skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Applecare is one of the only warranties worth it.

I am surprised: Loaner policies, and ease of swapping to other apple computers (migration assistant works from time machine) makes Apple great for freelance in my opinion.

Also: Mail in service is far superior timewise than going someplace in person.
Does http://google.com/ncr not work in germany? (Or does that also require the cookie?)
Hi fellows... (help to deliver)
assuming that we cant deliver a product to a PO BOx.. what else can i do to receive something "anonymously"? ( inside US)

tks
This is a myth. Lightroom and Aperture do not replace Photoshop. They are tools for a different job -- photography workflow management. Photoshop is a significantly different beast and the capital of expertise, tools and extensions gathered over the years makes it pretty hard to replace. I have tried using Pixelmator in lieu of Photoshop, but the lack of support for layers (among many many other features) makes it an unlikely replacement; but I doubt Pixelmator was trying that.
We definitely saw that pattern at reddit.
It works if the service runs a sufficient number of application instances behind a load balancer. In one of the videos about Tornado, a person from FriendFeed stated that FriendFeed runs multiple instances of the application with blocking calls to MySQL. There were many complaints about FriendFeed, but being slow was not one of them. (See slide 21 here http://bret.appspot.com/entry/tornado-tech-talk).
Or:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2636894
The metrics used in the comparison seems significantly flawed. It compares a reference set of tokens produced by applying the following rules:

1) Remove any sort of remaining inline html tags
2) Remove all punctuation characters
3) Remove all control characters
4) Remove all non ascii characters (due to unreliable information of the document encoding)
5) Normalize to lowercase
6) Split on whitespace

This seems to me a case of measuring what is easy to measure rather than measuring what is right. What would the author think about adding a rule to 'remove all vowels' or 'arbitrarily split words'? Yet he happily removes meaning and context in the form of punctuation and case. If the underlying text extraction algorithms are not similarly handicapped, then one or more of them might be a better standard of measurement than the one the author applies. Rather like measuring the accuracy of an atomic clock by using a rusty stopwatch.
From a business point of view, this makes some sense, but I find it creepy.

Apparently, so do some other people, because it is almost certainly becoming illegal throughout Europe as the recent rules on privacy/cookies take effect.
stack does a bunch of things i think are smart. we've learned a lot working with them
Can you explain how "big data" applies to the desktop, and how linux is falling behind?
The problem seems to be that no one thought ahead when they built the streets in the US. Back in Sweden, it's all underground. You won't find anything less than main HV transmission lines above ground. I don't know how they did it, but based on the lack of ever digging up the streets in the neighborhoods I lived in, they must have put in conduits when they build the streets. Why they don't do the same in the US baffles me. It makes absolutely no sense.
A Simple Exercise To Boost IQ
I appreciate Linux in every regard except for actually using it. OS X and the general focus on good design of its third party applications just provide a more pleasant place to spend time.
Fat and Hardworking? No problem!
The same could be said of existing centralized systems: If a centralized social networking service (e.g. Facebook) goes down, then nobody can get your information from that service.

With a distributed and federated system, you could have multiple copies of your data on geographically separated boxes. They could keep in sync with each other, and if one went down, the others could provide the needed information.
I tend not to use the desktop that much other than as a terminal multiplexer and convenient container for firefox. I think for the highly technical and remote users which seems to make up a fair proportion of the userbase, it's good. The remainder of users just have no motivation to use anything other than what they already do (i.e. MacOS/Windows).

TBH the only reason I NEED Linux is valgrind.
Ninja Passwords
As far as I can tell, the Freedom Box is the server, so you would only go offline if you unplugged the wall wart containing the software. It also seems like there's a chance that you wouldn't go down if your internet went down, as long as you had enough of a concentration of Freedom Boxes nearby that your packets could be delivered via mesh to someone whose internet had not gone down, or directly.

