skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I have mixed feelings about this. If the company owned the ecosystem - e.g. a Microsoft Surface or an Apple MacBook, would we expect them to support a different operating system? Albeit, MacBooks do support Windows.

I think it's fair that a vendor support the operating system(s) they advertise. If Lenovo doesn't claim to support Linux (or any other OS), it's OK for them to do whatever they want to prevent users from installing a different operating system. I'd even go so far as saying that a different OS should void the warranty. There are programs out their that will brick the BIOS if ran incorrectly.

I know this is controversial, but it's a functional business model of a large company that needs to provide support. With that said, nobody should ever buy Lenovo after their SuperFish ordeal. They should've been sued out of business: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superfish#Lenovo_security_inci...
Sam is based on the ordinary British soldiers that Tokien served alongside as an officer while enduring the horrors of the Western Front in WW1

"“My ‘Sam Gamgee’ is indeed a reflexion of the English soldier, of the privates and batmen I knew in the 1914 war, and recognized as so far superior to myself.” "

http://www.theonering.net/torwp/2014/02/26/87195-sam-gamgee-...
Thanks, that's new to me.
:D I am actually trying to do something similar with the js client. I recently tried to convert it to Dart using jsparser, since i am working with http://flutter.io, a hybrid app development project from Google. It worked out just fine for now, currently testing it to get the weak spots fixed.
TLDR No
When I was a kid, I remember my dad once cleaning corrosion off car battery terminals with Coke.

That + a wire brush. It did much better than just water + wire brush.
My current laptop is dying, stuff like this (lenovo in particular often comes to mind) is why I keep fixing it. Shopping for a new computer is just so incredibly unpleasant.
It shouldn't make you confident. In the economy of scales involved, it takes very little for system76 to disappear and dell to stop selling linux laptops.
How to Easily Make a Beehive in a Jar DIY Project – A Step-By-Step Guide
This is great! I wish somebody would write a Firebase API compatible wrapper around this so escaping Firebase lock-in would be possible without altering code.

I might start it myself when I find some time.
You sound like a follower of Ray Peat. He recommends MB, holds that position on fish oil, recommends K2 as a quinone, recommends aspirin, and recommends nicotinamide* (for the NAD+)

From what I can tell—and having experience with MB & his diet)—he's full of shit.

* You should look into that. Nicotinamide inhibits the sirtuins. You'd probably be better off with nicotinic acid or nicotinamide riboside (NR).
Have system76 laptops improved at all over the last few years? The last couple of laptop upgrade cycles I looked at them and the general consensus was that they were a overpriced for the hardware, and had really shoddy build quality and bad customer service.
The problem is "long enough" is not... and the manufacturers are continually trying to make that shorter and try to convince you it's "long enough".

IMHO a few years is NOT "long enough" for a nonvolatile storage device. A few decades is more reasonable.
Eh. It's only end game for them because of their particular style of governance. If they had chosen a more moderate path, they wouldn't be having these problems right now.
No, you're just not aware of how much you paid.
> Wouldn't the answer there be to try making your own of those too?

The difference with carbonation is that I can get CO2 and carbonation equipment really easily, and in different forms from different suppliers. I could even get some yeast from my local store and make it. Carbonating water takes less time and effort than making a cup of coffee.

The problem with syrups is that, as you can see from the recipe here on Open Cola, I would spend a lot of time and effort making it. The only syrup I know of that doesn't have this problem is root beer. Most grocery stores in the US seem to carry concentrate which need only be mixed with sweetener and carbonated water. Cola, lemon lime, orange, or other syrups don't have this kind of availability, apart from those from SodaStream.
This might help you out for now (if you are using Firefox): https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/accessibility-features-...
Passes Betteridge's law.
As much as I'd love to (hate to) see vintage 1990's Microsoft back in evil empire mode, this doesn't make sense.

What is their motive here? The Windows vs. Linux battle is long settled, and Windows is not under thread from Linux. Why would they intentionally block Linux on one vendors laptops, gaining basically no profit/market share, and risking lawsuits and online outrage?

