skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I use a Lenovo Thinkpad X220 that I purchased in August. The battery life with the 9-cell battery is downright amazing -- I just leave the charger at home now. The keyboard and screen are really nice too, although the widescreen aspect ratio takes a while to get used to. I also like the simple, matte black finish and the fairly utilitarian design that seems to have good ventilation and heat dissipation. Even the humble Core i5 in my build is also noticeably faster than any Core 2 laptop or desktop I've ever built or owned.

My only regret now is not getting the convertible tablet version, since I underestimated how much I use wacom tablets, and having one built into the screen would be extremely convenient for me.

However, what's best for me isn't best for you. If you use Linux and don't like tap to click or the Thinkpad trackpoint (the famous red pointing stick in the center of their keyboards), you might test drive the X220 before considering it, because the clickpad they put on these models will probably drive you nuts -- especially if you're used to the multitouch clickpads on Macbooks.

Also, about the screen size. It's big enough to see what you're doing, but since it's a lot wider than it is tall, you should consider how the development software you use will work with it. I spend most of my time inside of VIM, so I just maximize the window and split everything vertically. With a nice bold 9 or 10pt font (96dpi), I still get about 100-110 columns of text in each vertical window and almost 50 lines, without having to resort to small fonts (I don't like squinting). So for me, this screen size and ratio actually works out very nicely. If you spend all of your time inside of Eclipse or Visual Studio though, the lack of screen height will probably cause some pain.

Some people also report problems with noisy fans on this model. I haven't had this problem at all, but I intentionally avoided getting a soup'd up Core i7 configuration.

That said, I would also suggest considering a Macbook Pro. They usually have excellent battery life and a fairly solid design.
When I wanted to investigate fractals using Scheme, I had the Scheme program spit out PostScript output, then ran it through gs to look at the results.

PostScript is really tractable as a language to work directly in. Basic line-drawing stuff is almost as simple as the Logo I played with as a kid.
It's not exactly &#8216;Avatar&#8217;, but Google Maps are going 3D
That's a whole lot of text with very, very few code examples. Is the code too scary to show us more?
Don't forget that, even if the health-care costs are zero, the financial costs of smoking are non-trivial. In addition to the costs of the cigarettes themselves, there is associated wear on one's home, car and clothes.
You can also make arguments for the opportunity costs of time spent smoking, but that's harder to measure.
Vitamin D deficiency is extremely common in the US. If you are going to take a single supplement, make it 1000 UI/day of D.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypovitaminosis_D#Cancer

That said, if you are going to spend time outside, the benefits of wearing sunscreen and a hat undoubtedly outweigh whatever risk they may induce.
As I said, there were earlier deadlines, but they didn't apply to members who weren't in the working group -- just as the whole process doesn't apply to companies that aren't W3C members at all.

Perhaps it was a strategic error by the W3C to standardize touch events in a new working group (allowing Apple to delay longer just by refusing to participate), rather than an existing working group that Apple already participated in. But in the end, no matter what process changes a standardization body makes, Apple will always have the option to just take their things and go home. And they'll continue to do so whenever engaging the standards community is less beneficial than their other priorities (like having a stronger patent arsenal to use against mobile OS competitors).

And sure, I don't expect Apple to act any differently. They are a for-profit corporation, and they have not just an expectation but a duty to use the tools the system gives them -- including patents, secrecy, and lock-in -- to create and capture value. And they are very good at it. And they've created some tremendous value not just for their shareholders but also for users and developers.

But, thinking in the long term, remember that the open web is part of what kept alternative platforms like the Mac useful and viable through decades of Windows monopoly, and what made devices like the iPhone useful from day one, before the SDK and the app store. Open platforms like the web are great for disrupters, but for the same reason they are scary to incumbents.

