skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
My main computer is a five year old 17" MBP. I've upgraded it to the max and done repairs to maintain it. I need the computational power - I use it for programming, photo editing at scale, and recording/mixing music.

It would cost me $3000 to replace it with a computer that is not significantly more powerful, has a smaller screen and less I/O functionality, and would be incompatible with my audio interface unless I daisy-chain multiple adapters to get Firewire. Fuck that, as long as possible.

This week, my mother's crappy Windows computer died, and I bought her a Chromebook. It was great! I'm now seriously considering getting a Chromebook for myself for day-to-day web browsing and such, and retiring the MBP to music and photos only. If I can figure out how to run Vagrant on one, I'll probably switch for development, too (or maybe I'll just start paying for a cloud-based dev environment).

Meanwhile, I keep having computer envy for a friend's MS Surface Pro. It's the first time I've ever looked longingly from a MacBook to a Windows machine! But frankly, it does things my Mac doesn't do, and the build quality is on par.

Someone please tell Apple than when you need to hold a press conference to convince people you're committed to your product, you're not committed to your product.
I had actually spent a lot of time researching this particular use case - creating and maintaining website as B2C SMB and their way of promoting themselves to customers. I came to the conclusion that if you are mortar-and-brick business, focused on local people, the current web is actually totally broken for you and the only feasible solution for ads are location based ad systems.

In this particular case I distinguished between businesses which are location based and businesses which are able to sell their goods and services on the Internet. For those who are able to sell on Internet, there is plenty of options for e-commerce solution etc, but for local businesses it doesn't make economically sense to maintain website.

During my research I talked with 50 local small-business owners in SF and each one of them had website. They all agreed that it is luxurious expense and half of them had problem to maintain the site and only 10/50 were able to update their website at least once a month. What was kind of shocking for me to find out was that around 60% of these people was paying $50+/month for shitty website and almost nobody was willing to spend more money on their website.

When asking about social media(Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, Twitter, WhatsApp) - 95% had profiles there and were actually having them more updated than their business websites. Unfortunately, majority of the owners were pretty skeptic about the advertisement there and never tried, for example, targeted FB ads. Most of them never heard about this option.

Here is couple of findings:

- When asking, why do they have a website, some of them replied that it is must have in eyes of the customer - you don't exist if you don't have website, right?

- When asking what's their monthly number of visitors on their websites, 60% didn't know.

- When asking about the most used communication channel, almost everyone said phone. One barber was actually running WhatsApp group and worked pretty well for him.

- When asking how much they will be investing into a website - the majority said that they will not increase their costs for web and ads.

From my point of view, web is actually total nonsense for local businesses, it's unnecessary expense and the owners could do much better if they orient on social media and local advertisement. The real problem for them is that they are not willing to maintain 10 social network accounts and constantly update them, because they need to run their real business as well.

One funny thing I found out was that 10 out of 50 said that old-fashioned promotional flyer into mailbox still works best for them and has the biggest response and they will spent more money on that. Kinda surprise for me in SF in the beginning of 2016.
Facebook is a real juggernaut. Google is getting less effective because all of this information is moving to AOL style walled gardens.

It's sad.
Currently looking. I finally came to my last straw recently.

A coworker sent me an email because some data I was in charge of adding to the system was missing. I looked, and somehow data in our database had gone missing. I use the data to add information to another database, and that database had the information in it. So somehow he managed to lose information in SQL Server.

A few weeks later, my boss brought me in to his office because about 25k rows had incorrect information. I went to check my notes, and all of my notes from a period of 10 days were missing. I had been creating a changed file log (because files have been lost in the past), and I could see I had created notes during those dates, but they didn't exist anywhere.

The only evidence I had done my job at all during that time were the emails I sent to other people. (Thankfully Microsoft hosts these, so the IT director can't mess it up.) I had sent somebody an email that basically said "I found error [x], but I fixed it."

For a little while I was questioning whether I was insane. I mean, I would never have believed it was possible for data that you've added to an ACID database to just disappear. If you can't trust ACID principles, what can you trust?
The value of Bayes' work is somewhat orthogonal to his use of it to prove the truth of the Resurrection.

It was valuable to show that Hume's approach was flawed but limited value to prove the truth per se. To apply probabilities to the events you'd have to make an awful lot of assumptions about the accuracy of the, non-eye witness, reporting. However, it was an excellent approach for such an evaluation.

As to the Fulton Sheen quote. I's a bit unfair. I mean, if you're going to be picky about it you can lose the lunatic option: someone who claims to be God is either God or a liar, by definition. But you can be a liar by deliberate act, by diminished faculty or by being mistaken. And plenty of great teachers have been mistaken about important things.

