skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
At first I thought you were wrong but then I looked up prices on Amazon.

The Acer 13.3 at $899 has a 320gb sata drive + a 20gb ssd. It's slightly lower specced than the current Macbook Air 13 inch, but seems like a reasonable savings.

http://www.amazon.com/Acer-S3-951-6646-13-3-Inch-Aluminum-Ul...

I'm writing this comment on the current model 13 inch air, and I wouldn't give it up for any of the alternatives. The build quality and the feel of the machine is incredible. It's the best laptop I've ever owned.
Where did you get that idea? The picture shown has the bumps on top.
I'm glad I'm getting downvotes on my various comments here. I hope this means this basic idea is getting through peoples conciousness and making an impact, and it's not just 'a downvote for you, I don't agree'.

The fact is, just about everything that you sit on, touch and use was created for and sustained by profitability. From the ISP you connected to, to the device you used, all were designed and built by people using doing their best to make a profit in providing something of value to you.

Somehow we've ended up in a place (again) where making a profit is seen as a dirty business. I would expect to find that if I were posting to a socialist forum. But on a site revolving around startups and technology the last thing people should be doing is treating and using profit as a dirty word, something not to be uttered in polite company.

The fact is, if we're in a startup or technology company of any kind, we have to do things that create value for our customers and investors. It's moral to work hardest and smartest and try and win, certainly more moral than trying to slack off and hope someone else creates the value and masks our lack of effort. And in working hardest, smartest, doing that process we will create value for everyone involved. And that is profit.
Satellite surveillance is being used to gather market-moving information
“I finally cracked it” – Marco Arment on the rumored Apple TV set
I see Kindle price as $16.99, but that's still pretty ludicrous for a digital copy given the hardcover sale price...
I think Apple has proven it can maintain the premium cachet [1], making healthy profits as well as offering competitive pricing. It has sold more than 300 million iPods, and yet, they look and feel like luxury products.

Also, it is only through Intel's $300 million stimulus fund [2] that computer manufacturers other than Apple have finally started making slim notebooks that can compete with MacBook Air on price. Whether they can actually compete on quality remains to be seen, the 'ultrabooks' haven't exactly gotten favorable reviews. Read for instance Engadget's review of the Acer Aspire S3, their conclusion is "If you absolutely must buy a laptop of this ilk right now, you'll get better performance and longer battery life from the MacBook Air" [3].

[1] http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/cachet

[2] http://newsroom.intel.com/community/intel_newsroom/blog/2011...

[3] http://www.engadget.com/2011/10/14/acer-aspire-s3-ultrabook-...
For some of us, audio quality is actually important, even in portable audio players.
Did you do anything extra to see that price? Or was that simply what Amazon displayed when you went to view it?
Tim Cook's Speech at Steve Jobs Memorial
Math of "The Simpsons"
3D Printers to Save Hermit Crabs
Sweet. Does the Khan Academy plan to incorporate interactive simulations into its curriculum? I'd imagine they'd be very valuable in fields like physics, where concepts aren't particularly transparent unless you get to play with them for a while.

Here's a couple examples of the sort of thing I mean. Along with another physicist, we've made a complete special relativity simulator (still rather beta, though -- UI needs improvement, and the demos don't have much explanation):

http://schroedingers-hat.github.com/jsphys/relativity/relati...

There's some premade demos, and the goal is to make it embeddable so it can be used along with a video or text to illustrate a point. I've also done a bit of an interactive tutorial on wave interference, where you can play with waves to see the result:

http://schroedingers-hat.github.com/jsphys/waves/wave_summat...

Eventually I'd like to finish off these simulations and use them to teach, as part of a complete curriculum. There's been some past efforts (with Java applets, for instance), but nothing integrated into a curriculum. Someday...
Santa Claus is pre-determined to not exist; and as far as human culture is concerned Deities are not pre-determined to be non-existent.

Though yes, there is the strict belief that santa claus does not exist and that is a belief.

