skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
X.org considers hardware acceleration, with XRender, for example. Quite too often, buggy and incomplete graphic drivers and other problems makes it even worse than no acceleration at all. I don't really see these problems as X.org specific, is there any evidence that they are? I think it's more likely caused by very limited resources that are available, incomplete or proprietary (ati and nvidia tends to lag months behind new X server releases, would they ever catch up with a completely new system?) drivers, and other problems, and throwing out X means throwing out all effort spent to solve this problems.

But that doesn't mean that it is not a good idea to explore other possibilities and experiment with another systems in parallel. Like Wayland, for example. Of course it is. Just, don't hurry with burying X11, it's the best what you've got, and likely to remain so for a long time.
This is what keeps me off switching to Dvorak: I have all these keyboard shortcuts wired into my muscle memory that I would have to either relearn or remap when switching to Dvorak that it's just too much of a bother...
The thing that annoys me about lost (and we're leaving HN territory here) isn't just that the show makes things up as it goes along, or that the show pretends to be clever... it's that people actually believe the show is clever.

In a way, I can respect it that the producers/writers sit in a room and decide to throw mystery after illogical mystery at the viewer just because it does wonders for their ratings. What I can't respect is that people enjoy and are captivated by things that obviously have no explanation, or a Deus Ex Machina that is supposed to pass for one. What's the point of a mystery if you as the viewer can't think about possible explanations?

What is it that people like about Lost? I understand why people watch sci-fi, or medical dramas, or romantic comedies, or gross out comedies, or documentaries. All those things give the viewer something it wants (a laugh, a sob story, facts about history, and so on). But a show like Lost? I just don't get it.
go on. I'm not a hardware guy, but i'm pretty interested in STM/HTM. From what I understand, its harder than it appears considering Sun scrapped The Rock after its HTM speedups weren't as good as they were supposed to be.

Is your design pure HTM, or a hybrid approach? Or hardware support for STM? (Which seems more doable).
Cliff Click of Azul fame has some interesting comments on how HTM didn't really work as a 'dusty deck' solution for replacing locks, which is why I assumed its support and not a pure HTM implementation.

What happens if you overflow the 'rollback memory/cache' (or whatever you kids are calling it these days?)
Start with hjkl and see where it takes you. :)
They're waiting for widespread availability of WebGL.

Right now it's only available in Firefox or Safari nightlies and Chrome with command-line options.
Lindows/Linspire actually had an app store back in the day, where developers could package and distribute commercial software. It used apt as its backend.

Since that didn't work out, it looks like the next best alternative is something like Steam. It seems highly possible that Steam will be released for Linux (a port already exists). Valve could be persuaded by enough software developers to add non-game software to their system.

Neither system required/requires DRM to be integrated into the OS.
Turn Yourself Into CEO Material. Now
Your Personal Funsmith
Then create a cost for not wearing a helmet. Raise the insurance rates to account for the extra costs. Or give appropriate insurance discounts for wearing a helmet. If you are caught without a helmet and don't have the "helmet-free" insurance, then you get fined, your insurer can drop your policy, and/or your insurance skyrockets.
You kind of have to bury X, otherwise you're going to end up with two competing projects and then you're even worse off. See: Linux audio.

If X were to disappear from the face of the earth open source programmers would scramble to get something new into place, and that would in all likelihood be better at dealing the realities of graphics today.

Just because it's the best we got doesn't mean it's good enough.

(I'm not advocating we actually should bury X... just making the general point that sometimes it's worth it to stake a step back to take two steps forward later. I realize it's often not politically feasible.)
Perhaps HN should have a freshness date on all news.
you may be right about the check-in model, and if that's the case, using a blippy card might be a better model to broadcast purchases. and it'd be an easier way to consume the data on the client (ie push notifications when your friends spend using a blippy card, it's practically no different than a check in at that point).

i use manual mode, and i don't publish the boring transactions like my gas purchases. you can decide whether to unfollow people if they have boring purchases, but it's still interesting to see which applications my own friends are buying on the iphone, for example.
I almost dislocated my jaw while reading this article.

When we come to understand how brains function, we should become able to build amazing devices with cognitive abilities -- such as cognitive cars that are better at driving than we are because they communicate with other cars and share knowledge on road conditions.

Later:

As this cognitive infrastructure evolves, it may someday even reach a point where it will rival our brains in power and sophistication. Intelligence will inherit the earth.

Uhh... talk about lack of imagination. Self-driving cars? Smart power grids? Those are toys compared to other consequences of brain emulation. And "someday"? If you can model 1/1000th of a human brain at full speed today, then you'll be able to model a whole brain in 20 years (assuming no software speedups). 2 years after that, you'll have a model that runs at 2x human speed. Then it's off to the races. Biological humans are nowhere near the upper bound for intelligence. Just one example of our inefficient brains: Our neurons conduct signals at 0.000001c. If these things are as smart or smarter than us, then they'll be able to build even smarter intelligences even faster than us. Lather, rinse, repeat; you have I. J. Good's intelligence explosion.

