skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Here's one piece of anecdata, not for a "dev" but for another high-end use case: professional photography.

My wife is a professional photographer. Her current photo-editing computer is a Windows 7 desktop with 16 GB of RAM.

We know Windows 7's days are numbered, so we're starting to think about her next editing computer. The two most obvious options are (a) some Apple product, or (b) a computer running Windows 10.

Here are the major criteria for the replacement, which need to remain true for 3+ years after the computer's purchase:

(1) It must legally run current Adobe products.
(2) Can support > 16 GB RAM during its lifetime.
(3) There must be minimal unplanned downtime.
(4) The price can't be exorbitant, relative to a medium-high end PC. TCO should also be reasonable.
(5) It must be convenient to transfer photos from her camera's SD card.
(6) We'd like to minimize the time and attention we put into initial setup and maintenance.

So the most obvious options (currently) are:

* Apple: MacPro, iMac, or MacBook Pro

* PC: Windows 8 or Windows 10

Here's how I score the options, although perhaps someone will correct me:

(1) Easily satisfied by all options listed.

(2) No MacBook Pro satisfies this. Fast SSD for swap is helpful but sub-optimal.

(3) Windows 10 (non-enterprise) fails this, because of unavoidable updates. MacPro and iMac fail this because (AFAIK) Apple doesn't offer loaners for these during warranty work.

(4) For initial purchase cost, the MacPro is a fail, and the MacBook Pro is nearly a fail. However, all current Apple products are potential TCO fail given the lack of user-replaceable components.

(5) AFAIK the desktop Macs fail this, although connecting an external USB reader should be easy enough. I suspect the MacBook Pro would be more hassle, given its ports/dongles mess.

(6) All of the options should satisfy this criterion well-enough.

As far as I can tell, the winner is a Windows 8 PC.

Why is no Apple product a viable winner, given our criteria?

- Nothing in the current lineup meets all our criteria.

- We don't know if/when something will be added that meets our criteria.

- We're not sure what Apple's longer-term plans are, so we don't want to invest time/money into a PC-to-Apple transition, just to need to reverse it in a few years.

The three issues listed immediately above strike me as a pointless fail in Apple's strategy, at least relative to my wife's business's needs.
In NYC rent control refers to a program that freezes rents. It is all but gone, with less than 2% of rental units still in the program. Rent stabilization is a much bigger program that limits rent increases. That program has about 45% of rental units in it. Though it is worth noting that in many parts of the outer boros the market rent is less than the legally mandated rent stabilized rent, and so rent stabilization doesn't end up meaning much.

While I think eliminating rent stabilization would help, it isn't a magic bullet. What's really needed is more units. As compared to many other cities NYC is decent about greenlighting new units, but they can do better.

First, they need to reign in an out of control landmark process. Individual buildings are one thing, but when they start designating entire neighborhoods it is a problem. Second, there's some significant upzoning that can still happen. Related to the first point, it is one thing to preserve the character of parts of Greenwich Village that are quite nice, and another to preserve the character of the east village. The character of the east village is ugly dense housing. You can best honor that legacy by building modern ugly dense housing instead of "preserving" century plus old ugly dense housing. Third, the housing lottery is a affordable housing theater (a la security theater). It is a waste of everyone's time. Fourth, the city and state should not be putting their thumbs on the scale in negotiations between construction unions and developers. Construction unions have quite enough bargaining power as it is. Higher construction costs push developers towards luxury units. Fifth, the city needs to do its part in terms of developing infrastructure -- above all public transit, but also schools, water, sewage, etc.
Setup a square foot garden, and get a couple of earth boxes for Tomatoes. It doesn't take a ton of time, and is very rewarding.
Like come on, that's one well of an optioned title for an article that links to an article with a completely different title.