Atheism is a religion because people who self-declare atheism are normally people who strictly believe that no deities exist.

Either way, whether is a religion or non-religion, it is something people cite as their religious views, hence the inclusion of it in this form.
This is one if the things that could happen when you try to compensate for a cofounder with an employee/contractor.
If you're doing any sort of visual storytelling, especially animation or games, you owe it to yourself to read this book.
That's brilliant. I may need to start recommending these to my students.
Steve Jobs : about "60 Minutes" by Walter Isaacson [VIDEOS]
I've heard the technology is also in use to monitor corporate offices. They can track how many cars are in the parking lot and even what makes/models are showing up to indicate the rate the company is hiring or laying off workers and whether the employees are trading up to pricier models.

Similarly, infrared cameras are used to constantly monitor power stations (e.g. smoke stacks, cooling towers) to gather data on what level of capacity they are running and if there are any undisclosed shutdowns.

Workers in ports are paid to monitor incoming tankers to record what their draft is to calculate how much oil/whatever they are carrying. If they are resourceful they can even gather intel about what % of different grade materials are on the ships. This is used to track / estimate commodity flows and pricing.

Data == $$$
I always ask, not because it's required, but because the answer is often enlightening. Judging companies for asking isn't reasonable.
This probably won't matter to you, but the entire point is that it's not about the angst.
About this comic:

My Obsession with Chess

1998-1999

My fourth online comic seemed to strike a chord with many readers, despite requiring side-scrolling as well as down-scrolling (which I'll admit, can be pretty annoying).

This one's autobiographical; an account of a childhood obsession with "the most violent game" and how that obsession returned in my late twenties. It's all true, but pretty weird, 'cause I was, um... a weird kid.

I visited the legendary Xerox PARC shortly after completing the comic and they offered to print it for me on their humungous format printer. In 2008, the print-out was exhibited at New York's Museum of Comic and Cartoon Art and Bowling Green University as an artifact of webcomics history.

Anything more than ten years old is like the dead sea scrolls in webcomics.

From http://www.scottmccloud.com/1-webcomics/chess/index.html
IN-PROCESS BY HALL OHARA Spring/Summer 2012, Tokyo
Learn how to use range queries with StackMob
Previous conversation, from about a month ago. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3038296
EBay's 'Inspiration Shop' in NY.
Spot on. I am a college dropout and founder of a YC-funded, venture-backed startup. Whenever I talk at my old university, I always tell people that dropping out is by no means a rite of passage or prerequisite to success. I have an acquaintance who was able to start a company with $1MM in revenue while staying in school.

There is no glory in dropping out. "Dropouts" are not some super-class of people who are destined to save America. It's just something I had to do in order to have the time to start the company I wanted to start.

Addendum: The best dropouts are those who would do well in school anyway. I've had people tell me "I'm barely passing in school because the stuff doesn't interest me. I'll drop out and I do what I want to do". There are 1001 things about running a company that are more boring than your school homework. If you can't do well when someone gives you a curriculum and is helping you, you don't stand a chance keeping yourself motivated enough to start a company.
I've identified this as a form of humor. Homines sapientes react to it like this: Ho! Ho!
I see only a slight problem with this poll. There is no option for exactly $0. This is the only truly appropriate option for me, less than $50k still implies I make >$0.
Isn't that just a matter of how you hold the brick?!
'Steve Jobs' Biography Available Now, Electronically
That episode of 60 Minutes was fantastic, and the audio from Walter's interviews with Jobs was surprising. The best part of the program was the fact that Steve Jobs actually met his biological father years before knowing who his biological father truly was.
I remember the first time I saw your site and thought, interesting name. Simply for the fact that I'm the founder of fotoblur.com and wireblur.com. It was easy to find domain names after attaching 'blur' to the name (a 3 month search for fotoblur) :)! For photography it kind of made sense.

