skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I just wish all devices were more like PC's.

My desktop computer is a glorious, glorious device. I have millions of different bits of software for it, many operating systems, open source, proprietary, etcetera. It's all there. It really feels like my machine. If I don't want Windows, I blow it away and install Linux, BSD, Plan 9, code my own bootloader, whatever.

My laptop is a bit less so (can't find the perfect form factor for me, can't upgrade it, etc) but it's very similar. It's mine. I have spice, vnc, rdp, ssh, sftp, ftp, irc, <insert a million other things here regardless of whether I actually ever use them> as commandline tools that just work and aren't filled with adverts or in app purchases or 'please add this to your google account'.

Phones and tablets? Complete write off. My smartphone is basically a toaster. Android and iOS make what could be a general purpose computer into a Fisher Price experience. It's really sad to me.

I'd love a modern version of the Psion Series 5. The Pyra (https://pyra-handheld.com/boards/pages/pyra/) looks like a decent candidate. All I need is a Linux distribution with an API or commandline 'sms' and 'call' tool.

The mainstream is basically focused on creating a slightly more interactive version of a portable television, which I find deeply saddening.
I've wondered this myself. Companies going back private in general. Curious how often that sort of thing happens and what benefits there are. Also, thought it might happen to Apple when I saw what profits they were making.
I like to answer old questions whenever I think there's crucial information missing in the existing answers. This almost guarantees that you'll be one of the lower-voted answers for that question. I don't think the Elo scale accounts for this dynamic, but the timing of answers is a big part of how SO works. That is, you can't directly compare the score on an answer given 45 seconds in to one given 2 years later. The results will be useless (for the same reason that far fewer people are going to see this comment than if I had posted it 12 hours ago).
There's another issue created when companies issue debt in order to fund share repurchases. It may seem to make financial sense rates are so low but it's created a huge amount of additional leverage throughout the corporate world.
Finance theory disagrees with you.

A dividend lets the investors choose if they want to buy more shares (from the same sellers who would sell in a buyback) or mix their current shares with the cash.
"Albeit you could also argue that using that cash to buy other companies might be worthwhile."

BOOM! Especially HW and SW I.P. companies given Apple's market and legal strategy. Yet, it's the road not taken.
> The NY Times has a story that he straight-up murdered a guy on American soil.

This seemed extremely unlikely to me, so I Googled it. If you mean this story:

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/03/us/mikhail-lesins-strange-...

it doesn't say anything even remotely like Putin straight-up murdered a guy (a scumbag who has spent his life associating with and/or making enemies of other scumbags) on American soil.

In fact it doesn't even straight-up say he was murdered at all, by anyone:

The police [in the US] continue to treat Mr.
Lesin’s as a natural death

and:

Neither the F.B.I. nor the Justice Department
has taken a role in the investigation [...]
suggesting that it was being investigated as
an untimely death but not a federal crime.
Warren Buffet is on the phone for you ... He says when the intrinsic value of a company is greater then the price implied by the stock, buybacks benefit the shareholders .. And when the intrinsic value is less than the price implied by the market price of the stock buybacks are bad for shareholders.
Yes, it looks great. But it's a hybrid. It only has a 7kwh battery and can only travel 15 mi without gas.

There are plenty of normal looking hybrids these days.
What's not accurate?
This is right. Though it's not that there is nowhere to spend the money, it's that the company believes there is nowhere that would generate a better return than just buying back part of the company and the money earns nothing in the bank due to low interest rates. Apple has spent a truly staggering amount of money on buybacks, money which it could have, for instance, used to buy Tesla, Spotify, etc. Even after investing in major new product areas (watch, cars), they still have more cash than they will ever realistically need.
We've banned this account for using HN for ideological flamewars, which is an abuse of this site.
So you'll be perfectly understanding when, having adopted your preferred level of risk, people don't send in crews to help you. That we'll just bring in bulldozers and start over.

Maybe that lot on the slope of the volcano wasn't such a great idea after all?
How is that relevant? I'm claiming that their exists functions in Haskell that cannot be encoded either as functor or functions in ML. (If you want, I'll try to come up with an example, but my guess would be some funny polymorphic recursion + higher-kinded types)
Brilliant Brathwaite, Super Samuels Win World T20 for Windies
I'm still not clear on the lines between projects. Seems like people work together more than the various Linux distros.
Like all wars, it's fairly complicated.

> But it was far and away the largest component.

I don't know if that's true. If we're talking number of troops, I don't think so. The bulk would be the loyalist part of the army and the Guardia Civil/Guardia Asalto. Then you had a number of political militias which would eventually be integrated into the regular army. In parallel, communists would introduce the political commissar system to enforce ideological "correctness" within the army, thus giving rise to entirely Communist regiments, based on the prototype of the 5th regiment (originally a communist-affiliated unit, later on integrated in the regular army as an elite corps).
But, statistically speaking, it probably is an imbecile.