A minor detail in this future would be, "Oh by the way, biological humans can upload themselves and become practically immortal." Seriously, cars are the best the writer can come up with?! What's the point of cars if you can transfer consciousness at the speed of light?
This was my best answer to the question, written 4 years ago, hope it helps:

http://www.viemu.com/a_vi_vim_graphical_cheat_sheet_tutorial...

I also prepare this write up answering "Why vi?":

http://www.viemu.com/a-why-vi-vim.html

They've been on the HN front page a few times, too.
Here's one suggestion: adopt the drag & drop software installation model of OSX.
I agree it was better when it was all super mysterious. And I know a lot of people have given up on the show because it can be frustrating. But trust me, there are still many many millions of devoted fans who will be sad to see the show end. Myself included.

I think that expecting an answer for every single question is a bit ridiculous though. It's still a rather mysterious show, and if they decided they wanted to tell us every single little thing, that ruin part of what makes it special.
Exactly what artificial limitations are you referring to? Tumblr has an extensive theme engine, even a marketplace to sell those themes, a developer API, and an outstanding tumblr discovery system.

I don't seen anything artificial or limiting about any of that.
totally disagree. i think it is one of a handful of services that is truly pushing the envelope of social media and is experimenting with what exactly we are willing to share.
Use the Vimperator firefox plugin, so you can exercise your Vim muscles while you browse the internet.
I always pronounced it poe-ster-ous and not pah-ster-ous. oops
Yep - each time they wove a plot twist in, it was like writing a big check.

At the end, either all those checks are going to cash out and they are going to look brilliant (if it somehow all makes sense), or they will bounce (they were just making things up as they went), it will be revealed as a fraud and people will feel tricked.

It seems increasingly likely to be the latter as time goes on.
props to blippy for having the balls to try something aggressive, instead of developing just a "me too" sharing site
It's nice to see so many gay geeks 'come out' on this thread. I had assumed I was the only one. Sexuality is such an infrequent topic on HN.
> I use Crockford's object.beget rather than normal JS constructors, and that works quite fine.

Crockford's beget patches on Object which I think is a terrible idea. The main reason why people create class libraries on top of JavaScript is the constructor problem (that setting up the "inheritance chain" triggers the constructor even though we only want the prototype).
If the camera person for that video reads this, I suggest placing the speaker in the bottom-left/bottom-right corner of the video frame and keeping the slide visible at all times. You can pan around when people ask questions, but keep as much of the slide visible as possible and move back when the question is done.
Is it a crime To receive an item that you know belongs to a third party?
Women's: Women make less than men on average. They also make very different choices of what jobs to work in, how many hours to work

The problem is not that women make less than men on average, they often make less than men when doing the exact same job, for the exact same hours.

and they are much more likely to have interruptions in their career.

Did you read the thread about job hoppers, where many men said that job hopping was a good thing because it was in their best interest?
It’s like when you spend time with a 3-year-old, you quickly find out that one question just begets another-- there’s a 'why' in the wake of every 'why'-- and the only way to end the conversation is to say, "Oh look, a Chuck E. Cheese!" The show is doing its best to say, "Oh look, Chuck E. Cheese!"

I am so glad I never watched this show, if that's the producer's attitude.
Backtype Removes User Profiles
i found this surprisingly difficult to read because of the typography (admittedly, i am sensitive to this.) probably don't want full justification without hyphenation. or san-serif fonts for a large amount of text.
Perhaps the driver's license was fake. Either way, it's a shame we have to live with people who do these kinds of things. After having my car broken into multiple times and eventually stolen, and home broken into (luckily I don't have much worth stealing), it sickens me.
Spotify launches social networking integration today
They made Flood-it and included Google Ads. I'm sure they're way ahead of this curve...
Racing on Carbon Fiber Legs: How Abled Should We Be?
Heterosexism: discrimination or prejudice by heterosexuals against homosexuals (Merriam-Webster)
Supreme Court to rule on violent video games
Yeah, desktop linux sucks at installing apps.
Yes, I'm aware. I guess I should have phrased my question more explicitly as "why?"
It's amusing how "the web" bloats "push some text onto the end of an array" to 1K of interpreted code. No wonder web apps are so buggy.
There's no reason this couldn't be done now, someone just needs to implement that in PackageKit and it would work fine on many distros and package managers. The backend and everything is all there, just make a drag and drop event instead of clicking an "Install" button.

That said, installation of software on Linux has been one its shining points for a long time. Package management is awesome and neither OS X or Windows offer it.
NoSQL – Not The End Of RDBMS
The major advantage of "Desktop Linux" (that I've been using happily for quite a few years now) is that it's utterly unlike Mac OS X or Windows. We use Linux not because it's free, but because it's more comfortable, the UI is better and friendlier, and developing programs for it is a whole hell of a lot easier.