This Freedom Box stuff is new to me, and I'm finding Moglen talking about it very difficult to parse. I'm going to try the speech at http://freedomboxfndn.mirocommunity.org/video/4/freedom-in-t...

If this allows my friends to get off facebook, and allows me to get back the sort of community of distant friends that I had when I was on facebook without the middlemen and any ominous privacy implications, I'm all for it. Also, I'd love to directly share content with non-technical people I know without the overhead of domain names and webhosting.

At the price point of <= $100 dollars in return for an actual physical product, I'm sure I could get most to all of my friends to use it. Myself, I'll just install the software to my HTPC (which has evolved into the central server for my house) for free, but I think that with a price point that low, my non computer-savvy friends would pay to get off of facebook in return for something they could touch, wasn't complicated, and couldn't be shut down at the whim of some corporate board.

Just my thoughts though. If you require a presence on the social web regardless of power cuts, then I guess it's a dealbreaker for you.
I.M.F. Hit by Sophisticated Cyberattack
Are you sure you are not talking about a very small minority there?

There aren't that many really professional photographers out there (i.e. people who do it for a living) but there are masses of hobbyists.

There are plenty of people for whom Photoshop Elements or iPhoto are too simple and for whom Photoshop is overkill. Those people might be tempted to get Pixelmator but both Aperture and Lightroom seem like a much much sweeter deal for them to me.

Lightroom does some excellent workflow management but it also does some (quite complex, actually) photo editing.
They don't ban them just to ban them.

There is a list of things you can do on the phone. It's the approved public API. Stuff that does things calling other functions are banned. Things that change how the device behaves in an unpredictable manner are rejected out of course.

This makes it pretty foolproof to make apps not hurt other apps. This is a feature that makes iPhones tons easier for your mom to use (and to freely install apps on) than Android phones.

Lots of these things that use non-public functions are detected with a scanner that looks for calls to non-public functions.

For the camera functionality in particular, they were told to take it out, they did, but hid it in a secret portion of the app. Apple banned them for abuse there.

For every neat app like Camera+, there are 35 utterly phone breaking apps out there that would do stuff like this.

And it's not like those apps don't have a place to go. People who care (possibly you) often jailbreak and buy apps there.
a very good book ontopic is Program or Be Programmed: Ten Commands for a Digital Age by Douglas Rushkoff.
http://www.amazon.com/Program-Be-Programmed-Commands-Digital...
While that paradigm works in RL, how exactly would this translate to this freedom box idea, a 404 page? I just don't see how it will work, ok perhaps a sort of system where @ mentions or the equivalent are parallel to being in peoples thoughts while not actually being there, and the fact that your "social server" is online means you are online in the way you are online in IM.

If on the other hand, you want a social page such as Facebook, this model doesn't work, as no one would be able to access your page and images or any other part thats actually on your server.

Also the facebook model is not one that I think will stick and I do believe that it won't be the end all of this social game. However, I think that users running their own servers is unrealistic. How many "non-techy" users run their own servers for a blog system for example? And if this social network which we talk about is the one to replace or even supersede the facebook era, then it has to be a one click plug in situation.
>Are you implying that walking to work is an 'uncomfortable' thing like taking a cold shower? I may be misunderstanding you there, but I , for one, hate sitting in a car and suffering through morning-hour traffic jams. I hate searching for a parking spot. I much rather take my bike to work. You know, not to work out, but to breathe fresh morning air for once. To enjoy the sound of birds. Riding your bike, or walking, is exactly what that nice quite of yours is recommending.

No. I just needed to pull out some example. There are some situations in which driving is more pleasant than walking -- consider someone who works at a ski resort in the mountains, in the winter -- and situations in which walking is more pleasant than driving. Either way, by doing what you can to improve your living conditions you build an understanding of what "improved living conditions" might look like.
My company is Apple-heavy. Most of our users are on Macs, with a spattering of Windows PCs and lots of Dell servers running Linux, so I have plenty of experience with both worlds.

