skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'll grant you that. ImageShack and PhotoBucket are one of the worst sites I've ever seen in terms of getting in a way of using the service.
Postmates Secures $141M in a ‘Super, Super Difficult’ Fundraising Effort
That post is as close to a "WTF is going on" as you'll probably get from Gruber. I was pretty surprised to read it.
I had no idea that Grab.app was still around, because Preview.app does mostly the same thing. I'd guess it is hanging around as a backward-compatibility thing.
I miss Mayhem. Mayhem was an open source IFTTT-like application that ran on your own PC that Microsoft made a few years back.
From one staunch supporter of Mozilla to another:

1. Chrome was first to the easy JS addons game. Firefox is playing catch up there with Web Extensions. Did Firefox basically invent the browser extension? Yeah. But Chrome made it popular and easy to develop

2. Developers are largely moving towards Chrome as their sole browser for testing. Therefore, addons get developed for Chrome first. You also might be experiencing sample bias on the other end of that: PH and HN are developer focused, so Chrome gets more front-page love.
Yes, I was planning on abandoning my MacBook Air. Moving to a SurfaceBook + Mac Mini (for iOS builds) setup. Not happening I guess :|
Edith Skinner is still taught in conservatory drama programs. I used Skinner at NYU 2004-2008. It's not a rare book at all (or maybe it's just not in a big city with lots of drama schools and training programs). Regardless of how outdated the Good Speech sound is in most contexts (you hear it in a lot of Shakespeare still that isn't RP), the book is an excellent source for learning the International Phonetic Alphabet and techniques for analyzing speech.

I have a lot of southern and mid western speech habits, and learning a rigorous framework for analyzing speech helped me get control over them.
I see. I guess time will tell if apple made the right call to sacrifice ports and memory in exchange for thin and light.

I have a feeling that Apple's bigger screw up is the new pricing.

Cost of getting 15" laptop is now $2,400, which is colossally more expensive than before.

Some people just need bigger screen, and not high end specs.
Is Dark Silicon Useful? (2012) [pdf]
If you want to play with infra VM, that's at least 4 GB each, slack loves memory, like, seriously, video conf + sharing your desktop needs memory. Now start playing with some data stores on top of that, and 16 GB feels cramp.

I absolutely don't for fancy graphic adapter, but I need all the memory I can get. I want 13 inch so I can use my laptop anywhere, including airplanes, cars, light railway etc...
What I enjoy about pinyin input is I can just touch type.

Without remembering how the character is written.

And then when I see the result, I can check it and (assuming I sort-of-know the character well enough to do so) I confirm it and go on. Sometimes confirming is not an extra step; it's simply continuing to type.

Also I can type a long bunch of characters in sequence, and they give each other context so the characters get disambiguated, meaning I have less to check and fewer things to choose or correct.

This new method seems like a good system for someone who doesn't know how to say the words they want to type. Such as some of the people the OP described, so good job on that front! Maybe not so good if you are learning or aiming to learn spoken Chinese, though, because it keeps you away from learning or reinforcing the pronunciations, doesn't build on existing knowledge of the keyboard, and doesn't create a very portable skill as pinyin typing would.
Oh boy, we've got another poll-truther in here
You're confusing C20th sea level rises with projected future changes, which are much faster. (I'm sure you can find models, estimates and measurements they make the from and the associated data from climate reports)
The oil and gas industry regularly spends that kind of money. Look into offshore drilling.
Ask HN: How long to not be a job hopper?
I'm really miserable in my current job and am getting some headaches and general burnout because of the work conditions (very loud, no space, no one takes sick days, bad lighting, long hours without breaks being culturally acceptable). I am so worn down at the end of the day that I no longer have the motivation to exercise, so I've gained fat and lost muscle (haven't really "gained weight" though). My resting heart rate has gone up and I just generally feel terrible all of the time. But I am afraid of being permanently branded as a job hopper[1] and never being able to find a job again, so I am not sure when I can quit. I am coming up on two years of this next month.

I also feel so demotivated and don't know how to begin looking for jobs - I haven't done that for about 6 years, as I was directly recruited into this one.