If the dominant computing platforms of the 1990s were as locked-down as iOS and Windows Phone are today (with one company controlling software distribution, and forbidding any alternate ways to download and run code), then the web would never have been allowed to take off. I want to build and sustain platforms where the next web-like innovation will be allowed to happen. But today's incumbents understand what this means, so I expect a real fight to keep that possibility alive.
maybe he has a day job
The Psychology Of Social Shopping
Ask HN: Ideas For Implementing A Simple Web App?
Hi All,

I'm interested in learning web programming, but the huge variety of frameworks and languages available makes even beginning a bit intimidating. However, I do have an idea for a simple app I'd like to implement, so perhaps I could get some advice on what tools might be best for the job.

I'm a pretty big sports fan, and it's a nice way to keep in touch with friends spread out throughout the country. My idea, then, is to write up a simple app that would manage an over/under competition. Users could check one page of the site for the current lines, and then enter their guesses. The lines would refresh periodically (every week for the NFL, every other day or so for the NBA etc). There would then be a leaderboards page where users are ranked on the basis of their predictions. Since we're guessing based on lines to begin with, the ranking mechanism could be very simple indeed--maybe 1 pt for each correct guess. So I would need a way to pull in the lines and generate the page, and log user names and guesses, along with passwords, and generate leader board pages from that.

Any ideas? I know a little scheme from a while ago but am by no means a hacker. Does clojure make sense? I don't know any java.

Thanks in advance.
I've heard that good newspaper writers write the most important information at the beginning of the article so that you can keep reading if you're still interested but get the main points quickly.
"people can do whatever they want"

People can do whatever they want in the UK when it comes to healthcare - you can go to the NHS or go private if you want. Nobody makes you go to an NHS hospital.

Of course, what you can't opt out of is the tax bill that pays for the NHS - but as the NHS is reasonably efficient I don't mind paying for it if it means that everyone in the country has access to decent health care.
Thanks, I know the navigation needs some work. Also, the site is not for people that need an NDA. The privacy policy is simple: everything is public.
...and so a beautiful painting remains in a British museum and somewhere in the Third World a thousand people are dead.

This kind of moralizing about other people's choices leaves me very cold. It's their money; they can spend it as they see fit.

The point about the insecticide nets being more effective per dollar than antimalarial drugs is better taken; in that case the goal is the same, and only the means are in question. But if people want to give their money for an entirely different purpose, such as keeping a painting in a museum, that is their choice.

So no, there is not only one best charity.
Do you think Apple is against W3C adopting their implementation of touch events or are they against any non-Safari browser having touch? If it's the former the working group can just adapt the API a bit and rely on libraries to provide the compatibility layer.
I would say what’s positive is that more projects are finding ways to move away from a centralised database into a distributed, replicable system such as Git. Github provides an easy-to-use interface to Git, but this way of working is not necessarily limited to GitHub.
Let me tell you why you don't see this happening more often.

I did this on a project a few years back. I replaced a paper workflow process that was taking up two people each in three departments with a web-based workflow that increased visibility, dropped turn-around time from days to minutes, increased accountability and accuracy and trimmed those 16 person hours of processing down to 1-2 per department.

Everyone who directly interacted with the new system loved it. Numerous edge cases that would have been lost in high-level review were caught and integrated from day 1 due to my actually watching people do the job for a day or two per department. The solution has been rock solid (minor maintenance only) for five years.

And I almost lost the job.

The people who sign the checks were furious. The balance of political power between departments were thrown for a loop. One head in particular treated the thing as a near-existential threat. His entire concept of his job revolved around being the authoritative interface for retrieving and maintaining pieces of data that were no longer exclusively under his control. Another flipped out because middle management saw the results as cause to reduce his headcount and budget, and thus importance.

These two departments fought for months, refusing to contribute their shares of budget that were pledged toward modernizing this system.

