skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
There is no shiny in that. Apple is about making the shiny.

I don't mean that as a negative comment - they are about making shiny easy to use products and an ISP is not that.
The arguments here signify the content of the essay - if it contained only joke and anecdote, it would be impossible to dispute.

To add my own dispute, content-free writing is possible. Consider some self-help books; and Ed Catmull described most business books as "content-free" (in his Stanford Business School talk).

Most public speaking is entertainment - like TV news.
10% isn't a significant dent?
They can afford a monthly dividend for the next year, and still buy 100% of Amazon.com.
As a non-US person, I found it a nice recap. I mean, I knew BofA was bad but jesus fucking christ... they make Goldman Sachs look vaguely respectable.
It's possible, but it's also possible that each passenger has ten iPads in their carry-on bag. Will they perform a test flight with 3,000 iPads? Not to mention how many more iPads could be stored in checked luggage.
When I trade with someone who doesn't have a stronger competitive advantage, I have to give them more of our finite resources than others would need to do that job, and that's a lost opportunity for society to create more wealth. We all benefit when good producers can expand and bad ones are stopped.
Don't be. Coding at age 10/5/2/whatever is usually copying straight off books, and/or devising the most simple and crude software. It's no indicator of future ability, and frankly it usually is mentioned as a form of adolescent chest thumbing.

Just keep programming, you'll catch up in no time.
Why would we fear that? Skynet was an unparalleled pinnacle of engineering achievement.
In order for this to work you have to get the balloon high enough where it won't be affected by simple weather patterns.

Then you have to make the device capable of withstanding extreme conditions.

Then you have to make the balloon stay in position.

Then you have to swap out the balloon's every X day to refuel and recharge.

Predicting the future here: they will make a balloon and radio system that works for about 20 minutes before it drifts off and then realize there is a whole lot more to putting computers in the sky than just announcing you are going to move your data-center into the sky.
What The Walking Dead S2 did right
Do you have any resources for beginners you recommend? (I'm not a designer -- just have a certain fondness for dying media, I guess.)
Glad he mentioned pinboard. idlewords expressed a similar sentiment a few months back.
http://blog.pinboard.in/2011/12/don_t_be_a_free_user/

EDIT: Correct user.
"Evil" is a silly term. Robert Rubin (citi), Henry Paulson (goldman), Tim Geithner (ny fed), these names aren't ringing a bell?

The impression I've gotten is that the financial world is convinced that Obama is out to get them, so of course it's "common knowledge" that he has a plan to break up the banks. But what's he actually done? The settlement with the big banks a couple months ago was a slap on the wrist at best, and removed a huge liability.
Apple's market cap would go down by the amount of the dividend but it doesn't follow that Fidelity's stock price would drop, as their market cap does not reflect the value of their holdings.
You mean idlewords, perhaps?
> The flip side is the risk of cybercrimes. According to the Swedish National Council for Crime Prevention the number of computerized fraud cases, including skimming, surged to nearly 20,000 in 2011 from 3,304 in 2000.

Damn flip sides...
<3 his use of the term "saltational leaps."
The Invisible Computer
Yeah, making tools is clearly where Apple's strengths lie, vs. creating content. They can just continue to make great education-program-creation tools.
Consider a poorly written program: Cryptic variable names, lack of documentation, tightly coupled.

The code would be far from perfect, but if it works then it may be considered 'good enough'.

In fact, I'll go out on a limb and suggest that most (if not all) non-trivial code is imperfect yet 'good enough'.
minor point, but AT&T lost the legal right to control the equipment you plugged in at least a decade before they were broken up, iirc.
The problem with that is "Worse is Better". And there's just so much momentum behind current technologies, that switching seems almost unimaginable to most. Can you imagine not having Unix-like systems, and not being able to use C and all the languages built around that ecosystem?

But if you're looking for a replacement for the entire software stack we use today, one that tries to shun complexity (20k LOC for everything from kernel to common GUI apps), here you go: http://www.vpri.org/pdf/tr2011004_steps11.pdf

More info (see previous STEPS reports): http://vpri.org/html/writings.php
I had exactly the same reaction. Is this article going to be about Konrad Zuse? Oh look, IT IS!
Good point.