[1] see this article... https://bothsidesofthetable.com/never-hire-job-hoppers-never-they-make-terrible-employees-e30cd5ff7322#.3u7f2gt34
Out of curiosity, what's Activity Monitor report each is taking?
OS X seizes all available memory for the apps you have open, and aggressively manages it as you open more and more apps. Free memory in Activity Monitor is not a useful measure of how many apps your machine can run with sufficient performance.
I agree with you to a point. I'm doing the same thing I was 10 years ago, but my output is of much higher quality.

in 2007 I was developing websites, the ones I build now are considerably better in almost every way. I used photoshop, but now the images I work with are far better resolution. Video production.. you get the point.

So yes I'm doing much of the same thing, but my quality has improved significantly.
From https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/MacBook_Pro the lowest spec CPU is an i5-6360U which supports DDR4 and 32GB of RAM: http://ark.intel.com/m/products/91156/Intel-Core-i5-6360U-Pr...
> top-of-the-line

Define top of the line. What measurement do you use?

The reason the 2016 MBP has a 2015 Intel CPU is the same reason it has a 16GB memory limit.

Intel hasn't shipped a LPDDR4-capable quad-core mobile processor yet. Even dual-core Kaby Lake mobile processors released already don't support LPDDR4, and even if they did, they're less appropriate for a "pro" machine than previous generation quads.

[In competing devices the only machines that exceed 16GB of RAM will be using regular DDR3/4, (i.e. not low-power) and there will be a significant battery life effect, not to mention running hotter. (More power in == more heat out)

As a developer (i.e. not video/audio/graphics editing/production) the only use I can imagine that would regularly benefit from > 16GB of RAM is running multiple virtual machines to simulate a complex server environment.

This is the exact scenario I personally would like 32/64 GB of RAM to better handle. And yet, I'm still in favour of the highly portable configuration they settled on, rather than a power-hungry, hot machine using regular DDR.
Because in the windows market, surface isn't a laptop targeting video editors, game programmers, etc. It's a thin and light entry. Contrast with lenovo portable workstations which got 64gb over a year ago: http://www.theverge.com/2015/8/11/9129681/lenovo-skylake-xeo...

Apple produces every osx compatible device. This means it needs to produce at least one device that can meet the needs of power users.
> 'new roofs' are not built that often

Source? Roofs last 20-30 years. 125 million homes in the U.S., with roofs being replaced every 25 years means 5 million roofs per year. Triple that for Europe, China, and the rest and you've got 15 million a year. It's a big ticket item so you don't have to capture that much of the market to start hitting pretty serious revenue numbers.
>As I type this I'm running at 15.25GB used

Yes, the OS will use as much memory as possible, this doesn't mean you are hitting memory limits or performance bottlenecks.
Jobs is not a fan of softkeys:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yL7X3DTyS2Q

This is pretty much directly relevant to the state of apple right now:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-AxZofbMGpM

It's quite eery.
Microsoft Flow has been around for few months now (in Public Preview), but they just announced its General Availability.

https://flow.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/announcing-ga/
Google is becoming a tool for US imperialism.

"Whether it is being just a company or “more than just a company,” Google’s geopolitical aspirations are firmly enmeshed within the foreign-policy agenda of the world’s largest superpower. As Google’s search and internet service monopoly grows, and as it enlarges its industrial surveillance cone to cover the majority of the world’s population, rapidly dominating the mobile phone market and racing to extend internet access in the global south, Google is steadily becoming the internet for many people. Its influence on the choices and behavior of the totality of individual human beings translates to real power to influence the course of history."
The list is out-of-date for the other browsers.

There are key things that are missing such as 'object.observe': 'not planned' or 'RTC data channels': 'under consideration'.

Microsoft has massive engineering capabilities. Do you really think its a coincidence that Mozilla and Chrome have these types of key features but Microsoft's browser doesn't?