These systems aren't optimizing for someone like you trying to be clever. They're trying to handle the more common cases of someone typing a street address in the wrong field or forgetting the ".com" or putting in an HTTP address or some such.

They're trying to catch that, not every possible pedantically legal string you could throw at it. Maybe they could improve the validator, or maybe they'd rather be spending programmers' time on things with actual business value.

The sum total of imbeciles may well represent a bigger market than the sum total of people like you.
SO: simple golang question about pointers and methods
Ever watch one of those YouTube videos of RWD cars on proper winter tires out-tractioning AWD cars on summer / all-season tires?

I survived the Atlanta snow storm a couple years ago turning a 35 mile commute into 50+ miles due to detours in a BMW on summer tires... The only confidence I felt was that I was going to end up stuck somewhere, but adjusting driving style to conditions goes a long way and then it's just the luck of not getting hit by someone who didn't.
A strangely-biased article, starting with the headline. But setting aside the concerns of the companies opposing this for obvious reasons, this is a really great idea.

Consumers in poorer countries get the opportunity to buy used, high-end devices supported by the manufacturer, and those devices get another consumer cycle's worth of reuse before they get recycled. Plus Apple can now reach a large new segment of customers without compromising product quality or new-product margins.
Speculating from a single anecdote, I have a nontechnical friend that switched to using a smartphone instead of a PC.

Part of it is that the smartphone can do everything they need from a computer. Browsing the internet, messaging and email, etc. But that answer alone isn't very satisfying, because even when doing nontechnical stuff on a smartphone, like browsing reddit or watching youtube, I find it very inconvenient compared to a desktop.

I think the real reason is, when she needed to use her computer for something, it took 15 minutes to start up. That's super inconvenient. People talk about how small 15 second delays can discourage behavior and cause frustration. 15 minutes is just ridiculous, and really discourages using the thing unless you really need to.

I installed a pure copy of windows 7 on an old computer recently. Nothing installed on it at all, no connection to the internet, nothing put on it by the manufacturer. And the specs weren't that good. Yet it took 30 seconds to boot up. I was amazed, I didn't think that was possible for a modern PC. Even my phone takes longer to boot up.
So many companies with so much profit they literally can't find any way to invest it to generate return. It might make you wonder why wages are stagnant or what the argument for outsourcing to lower labor costs is really about, if you were the sort of person to bother wondering about such things.
I understand India's desire to push for local manufacturing, and some of this is all just a bunch of theater dancing around that issue. Meanwhile, the Bloomberg article does a good job of letting us read between the lines about the vested interests in keeping Apple out --

> “The millions of imported used phones will need their batteries replaced. What will happen to those batteries, where will they go?” asked Sunil Vachani, chairman of Dixon Technologies, whose phone assemblies roll out a million phones a month for brands like Japan’s Panasonic and China’s Gionee.

So what do they do with used batteries from other phones? This has nothing to do with whether a phone is imported or not.
When I was young, my Dad paid $4000AUD for a 486-DX clone. I can see the day coming where I'll have to pay that again to get a decent desktop.

Have you seen the low-end laptop market? 1366x768 and terrible build quality everywhere.

Everyone else might love their tablets and phones, but you can pry my desktop from my cold, dead hands.
> Does the BSD license apply to a patch to a BSD licensed file?

No, because the BSD License isn't copyleft. You'll have to contact the original author as well as any contributors.
GCE operates GKE which is a hosted Kubernetes as a service. I'm not saying that Google is using Kubernetes instead of Borg, but that doesn't mean they don't use Kubernetes at all.
what is it called, "multiply by three"?
It's interesting work, but what are the the applications?
Please correct me if I'm wrong, but I think the approach of your final paragraph could be very straightforward to implement in Elm (a purely functional language that also has one of the best implementations of FRP that you can find anywhere, in any language). See this article on "the Elm architecture", which I think could be very naturally extended in the way you propose:

https://github.com/evancz/elm-architecture-tutorial

Elm's approach involves having completely declarative, purely functional UI code (with efficient update computations resolved via a virtual DOM in the background), where individual components are highly composable and referentially transparent.
Following distance aware cruise control came on the scene in 1999.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autonomous_cruise_control_syst...

Collision avoidance systems similarly have a long history.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collision_avoidance_system

As I understand it, Tesla Autopilot is a collection of these ordinary luxury car features (lane keeping, adaptive cruise control, environment sensing/prediction and collision avoidance, integrated navigation) that with branding that recognizes them for what they are: the foundation of self-driving technology.
ETW is awesome! Been using PerfView for pudding for a while now. Is there a way of using ETW for Java code?
> And why does every article written by supposedly competent journalists not mention how ugly literally ever other electric car is when they discuss tradeoffs?