@conesus: However I'm curious. How did you decide on the name? I'm not claiming any inspiration, however, according to whois the newsblur.com was registered on 18-feb-2009 whereas fotoblur was on 28-sep-2007 ;)!

Motorola also got in on the act: https://portal-moto.svcmot.com/moto-web-portal/
> Eventually, an unprofitable enterprise will lose staff, investors, suppliers and will die.

I agree you can't lay too much emphasis on this. I have experienced it at startup, though the CEO tried hard to get out of the way along, and found the successful exit.

Yet, the worst was not running out of money, but the lack of our vision and will to achieve it. Or the vision might have been false, something good for us, not for customers. Anyway, in 3 years, we have burned out.

So I think the most important thing is something keeps you motivated, which drives you to try anything for the vision relentlessly.
The first chess-related work of fiction that comes to mind is "The defense", by Nabokov. The main character is similarly obsessed with chess and comes to see everything in terms of chess. There's a movie adaptation called "The Luzhin defense", with John Turturro and Emily Watson, which I thought was OK.
I feel schools teaching and testing terribly boring and insignificant material has helped romanticize the concept of dropping out. After all, people will say, why are you in school, if you're better than that?

The sooner people stop expecting university to be a stepping stone rather than an experience, the sooner the dropouts-will-save-america notion will fade. University is a lot of fun, and it's not just a passage to a job.
I agree with Marco: currently our only way to watch TV is with an AppleTV and it's been pretty great. It could be improved but it's much better than when we had cable, and I don't think Apple would allow being mixed with the cable experience. Plus, that means giving away a lot of control and revenue.

But if a TV set is in the works, I have a hard time imagining something different than a nice display (like a big Thunderbolt display) running the AppleTV software. And that seems that starting to make TVs, and thus competing in a highly-competitive, low-margin market just for that would be a huge investment for something they almost already have… (though I'd love to be able to remove the TV remote altogether, which I use just for on/off and volume)

That's probably why I'm not a high-level employee at Apple because I'm stuck trying to figure out what they're working on (if these rumors are true)…

One thing though is that I feel Apple is going to have something very powerful with AirPlay and AirPlay mirroring. It's going to be very powerful because that could allow them to gain a significant foothold in gaming in the living-room. (NB: AirPlay mirroring allows an app running on an iOS device (iPad 2 or iPhone 4S) to use a TV connected to an AppleTV as a secondary display. Some games have started to take advantage of this)
Few hackers - by which I assume you mean engineers or developers - consider Steve Jobs a "hero." Most would agree he created wonderful products that changed the world, but he isn't much of a hero to a software or hardware hacker. Because as you note, he wasn't technical. Woz is the geek god of the two, because he was building cheap, full fucking computers in a damn garage, by himself. Dennis Ritchie was a hero. Not Steve Jobs.

If anything, hackers are more likely than most to respond negatively to Steve's recent approach toward mobile platforms and use of IP in business... which are the sorts of alienating decisions a technical co-founder can make.

If by "hackers" you meant "people who want to make product(s) for a startup and learned a few things about code to hack out a prototype," you might be more on-target.
They won't use the iPhone as a remote. It's a personal device that lives in your pocket. The remote is a household device that lives on the coffee table. And you can't use a touchscreen while looking at something else.

The interface will be something magical, like a Wiimote. In fact, it may be exactly like a Wiimote. Whatever it is, it will be great for using an on-screen interface, and also for games. Yep, I can't see them making a TV that isn't a gaming platform.
The key is education, not schooling. The conflation of the two is unfortunate.
For the people who do not have CONFIG.SYS / DEBUG.COM / MASM kung-fu , please do not give up.. Google, wiki and read up. The journey will be fascinating.

Put your lenses on for jump-offs produced by Google on keywords TSR and LIM EMS for further mind-bending fun.