The reason Microsoft has always lagged behind on web platform capabilities and continues to do so today, despite all of the success their giant marketing machine has had in concealing it, is because the web platform is in fact the greatest potential threat to Microsoft's office and PC gaming monopolies. So they drag their feet on key capabilities and under-fund web platform engineering.
Roll your own political poll (MTurk+Python+Pandas)
The NeXT interface was wonderfully designed. Back in the day, its competition was Openlook and Motif, plus the classic Mac desktop and whatever Windows and OS/2 had at the time -- it was really a wonderful, integrated, beautifully executed desktop that made sense soon as I first sat down to use it.
Thanks for these suggestion, I'll check them out. There is also an interesting trend with pico8 "pixel games", for me some of them have a "thing", a bit like chiptune music.
Not to disparage one of the four great inventions of the Chinese but Europeans invented the printing press which is kind of the crux here: massive partially automated distribution of knowledge.
The flip side to this is all the times people thought Apple was making a huge mistake but it turned out great. The initial Slashdot review of the iPod is a pretty famous example.
I do a lot of work outside of an office too, but I don't care about the battery life advantages.

For my workloads, battery life is already terrible in a modern MBP, because all those great battery gains from the last 10 years are really about idle performance, not flattening the processor. My MBP is rarely quiet: Too often it has to do enough processing to sound like an airplane about to take off. If you actually tax it, it lasts about two hours before it runs out of juice.

I'd much rather have more power and less battery life than to just give up, buy a tablet with a keyboard, since then the computer is nothing more than a modernized VT100 terminal, and do all real computing in the cloud.
Forgive my laziness, but it's a pain for me to answer due to all of the Google Chrome Helper processes that I'd have to sum to supply you with an accurate answer :-)
Should Zapier be worried ?
Probably not, unless Microsoft suddenly forms a large division out of this and manages to get a 100 - 200 integrations going.
It also took me until college to learn to pronounce the e.
Really yucky
Great insights and cool to see Bazel. We'll start simple with the terminal https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/22864 and editor https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/22876 and keep iterating from there.
What's with this trend of calling an author's writing "childish" instead of saying you don't care for his style?
Adding 'touch' to a UI designed for mouse/trackpad + keyboard interaction is inherently a terrible idea. Even my pinky finger is much bigger than the cursor. I would have zero chance of being accurate with it.

Also, that still requires the actual controls to be on-screen somewhere. With the touch bar, you can opt to not have those controls (e.g. a toolbar in an IDE, or a palette in a visual tool like photoshop) shown on the main display if they're available when contextually relevant, on the touch bar.
When built in sat-navs came on the scene, apparently many people still preferred to use their dedicated satnav devices such as Garmins because the built-in varieties in their fancy new car were prone to bad UX, inferior performance, and difficulties with updating the maps and so on. No doubt sorted out in many cases, but this was a widespread problem, an example of the pitfalls of eager innovation.

I'm sure Apple will be fine. Their first attempt at the iPad Pro wasn't received that well, but they'll fix that and deliver something good next year. I'm actually on the lookout for a tablet I can draw on, but I'm hesitant to buy a Surface Pro because I don't trust Windows 10. I don't want my OS to be a service with mandatory updates and whatever other control they take away, but then again that's where Apple are headed too. I prefer the OS to be in the background, out of sight, not pushing itself to the foreground, desperate for attention and relevance.
Except for when macOS tells me that it has run out of RAM and that I need to close some applications...
Understood :) Similarly, I'm amazed at how much CPU some Safari tabs can use. (How do these tabs keep proliferating?)
To some extent, they're both right.

Podesta's emails definitely show a lot of rotten things, loads of scheming, backstabbing everyone (especially Bernie). Nobody trusts each other and for very good reason. The scandals are bad, but one of the things I find the worst is just how much they hate each other and the honest truth that they appear to spend all their time backstabbing. They've faked a ton of stories as well.

As for Trump, well, you know.
IoT Data Plans
Pinyin is a good tool with lasting benefits. You'll get past the early stages faster with it than you will without it.
It's an ideological complaint, not a technical one.