I've been programming since the age of 9, and I'm well into my 40s.

What that statement doesn't say is that for some of those years I learned very little (even though I was spending some of that time coding, I wasn't really "doing" anything; I.e., wasn't learning).

What really matters is doing quality work, making quality mistakes (so to speak), and learning from that and from other good engineers around you.
Still common in Coober Pedy http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coober_Pedy,_South_Australia#Ov...
Hey, sorry, I edited my post after you responded, but I didn't say and never said that it's "common knowledge" that Obama wants to break up banks.

What I said is that the financial industry, as of recently, has had an antagonistic relationship with the government, and that this is common knowledge in the industry. That's how they see it, anyway. There's a lot of tiptoeing the government has to do, because they're still counting on commercial banks to clear the housing market, to have their back on distressed bank mergers, etc.

Anyway, I'd rather see top bankers in those positions than top politicians. Obama's a moderate and a technocrat; so your thesis isn't distinguishable from the null hypothesis.
I think he's talking about people who never really jumped into programming. I had an XDCC server up and running by 5th grade, and my own website with decent traffic by 6th. Then I went a different route with my technical affinity.

Now I'm back, realizing that this is the path I wish I would have taken; and, instead of lamenting or trying to find other things to fill the programming void, I'm going for it.

Sure, it's not as fun - yet - as I remember. But I know that in the end, this is what I want to do.
It's more like an appliance -- which was the point all along
This is actually a good reason to move away from pixel designs and towards vector graphics. An assumption made now is that there is one or maybe two resolutions at which a 128x128 icon is displayed, and this is true for iOS screens. But with a more heterogenous selection of screen resolutions and expected screen distances, the actual display size of a 128x128 icon is basically unknown.

There are two problems you are conflating. One is that low-resolution icons have visual artifacts, and therefore manual pixel hinting is valuable. In general though, this problem only crops up for very small icons, say smaller than 32x32. But as screen resolutions increase, this problem will get easier.

The other problem is that at small sizes, we want icons to be less detailed and therefore more recognizable. A quarter-inch icon two feet from the eyes should have very little detail. This is a problem that vector graphics are very suited for. One can specify a low-detail icon that should be used when the real size of the icon is below some threshold, no matter whether that screen space is 64x64 or 20x20. In a world where the screen resolution of an icon that size can vary by more than a factor of two, using pixels is the wrong approach.
Check out this article for more information on the legality of expensing your apartment/car/etc.

http://mywifequitherjob.com/business-expenses-what-you-can-d...
There are a variety of issues with airborne servers. It's hard to keep things in the air for long periods, and it's harder at low heights. Higher up, you can avoid a lot of weather issues, winds tend to be predictable etc.

Satellites mean big latency. Boats have supply issues. Sealand is apparently a bust. Frankly, if you want a data haven, do something similar Cryptonomicon talked about. Though that too has some issues, especially given how undersea cables work.
This made me think of a presentation I recently gave. The first version of my talk was packed full of information that was relevant to my audience. Some advisors encouraged me to reduce the content and increase the emotional appeal. In the end, my presentation contained 25% content and 75% rhetoric designed to make an emotional connection.

And they were totally right. The audience loved it.

(Arguably, the information I originally packed into it would have been overwhelming to this audience.)

In contrast, I heard a talk from pg. It was 100% content. And I loved it.

I think it ultimately depends on the audience. Most people probably unconsciously prefer an emotional connection to a talk, though there are exceptions. Some of the most lauded talks on TED make a strong emotional connection while still imparting some important information, though it's arguably more emotion than content.

And come to think of it, had I gotten pg's talk in written form, I would have gotten just as much out of it.
"They took the "ends will justify the means" policy long ago."

To be fair, with negligible exception, everyone of every political bent takes that policy.
As a hard-science researcher, I've long thought that scientists should fight for the right to publish their findings (report, data...etc) to an open source github-like service, in addition to the scientific publications they already submit their work to.

