skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The article underplayed the importance of thermal design envelope to the situation, and your summary completely left it out.

I think that many people- especially consumers who know enough to reach the wrong conlcusions- don't understand the impact and importance of dealing with heat from CPUs and GPUS. IF you look closely at the inside-the-case view of the Air, you'll notice that the motherboard is at one level, in a plane with the keyboard, and then above it (toward the camera) is space that exists over the CPU board but not over the batteries (because this is where the case gets thicker). On the left, this extra space is taken up with an SSD card that is attached on top of the motherboard... on the right, it is taken up with a heat-pipe that hits the CPU and GPU and goes to the fan.

See how much space the fan takes with the heat pipe? The heat pipe alone doubles the thickness of the machine (assuming some battery space could be given up to fit the SSD in elsewhere.) But you can't go without it and you can't put it in plane with the motherboard.

Laptops are all about power, heat and heat management.
When the corporate tax rate is low, people have a large incentive to create corporations to shelter their income. This already happens now quite a bit given corporate deductions and the low tax rates on dividends, but if you got rid of corporate taxes altogether, you'd just increase the amount of money that stayed within those little corporations, thus decreasing the total overall tax revenue.
Not everyone was president of Pepsi.
"Isn't that exactly what the CBO has estimated as the result of health care reform? A reduction in the deficit despite the increase in scope (and thus surely number of desks) of government?"

I don't know if I believe it. I would have to see the numbers. For years, people have claimed how great France has been with it's many social programs. Now, after creating a society that is dependent on these programs, they can't even cut it a little bit (because they are running out of money) without violent riots in the streets.

Also, Even though the deficit is reduced, overall quality has also been reduced. I have many relatives in Canada and they all come over here for any major surgery because of the waiting lists.

Greece is very similar. I've heard from many Democrats that the reason it's doing so poorly is because they didn't get enough in taxes (not the ridiculous social programs that just don't work in the long-run). This is exactly what I am talking about.

"If you absorbed my point you would already know that my answer is an unqualified "absolutely"."

You say this now..and it does sound great. But reality shows that it never happens this way. Governments are generally very inefficient and bloated. They also have no incentive to save money since it all comes from the taxpayers. Running a successful government and a successful business aren't really that different.

If you get funding from the government and you spend less, guess what happens? You get less money the next year...so most will spend it all, even though they don't need to.

"I have to tell you, it's pretty difficult to talk to people who are so certain they know what the other party is thinking and how they will react."

The best way to predict someone's future actions is to look at what they've done in the past. This is because for the most part, people don't change. This logic also applies to future spouses, friends, and bosses. I would really like the Democratic party to prove me wrong.

It's not difficult to talk to me. You just don't have a very good convincing argument.
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I've always wondered -- is the reason people can't do fizzbuzz because a lack of understanding of modulus or because they can't comprehend the problem?

I know modulus isn't necessary, but I can see someone not doing the problem if the solution they are turning in is in a less elegant way.
learnpythonthehardway.com is good. I'd also recommend Think Python at http://www.greenteapress.com/thinkpython/thinkpython.html
For client-side Javascript, I started with JQuery and never really "got the basics" before that.
And browsing can be a pretty CPU heavy thing, these days. Not on the scale of video encoding, but enough to bring an ARM or Atom processor to its knees.
I'd add ExtJS (http://www.sencha.com/products/js/) to that list. It's a got a very larget widget library, an active community and provides adapters to make it easy to work at the same time with other libraries. Plus, some of the new libraries Sencha (the company behind ExtJS) is coming up with to develop JavaScript apps on Touch devices look very promising.
It may be a good idea for them from the stance that the author of the article is presenting, but any facebook user with an ounce of common sense will have the same sentiment that you do about it.

I'm already concerned by how often facebook is pushing out UI changes without me being notified about. If one day they shut of privacy that will be the final push to make me delete my account and be done with it.
But we are not on the payroll of the Queen in Cambridge.
Just because A contributed in some measure to B does not imply B could only have come about because of the contributions of A, nor does it imply that more of A will yield more Bs.

I'm not saying that at all. Google can offer the services that it does because it can ride on the back of the infrastructure developed beforehand and the taxes we pay now will enable future entrepreneurs to provide services utilizing potentially different infrastructure.
I evaluated it a few weeks back while porting a Common Lisp system to Android, and if you ask me, Arc is better suited as a resident language for a handheld device than most other languages.

Paul's insistence on brief symbol names, and heavily simplified Lisp syntax didn't make a lot of sense 8 years ago. But today, it's just what the doctor ordered for mobile.