The very first sentence of the article is, "The Intel Core i7-7700K is what happens when a chip company stops trying."
> "YouTube videos of Urban Farmer Curtis Stone"

https://youtube.com/user/urbanfarmercstone
> which means you end up with hardware with pointless bling attached

Sometimes, yes... but in this case, it appears to be a large heatsink spread out over the mobo. Gamer mobo's are often setup to be overclocked, so larger-than-normal heatsinks are common.
A really cool talk was the Dash button talk. The presenter exploited a bug in the audio stack, or as I like to think about it, he got the firmware by singing the secret code word.
A lot of Americans (in my anecdotal experience) have a very negative view of public transit. It's what you take when you are too poor or desperate to have a car. Chicken/egg, that's how it ends up, particularly in smaller metro areas (not your major cities, but cities).

I currently live in Seattle, and when I met guests and said we'd be taking the bus to my house (which involved a walk of about a block in good weather, with a bus line that ran every ~15 mins, would get us there in 30 mins, and I was covering the $3.50/person) they refused and called a $45 cab (they paid) to take the trip (still took 30 mins - the bus was an express).

I'm willing to bet a lot of city dwellers that DON'T use their public transit system have this negative view. They got it from somewhere else, brought it with them, and have no personal experience to change it. This will certainly impact how they vote on things like paying for transit and managing lines and stations.

From my own experience, I've lived in a place were the bus coverage was pretty good, but they ran in circles and were infrequent. So going from Point A to Point B might take 20 mins with a bus that came every 1.5 hours, but going from Point B to Point A would take over an hour, on that same bus that came every 1.5 hours. In another place (Richmond, VA) the coverage was TERRIBLE. Going to work from my apt (roughly 5 miles away) meant that I had a bus with 2 time slots I could catch (one at 6 something am and the other at 7 something - no buses ran after that until end of workday), it would take over an hour to make the trip, the bus was loud, smelly, and bouncy (I was unable to read on that bus, but have no such issues in Seattle), and if I had to work past 6pm, I had no transit options to get home, nor if something caused me to want to get home before the end of the workday. Needless to say, while there I drove myself and contributed to the traffic, parking, and environmental problems. I haven't even mentioned the other passengers on the bus, but let's just say all of us on the bus probably were on it for lack of other options. Very few people "elected" to take the bus, they were forced to.
Cherami: Uber engineering’s durable and scalable task queue in Go
Ever benchmark it against Lua? But yea a whole lot more people use Perl.
Banking is at the highest risk of disruption
Apple already abandoned the market this review is talking about. They don't ship desktops any more. As the article makes clear (not in the headline, obviously) Kaby Lake actually does have a bunch of improvements for mobile applications.
Now I can safely launch my "decorative stone encrusted zipper teeth" [1] startup!

[1] https://patents.google.com/patent/US5588185
Could be. But you need a chatbot to compare the performance. :)
Java, C#, C++, SQL, and if I cannot avoid it, JavaScript.
I still get paid to program in Pick Basic (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pick_operating_system) which seems kind of unreal in 2017.
Fair point about the ears and user replacability.

Still, Apple's Lightning cables are also extremely vulnerable to bending and abrasion. What makes you think their USB-C cables will be much better?

Non-technical customers who can't afford to buy new cables, or don't know to use better aftermarket cables, are already known to resort to using springs from pens as ad-hoc strain relief: https://www.google.ca/search?q=iphone+charger+spring
They could be referring to rent stabilization, which is closer to 50%:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rent_control_in_New_York#New_Y...

(not that I'm convinced either is a problem for this discussion)
The difference between business and economy plus is an order or magnitude, at the very least. My statement stands, just because someone is a software engineer, absolutely does not mean they are spending $9000 to fly to Japan business class. 6% of their salary on a single flight is just crazy talk.
Germany May Fine Facebook $552K per Fake News Story
I cofounded a startup based around a similar idea. We were (attempting) to make an API that mobile game developers could plug into their games to add skill based cash tournaments.

Mine was called Foosler. There were a couple others - Cashplay and Skillz.

Shut 'er down after a couple years of hard work and lessons learned. It's a hard business to make work. Good luck to Etherplay :)
> I've never seen that [memory pressure] halt animations, mouse motion, or stop the clock from updating.