On a technical and practical level, it was the single best experience I've ever had as a consultant. On a personal and economic level, is was one of the worst. It was some of the hardest money I've ever tried to collect. It was some of the most time and energy I've put into the political and 'sales' side of a job (the part I treat as a necessary evil, but very much evil). The corporation has made out like a bandit in the long run. But I paid the price.

It's simply too easy and financially rewarding to allow a client's political nonsense to screw up every stage of a project. I have less stress, the people who pay me are happier and I bill far more hours.

As with most software, internally developed software included, you don't see better projects more often because the incentives are horribly perverted and stacked against it.
This country is losing its liberties not because authorities are unaware, but because they dont care. the people are tranquilized into inactivity. My kid making a scene in class insisting on "liberties for some" will leave a mark on the future, encouraging people to call out and point at bull donk wheras a me talking with the principal would have zero effect.
See the sibling comment by raju for the specifics, but you can actually bind the Fn key with the `mac-function-modifier' variable.

I'd thought for a long time that Fn was a hardware/OS-only key based on the lack of apps that use it, but it seems Emacs has found a way.
> If Emacs is nearly an operating system then it's kind of nearly a software Lisp machine.

Correct or not, I've tended to think of Emacs as an LVM ([e]Lisp Virtual Machine) for years. The "bloated kitchen sink" argument holds little sway with me any more than saying that OpenBSD is a bloated kitchen sink because it can run a lot of software too. Emacs happens to be an awesome Batteries Included LVM.
Show HN: A gift giving service for men (built in 10 days and generating revenue)
We use git at Rackspace.
Does javascript guarantee a particular order of expression evaluation when there aren't any sequence points?

Alerting 'All Fixed' and afterwards 'Error' seems like it'd be just as valid an interpretation of the code.

Edited to add: Actually, I think the comma operator does do that, so no bad. Though the code is still unsightly...
UK to make publicly funded research free to read
Pluggable Domain-Specific Testcase Reducers
I think this is a good strategy regardless of its fairness
I used to design and build NOCS as a network management consultant, and we found one thing to be universally true at every NOC we designed:

1.) Even though the person who hired us fell in love with the set of NORAD from the movie Wargames with walls of giant monitors, not one of the NOC analysts sitting at their desks ever once looked up at the big screen (unless it was late at night and they replaced the network map with a first-person shooter) to do their job. They always look at the event viewer at their desk.

The big wall of screens is purely to impress customers/investors during visits.
It's totally, completely and utterly relevant as a measure of Apple's prowess in _retail_.
I was hoping for an article on the psychology behind social shopping - this one is about writing newsletters.
Composing the New Canon: Music, Harmony, Proportion
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0181689/
Weird you guys are having problems because it scans perfectly using the standard barcode scanner app on my Desire S (running MIUI):
http://www.armyofcrabs.com/qrsnake.png
I'm not really a fan. The name doesn't lend itself to the type of site that you have. Also, try to get something that's 3 syllables or less; it will be easier to speak, type, and remember. The "tus" suffix makes me think of a disease or germ or something nasty; not exactly the feeling you want to convey when you're trying to get eyeballs on a tech blog. I actually spent a brief period of time consulting with new businesses on their company names, so I have a little experience in this area. To get the ideas flowing, take a piece of paper or open doc and start writing down words that have anything to do with your concept, directly or tangentially. Then, start playing around with prefixes and suffixes and coming up with combinations that look and sound good. My favorite name to come along recently is Quora, it's short, sweet, and applies directly to the type of site they have. Plus, it's unique and original. My two cents. If you'd like any further advice feel free to shoot me an email (it's in my profile). Good luck!
SUBMIT ARTICLES/NEWS
That's a huge stretch. It would be like claiming that an engineer at Google should email me whenever my website goes down and help me fix it because, if my website is down, then it's one less website in their index, and they need sites in their index in order to sell advertising.

To make sure that I'm clear: the problem was entirely unrelated to Stripe; it had to do with a different component of my site.
It's usually in the proxies interest to fight the war anyway. Vietnam was a proxy war for the US even though Vietnam was fighting it long before the US got involved.