Because unlike other things they discuss, styling is 100% subjective. What would be the point of the journalists talking about their own tastes when you are going to make your own mind up about the styling anyway? On top of that, some cars look better in some colors than others, so there's more personal taste at work there.

Personally, while I really like the Model S and Model X, I found the Model 3 prototype's styling to be kinda meh in the three colors they've shown. I might still get one but it won't be because of the styling.

FWIW, I currently have a Nissan LEAF in blue and I think it looks really funky and fun. But it is "abnormal", so it's polarizing. Most EVs so far are styled in a polarizing way. It just so happens you seem to fall on the "I don't like it" side of that spectrum.
Fun how they protect this illicit key using permissions. Always nice to see security turned against the user by the malware.
They are largely US based and want to verify rather than risk being sued for livel. Give it a month.
Humanae
That book is doing a lot more for Jon Skeet than putting royalties in his pocket
Massive Document Leak Reveals Offshore Accounts of World Leaders
Vitter's reservoir sampling algorithm D: randomly selecting unique items
Legacy systems that are totally inflexible is the main problem. Much of this stuff was developed in the mid-1960s. Upgrades and standardization are not considered a "profit center" for an already very profitable industry, and the costs would be enormous. The EMV rollout has cost tens of billions and it doesn't even touch the formats.
The Bourne shell probably doesn't deal with reparented processes properly (at least, that's my experience with working on Docker (PID 1 is a weird process). Not to mention that your shell doesn't propogate signals to children so you'd need quite a bit of shell scripting to make it act like a real init system.

The main reason bash is the fallback init is because it's a good way to fix a borked setup. And "real men don't use init, they just need a root shell" (Linus).
Here are the famous politicos in ‘the Wikileaks of the mega-rich’
Taskpaper. There are vim, atom, emacs, and sublime text plugins to support the format, but I use the official Taskpaper app. I also have a handful of scripts that I use to help manage the file, including an any.do-like daily review in a terminal (i.e. find all the overdue stuff and for each one, prompt to either mark as complete or assign a new due date or delete it; same with @today and some others). I use a separate file for an inbox, and part of the daily review is moving each of the inbox tasks to an appropriate project list in my main tasks file. I use IFTTT and the DO Note app to append new tasks into my inbox file, and I have a couple other triggers set up (for instance, a Github project of mine will drop a task into my inbox when a PR is opened to go review the PR -- this is much less distracting than an email notification or similar).
Another solution would be improvements to transportation. If we had something like Hyperloop, ET3, skyTran, etc., we could increase the radius we could live from work. It's traffic jams that drive up the value of land in the inner city. If you can get to work in 20 minutes, you don't care how far you have to live from the city.
That's not the law of large numbers.
Have a look at http://maruos.com/, the dev has an interesting idea - AOSP when the phone's working by itself, plug in a Slimport connector and pair a Bluetooth keyboard and there's Debian running, ready for you to use.

I'm not sure what's going on with the project. Two months later you still have to email the developer to get a beta build, even though it was supposedly open sourced.

Approaching it from the other direction, https://plus.google.com/111524780435806926688/posts/fkQ1BMjN... shows a nearly mainline kernel running on the 2013 Nexus 7, including hardware accelerated graphics. It should be a hop skip and 14 hour build step [1] to get Debian running on it.

[1] repo sync -j24 / make -j24 droidcore can be painful
Check Out Adam Levine's New Tattoo
I do almsot this exact route(296mi roundtrip) about once a week.

Only reason at all I bought a Tesla is there's a Supercharger about 60mi from my house on that route. I can do the trip in good weather without the Supercharger. However with cold it becomes necessary.

Other fast charging? Forget about it. All the CHAdeMO along the route(there is only two) are 40kw which would take me 3x longer to charge. Also the tend to be non-functional regualrly and only have 1-2 slots vs 8 for the Supercharger.

The reason I started the parent thread is exactly this, once you own an EV with 120kw charging it changes everything for long trips.
V2: 6px.io has made some big improvements
I generally agree. For most things I find trying to do complicated tasks on my phone just an exercise in pain.

However, I find browsing reddit on my phone a more pleasant experience than on a desktop computer. Swipe gesture to collapse comment threads and the improved UI that some of the reddit apps have make it easier to consume comment threads than when I'm on a PC.
From my personal experience, it's useful if the editor has at least some basic support for this kind of blocks, e. g. enter key opens a line with same indent level etc. And editor scripting also helps, then you can write a script toreport the indent level on demand. Of course, many screen readers can report the number of spaces/tabs (e. g. the raw value), but you usually want only the level with respect to the current codebase and most likely only sometimes e. g. not on every line movement, you can infer the blocks sometimes from context and recheck only if needed/things go wrong.
The whole presentation was extremely well done. This seriously makes me consider going in to journalism if I ever feel the need for a career change.
You shouldn't wonder. Businesses need demand for something before they start making it. That doesn't need to be demand for something that exists, but if there were money out there for goods not yet made there would be more investment towards them.*

Since that is not the case, you can presume there is not money out there not yet tapped. Which, considering economic trends in recent decades towards wealth concentration in the same capitalist class who has nothing to spend money on except making more money nowadays, that should be no surprise.