Not being able to install apps is a nuisance; not being able to distribute apps for others to install is a deal-breaker, but the main thing is that I'm afraid of our world becoming a place where walled gardens are the typical model for consumer electronics.
I have an intel laptop (w520) from 5yrs that can supports more than 16gig of ram and currently has 20gb of ram (16+4). Yes spec says max is 16gb but that's not true. I don't know the max. i7 quad core. 5 years old.
Are you living in a fantasy world where:

* polls are over-sampled with pro-Clinton Democrats so badly that they aren't relevant

* Clinton's popularity is so low that she can't fill the venues she campaigns at yet Trump regularly fills them to max capacity (and then some)

* she makes minimal to no public appearances, instead relying on weak public figures (has-been film celebrities, entertainers) to campaign on her behalf

* both current and past DNC heads have been disgraced as shills for Hillary, absolutely destroying her popularity among Sanders' Democrats and independents

* scandals from the email leaks never stop going away, in fact they're getting worse

* evidence of unconscionable pay-for-play continues to mount so much that they cannot be swept under the rug

* the FBI investigation into her criminally negligent national security practices has been re-opened, further destroying her popularity among independents and giving an unrecoverable haircut to her loyalists

* Trump has to make absolutely zero effort to retain Republican voters, nullifying all risk that they will cross the floor to the Clinton camp

Because this is fantasy world is actually the reality you're willfully ignoring.
I don't know about the surface, but I've bee putting off my 6 year old Thinkpad x220 because the current replacement, the x260 has a 16gb limit.
Indeed, I was pointing out that anti-global-warming policies are not likely to be economically viable on a living individual's time scale.
If the FFA is to blame, how have windows laptops had 64gb of ram for over a year? http://www.theverge.com/2015/8/11/9129681/lenovo-skylake-xeo...
10 Noteworthy Guidelines on Getting HR Done Right
He means the software requires Kafka as a dependency, not that the foundation is sponsoring it. The claim of "designed primarily for ease of use" is a personal one, not hard to make.
Can I blame bitrot? Yes, thanks, of course I meant 2001.
Sure okay. I see your point. For reading it's no good. Perhaps Twitter should allow normal paragraphs in moments. The tweet could be just the title of the document, but from then on it's anything goes. That would be great, but they probably won't do that.
You should watch the TV show The West Wing.
Building a RESTful API in Go
So, this starts to get into somewhat interesting territory. I'v been thinking about automation and its contrast with industrialisation.

From the start of the industrial revolution through about the 1960s, the principle mechanisms were division of labour and application of more energy per worker. There was some automation, but it was largely at a very simple scale -- Jaquard's loom, duplicating patterns on lathes and machining systems, dies (a simple mode for reproducing complex shapes).

But for the most part, what wasn't being substituted for was the worker's skill.

Since the 1960s or so, that's begun changing. Soup-to-nuts factories produce goods with little or no worker intervention. CAD-CAM systems translate design directly to machining.

Automation, in short, replaces the mind of the worker, rather than the muscle.

This also calls to mind the question of just what it is that labour is. I'd consider it a compound factor of production:

1. A prime mover.

2. A complex manipulation system.

3. Skill and processing knowledge.

4. A control system through sensing, processing, feedback, and resulting process management inputs.

Labour-as-muscle has been subject to replacing since the time of draught animals, water, and wind power, though at a vastly greater rate with steam, electrical, and internal-combustion power. The result has largely been an amplification of labour via energy inputs.

Substituting for the information-processing capabilities of labour is another matter. It does mean, however, that increasing amounts of skilled work might be replaceable with a much less-skilled technician. I've seen this trend in the IT world over the past several decades, though there remain points at which greater skills are still in demand.

This makes the viability of coerced labour, including the coerced labour of sweatshops and workhouses, as well as actual prison slave labour, for complex goods, far more viable.