Everything Gnome, Ubuntu and this sort of people do work against these advantages. We use Linux because of its differences - these differences to other systems need to be accentuated (zsh, the suckless project, etc), not fought against (Ubuntu, network-manager, HAL, etc).

By every step these people take, Linux gets more difficult to develop for and less comfortable to use. This needs to stop.
Great! Now coda can get some love
According to them, they didn't learn his name until after they had taken the pictures of the phone. Once they had learned his name they contacted him, confirmed that he'd lost the phone and made arrangements to return it.
Don't go to the demo page unless you want to severely lag your browser.
The audio situation is a total debacle. n-1 of the sound systems need to be killed so we can focus on making the remaining one work really well.

It's really funny that this is his first point, because I ran into it just two days ago... the microphone jack on my laptop, which worked fine in Ubuntu hardy, intrepid, and jaunty, no longer works in karmic thanks to the upgrade to pulseaudio (bug has existed in launchpad since november). It's insane that something so simple (analog input jack) on such common hardware (Intel 82801i) could be non-functional in 2010. Of all the weird driver problems I've had in 12+ years of Linux use, this one is probably the most shocking.
I tend to watch shows all at once in weeklong binges.

Breaking bad is next in queue.
> Can you imagine if doctors remembered everything they ever had to memorize in med school?

It'd be pretty amazing! Which is why it's unfortunate that we don't have a close approximation to that with a man/machine interaction, where people do the hard-to-automate bits, and machines do the rote memorization bits. The first diagnosis expert system to beat human doctors (in an admittedly narrow domain), MYCIN, is now something like 35 years old, and yet doctors still rarely use computational assistance. Or at least, they don't officially: I know plenty of doctors who use Wikipedia in their daily work.
I don't think it's a given that our brains are "ruthlessly inefficient". In a complex system of trade-offs, they are actually pretty damn good at what they do. Human vision alone is incredibly complex. Anyone interested in how difficult it is to replicate the brain should read Steven Pinker's "How the Mind works".
In addition to all the excellent suggestions here, I will also suggest reading the free book "A Byte of Vim" (http://www.swaroopch.com/notes/Vim_en:Table_of_Contents).

This is how the book introduces itself:

"A Byte of Vim" is a book which aims to help you to learn how to use the Vim editor (version 7), even if all you know is how to use the computer keyboard.

The first part of this book is meant for new users who want to understand what Vim is and learn how to use it.

The second part of this book is for people who already know how to use Vim and want to learn about features that make Vim so powerful, such as windows and tabs, personal information management, making it a programmer's editor, how to extend Vim with your own plugins, and more.
How SaaS Pricing Plans Have Evolved Over a Period of Time
The "owner" of the phone, which the finder of the phone knows the name of, where it was found etc, was actively looking for the phone.

The words of the finder was published by none other than Gizmodo, who definitely has everything to gain if the statements were true. That's conflict of interest.

To cite some others who had found this specific California Law:
California law regulates what you can do when you find lost property in the state. Section 2080 of the Civil Code provides that any person who finds and takes charge of a lost item acts as "a depositary for the owner." If the true owner is known, the finder must notify him/her/it within a reasonable time and "make restitution without compensation, except a reasonable charge for saving and taking care of the property."

Now, where was the name dropping by Gizmodo came from? The finder of the phone claimed that the phoned was "remotely bricked" the day after. Certainly someone knew who the phone was assigned to.

Those are the facts.
I don't think that the idea was "Why would you stand up for a gay man if you're not gay?". It was more along the lines of "Since you are not a representative of this group, what would give you the motivation to pick up THIS particular cup and follow it through to completion?" There are lots of other injustices that he might be a representative member of and could have campaigned against.

I'm really happy that he picked it up on principle. In a way, it's a lot more pure that someone _not_ gay spearheaded the effort so there is no appearance of a conflict of interest (rational or irrational). Turing was the man, and I'm glad Britain recognizes that now.
Wasn't that the whole point to disclose this story in such an extent? The drama -and clicks- generated by exposing where the phone came from, how they obtained it, how much they paid, the engineer's full name and all other small details were the reason why this story got so much attention.

No amount of "leaked pictures by an anonymous source" posts could compete with laying down a perfect controversy as Gizmodo did with this story.
> The situation will change when the basic proficiency level of the average student makes them untenable to hire.