Google gets to fuck with Apple and if they lose they just roll up the company with out exposing the real profits to judgement. Moto bears the risk, Google reaps the rewards, classic proxy war.

Either way I don't think German politicians are ready to intervene.
All the companies they surveyed are less than 100 people. I'm actually surprised it's that high.
Nice! I like the about us page.
The W3C has similar requirements. Apple worked around them by never proposing touch events as a standard in the W3C [1]. The standardization effort was led by other W3C members without Apple's participation.

[1]: Also, although Safari lead David Hyatt hinted way back in January 2007 that he would eventually bring touch events to the WHAT-WG , it never actually happened: http://lists.whatwg.org/htdig.cgi/whatwg-whatwg.org/2007-Jan...

P.S. Greetings from a fellow Mudder! Thanks for ffmpeg! :)
Wow. Thanks for sharing that. This paints a really clear picture of why so much enterprise software are pieces of crap.
..and we wonder why so many companies are going out of business...
It doesn't get that expensive.

FastSpring's price is ALL IN. It includes the merchant account, payment gateway and subscription features, and no setup fees nor monthly charges; just the per-transaction costs as noodle commented.

Plus, sign-up and testing is totally free and still gets awesome customer support; you only start paying them anything when you start selling your service. This struck me as ideal for an SMB in its first year.
Funny story...

My daughter caused an incident at school when she wouldn't recite the Pledge of Allegiance to TEXAS! That's right, every morning, kids here in Houston recite the Pledge of Allegiance to the STATE OF TEXAS! Well my daughter refused, and would only pledge allegiance to the Flag of The United States.

Interesting exchanges ensued with the teachers and school administration telling her she wasn't being the right kind of 'leader'. She needed to be more of a 'team player'. In the end, they just told the other kids she was the 'class clown'. You know...because "She is always being 'loony'."

This is society writ small. If someone exercises free or critical thought, they will be labelled a 'crazy' or 'radical'. The worst part is that the rest of society, or in my daughter's case, the class, will believe the authorities.

Just came to my mind when I read your comment.
Yeah - this is how it works, they appeal the injunction and get a stay. If they can't win their, then they settle.
I've seen...really smart developers use notepad...there's probably a lesson to learn.

I find that really hard to believe, and I can't imagine what the lesson would be. It's akin to a NASCAR driver driving a Camry. It's true that the tools don't make the dev, but if what you say is true those devs are just hampering themselves.
I still dont understand what GeoSpatial support and Map Reduce means.
Anyhow, i'm excited to learn that companies are offering solutions for MongoDB, it gives me more confidence in putting together something in MongoDB.

I see they're also offering RockMongo GUI. Does anyone know how to get the interactive shell working as per the example on the main MongoDB website?
4 days and no answer..
I've found if the plugin has enterprise/business implementations, often that is a good indicator of durability.

Most of the jQuery plugins I've implemented involve me doing a proof of concept with the original plugin, then stripping it down or modifying it to meet any unmet performance or

Mixing plugins can be frustrating - it would be nice if some of them got together to do a plugin distro... it's the next logical extension.
My opinion is that Apple's patents on touch interactive are bad for consumers and bad for progress. Imagine if Xerox had patented the mouse, and never licensed it to other computer makers on the terms they did. How long would UI design have stagnated on text interfaces? Would something else more/less useful arisen to work around the patent?

I don't know exactly how to express this, but maybe it's best to say that I'm always "concerned" when an argument occurs where one party is fighting the wrong battle. That's also just an opinion. "Apple shouldn't have these touch patents" is a lot harder fight to win than "Apple is a bad company and does mean things to the W3C." I question the effectiveness of the latter though. Say you convince people that Apple is a meanie and is undermining standards, have you produced any significant outcome that will change things? Apple's historical disposition hasn't exactly been yielding to consumers' interests. They decide what consumers want, build it, then make a ton of money. You have to find a way to assault that head on, or use the power of law to prevent them from using these tactics.