Hanlon's razor applies; I assume this is a case of incompetence.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanlon%27s_razor
> I bet it feels 'normal' on Android.
> I have a feeling this is going to drive me nuts.

You can rely on this not being entirely accidental.
More likely, it's a conspiracy against Win7/Win8 users, which hurts Linux users as collateral damage. What likely happened was the ms/lenovo deal was "And Lenovo will make sure win7 and win8 are not supported on laptop", which lenovo solved by switching the hard drive to a mode not even win10 supports, locking it that way (that's the evil part), and putting drivers for it on the lenovo install media, which are win10 only.

Thus, this laptop can only ever be installed from the Lenovo win10 media. No win7, no win8, no retail win10 (for now), and .... probably as a (not unwelcome) side effect, no linux.

Still, just as evil and despicable.
Perceptual Hashing Image Similarity Framework
"Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct, not tried it." (Donald Knuth)
I tried a few episodes of sleep with me, and it creeped me right the hell out. It was some guy talking in a pouty, condescending baby-voice about some nonsense or other. His voice especially threw me off.

Dan Carlin is great, but way too intense and interesting for me to sleep to. I pay attention to the podcast and want to hear "just another 20 minutes" instead. 99% invisible is perfect in this regard. Roman has a great voice, good editing and nice, mellow music in his production. I listen to it a lot.

I also like to listen to The Moth, Hello Internet, Radiolab and Benjamin Walker's theory of everything when I go to sleep.
In my opinion, motive is locking win7/win8 out. Locking linux out would be a happy (for MS) coincidence in this case.
>Do not attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity.

Except where malice has previously been proven, in which case go wild.
WebRTC Weekly
I took Modafinil for a year after reading Gwern, 100mg twice a week on average. It relieves a lot of anxiety for me and also acted as a great appetite suppresant, but I also worry it has caused me some cognitive decline. I feel like a bit of a zombie sometimes, kind of dead emotionally, not talking as much, feeling generally dumber. Can't say for sure as I've had a lot of stress in the last few months too, but people should be very careful with these things.
6 Σημάδια Για Να Ανακαλύψετε Την Απιστία – Sex Escort News
AT&T Wants to Blanket the Nation with Gigabit Wi-Fi from Utility Poles
Coke will help free a stuck seatpost in a bicycle if the frame is steel and the seat post is aluminium.

Just turn the bike upside down, pour some coke down the seat tube, leave to stand overnight, and hit the seat with a mallet the next day.
It also effectively locks out the use of that service on a non-mobile operating system unless you tether your Android or IOS smartphone to it. It seems really backwards to force the use of specific (proprietary) client software and specific operating systems in an age where every modern operating system can technically participate on the internet.
Coke is used to clean a toilet and not flush it. To clean a toilet, generally some acid or detergent is needed. Effectiveness of Coke being used for this purpose shows its acidic nature and its ability to dissolve the material on which it is applied.
It'd be cool if they published it on GitHub and allowed people to improve or adapt the recipe with PRs.

Bit tenuous, but...
I had nothing but trouble with my XPS 13 developer edition laptop. Ended up sending it back on the same day I got it. The issues I experienced were seemingly widespread too, with a lot of consumers complaining about the same problems on the forums.

There were incredibly irritating keyboard debounce issues (and yes, I was running the latest BIOS version available at the time) and there were also issues with the touchpad glitching out (messing with the mouse cursor position) with X restarting every now and then due to the broken touchpad driver. Really disappointing for a laptop with Linux preinstalled, and I've avoided Dell ever since.

To top it all off, it became painfully obvious that the Linux DEs weren't able to do a seamless job of supporting a high-DPI screen (I got the 4K edition) or multitouch touchscreen and interfaces like the login screen were unreadably tiny. I know this got fixed in a more recent version of Ubuntu, but I don't understand why Dell ever shipped the laptop they did.
> not saying anything about the problem

That's incorrect. Someone from Lenovo had already posted in the thread saying that it had been escalated.
Really? I didn't know that. I'm sure he has plenty of options though.
As a user, Homebrew is a great experience.

