

Body:
Brushed metal exterior, hard rubber for hand rests- no sharp edges either (my wrists hate MBP's edges).
Nice big touchpad.
Elegant branding (love the lightbar on the chromebook pixels) but perhaps even more subtle (the new macbooks do a good job of this- eliminating the obnoxious glowing apple). Thin would be good.

Hardware:
500GB SSD would be more than enough.
Don't need GFX card.
8gb ram is more than enough.
Good CPU please.
Fan-less would be amazing.
USB-C would be interesting, at least need a couple of those.
And then a pair of USB-3 ports, and a headphone/mic jack. Maybe an HDMI. It would be good if the internals were simple enough to swap out everything with a small philips head.

MOST IMPORTANT THING:
I can buy replacement parts on your site for everything (screen, keyboard, shell, all of the hardware, touchpad, etc.)

Price:
I would pay anywhere from 1-2k US for this computer. Honestly just to support some healthy competition in the space- I would even go to 2.5k
"it could be parallel construction" is true in literally every instance since it's impossible to prove the negative case.

This is becoming my cue to stop reading the comments; when parallel construction is the most obvious argument, you've read the interesting ideas up thread.
Microsoft takes over Google domains
Looks like Google lost the race to get their domain names and now gce.cloud and gcp.cloud redirect to Azure. Gotta hand it to Microsoft!
Law enforcement can legally force you to unlock your phone with your fingerprint, but cannot force you to reveal your passcode.

http://pilotonline.com/news/local/crime/police-can-require-c...
Was that in the story? Did I miss that part somehow? This makes way more sense and is certainly less inflammatory than just sending out debt collectors with military gear. Thanks for the clarification.
These are State licensing requirements, not federal regulations.
I once had a cold-call recruiter tell me Go was worthless. I asked the recruiter to never call me again and hung up.

People whom are both disrespectful and unable to see where their hockey puck sports analogies will be later on have marginal utility and are likely liabilities... don't get involved with those sorts.
It's at times like these they're surely knocking on the door of every company whose R&D in quantum computing, information theory and algorithms they've been funding for at least the past 2 or so odd decades. "So, is it ready yet?"
So what can we say about 27 lines? Is it enough to just exclude the counterexample you gave? Say, is it true that:

All sets of 27 distinct lines describe a smooth cubic surface as long as no subset of 3 of them both intersect at the same point and are mutually orthogonal.

What additional restrictions would it take to know that the lines describe a distinct smooth cubic surface? (if that's possible at all)
I really appreciate the down-to-earth-ness of this interview, this man is being very honest. It's good not to create false hope and present cancer immunotherapy (yet perhaps) as the thing that will cure any cancer.

However, it is the only real curative treatment next to surgery and really the only treatment that can cure metastatic cancer. At the moment though, only in small percentage of people with specific cancers (mostly melanoma, skin cancers.) So there certainly is reason to be excited, the cancer field is all over this at the moment so advances in the near future can be expected.
[2011]
Our freedoms and rights seem to end were the people who get offended and have hurt feelings begin.

Have an opinion that is not in the majority and you might get censored?

Free expression and free speech means you can have your opinions even if the majority does not agree with you. Without it there can be no honest debates that lead to learning.

The majority is not always right. Like when the majority supported slavery or killing Native-Americans. Things have changed since then, but censoring the minority opinions is just censorchip and has no place in a free society.
e.g. Merriam Webster (http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/literally):

1 : in a literal sense or manner : actually <took the remark literally> <was literally insane>

2 : in effect : virtually <will literally turn the world upside down to combat cruelty or injustice — Norman Cousins>

For what it's worth, I think they've got it wrong. In my experience, no one uses the word to convey that it was "in effect" - that would be equally understood if the word was omitted. Including, very much, the example of usage they gave. I would say what is going on is that the word is still being used in sense 1, but being used hyperbolically.

We don't say that "miles" has a separate meaning of "a few hundred feet" when someone says "I've walked miles through this store looking for you".
It’s time to kill the $100 bill
Take a look at https://github.com/andrewgodwin/channels
I would like to know the answer to this also.

Maybe there is some sort of booby trap whereby cutting the processor damages the vital data?
I think it is because in blood drugs and gene based treatments are the only option, surgery is simply not an option. This has always spurred the blood cancer field to take greater risks, the all or nothing approach.
> contests let you use your station, not test it well.

There are different dimensions to station testing. Contesters usually attempt to maximize the communications path with a wide geographical area.

Since other stations are often using fairly poor antennas and low power, a contest station usually has high gain antennas and legal limit amplifiers... Asymmetric communications channels are just part of the game. A contest station that is S9 to you might be barely copyable somewhere else in the world.

So there is antenna strategy (gain, rotatability, radiation angle, polarization). Not to mention tower placement, tower loading, inter-station interference, etc.

There is also operator strategy... things like rate maximization, multiplier maximization (moving multipliers, being aware of band openings and propagation conditions, etc.). Not to mention fatigue, sleep strategy, when to eat, use the restroom, etc.

The ergonomics of radio and computer interfaces (screens, knobs, CW paddles, antenna switches, headphones, etc.) are all areas for optimization.

When you look at the composition of the team who wrote N1MM logger, it's a bunch of people who have had all sorts of high caliber software careers, including NASA.

There are so many brilliant people who for the sake of fun and competitive spirit advance the state of the art.

So yes, contesting serves no purpose (though it's conceivable that if something happened the mainstream communications grid we'd be glad such stations existed).

But no sport serves a purpose, nor does any art. Contesting is both.
You are going to fuck up and that's ok
Because even for people who are actual high-level experts on it, correctly representing what a policy does and does not offer, and explaining that in a way that's factually correct, compliant with the local laws governing insurance, and understandable without being misleading to a potential customer, is incredibly difficult, to such a degree that your comparison of it to hair braiding should be prima facie evidence of lack of good faith on your part.
That looks like an M.2 PCIe connection. Is it something less standard than that?
> I'm NOT for backdoors

I think you've just learned that you are, in fact, for backdoors. A backdoor doesn't become any less of a backdoor when it's only used against bad people.
If there's no question someone killed your dog, then you don't need to read what's in the phone, do you? There's a point to your analogy.
I recommend System76. Good laptops, clear website, and you know exactly what you're getting with the OS.

https://system76.com/laptops
This doesn't seem like a particularly compelling argument. Bad loan volumes have risen, but not above historical highs.

As a percentage of total debt, the article says bad debt is at 1.67%. This is up 51% from 1.25% in the last year. Considering the amount of margin that's been wiped out as a result of the stock bubble popping, this doesn't seem terrible. In addition, it doesn't seem like this rate is accelerating (since 2009), but linearly increasing.

Maybe Chinese banks are consistently increasing the amount of debt they issue and the risk they take per unit debt as a rational response to increasing productivity of Chinese businesses. This implies a greater amount of leverage for the Chinese economy, but not necessarily extreme irrationality.

Maybe there's something here (I actually think there are structural problems in the Chinese economy) but this article does not make a compelling case.
And by important you don't mean the women who have already been raped or assaulted by Uber drivers right?