skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: Good used $300-$500 Linux laptop for road warrior?
I travel a lot for work and I already have company-issued MacBook Pro for work purposes. For various reasons (mainly to keep work stuff and personal stuff separate) I would prefer to carry a second personal laptop. The main requirements would be:

Must run Linux or FreeBSD well. Preferably Manjaro, but XUbuntu would be OK, too

Light weight. I'm lugging a ton of stuff around already and I'd prefer not having to bring a pack animal

* Compact enough to I can use it on the seatback tray in cattle class if I need to

* Decent battery life

* Expandable RAM and SSDs that can be replaced without using funky adapters would be really nice

What I don't need:

* A desktop replacement - I've got a nice collection of powerful desktops already. It does need to be powerful enough to run Emacs + C++ compiler and compiler for various JDK-based languages, but it's not a full-on development machine

Lenovo is usually my go-to when it comes to PC laptops, so I've been looking at 1st & 2nd gen X1 Carbons (fail on the expandable RAM and the SSD with no funky adapter, great otherwise) and X220/240/260s. I guess I should also at older Dell XPS 13s, but are there other laptops I should also look at?
Having a pi cluster "feels" more like a datacenter with many servers. Using kubernetes to coordinate it all is pretty fun when you actually have several "servers" to coordinate across. That to me was the satisfying part. Not that I NEEDED miniature scale, but that the miniature scale felt like a valid downsizing of real scale.
JPEG 2000: The Better Alternative to JPEG That Never Made It Big
Yes, Smith's The Wealth of Individuals is a must-read
The Unlikely Odds of Making It Big
When I open Handbrake, it's usually because I have a video that won't play in some device/program. For example, I have an mkv but my Chromecast only supports MP4. I found out recently that Handbrake isn't always the best option.

Oftentimes you want to remux the video, which means copying it to a new container format without touching the underlying stream. Handbrake doesn't support remuxing (no idea why); you have to turn to ffmpeg on the commandline [1]. Remuxing works if the video and audio codecs are supported by your target but the container isn't, and is very fast—about as fast as copying the file.

With remuxing you still have the option of changing the order of the audio tracks. For example, you can take a Cantonese film with a Mandarin dub and make the Mandarin dub primary so you don't have to fiddle with it (protip if you're learning Mandarin: all the good movies are in Cantonese but they all have Mandarin dubs).

[1] There are GUI options that I haven't explored, see below.
Thanks a lot for the explanation and the links, I'm going to go through all this.

I think the signal/slot system of Qt is very well designed actually (I had no problem with it in pure C++ applications), it's just my implementation while using QML which ended up being messy. I also had to refactor some parts due to Android not liking slots in one thread and signal emitter in another. Also it seems signals were sent in a particular order on desktop and a different order on Android. That's why I'm looking for a clean architecture which would allow me to know and reason about what's happening in the application.
Verizon might buy Charter, which just bought Time Warner Cable
The probability of data loss in large clusters
26% of the Indian population is illiterate, a much higher proportion is functionally illiterate.
Concrete constrained extensions and nested generics are great. These were pretty big holes in the previous versions, and will help simplify a bunch of real code.
Yes, that's what I meant. Unfortunately, I did not want to disassemble the unit as it would void the warranty.
India now has 462M internet users – 80% of traffic is mobile
One issue with buying two keys is they internally have different keys, so you need to connect both to each new account which is a pain in the ass and stops you just keeping one somewhere very safe (i.e. safety deposit box, or a safe at a friends house)
Their site doesn't seem to have a lot of info about its features, but from the screenshots it doesn't seem to do much that the built-in Apple Notes doesn't do. Weather and geotagging are unique, of course, but I'm not sure those are worth $45 (for the iOS and macOS app together) to me.

What in particular do you think DayOne offers that can't be offered by Notes on iOS or macOS?
Surprised there's no comment here regarding the claim that using Dropbox is anonymous...
Ctrl+Shift+R is a bit more ergonomic.