When I go to an Apple store, I ask for their business sales staff and I skip all the bubbly "Oh is this your first Mac?" blue shirts. Often I call ahead, and my hardware is waiting for me when I arrive.

When I have issues with hardware, I do not deal with the Genius bar, but as I do with all other PC companies, I talk to a business support person at Apple over the phone, and resolve most issues either on the phone, or via RMA. They sometimes schedule me an "appointment" of sorts at one of the local Apple stores, but I don't have to wait for anything. I drop off the machine, and come back and get it later. They have bent over backwards for me on multiple occasions, even allowing me to come pick up hardware after hours.

So yes, I think that Apple is especially good at small to medium sized business support. Better experiences than I've had with Dell and HP.
I am surprised Apple didn't sue Finland for copyright infringement.
The PC is dying, I would rather see more advancements in wireless speeds rather than rolling out all this FTTH.

A couple of the comments talk about speeds enabling cloud lifestyle, I would point out also that mainly hinges again on wireless.

edit: why all the downvotes? have i said anything thats wrong? how does 1gbps help you watch stuff outside one room in your home without unplugging and re-plugging all your devices? is 100mbps sufficient for viewing HD video or do you need 1gbps?

And for the record wireless is not just about mobile phones- as I said the PC is dying, it's about laptops, netbooks, ipads, tablets, internet-enabled TVs, gaming consoles, and the future IP devices (cars) etc all of which are now, today, usually connected wirelessly. And we are the better for it.
Or perhaps the necessity of HCLs at all is indicative of a larger problem. This is not something end-users should be responsible for. Maybe 10+ years ago when the options were fewer and easier to sift through, but now? It's tedious to the point of maddening.
Yes. Protomatter was the substance used to cut some corners to make Project Genesis possible, which made the resulting Genesis Planet explode — but, strangely, the reborn Spock did not.
Technology is creative
I think it also requires the cookie. Also, to be honest I was too stupid to get that configured in the Firefox search bar so far (couldn't figure out how to do it I mean).
Up to date combatibility information for Thinkpads:
http://www.thinkwiki.org/wiki/ThinkWiki
Resources for TRUE cross platform development, web, mobile, desktop, tv etc.
While I accept the point, how do you explain how X amount of users are going to keep all their servers running if they want an online presence?

Facebook going down, while not an impossibility is less likely than a power outage in a person's home. Geographically seperated boxes unless in some sort of hosted environment where you choose your host and they manage your servers but then you seem to not really escape facebook's grasp but rather distribute it to many servers?
great Andrea
Obsidian would actually be a pretty awesome razor material, come to think of it. From Wikipedia:

>Because of this lack of crystal structure, obsidian blade edges can reach almost molecular thinness, leading to its ancient use as projectile points and blades, and its modern use as surgical scalpel blades

see also: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Obsidian#Current_use

You wouldn't want to use volcanic chips, of course, but now I want to pitch this to pg. I mean, used in scalpels? Shiiiit.
The control panel works well... until it suddenly doesn't (which has happened at least twice on my Ubuntu 10.10 install).

And in 9.04 I had to keep a piece of paper with the commands to reinstall the closed-source NVidia drivers every time the kernel got patched. Apparently I shouldn't have needed to do this, and yet every single update for months would drop me back to the shell after X failed to start.

When I was younger I'd have tried to work out what was wrong. Now I just sigh and are grateful I wrote down the package I needed, and the flag to get it to work from a non-X environment.