And of course, in both the Bayes and Fulton cases, there is the implicit assumption that what was recorded about Jesus had no systemic bias i.e. any errors while recording what He said and did were mistakes, not deliberate misrepresentations. Given the strong requirement to show that He fulfilled scripture, this is a highly dubious assumption.
Agree with your point, but bear in mind that any time you use caps lock on the internet for emphasis you start to look like a yelling crazy person and it reduces the impact of your argument regardless of its correctness.
You could probably take geo located timestamp Facebook / instagram / snapchat and get a similar result.
Merry Haxmas Shadow Brokers Strike Again
One problem amongst several with allocating memory in batches (or using a pool allocation scheme) is that you end up making poor use of the cache. After a while you have a lot of free memory mixed up with the used memory in your pool (see the article - the generational hypothesis), but because it's spread out a lot of that unused memory gets loaded into cache lines when accessing the memory which is still being used.

Having said all that, pool allocators can work really well for certain workloads, especially client-server stuff. Apache uses a pool allocator for serving requests. Pool allocators also fit well with languages like C/C++, but that's just because those languages are very poorly suited to GC, there are much better designed languages which integrate better with modern GC.
That's salary above the average for IT workers.

The average IT worker makes $72000, while cybersecurity workers are making $78500, a 9% premium
>As an aside I always kind of wondered why all browsers started including developer tools by default as they are not of use to 99.9% of users. Maybe because it's just easier than making them optional extensions? Does anyone know about what year this started?

This is total conjecture but I wouldn't be surprised if it had something to do with competitive advantage. The best browsers to develop for have a better chance to become the browsers of choice because when things were less standardized (or browsers adhered to standards less) webpages could run better in one browser than another (if they even worked in multiple browsers at all). IE kind of breaks that theory but they had other ways to push IE that did not depend on quality or ease of development.
> Oh, the EU knew it could happen; they were told it wouldn't happen.

This is not what's stated in the article.
Out of all the devices I've ever owned, my Apple devices have had the most hardware failures. My iPhone 4S's headphone jack stopped working. I bought a replacement and installed it myself
(which was a nightmare) but it was still broken. Turns out the logic board had an issue and replacing that is hundreds of dollars. My Macbook Pro 2010's hard drive cable failed. New one was $50.

I've never had any hardware issues with my PCs or Android phones. Sure, they arguably have more software issues, but those are "free" for me to fix.

Apple may be a good fit for some people, but it's too expensive for my blood. I'm not paying $1500 for a laptop only to shell out another $50 a year later for a hard drive cable. That's bullcrap considering my $150 chromebook has been running for 4 years now with 0 issues.
How about Cray? This was my favorite workstation:

> typical tower form-factor (a little oversized)

> maximum of eight modular single-width blades

> active noise cancellation system built into the cooling apparatus

> modules could be optimized for compute, storage, or visualization

> redundant power supplies designed to support traditional office power

> integrated network switches for Ethernet and/or Infiniband

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cray_CX1

http://wwwjp.cray.com/images_jp/side-by-side-cx1-painted.jpg
I believe that was coined by theregister.co.uk ^1, a fine source for quality wordplay and tech news/opinion. Unfortunately fondleslab never took off for tablet.

^1 I may be wrong
The whole 100W thing was, as far as I can tell, an almost completely unsupported theory advanced by a Mac blogger about why Apple doesn't put bigger batteries in their laptops. There is apparently some FAA document saying something to that effect, but of course there are lots of regulations on various books that are unenforced or unenforceable, and there have been dozens, maybe hundreds, of laptops made over the years with larger batteries, and none have ever been, to my knowledge, barred from flying.
First Round Holiday Parody Video 2016: Just Be a Founder
I've enjoyed Troy's posts explaining past high-profile hacks, so I assume the content he created for Pluralsight is pretty good, too. I'm glad he didn't directly tailor them to the CEH, because from what I've seen it's not the most esteemed certification. Most managers I've talked to on the security side of things have said something like Security+ is a good starting point for newbie hires, and CISSP or OSCP are a decent indicator for mid-to-senior hires.