Should be a good language to script Android.
Just curious -- how do you explain away the many fewer head injuries in the australian football leagues?
Forget about everything you know. Javascript, CSS, and HTML are all best learned on a clean slate. Grab a handbook about each, so you know the rules, then go immediately to http://www.csszengarden.com/ and make a few solid css sheets to build up your css skills (this'll put you in the top 10% of css designers immediately). HTML and Javacsript are pretty similiar, grab a book on the DOM, and you'll learn pretty quickly. HTML defines the DOM, and Javascript modifies it (AJAX (jQuery) does so without page reloading- you're at an advantage to learn AJAX (jQuery) right off the bat- JS will seem easy as pie after you have a grasp on that.) Most of all, good luck! Don't forget about http://www.w3schools.com/ for everything, it's a solid resource (and pretty much the 'lucky' result everytime you'll do an html, css, or js search)
So? Then the UK needs to close the loopholes that allow Google to operate this way.

Google is not obligated in any way shape or form to pay more for taxes if there are rules and regulations that state they can operate their business in a certain way that allows them to not be taxed for that amount of money.

As a socialist I don't agree with that (I am from Europe), and I wish they did pay more taxes as it would certainly help the various governments there provide social services, at the same time I can definitely see that Google who is accountable to its shareholders and has to make as much money as possible is going to use the loopholes to keep as much money and not have it taxed.
Because Google uses Ireland to avoid paying tax on revenues earned in England.
As always, Google did an excellent job making money left and right. You gotta give them credit for that.

On the other hand, they are a bit "disingenuous" (Jobs' favorite word to describe Google) about their mantra, as ultimately this profit is made at the expense of American citizens (lower tax revenue). Why does it matter? Well it matters because they (tangibly and intangibly) benefited greatly then and now from the "Do No Evil" mantra, and they should accept that it comes at the price of people holding them to a higher standard. It is "Do No Evil", not "Do Less Evil" or "Do No Evil When Convenient".
What Steve Jobs says and what Steve Jobs does are two separate things. While I don't think touchscreen laptops are coming anytime soon, the fact that Jobs called them out isn't evidence to me that Apple won't make one. There are a long list of things he claims he wasn't interested in that he really was (video on the iPod, making a cell phone, making a tablet, a book store, etc etc).
The first thing that popped into my head after reading this was "That is straight up gangsta" . Honestly I don't fault them for doing the most allowable under the law. Hat-tip to google's army of accountants and CFOs for figuring out these massively profitable loopholes.
Whoops! Well spotted. Somebody committed a political faux pas there. All these wet rainy island nations in the North Atlantic tend to blur together obviously...

It is interesting for me as an Irish person to see this brought up as our government (a sorry lot) are under huge pressure to keep jobs and money in the country. Putting this under the spotlight is the last thing they need. Our economy is in a pretty poor state.
"I mean, why would we believe that other than residual religious dogma?"

Because when we look out into the universe, it looks like we expect it to look when it is dead, not full of life, some significant percentage of which becomes intelligent. Nothing that looks like Dyson spheres of any form (recalling that the "solid shell" is actually only a special case), nothing that looks like curated stellar evolution (very high-end stuff but a truly advanced civilization will not want to leave stars just randomly flying around a galaxy and exploding), very very little that could even conceivably be a ship traveling between the stars (which turns out with any physically-plausible propulsion mechanism to be visible from a very long ways away and would show very clear blue/red shift changes), nothing that doesn't appear entirely natural.

This isn't the whole story (maybe they're hiding, maybe our idea of the top end of tech is wrong, maybe they're all virtual, maybe they escaped into another, friendlier dimension, maybe they all kill themselves, maybe the universe is soaked with simple life but this article is essentially correct and complex intelligent life really is a 10^-1000 event, etc.), but it is not true that the claim that complex life must be hard is some sort of stupid idea in light of the size of the universe. Arguably it's actually the claim best supported by the evidence at this time.

People are really bad at thinking about small probabilities even on the scale of one out of a million, and it's not impossible that complex intelligent life turns out to be one out of 10^1000 or worse; we simply don't know. It is not hard to come up with calculations that plausibly set the odds of advanced life occurring even once in the universe as less than 50/50 without having to make stuff up. Our ignorance dominates our knowledge here.
Have you had a look at these (not that I'm recommending, but might be worth a look)?

http://www.angelinvestmentnetwork.co.uk/home
http://www.venturegiant.com/
http://www.angelsden.co.uk/

I believe Business Link also run a similar scheme but I generally stay well clear of them, I've yet to see anyone from Business Link try to do anything other than sell me more Business Link stuff I don't need.