As a package maintainer, though, one thing surprised me: you can't make your package depend on a specific version -- even a major version -- of a library.

So if MyApp uses YourLib 1.0, everything is fine until YourLib 2.0 comes out, at which point users doing `brew install myapp` will start getting cryptic compiler errors. I have no choice but to drop whatever I'm doing and make MyApp compatible with YourLib 2.0, which may even be impossible.

It's just odd because otherwise Homebrew is so well designed. It seems like a weird omission.

Edit: Some packages get around this by packaging major versions separately (qt, qt5) but most don't.
How to see all the dots in the 12-dot optical illusion
Seamless mode in vbox is great.
I don't think I suggested that all change controls amount to FUD, certainly I didn't mean to anyway. What I did say was that it plays a large part, which is evident in how little many of the decision makers actually know about what a change is, what it means, and what repercussions it might have, so it's easier to err on the side of caution. The answer, of course, is to do more research, but that's more expensive and harder than to just say "no."

My experience is that whatever technical issues may arise really aren't that big of a deal, provided you do the proper research to realize what a change to the system actually means. Significant effort, perhaps, but not particularly difficult from a purely technical standpoint. But it usually means coordinating with different parts of the organization, which can be excruciating, and more often than not has little to do with technological aspects and more with territorial politics and process. That's not necessarily a bad thing, like I said I've seen it stop some really horrid stuff make it into production, but it can also introduce so much friction that you give up before even having started.

I don't rightly know where the balance lies. For a small outfit like monzo it makes sense to be nimble, but for a huge organizations like RBS, UBS, JPM, HSBC etc., there are so many things at play that being conservative isn't necessarily a bad thing. Plenty more degrees in this hell than people generally believe there is, that's for sure.
As someone with a graduate degree in mathematics, I not only find the result with blind people unsurprising but also doubt the veracity of the results with sighted people. Let me elaborate.

Pure mathematics, at a high level, seeks for formalize some sort of observable, intuitive behavior in an experientially accessible system and then generalize it to an abstract degree that is no longer anything to do with experience. For example, counting pebbles directly leads to the positive integers, but you can construct the real numbers, almost all of which are uncomputable and/or transcendental, starting entirely from the integers. When doing high school algebra, we are reasoning about quantities and moving them around, so it makes sense that an otherwise underutilized visual cortex would be used for this purpose in a blind person, especially considering that he would need to construct a more elaborate mental model as a consequence of being unable to look at scratch paper.

I would not expect a random sample of sighted people to show activation of visual or spatial reasoning areas just because math education is so poor and so many people get through it by memorization rather than employing abstract reasoning skills based on spatial reasoning - in fact, I would expect increased activation of areas related to language. I would expect fMRI imaging of mathematicians, in contrast, to show high activations of areas to do with spatial reasoning, and perhaps even visual processing. See, for example, [1], which provides evidence for this hypothesis.

Drawing on personal experience, I learned the basic concepts of linear algebra by direct analogy to three-dimensional visualization, which is of course experientially already present. However, as I progressed and studied n-dimensional vector spaces, I no longer had an experiential analog - and yet I still use some of the same spatial reasoning abstractions (in a different, extended and/or generalized way) when reasoning in the N-dimensional case.

My opinion is that this study should have included an experimental group of trained mathematicians (or at least advanced mathematics students with demonstrated mathematical reasoning skills), and I again point to [1] for some degree of justification for this stance.

[1] http://m.pnas.org/content/113/18/4909.abstract?sid=fae659df-...
Yes, because a low level customer support agent is going to be privy to a secret agreement.

In reality the agent probably misunderstood what's bring asked.
Battlefield finalist Photomath’s app can now solve handwritten math problems
True - but as the other HN thread (that I can't seem to find anymore ><) pointed out, if Microsoft's requirements were planned as an attack against free software, it would be an unnecessarily complicated and ineffective one: There is nothing stopping anyone from writing Linux drivers for the new RAID mode - and I guess if more models with this setup show up, eventually someone will write one.