Let that spin your moral compass for a bit.
Just bough a 14 inch thinkpad t460p with 32gb of ram for $980. The form factor isn't quite as sexy, but the specs compare favorably to the macbook pro, and the price difference is pretty absurd. It's entirely upgradable to boot.
shit, my company had a "when a user is created or deleted in AD, do X" type of functionality, we could save so much freaking money money its ridiculous. Im still. planning on sitting down and building it.
I don't see richer, more app-like web sites as a clear improvement. They often leave me feeling frustrated, like the designer's ego is more important than actual utility. Would you please, I sometimes want to say, just stop zooming around and show me the text already?
Yes, but Apple use LPDDR* ("LP" for the low power variant of RAM)
IFTTT + Sanctioned by corporate IT? This could be huge.
Have you done this? Does it work? Does nginx actually close the file and re-open it every time it does a write, or does it mmap the file as would be sensible on local disk?

Even if nginx gets this right, now you're relying on the consistency of your shared disk implementation. Popular options include:

1. A single UNIX machine. Now you have a single point of failure, and all your traffic . If you're okay with that, you can just do that and skip NFS. If you're okay home-brewing failover solutions for your former single point of failure and its backup, you can just do that and skip NFS.

2. A fancy cluster of filers that attempts to promise you distributed close-to-open consistency, and gets it right with very high but not 100% probability.

3. A fancy cluster of filers that relaxes some of the guarantees on NFS consistency, or only lets one person successfully open a file at once, or something.

4. Something opaque from Amazon, which could be any of the above options and you have no idea which, or something else entirely. Also, a single NFS export from Amazon EFS only runs within a single availability zone. If you're okay having a single AZ as a SPOF, again, you can skip NFS.

(My employer runs NFS at very large scale in production; basically everything in the company touches NFS one way or another, and we have lots of infrastructure to ensure availability and geographic redundancy in NFS. Every time it fails, things get weird, because application software rarely expects files to have the same problems distributed systems have. It's no more magic than any other distributed system, and possibly quite a bit less magic.)
MacOS tends to use all the ram it has available but that doesn't mean it needs it all. Much of it is used for caching and the like. It's a good thing, since if you're going to be powering the RAM you might as well use it all, even for marginal benefit. That means though that if you had 64GB of RAM on your next MBP, you'd be (hopefully) running at 53.4GB used.
First, important to note: You are awesome and doing amazing work. (Link to what I am doing later in this message).

The problem with all projects, not just deis is that the end user needs to know too much.

I launch about 30 projects a year on top of Heroku and it never ceases to amaze me how simple it is. Yes, the applications are simple. Classic app->db. That being said, the setup is stupid simple.

When I started working on the-startup-stack[1], I was amazed on how much you need to do when you start from scratch. Things I forgot I even did since I have a system running in production with incremental changes for 5 years.

You need to configure networking, decide on DNS, decide on so many thing. It's a lot of work.

Here's what I want (and what I am trying to do with the-startup-stack[1]).

0. AWS KeyPair
1. create-stack
2. launch-app

Lot of what's missing is best practices and production-ready environments.

Going back to that same lunch discussion I had with the CTO of a big company doing a replatforming of their infrastructure: Generalization is the hardest thing here. Reasoning on who's the customer and what does their stack look like.

If you give Deis/OpenShift/Kubernetes to the typical YC founder (I am not trying to insult anyone here) that's trying to get their app in their cloud, it's just too much. It's too much of things they don't care about right now. By not caring about it right now they are likely vendor-locking themselves for a very long time.

[1] http://docs.the-startup-stack.com
True, and I've seen great results with Firefox's asm.js AOT mode, but the app I'm working on has a lot of non cached users.
And the highest spec is a i7-6920HQ, which supports 64GB DDR4... but Apple declined to use DDR4.
If you RTA you'll see that it's a forced compromise between battery life and FFA restrictions
What? Illegal under which law? Thinkpad x260 can't take more than 16 GB as far as I know!
Software with Soul: A Geek's View on Matt Crawford's “Shop Class as Soulcraft”
Anyone have any opinions on the long-term viability of Kafka? I've been lurking on the kafka dev mailing lists and I'm fairly turned off by the attitude from Confluent's employees that I've read from. There was a recent thread about their open source status and how they backhand Apache's open source philosophies, I'm wondering if they are thinking of moving away from open source in the future.