In general though, the prevailing sentiment has been that demonstrated experience is the #1 factor. Infosec isn't a career path that begins as a totally oblivious hire after floating around in college. It begins in your bedroom in the evenings poking around bug bounties or playing on hackthissite.org and its forums and that sort of thing. A professional setting isn't required to gain some good real-world experience, so there's no reason you should be inexperienced by the time you're sitting for your first professional interview.
Yeah, it's been really hit and miss here in AU for a few people I know.
Building the world's most accurate transit tracker
I agree that Uber has resulted in more competition from local competitors which is great, but this information about Uber pricing is not correct. Uber prices have gone down overall since the regulatory changes were made to allow Uber and other "ride shares" in Edmonton and put in place insurance requirements. The base cost per trip has gone up but the per distance and per time cost has gone down. Before the regulatory change my trip home from work averaged ~ $10. Example: Base fare: $2.75, Distance: $3.56, Time: $2.32, Safe ride fee: $1.00, Total: $9.63 After the change my trips average the same. Example: Base fair: $2.25, distance $3.46, time: $1.58, booking fee: $2.15, per trip fee (for insurance): $0.06. The total base cost before was $3.75 and after is $4.46, but the per minute and per km costs have gone down. So very short trips cost more than before, but long trips cost less than before. The regulatory change resulted in a cost of $0.06 per trip for insurance.
Many thanks, that's very interesting.
As a Mac Loyalist I don't feel at all alienated. I am not merely a consumer and my life is more than the computer I use. I don't need or want constant attention. I think what they've been doing it great. Frankly I'm more annoying with the bloggers and media with their constant bullying of Apple. The iPhone 7 had just been announced and they were already speculating what the iPhone 8 was going to be. WTF? How about we give it some time before we start down that road.
Employers aren't going to care that you built a clone of (insert something here) that has 0 active users and just sits in a Github repo.

If I were interviewing you, I'd care more that you built something regardless of how many users it has, or whether it has any at all. Take this anecdote for what it's worth.

I've also tried the whole "make something you would use" and wind up finding out someone has already done it and better than I could do it.

I can't help but suspect you're limiting your own thinking somehow, in regards to the class of things you would use. There's no way everything that you could possibly use / find useful, has already been built. And even if it has, so what? Surely there has to be some quirk or annoyance to the existing solutions that you'd like to work around, or some missing feature you'd like to implement?

Heck, if nothing else, build a tool for helping you come up with ideas for things to build. Yeah, it's kinda meta, I know. But seriously, go find one of the slew of books out there on "how to spark your creativity" or whatever, and then translate their methodology into a tool that gives you a "seed" idea and then walks you through their various little brainstorming ideas. Gather your "seed" ideas by using some NLP to mine Reddit or Twitter (or HN), etc.

Or not... it's just a throwaway idea. But the point is, whatever you're thinking about, or whatever is bothering you, think about someway to build a solution to help you with that.
What exactly do you mean by "increasingly difficult for an SMB website to show up in organic searches"? I just googled a dozen local restaurants, stores, rock gyms and for each either the official website was first in google or there did not appear to be an official website (for 3 or 4 of them). Only one of them had the Yelp page before their site, and that's a restaurant that heavily promotes its Yelp page because it has the highest rating among cheap restaurants in town. I was googling them by name plus city (if I thought it would be ambiguous).

So did you mean mean that they don't show up for other important searches like "Indian food in Seattle"?
I've been planning for my next laptop purchase next year, and for some reason, I can't pull the Alienware 13R3 off the top of my short list. It's big (for a 13"), heavy, ugly and adorned with hideous gamer bling (WHY, WHY, WHY??), but it also has all the ports and features (discrete trackpad buttons!) I want in my work machine. Right now, it's basically between the new XPS 15 and the 13R3 (or R4 if it's out by the time I am ready).
psh, iOS can be rebooted from safari by web pages - just send them enough images with 3d transform + filters and watch the memory allocator kill the whole system trying to compose the thing.
True, but it's too hard to get work with bigger guys
The quote basically says that this task is complicated because it requires an equivalent of a SQL one-liner that any CS undergrad should be able to write. Where would Facebook/WhatsApp find experts that good?
System76 sells laptops with Linux preloaded. I believe Dell does as well (or at least used to if they don't anymore). I'm not sure how high end you are looking for but a quick glance shows System76's most expensive laptop is well over $2,000.
Solar System’s biggest asteroid is an ancient ocean world
One side effect of using real estate prices to segregate based on demographics is some districts are very pleasant to work in and high paying and some are very unpleasant and often not as high paying. The kind of kids where Dad make sure the homework is done vs the kind of kids where there is no Dad but you get to wear a bullet proof vest. Dumping money into a district results in administrators soaking it up and no change in results. The only thing that changes results is demographic changes.

The teachers are segregated as much as the kids, such that the PHD in math with 30 yrs experience and a fat paycheck did a good job teaching my high school calculus class, and teachers of somewhat lesser quality are stuck wearing bullet proof vests and having their cars vandalized and stolen. Simultaneously, inside individual districts something akin to communism reigns where the union enforces strict salary discipline based on skill and experience. Its between districts where things get competitive.

Schools are run locally but regulated at state level. My SiL can run her classroom as the locals and her agree, but to renew her state teaching license every couple years she needs X continuing education units per year and her coworkers run the entire range of ant and grasshopper mentality. Its a classic confusion of butts-in-seat with productivity or confusing panic'd last minute cramming with productive effort.