Best of luck.
Authentic From the Start-Up: 4 Tips from Cindy Gallop and IfWeRanTheWorld
I see what you mean, but when I wrote the first sentence I was actually thinking of the the Drudge headline from yesterday that the UK planned to cut 500,000 jobs from the government payroll. Even though the Bush tax cut issue is US specific, it was meant as a general diatribe against the inequity of any tax system that favors the well-heeled who can afford tax expertise to skirt taxes. I'm not going to lie - it's personal. I worked for a company that was acquired by (Bermuda based) Tyco International, and the aftermath wasn't pretty. Ever since I've harbored a steep grudge against companies who use international tax havens.
"I think a big reason why people don't like Microsoft, is the anti-competitive behavior they used to get to the size they are today."

That's completely nonsensical. Microsoft didn't act anti-competitively to become big, they did it AFTER becoming big. You can't abuse power you don't have, and when Microsoft won the OS contract with IBM, it was a tiny company, and Apple was by comparison huge.

Microsoft got big by taking advantage of the fact that the guy that wrote DOS didn't think it was worth anything, so he was happy with the $50k (or whatever) that Bill gave him for it, and IBM didn't think that the PC market would go anywhere, so they didn't think anything of giving MS money for every PC sold.

When Bill started licensing DOS to every company that wanted to make a PC, Microsoft became big.

THAT is how Microsoft acquired the power to abuse that they then proceeded to abuse.
Are you saying that a corporation does not have a fiduciary duty to its shareholders?

That paper just expresses a limitation of conclusions that can be drawn from a single case, Dodge v Ford.
You are right (I know my comment is old) but just in case,here is the correct url http://lima-valley.com/
Yes, the whole thing is required. In fact, my app is 34MB, the majority of which is MacRuby + the stdlib.

I cobbled together a process using information found on a number of blog posts and mailing list archives which let me exclude the parts of the stdlib I wasn't using. This got the file size down to 14MB. However, I don't have any QA resources so I'm not sure if this has introduced any instability in the app.

In contrast, the pure Cocoa version of this app is 4.5MB.
That's a very clever move. If you don't want your app store to distribute Flash based programs, just make it so that Flash isn't installed by default. Since it can be installed by users, most people won't notice. But they can legitimately claim that Flash is an optional component...

Clever like a fox.
National libraries start to preserve the web, but cannot save everything
I don't see it having a big impact on server side JVM languages. As long as the developers are the only ones that have to be the ones to deal with the JVM installation headaches, it won't be that much worse than server side Java already is :)
How about trying to find errors as early as possible, by for example using the type system? That will not catch everything, but it will catch quite a lot.
You could change the NFL a great deal by changing the substitution rules, and making players play both ways as they commonly did before about 1960. You'd probably see the linemen come down to about linebacker size, and the skill positions to about defensive back size.

Meanwhile I'm waiting for the obsessive parents of America to read up on the cumulative effects of heading soccer balls.
> It's barely faster than the best dynamic languages

Go on x86 doesn't seem to perform as well as Go on x64

http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/u64/benchmark.php?test=all...
Although Sebastian's original post stopped just short of doing so, it would be equally sloppy to suggest that Google's ability to come up with amazing free (but profitable) services was a consequence of their tax avoidance.
The reason that this is a big deal is that they've released/leaked some of the guidelines for the Mac App Store and it states that apps developed using "deprecated or optionally-installed technologies will not be accepted."
I'd argue that the infrastructure would have been built regardless.

It would likely be very different than the relatively free/open roads, GPS and internet we have today.

The "internet" would likely be similar to the mesh of networks we had back in the '90's (eWorld/AOL, Compuserve, Prodigy, the proposed Microsoft Blackbird/MSN strategy) and who knows if they would have played well with each other.

Roads would be toll roads each with their own restrictions (and I'm sure some enterprising roadway operator would block self-driven cars or charge them higher fees because they good).

And does anyone believe that a privately developed GPS system would be anything but horribly expensive or unreliably? Just look at satellite telephone. Satellite TV and radio have more reasonable cost structures, but they're partially underwritten by advertiser fees.
11.6" Air + Mac App store = iPad with a keyboard (approximately)

That's why core2 is fine.
reddit much?
Unless you present them an alternative that works for them just as well. E.g. showing them GMail when they think Hotmail is the best thing ever.
Computer vision: Eye robot (Improving vision in robots)
The 12 Most Interesting Cyberlaw Blogs You Will Ever Read
seconded. Great idea btw.
> The fact is that they pay 2% tax while most US based persons pay at least 10x that rate.