You can kind of see that now. It used to be that people with only High School diplomas were very hire-able and people with B.A/S.s were the rarity. Now, in most professional environments a B.A/S. is a minimum requirement and M.A/S.s are preferred. Before too long M.A/S.s will be required for entry level jobs and either a second degree or a PhD will be the preferred.
One good meme deserves another: http://failbook.com/2010/04/14/funny-facebook-fails-that-was...
Really? even Alexander Fleming before his accidental discovery of penicillin?
Perhaps you should tell that group of investors how stupid their investment was. They must have been asleep during the pitch.
I stayed for about 15 seconds.
Labrepl for Clojure (Environment for exploring the Clojure language)
Memristor, not memresistor.

Memristors are a fundamental component, analagous to resistors, capacitors, and inductors.

You probably wouldn't notice the difference, as computers work at a different abstraction level.
Seriously! Luckily, I am in a relationship with an excellent one. whew

If you are only looking for college students the search will have a pretty limited scope, won't it? Isn't there a design club on campus?
I figured that I would wait until it was finished. That way, I could know if everyone else was angry about the ending.
Don't agree. Installation of distribution supported software on linux is very easy already. Drag and drop will just cause a lot of issues with software that actually requires more complicated installation, as well as libraries, etc.
Books Programmers Don't Really Read
I don't know if I'd call it "artificial" exactly, but last time I checked, Posterous was limited by how big of an email you can send (gmail limits to 20 or 25 mb, I think). Have they opened up on-site uploads yet?
Your way makes more sense. You use it to post things and it isn't preposterous.

They need to fix the pronunciation.
1. ...
2. get bought by google...
3. profit?
Of course, It's completely counter-intuitive to pronounce it pah-ster-ous. Especially for an email to post blogging platform.
I have no doubt that many gay couples do quite well at raising children. I would however put those cases were one of the biological parents was present in a different category to what we are talking about (which I suspect is your case).

> "Beliefs that lesbian and gay adults are not fit parents likewise have no empirical foundation."

As I argued in my post, most studies are likely to effected by selection bias so it is going to be tough to get a solid "empirical foundation" either way.

The real question is who should have the burden of evidence? Should we say that 'until gay couples are proven to be good parents we won't allow adoption' or 'unless it is proven that gay couples are bad parents they should have identical adoption rights'. I don't think either is sensible position and some sort of middle ground would be best as more evidence accumulates.
Sure, the brain is impressive. It's not bad considering the limitations of biology. Likewise, I think the human eye is impressive. I'd certainly have a hard time designing a video camera made of jelly. But the brain, like the eye, is highly sub-optimal compared to non-biological solutions. The laws of physics allow for brains that run a million times faster than ours while consuming the same amount of energy. And that's without using tricks like quantum or reversible computing.

Evolution can only hill-climb. It can't jump to the highest points of the solution space, and it can't explore any areas of the solution space surrounded by valleys. This is why no animal has evolved wheels, treads, or impeller pumps. This is also why animals haven't evolved brains made out of materials that conduct signals at speeds close to c.
UC San Diego Physicists Locate Long Lost Soviet Reflector on Moon
It is hard to believe that sound can be so broken, after all these years (and looking at the huge strides other parts of the desktop have made).

If Ubuntu wants to be the uber-friendly, runs anywhere (just works!) distro, they need to avoid these types of regressions from one version to the next. I know they're not in charge of all the upstream work, but they are the ones that make the decision on what version of pulse audio to use (or X version, or whatever). Instead it seems that Ubuntu always tries to stay on the bleeding edge, which is inevitably going to be broken for some people.
I've got to say, I've been playing with it for a while, and it's absolutely beautiful in every way: snappy, pretty, useful, intuitive & feature-packed.

Panic does it again.
Well, I was hoping for many more than just two. I don't really see any other way than many competing projects, one eventually killing all others.

But it shouldn't be that painful. As you've said, it's mostly about toolkits, and it's easy to simply run X server atop of the new system (Mac OS X does that, Linux does that in some ways, Windows can do that, so anybody can). I guess that the terrible mess of Linux audio can be avoided (after all, you don't have X11 applications locking whole graphic system for just themselves, as is often the case in audio).
This is great -- I'm upgrading now for the Disks feature alone. It already works better than MacFusion (no longer maintained?) and ExpanDrive (which is actually $5 more expensive than Transmit!).
I suppose since he was head of Sun at the time, pointing out that Scot McNealy banned powerpoint presentations back in '96 isn't especially supportive of the "ppt bad" camp...

(grep http://www.acs.org.au/president/1996/atm/npc/im961009.htm fr "powerpoint")
with a UI, over a network, backed by a resilient persistence engine
The problem might be that the parent doesn't know the difference between X.org and XFree86.
Interesting you should say that. I was reading the declaration of human rights the other day and it struck me that we have a long long way to go before we can even begin to say that the majority of the countries that are signatory to it actually practice them all the time.

It's really quite shocking how many of those 'basic principles' are trampled on a daily basis. There should be a long term trend towards respect for those principles in the countries that are signatory to them, but in fact, on some fronts especially privacy the trend is backwards.