> It's actually been super annoying to explain to Project Managers - as they often don't see CSS changes due to this change (which actually happened nearly over a month ago).

You are appending a cachebuster to the URL that changes for every release, right?
He gets extremely upset about criticism and lack of respect. His brand really seems to matter to him.
A charitable interpretation of both my comment and the comment I'm replying to is that the groups we are describing have a higher/lower proportion of people who are "the best" and "the worst".
I know corps need to do that, and they get to handle the trade-offs that it generates (although I'd argue that HTTPS interception doesn't in any way provide a panacea for the internal security issues you've mentioned).

The advantage is that they should have informed professional security people who can understand the trade-offs and make intelligent decisions about them.

Even then this strategy fails against certificate pinning which is becoming ever more common in mobile and also web space, so corps need other solutions to those problems (likely endpoint based)

However what we're talking about here is end-user A-V products and their use of HTTPS interception at a desktop level and the trade-offs that this forces on individual end users who are less equipped to handle this.

Realistically the A-V product will likely choose to cause "less noise" to the user so won't present them detailed technical information about the errors their masking, potentially making the user's security worse.
Actually, the saddest part is what a pain it is when it's all working correctly.
My thought is that the confusion is most people are taught that lisp has no syntax. And that they should avoid the reader macro at all costs. Few, then, actually dive into large programs in lisp to see how real programs actually look.

In this example, though, what was the advantage of the special syntax? (I'm assuming there was one. Just a lot of these parallel hash tables written in literal form?)
If Rust is slower than the equivalent C++, that's a bug. Please file them.
Ask:HN  a strong argument for privacy
I often have conversations where I have to defend reasons why I find privacy important. Eventually many of those conversations got to a point where someone pointed out "I have nothing to hide" which has been frustrating. I have heard a lot of people point towards a quote by edward snowden [0] ""Arguing that you don't care about the right to privacy because you have nothing to hide is no different than saying you don't care about free speech because you have nothing to say,".

I think a stronger argument is needed that also provides security... the inherent tradeoff. I am also concerned if the argument is not strong enough, privacy's and freedoms will continue to be infringed on.

with that said, I am looking for others experiences in this realm and open debate on fine-tuning a strong argument.

[0] https://mic.com/articles/119602/in-one-quote-edward-snowden-summed-up-why-our-privacy-is-worth-fighting-for [ads - sorry!]
"The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is it's natural manure." - Thomas Jefferson
You'll have to take that up with Mark Mayo:

> Mayo says it took the focus off of Firefox. “It was close to a bet-the-farm effort,” he said.
Starvation had wiped out all the children under 5 in Northern Nigeria
Show HN: bndr – jsFiddle for Slack commands
The reason for this is that Git patches are meant to be exchanged over email. Historically email has a line limitation of 80 characters. You are supposed to use less than that to allow insertion of quoting characters in the first columns in replies.
There is this: https://www.italki.com/
some other similar options.
11 benefits of lead tracking with marketing automation
Great language-level features (especially the concrete extensions, finally), but I'm most interested in whether the compiler still crashes, whether it can correctly report error messages in code using type inference and closures, and whether incremental compilation works properly.
Explore MKVMerge in the MKVtoolnix set. It can de-mux and re-mux really well, and has a good GUI.
> ...he'll find another venue for his engineering itches.

Will he?

I followed Palmer for a couple of years (on MTSB3D forums) before the kickstarter; it was his passion and dedication for hacking old/vintage HMDs that got me interested, and ultimately led me to supporting the KS.

He showed the kind of interest and dedication in DIY VR that I hadn't seen since the mid-1990s (and I only knew of one other individual at that time with the same kind of interest - DIY VR, heck VR in general outside of a few niche areas - was really dead).

DIY VR -was- his "engineering itch".