By open-sourcing knowledge, humanity benefits. However, publishers prestige currently has everyone locked in a vicious cycle of publishing under-any-circumstance for the sake of career recognition. Is that really the end goal of scientific discovery?
Meh, justify it that way if you need to - I was making an assumption based on observed behaviour, you were working from an inaccurate sterotype from 200 years ago.
Looking backwards, rather than forwards, the people best placed to do something about what has already happened are "The Pirate Bay". Surely it couldn't be too hard to obtain copies of all the papers to date and put them online?

Another option might be for researchers to post screenshots of every paper read to Freenet. Over time, the collection would build into something useful.

Does software exist to strip stenography and DRM out of documents? Maybe reduce it to ASCII or TeX, then do a brand new reformat?
That's more of a Shelbyville idea.
Jordans 8
Absolutely! Though pixel art isn’t dying—the niche is small, but not shrinking, and there are artists who make a considerable amount in commissions, typically sprites and backgrounds for games.

I suggest you check out Pixeljoint[1]—coincidentally it’s down today for a server upgrade, but the community offers excellent feedback for new artists, and the tutorial section has links to some great resources. Pixelation[2] is a great community with many experienced artists from the pixel world and demoscene. You’ll also find a couple of tutorials on an older site of mine, Studio Purloux[3]. One is a general tutorial by my good friend Kevin Chaloux[4], an outstanding and highly regarded pixel artist; the other is my own introduction to manual antialiasing. That should be enough to get you started.

[1]: http://www.pixeljoint.com

[2]: http://www.wayofthepixel.net/

[3]: http://purloux.com/artwork/tutorials/

[4]: http://kaiseto.deviantart.com/
Yet both examples still have to go through FCC testing. Anything digital with a clock over 9 kHz has to go through unintentional radiator testing.
It's missing the 13W3 video ports used for a long time by Sun and SGI machines (and some of the best monitors around in the late 90s): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DB13W3
What was the "obvious move for a tablet-style PC" before the iPad (2005)
If anything Apple seems to be moving away from Intel chips and emphasizing their own ARM designs. Much more likely they will release an ARM-based laptop.
People have been putting their servers in the cloud for a while now.
Exactly what I'm hoping for, actually. X220 was perfect, except 1366x768 a bit harder for me to be productive on.

For most programming I do it's fine as I use vim and don't need a lot of real estate...but for large projects for which I use eclipse, it was a bit painful.

Also on the way is the T430U, the 14" ultraportable version of the T420. Might be nice too. Would take a 1600x900 x230 over it any day though.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Pepperpad2.jpg
Fortunately all of this will be moot in a few years, when high-dpi becomes the norm.

Some of the examples he shows are much worse than reality. You can have outlines that don't increase in width for larger sizes.
True religion Outlet Online
What I mean is that while the credit card system can be used anonymously, it is not easy to do so. By default, most casual users of credit cards should assume they are certainly not anonymous. And most people with credit cards know this.

Now, if you google for it, you will find people out there that are very careful about their privacy, and so go through great lengths to acquire and use credit cards that are not bound to their identity.

I can't speculate why they do this. My point is really that you wouldn't say 'the credit card system is anonymous' even though it can, with great care, probably be used anonymously.

Equally, people shouldn't say 'Bitcoin is anonymous', if the case is that it can be anonymous if used with care, but when used casually, it also leaves information that can be used to link user accounts. People should not think of it like cash.
Why would you be moving data between cores? I'm talking about an arrangement where each core is dedicated to a single program. No sharing of memory, even via the kernel. Each hardware devices talks to a single core only. Multiplexing of hardware would be done in.. hardware. For all intents and purposes the "core" could be out on the network.