This is exactly what I've seen. If I catch it early enough and can get the UI to respond to me tabbing to the terminal, I can kill Safari's web content processes or whatever it is that's leaking memory and it goes away.
I have looked into this extensively and the promise of vertical farming is a big if, and It might take a breakthrough like fusion power to make it cost competitive with the methods these farmers are using.

The capital costs of the building and infrastructure and lights and most importantly the input costs of the power are going to have a very hard time beating what is essentially free energy from the sun, free land, free growing medium in the form of soil and virtually free water everywhere but in very dry climates.

These farmers also grow year round, even in places like Canada with very low tech solutions, which are basically plastic sheeting and metal tubes fashioned into low tunnels that cover the rows of crops.

When you factor in labor costs it might be hard to scale it over a certain size, but for a person that owns a half acre lot that came with their house and wants to farm instead of commuting into the city to a cubicle, that economy is going to be hard to beat.
First sentence of article:
"The Intel Core i7-7700K is what happens when a chip company stops trying."
Sadly, the PC companies are following the money. I guess it's mainly gamers who are forking out cash for high end hardware these days.

The keyboard and mouse on my work desktop are gamer gear, as is my work laptop (my next one might even be an Alienware). And boy, do I hate their radioactive glowing.
A carbon tax is not artificial; it's internalizing the environmental costs of using coal as a fuel.
Then you have an even better incentive to fast, since it has been shown to reduce or eliminate jet lag [0].
I use this protocol on long flights and find it works well, getting me back in action within a day, even after traversing 8 time zones

[0] http://harpers.org/blog/2012/03/the-empty-stomach-fasting-to...
>dangers such as the PTO on the tractor

Never mind the PTO , watch out for the hydraulics on the tractor...
> Isn't LA known for it's smog?!

LA has the second-lowest carbon emissions in the country, after NYC. The problem is that it sits at the foothills of mountains which block the wind and prevent the pollution from blowing away.

NYC, on the other hand, has very clean air because it has incredibly low pollution output per capita and the geography favors its quick removal.

(In fact, most of the pollution in NYC air actually comes from across the Hudson - pollutants emitted by Newark and Elizabeth and which pass over NYC as they disseminate.)
Microsoft just missed the boat on this one. They initially had some presence in the mobile market but left it to others to take it over. Personally, I think Microsoft would be wise to focus on the next stage of mobile devices rather than trying to fight it out over smart phones since very few vendors make the kinds of profits that Samsung (on a good year) or Apple do. It's a race to the bottom in that regard and so I think Microsoft's Hololens could be a signal that they're putting out feelers for the next big thing. If AR turns into that thing and they're ready to take a position then they'll win big. If they ignore it this time I expect them to lose further relevance as other OSes eat their consumer market share.
I studied English lol. My whole career is based on my weekends. My education helps me write eloquent email responses, though.
That title (and first sentence) is a pretty good encapsulation on what's been happening with their CPU line and why most people will keep their good enough 2-5 year-old CPUs and just overclock them occasionally. Too bad there's no real competition to Intel in the desktop CPU marker.
Nim is one of the few 'new' languages with nice syntax. (others being Haskell, which could use less confusing 'operators', LiveScript and Elm)

Somehow language designers seem to cling to old syntaxes.

I mean s-expressions have their beauty. But C or VB like syntaxes always feel clunky to me.
Does your thinking need a refresh in 2017? Maybe this article can help
Noted.

However,

Title: Intel Core i7-7700K Kaby Lake review: Is the desktop CPU dead?

Subtitle: With identical performance to Skylake, Intel brings desktop performance to a standstill.

*edit: while I'm not in any way sticking up for intel (I love RISC architecture personally) I do wonder if this cycle is just aligning technologies such as DDR4 / PCIe bus speeds, chipset smarts such as NVMe pass through to bypass the SCSI subsystem etc... more than it was outrun / be directly faster than the previous generation. I might be wrong (again no research done here!) but it wouldn't surprise me if it was a feature alignment cycle. IMO - what we need is ECC on the desktop i7 range, that would be a killer.
I started paying business just for the legroom. It's the only reason.