Sure - he got rich beyond his wildest dreams, but I don't think (or maybe I don't want to believe?) that was his endgame. From what I could see then, the endgame was to make VR something again - to make it "take off", to get it back to where it was (the hype?) in the 1990s. I'm not even sure if he wanted it commercialized - just more popular, and more people hacking on it. I think - or want to believe, maybe - that had the only thing that came out of the KS had been the DK1, that Palmer would be happy to have done only that. I don't think he ever intended it to become what it has, but I don't know him - maybe he did. From my perspective, which is skewed for a number of reasons (most of all because I don't know him personally), he never intended for it to explode like it has.

Personally, it surprised me greatly that it did. What I couldn't understand then (nor even now) is why there was an apparent pent-up demand for an HMD for the PC and gaming, yet virtually no one (outside of Palmer and one or two others) was hacking on HMDs? In the 1990s, there was a fairly vibrant DIY VR culture - a few well known books, an unfortunately short-lived magazine (PCVR) - but there were more than a handful of people hacking their own systems together, sharing stuff on the nascent internet and BBS's.

...then, it died off. But apparently there was still demand for it, but it seemed like nobody wanted to DIY their own systems, until after the Rift was announced. It isn't like there wasn't any information on the internet to get people started, plus the whole "maker movement" was strong. The software was all available to play with (game engines, 3d tools, etc). Yet - there wasn't any DIY movement. Until the Rift.

Strangely, though, the DIY VR movement is still fairly small; bigger than it was in 2012 and before, certainly - but it still seems like a lot of people don't want to DIY their own VR rig - most seems to only want to be consumers of the devices, not hackers/innovators - which is a bit strange to me.

Total tangent there - my apologies. As far as Palmer is concerned - well, I hope he continues with hacking VR - but I worry that the FB acquisition and the Oculus brand may dash that. I worry that he may have inadvertently killed the one thing he cared most about - hacking VR as his personal hobby - by making it big. I hope not, but I do wonder.

I'm not Palmer, but I know if I had the stark choice of choosing between being super-wealthy vs being able to freely work on and happily pursue my hobbies, I think I would ultimately kick myself if I chose the former.
Or the Yubico official https://developers.yubico.com/libu2f-host/ - that will do the same
I find myself now thinking in Swift and coding in ES6... looks like SwiftJS is dead [0] but notice the Cocos2D folks just released a Swift-to-Android feature [1]. I really wouldn't mind Swift uber alles... someday.

[0] https://github.com/shift-js/shift-js
[1] http://forum.cocos2d-objc.org/t/swift-version-is-ported-to-a...
Point of interest: sometimes technical people forget that the law doesn't work the way that computers do.

If you close all reasonable loopholes and make your intent clear when you write the law, a judge (at least here in the US, I know the UK has a slightly different system) is not going to say "Oh, that's undefined behavior, you get a free pass."

He or she is going to say "That's undefined behavior, but you're trying to circumvent what was clearly the intent of the law. Bring yourself into compliance or face further penalties."
One Dataset, Visualized 25 Ways
> I personally find these types of questions easy to answer well.

In some sense, this is my actual complaint. I'm good at answering this question, but my ability to answer it wasn't actually a representation of my interest in a given school. All it took was finding something fairly impressive and unique about a school and talking about it with a mindset of "this is more appealing to me than the unique perks of other schools". Doing that was pretty easy even without actually caring about the school, so it felt more like a test of my creative writing than an expression of interest.

I suppose there were a few places that got closer to honest signals from me - they weren't the top of my list. Those were the ones that probably had best-in-class offerings, but didn't have any truly applicable to me, so my honest viewpoint was "if I don't get into X or Y, you have the third-best of this thing I want". For any top-tier place, though, I think I could have been convincing even with no intention at all of attending.