All this throughput nonsense is benchmrk lies. Websites are not as a general rule highly responsive. They have huge variability in response times. Who cares if it costs a bit more to run the system if it means having a nice predictable system built for simplcity and safety from the ground up?
Whilst I don't want to turn this into a reddit style pun thread.. that genuinely made me laugh out loud
Australian iOS Conference with Loren Brichter, Neven Morgan, Shaun Inman & More
I checked out the site and while the comps you have there seem nice, I don't see what makes it different from other bookmarking services.
For me, the switching cost of changing my gas bill, electricity bill, mortgage, credit card, Home phone, Cell phone, dentist, AWS account, heroku, mysafari, spotify, napster, hulu, engine yard, ... I know I'm just hitting a few here... to a new bank/card is a big enough disincentive to have me locked in. I AM however looking at better alternatives because i'm tired of BOA.
What about doing this is pandering? Almost all of Apple is owned by institutions and they have been reaping all of the benefit of the company's crazy growth. The total ownership of all pension funds (29 of them) and mutual funds (626 >= 1000 shares) account for < 5% of the float. I'd love to see the wealth spread around to all who want to participate. That could possibly do more for the common person than a dividend ever would. Apple is 72% institutionally owned. Paying a dividend at all is directly pandering to institutional investors!
I want higher DPI and it's an "easier" albeit expensive solution.
> When you speak, your curiosity and sense of humor come through strongly.

Now that you say that, I gotta agree. Hearing him talk, I had no idea he used so many colorful metaphors and analogies. His essays don't quite have the color his talks have.
gulp, off topic but how did krav maga screw you up? I was thinking of trying it out
Thanks for the link. I will check this out later.

>Can you imagine not having Unix-like systems, and not being able to use C and all the languages built around that ecosystem?

Yes! Charles Moore has been essentially living this since the 1970's. No many have his level of courage though.
Capitalism can't work properly if risk-takers are insulated from the consequences of bad bets. The #1 priority should be making sure that no institution is "too big to fail" next time we get what is effectively a global margin call.
A Boom Time for Education Start-Ups
These days education-tech startups are hot... Investments in education-technology companies nationwide tripled in the last decade, shooting up to $429-million in 2011 from $146-million in 2002. An confusing assortment of new players are hoping to profit as colleges try to do more with less through tech. Coursekit, Courseload, CourseRank, Udacity, Udemy, and University­Now.
You misunderstand his argument. He's not arguing that we should replace C with "higher-level languages" that don't give you precise control of the hardware; in fact, he bemoans the fact that the PL community at large seems interested only in such high-level languages. Nor is he complaining that C is hard to learn (I'm not sure where you got that impression). In fact, the paper mostly takes for granted that C needs to be replaced, and discusses the challenges in doing so, which may be why you assumed that BitC is (was, really) just another typical research-community high level programming language project.

The fact is, C is broken, and we all suffer every day because of it. From a security perspective, C is a nightmare. It is not just an unsafe language (in the PL sense of having undefined behavior), but a rampantly unsafe language. Null pointers (which C.A.R. Hoare famously called his "billion-dollar mistake"), buffer overruns, unrestricted pointer arithmetic, arbitrary casting, manual memory management; all of these are the cause of innumerable bugs in real code, often critical security vulnerabilities. C is also not the nicest of languages to code in. It is terribly verbose. There is no good way of writing generic code in it. The preprocessor is a gigantic ugly hack. Writing portable C is a pain in the ass, and building it portably is doubly so.

The worst part is, we know reasonable ways to solve most of these problems. In many cases we have known them for decades. Unfortunately, how to best integrate these solutions into a language and still keep it useful for systems programming was (and is) an open problem. I can't speak for Shapiro, but as I see it this is what BitC was aimed at doing.
Yes. I was a bit ambiguous. I meant that the value of Apple stock that Fidelity owned would go down, not that Fidelity's own stock would drop in price.
Have you ever seen how quickly money is moved/laundered after an ATM skimming operation?
A space program is about the only worthwhile thing apple could do with that money. The world doesn't need any more novel distractions, or rich investors.
I've been running a T420s with LMDE for 4 months now, and the one issue that's been bugging me is battery life. Boot up the windows partition: 6.5 hours. Linux partition: 1.5 hours.
http://coderrr.wordpress.com/2011/06/30/patching-the-bitcoin...