But yes, your point is noted.
Recently, there've been periods of time stretching up to a couple of months after a new Intel chip with integrated graphics comes out where the don't have the drivers ready yet, or they're still pushing them into the kernel, or the distros haven't updated to new kernels yet. Trying to use brand new Intel chips during those periods is frustrating, but the problem just goes away by itself after a little while.
well, pixelmator itself is not much more than a glorified frontend to the core image API. though the API supports filters and layers it doesn't support layer styles. that's why this feature won't be implemented for a long time.
Do you have a tl;dr? The title is bad already, "freedom or tyranny". I think there is more to this than good vs. evil. But looking at RMS, you can see that black/white thinking can produce licenses that work great in the hands of people who think more colorful (the free software scene).
Shouldn't Open Source Desktops be a hotbed of innovation? A carnival of new ideas, metaphors, experimental interaction designs?

Only if you don't want them to be used. Which is totally okay, but it'll keep most people (myself included) far, far away.
Why is that surprising? People complaining about the lack of features obviously need something more capable. For the rest of us, the lightweight, cheap option is good enough. :)
Do most people not care, or are they simply unaware of what they are giving up and the real impliciations of the social web?

For example, we all know Facebook is huge, and many people give up all sorts of personal data to the company running it. And yet, on several recent occasions when Facebook have made changes that they were demonstrably technically capable of making and arguably within their legal rights to make, but which diminished the privacy of their users, the outcry from the user base was substantial and in some cases they gave up and essentially reverted the changes.

That was basically a PR/marketing move by Facebook: when you rely on critical mass of users in the way they do, you can't afford to upset people en masse so that they start to drift away to a rival service. It wasn't forced on them for technical reasons, and relatively few countries raised significant legal concerns about the privacy implications.

I wonder whether users would be similarly upset if they realised how much of their "private" data has been shared with other parties over the years, and where it has wound up, and how many people have wound up defrauded/stalked/otherwise genuinely damaged as a result. I think there's an element of "It can't happen to me" at work here, and my biggest worry is that as we've seen recently with organisations like Sony, corporate complacency and denial are no substitute for real security and privacy protection when Bad People decide to come after you.

[Edit: I would also be interested in proper studies if anyone has links, but only if their methodology is sound. I am reminded of the "study" last year about attitudes to the virtual strip search machines at airports, where apparently 90% of people in my country said they supported them. When asked with different wording in another study, not conducted by an organisation with ties to making the machines in question, it turned out that many of those people really meant that they preferred the hands-off abuse of the machines to being physically abused during an aggressive pat-down, which isn't the same thing at all. Privacy studies are all about how you phrase the question, and those with vested interests are very good at that sort of thing.]
Nobody needs it right now, but once most people have the option of it, new ways of needing it will appear.

This would be great for cloud computing with family videos or games that you rent online which stream all the content directly from the servers.

With the rise of IPv6, it could also lead to the development of a more distributed web content model where people host a lot of their own content for others to access and browse using personal web servers instead of P2P clients, since pretty much everyone will have the extra processing power and bandwidth.

There's a lot of uses, and many of them could easily become the new "needs" of the future.
Please don't get me wrong, I really like the idea, I just think that my non tech savvy friends will immediately dismiss the idea of "normality" we have come to assume with the facebook pages always being on.

The hard truth is many of the people I talk to use facebook primarily to look at other peoples pages, if you look at facebook chat now and see exactly how many are online, it at best makes about half of your friends invisible.

I think this is a better solution than facebook if feasible to implement
Should CS depts. reject creative applicants?
Like it or not (and I'm ambivalent), what Ubuntu ships is, almost by definition, not experimental. They are desktop Linux in the minds of most.

And, to be honest, GNOME 2 is still pretty lacking. I know a lot of GNOME team members past and present, and I like and respect most of them for a lot of work put in on a pretty thankless project, but the results aren't there compared to Windows or OS X.
Linux was excellent on the desktop about 4 years ago. After that we had fedora turning to a big pile of broken packages, ubuntu adopting some seriously broken technologies (pulseaudio, compiz-beryl, tracker, unity, upstart, readahead, ... ).

My favourite anecdote about linux's degradation is this:
Earlier, applications like nautilus , cdburner etc would accurately predict and show the amount of time for operations like copy to complete. Moreover, copying stuff via the GUI was not significantly slower than command line.