As for the UPenn essay, that one in particular felt more like fluffing than creative writing. I'd have to try to and dig up the specific prompt, but the distinction was basically that it didn't say "Why are we right for you?" but instead "Why are we objectively the best for anyone?"
Your link got eaten, but we don't have capture modifiers anymore. Captures are inferred, and you can override this with a keyword to take all captures by value instead. This still lets you get the same effect as C++, but we find that it's generally less verbose. It depends though!
"you're quitting because of a new leader with opposing views", this says it all about how tolerant the radical chics are!!

if they win it is democracy, if they lose it is tyranny

and the only ones who benefited from 20+ years of liberals/globalists in power are Wall Street oligarchs
This is just as simplistic - and wrong - a view as the one you're opposing.
Pretty good idea. I write a lot (books, blog, emails) and my starting kit for writing consists of lots of notes, web URLs, etc. I used to keep everything in Evernote (still there) but I exported everything to iOS/macOS Notes. The key thing is to have the notes searchable.

Indexed notes are kind of like my own private library.
Very nice. I miss hotseat multiplayer so much.

I loved playing Age of Wonders with my friends on the same machine.
> Please try to conform to the rules of the community as they are, not as you wish they were.

Ah yes. If there's anything Hacker News readers are known for, it's conforming to the rules.

(Sorry, just a joke.)

But yes, I will accept my reprimand, and now I shall stay on topic at all times. From this moment forward, we shall talk about the article, and nothing but the article.
I don't know why this was downvoted. This shouldn't be that controversial. It's in the employer's interests, and the media's interests are often in sync with the same corporations.
I still sometimes see "broken" pages (on both desktop and mobile - more common with flaky WiFi) - e.g. pages that have bad or broken CSS because the server connection was interrupted. The resulting pages are usually nigh-unusable, and the broken resources can end up cached in the browser.

Usually a reload will solve this issue. It sounds like the Chrome team wanted to validate only the main resource and rely on cached data - isn't this inherently going to break the "reload a broken page" use case? It sounds as if the Chrome team wants to abandon that use case entirely because "the quality of webpages has improved". That may be true - but the quality of some network links hasn't!
Which, in the case of HN and other pages, can either break the formatting of the entire page by pushing the right margin beyond the window, or artificially constrained windows which you need to scroll sideways on.

Text layout is a hard problem. It's why TEX (and its derivatives) is still so damned useful (and complicated).
Both of this tools use the same encoders under the hood, what you see here is just comparing different settings in default presets they provide. If you would like to experiment yourself with x264 encoding you can find descriptions of possible options here http://www.chaneru.com/Roku/HLS/X264_Settings.htm
My exact thoughts. These were like 30% of the things I was looking forward to in Swift 4 so the fact that I don't have to wait is nice.
Seymour Papert's Mindstorms is now freely available
Sea level rise will disproportionately hit U.S. this century, NOAA warns
Honesty is great, but let's be honest about our own experiences, not someone else's tragedy that we randomly encountered on the internet and are in no position to make claims about. Otherwise we reduce that person to raw material for an argument. That's not right.

I understand the shock of encountering something like this, and how it can spur us to reflect more deeply on our own situation. Those are natural and good reactions. But we need to be careful about going any further, and large internet communities aren't capable of being careful that way.
I know that in Venezuela fuel is extremely cheap. After all, they produce lots of petroleum and they follow the political decision to use some of this oil to drop the prices in the internal market, even when exportation prices would make them get more money selling all the oil to foreign countries.
Politicians expect sweeping change at FCC
It's not "small parts." Quantum has big ambitions. For example, Stylo, a sub-project of quantum, replaces the CSS layout code with Rust. That's a large, key component.
It's their career in LA that makes them rich and famous.
> Do you keep a personal journal?

Yes, I find it very useful.

> What tools would you recommend? Is there any specific methodology that you follow?

Sure, here is my current framework:

https://pastebin.com/djyFiZkz

I keep all text files in a journal folder with subfolders for each year. At the end of each week I review the last week's journal entries for information which is applicable to future projects or needs, and move that information into systems of frameworks, which are also described in text files in a different location.