And this is Google's fault? If you don't like the outcomes that result from players playing by the rules, perhaps you should direct your ire toward the rulemakers rather than the players.
> Almost every person I have ever met who hates Microsoft was either ignorant of the matters (meaning they just read what other people said and never had original thoughts) or had a specific beef in one area that they let inform their thoughts about the company as a whole.

I don't hate microsoft as a whole. I hate COM+ office interop, and I hate that I'm forced to use this because of an internal dependency on Excel by the company that writes my checks. I hate that I have to have an entirely different approach to read the contents of an Excel spreadsheet then to write to one with office interop.

All of that gets shorthanded to "I hate microsoft" when talking to co workers though.
I have a very hard time understanding how you translate my line of thought:

low tax rate->more multinationals->higher debt for local business and government->higher tax rate->less multinationals->social catastrophe

into your line of thought:

low tax rate->more multinationals->property bubble->"current problems"

what are "current problems" you identify in Ireland anyway?

all I was saying is that low tax rate is not sustainable with level of public and private debts in Ireland. Do you agree or disagree?

of course property bubble is connected to presence of many multinationals in a way, but I wouldn't nor did I identify it with this primarily.

Property bubble was global as you might know. So why does Ireland have such large problems when compared to other countries?
Summing up Apple's keynote
Benoît Mandelbrot, father of fractal geometry
Ask HN: WIll you purchase the new macbook air? Why or why not?
we've all heard about the new macbook air released from apple today, i'm considering getting one for myself but i'm just not certain about it.
so what do you think of the device? will you purchase one? if so what specs?
FTA, it looks like WP7 is trying to walk the fine line between Apple (little-no customization) and Google (full on open source) in its user experience.

If they're able to continue staying on this line for an extended period of time (say, for two or three generations of the OS) they can be successful. However if they start falling on to one side (which they have in the past), they will be seen as a me too in the space and their brand will suffer.
"Don't be evil", if it actually means anything, sets a limit more strict than the legal in terms of what activities are acceptable to perform in order to maximize shareholder value. If they didn't claim a higher standard you'd be right, but they do.
If Lion came with MacRuby installed on it you wouldn't need to bundle MacRuby to distrubte the app ... for Lion users? But what about for those of us who are on Leopard/Snow Leopard (or Tiger for that matter) - while Apple users seem to adopt the newer tech much quicker than others it still seems like you'd be cutting out a large group of potential customers/users.
> But many Go libraries (like regex or http) are very immature and horribly slow, as is the garbage collector, which is the reason for the bad averages in the alioth shootout.

If that was true, taking regex-dna and pi-digits and binary-trees out of the data would shift the median significantly - (last time I checked) it doesn't.

However it is an explanation for that 13x slower data point.
Minecraft: The DDoS attack continues, I’ll just get back to coding, then.
Right, we should all be so grateful to Google that they're paying any taxes at all. Thank you, Google, for the 2.4%! Thank you! In return, let's have all the corporate-friendly policies that the government funds be paid for by individual tax payers and smaller, non-international companies. What a great plan! Everyone else can hide behind "fiduciary responsibility" (possibly the smallest fig-leaf there ever was) and a quote from some random judge.
I do expect a Public Corporation to minimize their tax liability. I would have not been surprised if they minimized their effective tax from 35% to 25%, or even 15%. But going from 35% to 1% is rather surprising. I guess their Corporate Tax team got some real nice bonus for 2008.
I suspect that it's related to history, because there is a reason that the term "Microserf" exists. Microsoft used to operate like amazon does today -- burn the developers out and who gives a $# about turnout, because EVERYONE wants to work here...

... which was true, but it was for the money; Microsoft stock options were making people rich.

The proof?

The year that MS stock values dropped for the first time, MS started having trouble hiring people.

They treat their own developers a LOT better than they used to, in fact almost as well as Google does.

But it's hard to live that Microserf thing down... partly because that sweatshop method, replacing process with extra hours, leads to terrible, bug-ridden code.

What irks me more than people irrationally disliking Microsoft is people who spout about how bad Microsoft's code is, and how asinine their processes are, while making exactly the same mistakes that even Microsoft learned from and has been fixing.
I read once that the studies show that as cars got safer with better brakes, tires, seatbelts, airbags, etc. people increased their speed or took more risks to compensate so the overall risk stayed roughly the same.