On the other hand, Microsoft could have easily gotten a much more "robust" lockdown - by simply demanding mandatory, unchangeable Secure Boot like on the ARM tablets. But they didn't do that.
Is CSS or HTML a programming language
Just wondering, does Dell support non-US keyboard layouts? I only saw that XPS available on some Dell-US site..
A Few Tricks to Help Your Laptop Last Longer
Unprecedented and Unlawful: The NSA’s “Upstream” Surveillance
We are in a world where being bad at your job can send you to jail, for criminal negligence.

Are you arguing that you want to get rid of all of those criminal laws, leaving only civil laws?

Bear in mind that Wells Fargo's agreement requires arbitration and prevents class action suits (http://www.reuters.com/article/wells-fargo-accounts-arbitrat... ), leaving very little external check on systemic failures due to high-level negligence.
Not a high chance. Earth has a molten core, which generates a magnetic field that shields us from harmful cosmic rays. It's been like this for so long that we've evolved to require this shielding.

Mars has less of a molten core, and a very weak magnetosphere. Therefore outdoor terraforming seems unlikely. We may have to walk around on Mars inside shielded colonies only, along with whatever other life we bring: plants, animals, everything.

More on this:

https://www.quora.com/Why-does-Earth-have-an-active-core-whi...

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

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0031891439...

Water seems to be a fairly decent shield, so it's tempting to imagine a human-made aquatic ecosystem. Fish would probably survive without any extra shielding besides water, so that's one natural resource we could start generating, assuming we could transport massive quantities of water to Mars. Unfortunately, the water would just evaporate or freeze, so we'd need shielding for that too.
Acer, with Debian Testing.
Come on. Do you really wan't to demonize people from using allegories?

User languagewars is in good company. Orwell compared early dissidents in USSR to chickens in his Animal farm. Jesus compared Kindom of Heaven to mustard seed, himself to wine and bread, redemption to finding a coin and true faith to freaking oil lamp. Plato compared whole human existence to group of dudes sitting in a cave. Socrates compared himself to gadfly.

This is one of the most used literary vehicle. By the best and most famous thinkers of all times.
Correcting the Record on Section 702: A Prerequisite for Surveillance Reform
Would it have happened if Compaq hadn't done a clean room reverse engineering?
Hmm, results would be different if iron (not steel) nails would be used.
Unfortunately styling SVGs is still not particularly convenient yet.
To keep control on what users do with the hardware? Same reason most Android devices have locked bootloaders.
I think that's not really the point here. If the story turns out to be true, then Microsoft is abusing its market power to lock down devices from vendors like Lenovo and friends.

Since Microsoft got into trouble with the EU before, they should know that this could potentially cause another investigation. Hands down, a big company is actively trying to make devices unusable with anything but their software. This is not in the interest of consumers, therefore probably illegal in some regions.
The Last Ringbearer is good fun. But I wouldn't recommend it for its moral sophistication.

People seem to miss that Tolkien's rejection of moral ambiguity was not just some lacuna. It was the point. In his world it is usually not hard to know what it is the right thing to do, bit it can be very hard to do it.

Tolkien, the Catholic, wants us to forgive others (e.g. Gollum) when they fail this difficult moral test, but still resolve to pass it ourselves rather than evade it by making excuses about complexity and ambiguity.

You might not agree with that philosophy, but it is still a serious message that pervades the story, and lends it much of its beauty.
Electron "apps" really suck honestly. They're very slow and large and eat memory.
Hitting stuck things with a mallet is probably a pretty effective way to get them unstuck, independent of the presence of coke.
Relevant?