And it's not always as somebody pointed out above that you may chose the door seats for the same price. I had to take a last minute trip for this summer vacation. Those places were part of some "Comfort" plan I didn't even hear of while booking. Fortunately those were the only ones free on the plane and they let me sit there for free. They were booked out for the flight back though...

It's a pain, it got worse through the decades and I fail to understand that development. Was the free market not supposed to make everything better and cheaper? ;)
I work on Riak, a distributed database by Basho.
Same here. Even worse, the issue happened so frequently that I had to reinstall a fresh copy of Sierra. Frustrating!
> Of course, every one knows, sky marshals and enforced cockpit doors keep bombs out of the plane...

This presumes that the TSA keeps bombs out of the plane, which does not seem to be the case.

http://thehill.com/blogs/pundits-blog/homeland-security/2449...
In most cycling-oriented countries, those kinds of distances would be dealt with by better bike parking at the train stations. "2-fare zones" in NYC are still generally within a quick bike ride of a sub-1-hour subway ride to all of Manhattan.
So alter my statement and get a different meaning and outcome? Right-o.
Apple has made three processor transitions 68K -> PPC -> Intel. During each transition, the processor they were moving to was much faster than the previous processor. That's not the case for ARM vs Intel.

A lot of the appeal of the Intel based Macs is the ability to run Windows at native speeds. That wouldn't be possible with ARM.

Finally, Apple only sells 16-20 million Macs a year. I can't see it being worth the investment to switch to ARM and creating all of the auxiliary supporting hardware it gets to use by using standard PC hardware.
An idea on how you make your purchases
Ha, I also liked those shoes. Looks like the patent for the competing Reebok Pump also expired a few years ago: https://patents.google.com/patent/US5113599A . It's interesting to see that LA Gear filed for their Regulators patent 1 month before Reebok was granted the Pump patent.
Fogus–The best things and stuff of 2016
That seems like a stretch to me, maybe expound on what you implied by "more".
There's a lot of hand wringing comments about the demand side but don't forget the supply side.

Jobs come with a lot of baggage. Could I make a good doctor in an abstract sense? Hell yes, I thrive at diagnosing complicated technical systems under pressure working closely with people. However I am sensitive to lack of sleep and when I inevitably kill someone during my training hazing when you have to work 36 straight hours without sleep, I'd... react rather poorly to having killed them over basically being too much of a coward to say F that hazing tradition. So I can't become a doctor. The problem would be the hazing but the firing paperwork would be some BS like culture fit, and I'm smart enough to predict the whole thing so I'm not even gonna try. A pity, I'd be a hell of a good doc.

Likewise we've loaded the psychology of nursing with certain baggage that only a fraction of the population is going to tolerate. The reason the supply of nurses is limited is not because we lack for the technical ability to learn to give sponge baths or ability to follow surgeons orders to assist them. I think we pretty much have all the people nursing who can fit the precise psychological cookie cutter of stereotypical nurse and folks who don't fit that cutter will have their money taken in classrooms but they'll get weeded out of the field. Leading to "how we gonna retrain these excess unemployable nurses?" and maybe we'll torture them with some other field requiring a unique unusual personality, like psychologist or chef, and when they fail that, we'll collect tuition retraining all of them to be ...

We're only allowed culturally to talk about changing employees never changing the employer or the workplace itself. Which is unfortunately the thing most needing changing now.

So its a forbidden thought to consider that the problem is we need to accept drill sgt like nurses and construction dude like nurses not just nurse like nurses. Or its a forbidden thought that I could become an ER doc without the required lack of sleep hazing. But if you want to actually fix broken systems sometimes you need to at least think about forbidden thoughts.