And quit laughing at HIMEM.SYS
Obvious in retrospect. I had a friend who was a world expert in pen and touch interfaces and he had tablet computers from all over the place. None of them ever looked remotely like the iPad. They were all funky mishmashes that looked like they had been designed by committee whose main pool of ideas was based on hinges, swivels, styluses, and hideable keyboards. They were horrendous, but it wasn't obvious why until after I saw the iPad.
The comments on this article have made me lose a great deal of hope for humanity.

Ignoring the fact that most plastic used as feedstock for makerbots is BIO-DEGRADABLE, are people really concerned about the prospect of dumping a few plastic shells into the ocean? Do they realize how absurdly huge the oceans are, and how astronomically insignificant this amount of plastic would be?

Besides, what's the worst case scenario here? Hermit crabs for hundreds of years are able to reuse the same shells? Oh the horror!.

The absolute vitriolic comments there are gut wrenching. Even when somebody posts clarifications (such as "the plan is to use them domestically, not dump them in the ocean") they just get flamed for "back pedaling". Either project members posted this to greenpeace boards with added insulting comments about their mothers, or there surely is something going on between the Makerbot chaps and some other group of people that I'm not aware of. This is just unnatural.
An Option To Get Fitness Centers In Shape
McCloud is playing with the compositional rhythms allowed by the web. Normally a comics artist is constrained by whatever page size she's using for the book; McCloud is completely and utterly fascinated* by the possibility of breaking that long-standing constraint.

The repetition of regular squares sets up rhythms, that he then violates for purposes of mood, emphasis, timing, etc.

*seriously, his second comic about comics, "Reinventing Comics", basically boils down to "the Internet will transform the finances behind comics via micropayments" (right on the transformation, wrong on the micropayments) and "the Internet will transform the layout of comics by freeing us from the constraints of a particular page size".
Could that video player have been any worse? To click the fullscreen button, you literally have to click on the darkened pixels of the icon. It's not a rectangular click area.
Great men live for mastery and academia but modern universities have nothing to do with either therefore attending is a waste of precious years. University takes up your spare time that you could be learning things that you're passionate about, it also seeds poisonous ideas into your head.

This is mostly relevant to the tech community at the moment because we have had the tools to make our education open enabling the guys mentioned in the article to educate them self.

Once the other industries start openly publishing educational material then the true power of passionate self development will be known.
>But I just wish more people would have the gumption to say 'I made a big set of money hats for myself, my investors and my employees, and I feel great about it'.

It would be great if making money for employees counted as a plus on the balance sheet. Instead, giving money to employees counts as an expense. Isn't capitalism wonderful?
I am wondering what good does Apple do to customers when it forbids users from using software not paying to Apple or buying content that has nothing to do with Apple without paying Apple.
Agreed.

I know so many people who attended university but are less interested in lifelong learning than people who never attended.

University is an environment for those who benefit from such.
The Coming Storm
While all the companies mentioned are the creation of dropouts, it still took hundreds (thousands in some cases) of people to bring all those companies to the point of maturity that they are at now with the help of extremely talented college degreed people.
Agreed that it is silly to compare the Air to competitor's laptops, arguing it is cheaper. A Toshiba Portege R835-P81 is $400 cheaper and similarly spec'd (more RAM, lower res). It's missing an SSD, but that can be had for $150, leaving it still way cheaper than a 13" air.
I learned to program in Ruby and what is this?
I've read MMM twice. Once, at about 28 years old, the next around 35 years old. (I'm aging myself here.)

I think I'll pick it up again next year. It really is a classic read that I'm only just now beginning to fully appreciate, even if I'm not discovering anything I didn't already know.

It tells me so much about myself and my colleagues. Thank you, Fred Brooks.
Six Not Quite Sufficient Ways to Share Information
I went to a job fair a few weeks ago where a few of the engineers from a very hardcore coding company said "Why don't you drop out? I never really found a degree useful." That's the problem though. College isn't about the degree or the resume building. It's about meeting people, having fun, and spending late nights hacking on projects for the hell of it.