With the latest versions of KDE (and even gnome), we've gone back to windows98 levels of inconsistencies (seeing the kde time-estimate bar during a file copy is just painful).

If you want a distro which doesnt take 1G of ram to run a filemanager, the latest one you can try is Ubuntu 7.04 - runs much faster on my 6 year old laptop (with 200MB ram) than my modern desktop (with 1G ram).
take that thought one bit further.

Say you only support hardware from the last 5 years (Drop all pre-2001 compatibility.) - 5 major laptop makers,3-4 hardware/motherboard lines. Can a software player not raise 20K$ to buy hardware and build in full out-of-the-box compatibility ?

Diaspora raised 200K for vaporware - can this not be funded ?
Thanks for the comments!

Some quick responses:

1) Hopefully you were taken to a blank dashboard page with a navigation sidebar for both Momentomail and Wormwall. If not, GAE is probably serving up something wrongly.

2) We're trying for a cute and fun design, any suggestions? Neither of us are designers by any stretch of the imagination and are trying to figure it out as we go.

3) We offer two services right now, one is Momentomail, a simple email scheduling service, the other is Wormwall a simple web publishing service. We're trying to target the internet savvy user, but who may not have much technical know-how. Hip moms, busy granddads, people who want to do things but don't want to futz around with technical mumbo-jumbo.

We want to make these things about as easy, quick and involved as typing an email.

4) If you wouldn't mind letting me know what's broken, I'll check it out. We didn't notice anything broken in testing, but it could just be our machines :)

5) We're still thinking about the best way to present the user's pages. Right now we want people who come to see that it's our service so we can build up some brand awareness, but we'll probably revisit this idea for sure.

6) That's a great suggestion! We have a few directions we're intending to go, and we've been getting some great ideas. I'll throw that in the next development discussion meeting.

7) Our next few development cycles are going to focus on cleaning up the design a bit. One thing that both me and my co-founder don't like is the notion of business=single product, knowing of course that this will drag out development and polish for quite a while. But the advantage is that it gives us more properties to play around with and interesting integration paths between our services to work with.

Momentomail has been doing pretty well, but not quite as well as we'd like. However, there's only so much you can really do with that idea before it starts getting really complicated or we're going to start to have to charge for it -- something we're trying to avoid with our development plan. Some ideas we've received (plugins for Yahoo mail, or browsers, etc.) would effectively cut the users off from the site, and our only source revenue at the moment (ads) -- which is one of several reasons we didn't go the boomerang route.

With Wormwall, we think there's a niche there that's not served by blogs, other simple web page tools, or other services, but we can use to help build company awareness. But admittedly, this is v1.0 of the idea.

Thanks for taking the time to write up your notes though! We appreciate it!
And despite the article author's claim, the old style connectors also frayed, usually right at the strain relief. In my experience, while the magsafe style strain relief isn't perfect (it's showing a little wear after two years), it's lightyears ahead of the old barrel connector which required replacing every 9 months.
well "channels" are: if you've got an RGB picture, you got 3 channels: R channel, G channel, B channel

it doesn't get more basic than that imho :)
Good machines. I have an X201 and am looking at getting an X220. Linux is not my primary OS on it, but I've installed it (SSD has Windows, HDD has Linux, I swapped in the HDD experimentally) runs very well and seems to be fully supported on all the hardware I care about. The X220 seems to share these characteristics.

And yeah, it's a complete tank. The only downside I have is that both models seem to have issues with Sandforce SSDs and resuming from sleep, but that's a hardware issue instead of an OS one.
I get atleast 30% less battery life as compared to Win7

oh, oh.. jumps around excitedly. I know this one!

sudo apt-get install powertop
sudo powertop

Express mild surprise to find that npviewer.bin is using a huge amount of power

pkill npviewer.bin

Yay for flash!!