This is important, if you would like to be anonymous (along with a few other tools).
Very well thought :D made me laugh too.
Indeed! And that's at inflated government prices. If they just contracted with SpaceX and Bigelow or others they could probably have a space station for a tenth of that or less.
From the article, it seems the main feature of the service is that it will exist forever -- no sellouts.

That is are very big claim to make, indeed. While very well intentioned and honorable, it is very difficult for anyone to say "this will never go away" and be able to back it up in a meaningful way.

But good for him, nonetheless. In a time when apps and services are treated as throwaway commodities, his eagerness is refreshing.
Does of mean on or off?
And yet, that'll get you labeled a "socialist" in most parts of the country.
Apple’s new iPad screen gets compared to iPad 2 under a microscope
Workout Music: Hadouken, Mecha Love
DNS, IP blackhole, or "transparent" proxy? All are trivial to defeat.

Filtering the Internet is nearly impossible unless you block it all.
JQueryUI Icons Cheatsheet - A Free Printable jQueryUI Icons Cheatsheet
Mathematics Education: Being Outwitted by Stupidity
The problem is creating a market for content creation. The idea is that if you can generate revenu from quality content, then more quality content will be generated. Think of what Etsy has done for small craft products or what hollywood has done for movies. HN and reddit have created enough of a viewership that an upvote has some amount of value. However that value is only enough to support link aggregation, blog posts, and other low value items.

the idea behind charging to post/upvote is to generate enough of a return to warrant higher value content creation.
For the same reason Microsoft paid far, far too much money for Skype.

It's a bit of silliness that really ought to go away. Corporate taxes are rather silly. Get rid of them and make capital gains count as regular income for tax purposes.
I sense a certain amount of enmity from your pg-related posts here and your tweets.
Let's hope that 747s aren't flying around randomly in uncontrolled airspace.
Github.js - A JS Library To Store A File On Github Right From The Browser
Hi,

thanks so much for linking this. I have always been a fan of the history of computing (e.g., Moshe Vardi mentioned Charles Peirce in a talk once http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Sanders_Peirce, and I have seen a reconstruction of one of Leibniz' calculators [http://de.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Datei:Leibnitzrech...), but I did not know that Konrad Zuse got a patent on the concept of pipelining in 1949. (AFAIR Hennesy and Pattern's "Computer Architecture: A Quantitative Approach" cites Tomasulo's algorithm from 1967)
Man, it's downvote central over here.
I believe I've heard of linguistic studies which demonstrate that the use of "filler" words like um is, in part, a form of "code switching". For example, when teenagers talk to their peers, or to people they don't particularly respect, their speech will tend to be peppered with ums and you knows and likes [1], as in: "I'd, um, you know, prefer to watch something, like, interesting.". But when talking to respected elders, or working as waitstaff in a restaurant, the same people suddenly prove capable of uttering perfectly fine sentences in formal English. The "reversion" to the broken-up speech pattern is not necessarily because the speakers are thinking too hard, or drinking too hard, and it's certainly not because they don't know how to speak: It's often a subconscious but deliberate technique for setting an informal mood.

Some languages actually have a syntactically-distinct informal mode; English has the word um.

Why do I tell this random anecdote? The usual reason: I love to ramble. But also because my point is: Stop worrying about the "ums". They're fine. Your listeners were probably already interpreting them as a sign that you've become really engaged in the conversation.

(Now, of course, the above comment will be added to the YC FAQ, and teams will be competing to see how quickly they can get PG to utter the first um of the entrance interview. ;)

---

[1] At least, this is what informal teen speech sounded like years ago. These days, it may be different. It usually is.
Showyou designed Mecha to run Solr with Riak, there are slides here http://www.slideshare.net/jmuellerleile/scaling-with-riak-at... and I noticed someone else posted the video of the talk.
I didn't see it, thanks. I usually consume via RSS so it doesn't help me too much anyway.
This definitely has a backend. Something has to serve up the page.