A world where its safe to question why a nurse can't tell a patient to F themselves when they need to be told to F themselves or where its safe to question why a new doc needs to go thru hazing at the cost of patient lives is a better world. Its not exclusively about convincing students to enter fields where everyone knows they're not gonna fit and then shrugging shoulders when they inevitably don't fit and wash out. Sometimes fields suck and need fixing.
Interesting. I ran the support function for some of the world's busiest gambling sites' backends. A lot of this looks very familiar!

Probably the most significant thing I learned was the power of automation through Incident Models. I spent 7 months of my own time, full time, writing them for the previous two years' major incidents. This changed my life, as I simply stopped getting called, and juniors only escalated to me when the docs were faulty.
This isn't exactly news: anyone who's listened to "Rachel from Cardholder Services" is aware that Indian callcenters/boiler rooms are behind most or all phone scams.

The real news would be something like "FCC enforces Caller ID Laws".
> Potatoes - Incredibly easy to grow.

I lost my entire crop to the Colorado Potato Beetle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colorado_potato_beetle in 2016.

Note: "However, many chemicals are often unsuccessful when used against this pest because of the beetle's ability to rapidly develop insecticide resistance."

If that was my staple crop, I'd be dead of starvation right about now.
Devs are notoriously cheap. Tricky market to crack. Just having an app store I don't think would be enough to get much traction.
Works of Fiction?

People pay lip service to letting people expand their horizons and bettering themselves right before they tell you to get back to work.

Simply because I said the US is an example of one way does not mean other country is an example of the other, which is what the OP I was responding to was talking about. The US is just one of the worst examples of your worth being tied to your work.
Having been on a ketogentic diet (low carbs, high fat) for the last 5 months or so, this is in line with what I've seen.

I went on the diet because of the promise of a clearer head, as well as general health improvement. It made sense, as I'd been plotting my work efficiency with and without sugary products. The complete removal of all carbs has done nothing but improve my life.

The carb addiction component mentioned elsewhere lines up as well. At the beginning of the diet, there's a period called the keto flu that lasts a couple weeks. It's described as mental fogging, headaches, dehydration, etc. While this is also attributed to the switching of metabolic pathways (more water and electrolytes are needed daily), the effects were very similar to caffeine withdrawal.

And of course I indulged in sugar through the holidays, and found myself figuratively face down in a gutter each time ;)
Take what I'm saying with a grain of salt. It was stuff at work with MongooseIM (a fork of ejabberd) and it was just horribly unintuitive to configure and run. That could have just been my outsider's view as a devops person trying to figure out how to run a poorly configured app for production though.
Here in Canada we have a place for all these people. Some even start and end their careers there. It's called the Public Service.
Can't you already filter by flights that don't meet your criteria?

It would be even better if you could specify an arbitrary utility function over the flight properties (total price, bags you want to bring, seat size, departure time sensitivity, etc) and have the results ranked by that function.
Haskell, which is now a very mature language, over 26 years old.
I have flown first class, not international business. Yes, there is of course a range of first class experiences. Many include expensive additional services.

But a sigificant component of the cost is simply that first class carries fewer people per linear foot than does economy.

Allowing the unbundling of services is much more likely to allow the emergence of an "extra leg room only" class, than is a situation where services must be bundled into a standard package. If the prices have to be the same regardless of seat location, and be packaged with an identical bundle of food, blankets, etc, then that's a strong disincentive to attempt to sell a separate class of legroom seats. And it's much more likely that a "standardized seat" will be too short for very tall people than it will be tall enough - and even if it were, that would mean fewer seats on the plane and thus higher prices.
Are Local Papers Becoming Old News?
It's not impossible, it's a cultural mismatch. Perl is obscenely permissive, which makes it a really interesting and weird language.

But when you work in a big team and make something complex, you want something that's consistent. All of that permissiveness and flexibility bites you.

Now, with good styling guides and linting, you can make it work for complex software with a big team, but that's culturally pretty anti-perl. We're trying to do that with Javascript now, which isn't as weird as perl, but has many of the same excesses that you want to reign in with a style guide.
One of the companies that works with us in health care projects do all their Windows products in Delphi and AFAIK they don't plan to change anytime soon.