Convincing those who are paying attention that Apple undermining standards won't amount to much.
I like it. Great design.
One man, one company, one device in Germany?
Remember those Vic Gundotra shot's at Google I/O ? "Draconian future, a future where one man, one company, one device, one carrier would be our only choice.” “Not The Future We Want.”
Now, when Motorola (Google) succesfully banned iPhones in Germany, someone should ask Vic, what is he gonna do about it. If Vic stands behind his words and is not a whiny-shitty-marketing-puppy, I expect Google to do something. And soon.
Amazon’s Apple-Like Growth is Missing One Element: Rising Profits
I think local retailers are given "special treatment" in that they don't have to add a shipping cost on top of the item price.

Consumer retail is evolving, as it has been forever, and will continue to do so into the future.

Local retail shops can cater to immediate gratification desires by shoppers. I can't just order up a latte on Amazon and have it NOW. If I need a new HDMI cable to watch a DVD with some friends tonight, then even free overnight shipping won't solve my needs.

But, for many other things... A new pair of shoes, a new coffee pot, a bottle opener, etc., I can wait 2 or 3 or 7 days to get the item. The Internet isn't going away, and even if I had to pay sales tax, I'd probably still continue to buy things on Amazon because it's easier for me than going to a retail store and dealing with potentially limited selection, crowds, etc.

These companies are simply NOT going to beat Amazon into submission. It's far too late for that, and I actively despise any retailers who try to increase my tax burden vs. offering a valuable service to me.
> Merely because an Apple /engineer/ did an outstanding job? That's nonsense.

Furthermore, from what I've heard, Apple engineers don't get more than the going rate either for doing an outstanding job of executing the outstanding /designer/ vision. And neither do most of the people who work at design in apple.

But the outstanding /executives/ do actually get more than the going rate. That includes the heads of design, engineering and sales.
1) auth.net is always safe

2) you set it to whatever you want

3) easy - you decide - probably pro-rate

4) credits are easy

5) select sum(amount) from charges where date='this year'... the other thing is just accounting by dates, up to individual company... easy reporting by date

6) chargeback you get a fax or letter - respond back and keep templates for each case - EASY

7) b/c then you're not paying someone else for a trivial service.
Or better yet: don't ever look at anything from Rational (now IBM).

Unless you are a consulting company the size of IBM. With the same business model.
Then why don't you make a scene?

It bothers me that a lot of people seem to think that the best form of activism they can possibly practise is training their children to mindlessly repeat talking points on concepts they are barely able to grasp.

There's a great BBC documentary on the Westboro Baptist Church where the interviewer asks a small child what he's protesting about. He trots out lines about homosexual sin etc. etc. but when questioned further it becomes blindingly obvious that he has no idea what he's talking about- he is just looking for approval from his parents.

He is later hit in the face by someone inaccurately throwing a drink from their car. He has no idea why he's there or what he's doing, but his parents drag him there to suffer for the causes they believe in.
"Apple views touch events as a proprietary interaction that they pioneered."

That's the problem. The marketing that "Apple invented the PC, Apple invented the GUI, Apple invented music players, apple invented pads" is one thing. But to actually continually threaten competitors with law suits is just being a bully.
Just out of curiosity, were you using a caching plugin, such as WP Super Cache?
I'm on your side. If dates are an issue then have a change-log noted in the source code file where you create a tag (such as initials+date) and insert that above large code changes so you can see code commit changes based on date within code as well.

Comments don't take up much space (reading or on disk) so don't think its bad to be verbose.
This has come up A LOT more than it should. There's a line immediately before the first example explaining exactly what you're looking at. It's slightly absurd to assume that's how you'd actually write those examples in javascript. The compiled javascript is rather approachable, though.