"Predicting if a Metal Will Dissolve in Acid" [0]

as well as

"Is Soda Acidic? – How Cola Impacts Digestion" [1] and "Why is phosphoric acid used in some Coca‑Cola drinks?" [2]

> Short of drinking undiluted vinegar, cola is about the most acidic thing you can buy to
> drink. The pH level of soda is approximately 2.5 (testing seems to come up with results
> ranging from 2.3 to 3.5 but a pH of 2.5 is commonly cited...

the acid usually is phosphoric acid and occasionally citric acid it seems.

[0] https://www.boundless.com/chemistry/textbooks/boundless-chem...

[1] http://flatulencecures.com/is-soda-acidic

[2] http://www.coca-cola.co.uk/faq/why-is-phosphoric-acid-used-i...
Still does not mean it is bad for you. Same holds for vinegar (it's acidic). Vinegar is not bad for you, at least when pored over your salad. In fact, only the dose determines the toxicity, it makes no sense to talk about toxicity with out discussing dose (or LD50 value or something.)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_dose_makes_the_poison
The dire status of MacPorts and Fink was the impetus behind Arch OS X back then, but Homebrew's success and ease of use combined with the build-from-source design (it was a real plus not having to host binary packages at the time) preempted that effort.

Some design choices still rub me the wrong way to this day though (quibbles to some, but for a couple use cases it can matter), that's why I'm trying hard to bring back Arch OS X to life.

Anyway, congrats to the Homebrew team! They truly deserve it.
I'm running an ISO keyboard on a Dell Precision as we "speak". Recall you don't have to buy the Ubuntu pre-installed version because it's the same hardware. I retro-installed mine on a UK-keyboard Windows Precision M3800 (now superseded by the 5510). And it works perfectly. If I were to buy one now I'd just go for the 13-XPS as the infinity display is big enough, although a fully kitted out Precision 5510 with Xeon, 32GB RAM and Nvidia quadro is mighty tempting but we're talking 3000 USD (2150 GBP) with 1TB SSD.
Stanford Expert Explains Antibacterial Soap Ban
I would refrain from calling that a confirmation. It's a statement expressed by customer support, without any context.
After it has been determined that there is a certain level of capacity to perform, then it should be about how excited they are to learn and integrate into the company's technology stack and culture. Technology stacks have become complex enough in recent years that it is a little bit unreasonable to expect a candidate to be familiar with all of it. The same way it is a little bit unreasonable that the developer would know or remember every college level gotcha you could throw their way.

For instance what if they code in such a way that they haven't run into that problem in years as it is internalised. Or maybe they make use of tools that eliminate a lot of problems, such as TypeScript or similar.

A good developer comes in many forms and increasingly often from all over the world.
Gene therapy technique may help prevent cancer metastasis
I thought this was reminding me of something.... and it turned out I had even commented on it!

"Reconstruct a scene that is as similar as possible to a photograph" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12371975
Isn't the Microsoft key the only mandatory key in UEFI Secure Boot? So I guess they are still the boss of the (non-Apple) modern x86 PC architecture.
A paper on live programming with embedded live programming tools
I don't use Linux myself, but am curious as to why this has been so heavily downvoted.
I find it hard to find any explanation for this behaviour that fits except for the rather bleak suspicion that right now all that matters is gaining market share and locking people into your walled garden. Perhaps they are getting some return on investment now by creating ever more detailed advertising profiles on their users, but that doesn't seem sustainable — it strikes me as rather bubblish.

I wonder what the long term vision is. More data harvesting for advertising? Become the de facto platform for services offered through your chat network? The latter reminds of how every company needed a presence in Second Life to engage with customers and leads…
Validates tome's law: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9077549
I'm definitely not against terraforming, but I'd be against individual governments doing it for the same reasons that I gave for corporations. IMO it would have to be an international endeavour. Certainly wen we're talking about the solar system, where the number of candidate planets is basically two (plus Titan?). Does a Chinese planet and a US planet and a Facebook moon represent a useful and viable future?

In some far-future scenario where there are thousands of accessible planets suitable for terraforming then maybe it would be ok for corps and governments to do as they wish. But you're past the point where there is likely to be any overall political or legal system of control anyway.