> When journaling, do you try to track any specific aspects of your life or just write about anything that is currently occupying your mind?

Both.

I track my mood, as you can see by the DaySCOR item (this rating system is a work in progress and has an alternate look when I use it on paper; it's more of a multidimensional graph on paper).

I've learned that most days are around a 3/5 _no matter how much I accomplish_ unless I make a conscious effort to enjoy the day and just be a happy person. That has been a lesson I didn't expect. I thought that getting more done would make me a happier person, but upon reviewing my numbers, that hasn't been the case at all. Productivity is something of a psychological fake-out, but I haven't gone too deep into why just yet. Psychologically, it seems that a person is much more than just their accomplishments. Also at HN many of us tend to project a very strong productive aspect, which could compound this issue. (That would indicate that we repress an inner lazy person, for one...lack of time off, time out, time away, inability to give the finger to work and just waste a day...the boundary there is not an easy one to navigate for productive people)

I also open a new file for each client project and keep those separate. It's helpful to be able to open my last client project file when working on a new file. I also try not to let information build up in email threads and immediately move project information out of emails and into text files. This is in part because GMail search is so slow and long threads are a pain to search.

> Any advice on how to get the most out of personal journaling?

Build your own journaling framework to improve your journaling system. Watch for leverage points that work for you, write them down, and change/refine your framework. This will keep the practice enjoyable and effective for you.

Through two years of journaling I went from obese to healthy weight and only did it by addressing the subject of my weight directly. If you feel like you cannot address tough subjects directly, you may need to change your journaling technology or system or it may fail in its role as a problem-solver. In order to address difficult subject in my paper journals, I leared the simple Ford Shorthand technique at fordshorthand.com and am worry-free when it comes to others possibly prying through my journals. I keep one on the mantle in my home, in fact. Being able to address difficult topics at a time of your liking is crucial.
Give me your porn history and I'll post on your Facebook wall. What do you mean you don't want to because it's private ? See, you have something to hide !
I thought it was at first, but by the end I was sure he's serious.
That will surely get the kids to stop using it and move on to the next great social media platform.
Hemingway discussed one of the ideas in TFA in this awesome Paris Review interview [1]. His trick was to stop a day's work at a point where he knew what came next:

"As long as you can start, you are all right. The juice will come."

I've found the advice to be very helpful for fiction writing.

[1] https://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/4825/ernest-heming...
Hey HN, thanks for reading! Jesse and I wrote Conceptually as a free way to discover and learn about important concepts that give us a lens to view a problem, help us make better decisions, or at the very least, sound smart. Last time I wrote something of this nature it took off and got a fair bit of attention (~80,000 uniques), but the problem is that it's not a great way to actually learn something or apply it. So we spent the holiday writing about a bunch of concepts in much more detail, and turning it into a series of emails, 1 per week, where you get more of an opportunity to apply it all (to make use of the spacing effect), though you can also just read the articles on the site if you'd prefer.

Basically, we wanted to do a non-horrible and free version of this: http://www.thinkmentalmodels.com/

We wanted to show you what we've got so far, and would love to hear any feedback you had.

Jesse used to work for Teespring (YC W13), and we both work for 80,000 Hours (YC S15) now, though this is something we did in our spare time over the holidays.
One of the strangest moves during the election was that Trump stopped by Edison, NJ, to deliver a stump speech. Edison has a very heavy immigrant population, particularly from from south-east Asia. Which makes no sense, since the organization he was stumping for (an explicitly Hindu organization) would likely be very adversely affected by his immigration changes.

https://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/16/us/politics/trump-modi-in...
I didn't see it on the site, but there's also an advocacy group for science / STEM folks who want to run for the first time: http://www.314action.org/want-to-run/
Show HN: Easily connect to a VPN in a country of your choice