I could graduate in three years or less, but I would be missing out on an experience that will most likely be extremely beneficial.
That icon resembles something from the Adobe suite, and I don't think that's a particularly good idea. It also doesn't make a good first impression.

On a more general note, the situation with menu bars and toolbars on Windows sure is atrocious. Ever since Microsoft's embracement of the ribbon interface for what seems like everything in the world, menu bars and toolbars sure have lacked a lot of love.

And using them, no matter whether it's the native or .NET/Office 2003 (ugh) style, sure make for some not-particularly-nice-on-the-eye interfaces. And I do mean most of the Windows ecosystem in general, not just this app.
Price is the reason why no manufacturer has been able to compete with the iPad. It's not only a tremendous product as far as tablets go, it's relatively cheap. Look at the latest high-end tablet offerings; all subjectively "worse", most more expensive than the Apple product.

The market-share argument against Apple will disappear as they strengthen their supply chain and become more efficient. They will become great AND cheap products. As someone who recently purchased his first Mac (decked out 13" MBA) and loves it, this is good news for everyone.
Do you have any data to back up the claim that unprofitable enterprises are more likely to be damaging to the environment than profitable ones? I doubt very much that you can find such data. I'm open minded enough to consider such data.

As an example of my doubt that such data can be found I'll note that oil wells and pipelines in Nigeria are much more likely to leak crude than pipelines in the U.S. Regulations are in place precisely because in the absence of such regulations companies will not engage in environmentally safe operations. Countries that lack a decent regulatory governing structure are the ones that have the most environmental damage from mining and oil extraction.

I didn't say anything about profit being necessary or unnecessary. I said that profit without considering moral implications is bad.
Too bad they wont change a thing.
"The old king is dead, long live the king"

interesting song choice by Coldplay.
Follow-up: 3. Is this situation like resume/cover letter advice, where everyone has their own favourite system and each person's advice for the perfect application is different?
Implementing Inheritance for jQueryUI Dialog Boxes
A free market also implies some transparency does it not? If it's crystal clear what is being bought & sold, then everyone can make informed decisions and take their gains/losses honestly. When things like derivatives are created specifically to obscure the product and mislead potential buyers, then is it truly a free market? Shouldn't the government's roll be oversight (aka interference) if deception is creating a clear advantage for one party in the transaction? Your premise of mutual gain falls short in these cases.
The Summer of Radiators and Incidental Complexity
I guess a better point could be made.
1) the American way : more efficient = better
2) technology will eventually build a better human

The logical conclusion of the American way is the extinction of the human species.

We've crossed the point where there is a significant fraction of human beings alive that cannot do anything more efficient than a machine can.

That fraction is going up daily. Partially, this is the fault of the education system, where the quest for "equality" mostly operates by making smart people dumb, for the alternative is too hard. Only by choosing an absurdly low standard and forcibly lowering everyone to it can a decent measure of equality be attained it seems (if evolution is true, this is of course a very much expected outcome).

But that, matters little, if at all.

The "singularity" whose praises are sung on this site is the point where that fraction becomes 100%, and nobody has a job, save for political reasons.

Those people will not lie down and die quietly. In fact, they won't even stop breeding.

I'm very glad they do this. Frankly the main problem facing America is not China, not Russia, not islam, nor is it the super-rich "not doing their part", nor does it have all that much to do with wall street. All of the aforementioned are more than capable of destroying themselves, and all are at various stages of doing exactly that.

The problem is simple : there is no need for humans at the base of our economy. The largest fraction of people gets hit first, and they will not go quietly.

Frankly I understand the problem, and if it comes to that I will be more than happy to join the mobs that are coming for whoever makes a significant advancement towards the singularity, for one simple reason : I have kids.

Anyone who disagrees with this problem, and sings the praises of "efficiency" can negotiate the way the base of the population has always negotiated. They can try to negotiate a pitchfork out of their throat. Most people don't realize this will happen, but unless something changes drastically ...