When the consumers are getting poorer, their demand is dropping, not increasing, so there is no reason to ever try increasing supply. Just use monetary loopholes to profit more instead.

* : all relative to risk. There are of course things you could take large risks on and see incredible returns if you succeed, but you cannot predict or even guarantee success on them (gene therapy, new silicon fab tech, nuclear energy, new solar panel tech, better battery tech, AI, and way, way more). When the board is awash in cash from a perpetual money machine, and you could easily just do stock buybacks to make shareholders happy, you go with the no risk easy route to appease shareholders than taking the risk.
> it's not worth it for them - they do not pay enough taxes to warrant it

Not only do they pay a larger portion of their fortune, that money makes a much bigger difference to them (us, why do I say them?) in our everyday lives.

> They most probably still pay much more tax than average person

They probably pay much less than what they should. They benefit from from an organized state much more than the average person.
People don't list 45kw vs 60kw today on plugshare(or the system cab act up as what happened with a lot of Nissan units that were "rated" for 60 but couldn't handle it).
> At least any argument why Go is not productive, why its productivity is an illusion.

- generic code only via go generate and interface {}

- verbose error handling

- the way dependencies are handled

- no language support for functional paradigms

- nil pointer semantics in interfaces

- very thin type system

Go would be a great language in the mid-90's, nowadays given the features adopted in the mainstream it feels too little.

For me, the positive thing is that it may lure developers that would use C to use Go instead, and in the process discover that their use case is perfectly doable with a memory safe language.
The Japanese have been dealing with earthquakes for eons and the housing fashion from the previous era could still crush you like a bug if the pillars give out (those tile roofs are -heavy-).

I think there's a quite different lesson in these codes. What's the difference between software developers that don't have a Code and electricians or plumbers who do? Not all that much. Except that we get to spend a lot of time trying to talk people out of doing stuff using reason and logic. People who got the job they did instead of your job because they weren't quite so good at reason and logic.

Pull the sort of things we deal with every day on an electrician? Fuck you, I'm not doing that, it's not to code. Now cough up the time and materials to do it right, or we're done here. Don't like it? The next guy you call is going to tell you the exact same thing. Have a nice day.
Many people have totally lost faith in establishment politicians... our system is constantly exploited by business and even "good" politicians have shady support (through lobbying/superpacs/etc). If a mainstream politician is implicated in this mess, it gives the public concrete evidence to improve the status quo.

It's like the Snowden leaks. Many knew about the NSA conspiracies years before his information came out. For all those years the public was blind to their rights slowly slipping away as precedents were set, while those that knew were ignored as paranoid nutters. Now we can see the light.

edit: to be clear, I'm not talking about any specific politician here.
Yep, I agree. In pretty much every organization I've worked in, some engineers are more equal than others.

If you're a golden child, you'll have praise heaped upon you for whatever you do. If you're not one of them, you can take charge and go above & beyond if you want... but probably no one will care. So at least for me, I really question the value of doing those things nowadays. I just do my work, try hard to do a good job, help out if I'm asked, and that's that.

The worst aspect of this dynamic is when you see one of the "more equal" people doing something that's going to cause pain and trouble down the road, but you know nobody is gonna listen. That's life as an engineer I guess.
Good luck! 6 posts on that forum then disappeared forever.
Very interested in the Nexus 7 progress. I may have to pick one up and grab a hardware keyboard.

Killing off Android and getting X11/Wayland on there with a regular DE would be amazing.

I can deal with WiFi only - a workaround would be to just carry around an android device or similar as a hotspot.
All of them are taxable. Interest is taxable income (to the lender), though it's also a prime opportunity for tax arbitrage so the lenders have a strong tendency to be incorporated in low tax jurisdictions.

And buybacks effectively get taxed as capital gains (because they result in higher share prices), but not until the shareholders sell their shares, and of course then it's at the capital gains rate.

So what you're really getting at is that dividends and capital gains should be taxed at the same rate.

And if you really want to promote dividends, let reinvested dividends defer taxes like buybacks do until the shares purchased with the dividends are sold, even if they're reinvested in a different company. Then you'll see investors demanding dividends because the tax advantage of buybacks would be gone and dividends would have the advantage of allowing investors to choose what to invest the new money in.