If the license lasts five years between renewals, and career attrition is roughly 10% per year, then the tiny minority of teachers who retire as teachers will have renewed roughly 8 times, while simultaneously a huge fraction of people holding a teaching license are leaving the field or have left the field and are therefore not working very hard on CEU to renew. So its simultaneously true the teachers study and prep constantly and that teacher don't study and prep at all, because a very small fraction of survivors need to while a very large fraction will not survive.

The supply of teachers is too high leading to intentional burnout by management, careers that are shorter than the time it takes to pay off the student loans, and unpleasant working conditions because they can and it reliably produces countable beans. There is no contradiction in stating very few entering the field will be successful, while all who are successful enjoy great rewards. Those who have a very long and well paid NBA career will be quite happy about it; simultaneously almost every kid wanting to be a pro basketball player will not have a long well paid career in the field; the situation is the same for teaching.
Ask HN: Any decent laptop in 12 inch or less class this days?
Hi guys,

I'm looking for a second laptop that I can carry around everyday. Previously I used Sony 8 incher, but its battery is about to kick the bucket.

Any suggestion on a machine with bearable screen and real battery life in 6+ hours?

The few non-atom based machines were either ultrathin class laptops with microscopic batteries, or chromebooks without expandable storage.
Same in Mexico. The web presence is mostly through Facebook. SMB do not care about custom domain or website. Facebook is free, gmail is free. And WhatsApp as a business channel is HUGE here.
Just a guess, but I vaguely recall something with linux in the early 90's. Because no other end devices (PC's and the like) would advertise things like RIP, many of the routers on campus and corporate networks would accept route announcements from any device. They assumed any device that could do these things were legit by default.

So, a misconfigured Linux box could hork up the network pretty quickly. Of course, that's just a guess.
https://puri.sm/ seem to have picked up that baton. Looking at their machines, pretty successfully too. If they can survive and get past teething issues and a couple of silly choices they could have a great future.
I honestly doubt it would cost $3000 to replace your 5 year old macbook.
The purchasing power of that money is much higher in China.
Snapchat have a lot of "fraud protection" in the form of time sensitive tokens hashed with secret keys generated by strange .so libraries. This is used to keep third party apps from using their API, obviously a lot of user's devices have incorrect clocks, so when they reduced the secret token time frame lots of users probably started getting API errors, so this is their attempt at a solution.
The way they achieved their goal was misguided but what you've described skips over large parts of the problem. Why would the server time and phone time be in sync?
It has repeatedly been observed here that Quiver and Jupyter have a lot in common. One thing I'm missing with Jupyter, though, is a convenient infrastructure for dealing with a large number of small notes. Are you using one notebook for each note?
I've never used Snapchat but I believe one of its features is time-expiring photos. If they do the expiration in the client then this may be a way to check if a user is getting around it by setting the system clock backwards.
Sorry, it would be nice if someone could explain what "SMB" means. To me, it's a network file sharing protocol, and a basic Google search confirms this as the top definition.
Not true. I read through twitter arguments/debates multiple times a week.
Rich Hickey: The Language of the System
Alternate title: "How Tech Journalists Alienated Anybody Who Remembers They've Been Saying the Same Thing For Ten Years"
Planning a bastion environment
I am genuinely not trolling, just curious coz I'm new here: what does this have to do with software? Or does HackerNews cover more than just software? Genuine question, not rhetorical
Research is done. Here is a tech talk on a form of GC integrated into the JVM where the user can annotate regions:

http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/java/jvmls2015-wimmer-2637...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3JphI1Z0MTk&list=PLX8CzqL3Ar...

The region markings are used as hints. Allocations are put into the region when possible and then the region is discarded at the end in one go, which is of course a well explored idea but this one is interesting in that you only scope out the regions and don't need to manually assign each allocation. Also allocations that naturally exist beyond the end of the region work properly without additional effort.

One issue is that it's often quite hard to beat a properly tuned generational collector even with techniques that intuitively 'feel' right. As one example, Azul experimented with aggressive hardware-assisted stack allocation on their custom CPU and abandoned it because they found it didn't really beat well tuned generational collection.
Look at the specific model number. 9560 is the latest XPS 15" (and 9360 is the latest XPS 13", from Oct 2016)
Social Network for Meditators
> That site is horrible

That's an understatement. I wonder how can a site, that is so designed not to make you read anything, say anything of value.
Your example of the trench is a textbook example of the broken windows fallacy. Digging a trench and filling it up may increase GDP when unemployment is low. It will reduce it when you're near full employment.
Sometimes size can work against you.