skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This used to be common in parts of Europe as well, until not that long ago. There are still inhabited houses set into cliffs in parts of France, e.g. around Chinon (http://www.travelblog.org/Photos/6368827), and some in Italy have become tourist destinations (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sassi_di_Matera).
"I thought English is the only language in the world?" </sarcasm off>

Disclaimer: My primary language is not English.
Here, try this: he both thinks that you are not stupid and that "nobody" would confuse who wrote the book (evidently, the second thought was shown to be factually incorrect).

Not so hard--I, however, think you're being silly.
12 Websites to Create Free Websites
T. rex's killer smile revealed
On the other other (third?) hand, sometimes you want GPGPU which even in laptops can give some speedup, not to mention not having to debug it on large computer. With intel, you're out of luck there.

But I think they promised OpenCL for Ivy Bridge.
It doesn't matter what Computer you throw against Linux - it will just work (with tinkering of course). My prefered setup years ago was Gentoo on a MacBook (the black , plastic ones fom the 90ies).

Today I would recommend a MacBook for its display. You can then wipe the disk or swap them, as I did with my work notebook from Lenovo (x201) - running FC16. I heard Mint and Ubuntu is great too.
Plus the guy can afford the very best of legal counsel. Any holes in the case are sure to get found and exploited.
no we are very serious business
TCPDF - A PHP-Class with 26.000 loc
On a recent Ruby Rogues podcast one of the guys mentions that if you want to see what software applications need to be build in an organization, see what people are doing with Excel.

"Excel is a coping method." - James Edward Gray II

This has definitely been the case in all the companies I have been at.
Apple Adds new Features to  its OS X 10.8 beta version
Great satire, the ads were a great touch.

Seriously, law enforcement's behavior towards computer crimes is so out of proportion with the magnitude of the crime that their "bring a blowtorch to a daycare" response hurts their image.
"Rather than applying for an interim restraining order, the Police Commissioner applied for a foreign restraining order instead, one which did not give Dotcom a chance to mount a defense."

This makes a case for the mistake being deliberate, since it may have given the police the element of surprise or let them move quicker on the seizures.
How do you deal with absence of PgUp/PgDn and Home/End? I've honestly tried for 2 weeks to get comfortable with MacBook, but feel that the keyboard is simply bad.
Executive Order -- National Defense Resources Preparedness
Have you looked at Apple's supplier responsibility report? It's two clicks from their home page and lists basically everything that was true. (e.g. underage workers, aluminum dust explosions)
Creating an Android Widget | Cain's Vault
Basic steps for creating your first Android Widget. Part 1 in the series.
I believe that the Blackberry 9700 has a 624Mhz processor, 256MB or RAM, and a relatively low resolution 2.44" screen. The battery is about the same size as that of a modern smartphone, though (1500Mah).

I don't think it's fair to say that they have battery life nailed, as their approach to nailing it (low hardware specs) is one of several things that is killing them in the marketplace.
Yes. I have had to completely disable the trackpad on my Lenovo X220, and I use its 'nipple' mouse button instead.
I have ATI cards in all my linux machines. They work /ok/, but it really seems like ATI only gives lipservice to being linux-friendly. After making promises for over a year about how big there commitment is, the improvement has been disappointing.
This kind-of look like the shots/demos I've seen of the Self environment.

In fact, I think a Self-type environment might be the best: image-based, most of the objects are live (not types and a class browser as in Smalltalk, but a hierarchy of live objects) and can be manipulated via small pop-up menus, drags and swipes, with only minimal actual text edition.

It's a very visual experience, where actual typing is generally restricted to small functional blocks (for method slots), this is shared with Smalltalk (methods are edited one at a time in a small self-contained editor).

I don't think text is a good primary interface when the keyboard is a second-class citizen, this is decorated text but text is still king. The problem should be turned around, in touch-based environments where keyboards are secondary so should text be: it should be a DSL for defining behaviors but most of the application-building should be spent away from text.
The TAL retraction explains this pretty well -- what fact-checking they did, how they let Daisey slide on identifying his translator, etc.

PDF transcript here http://podcast.thisamericanlife.org/special/TAL_460_Retracti...

As with many big lies, this one started small then snowballed as Daisey tried to cover his tracks.

Even though the motivation may have been pure -- to make people care about the real human costs of our consumerism -- in the end the lies have detracted from that cause.
Windows Phone is all about UX
You can buy spare phone batteries on eBay for $2 each. Carry one or two around with you (they're small, of course, since the phones are thin to begin with), and you're set. You'll likely need extra chargers for them too, so a little more money spend there, but eBay provides there as well.

Of course, iPhone users (such as myself) can't do this because the battery can't be easily removed.

Making the phones a bit thicker probably couldn't hurt at this point either...
I've been programming for quite some time, and I find it fascinating how quickly I can learn, understand, and use the syntax of a new programming language.

I think there are similar mechanisms going on as compared to linguistics, particularly neurologically. Maybe all of us programmers are smarter, too, huh?
I think there's a very important line to be drawn between "require everyone to know (the basics of) $tool" and "mandate that everyone use $tool". I think the former can be reasonable, if it's done both ways, ie everyone is required to be somewhat familiar with the standard UNIX toolchain, but also with $IDE. Then, the choice could be left to every member of the team what to use.

I think, however, it's a huge mistake to take the second route. Myself, for example, I could never be even remotely productive in an IDE. The moment I open one, it feels wrong, and my productivity as well as motivation drops significantly. I just prefer vim + $tools for the language I am working with, and it's highly unlikely that this will ever change. It's like trying to code in a noisy, public place when I could be coding at my desk listening to my favorite music.

Yes, this is partially an emotional reason. I hate programs that throw tons of information, menus and buttons at you, most of which are useless 98% of the time. Furthermore, I hate programs that try to be a God Object and do everything by themselves - I'm a stern advocate of modularity/interoperability and the UNIX philosophy of writing programs that do one thing, and do it well.

But, to conclude this, I would fiercely disapprove forcing anyone to do it my way as much as I would object to being forced into a different workflow myself. I know I could never work for someone that does either.
In my opinion, business and management need programmers, it’s just that no one has told them yet.

This is very true as it is true the reverse.

The reason why this is very true is that big corp are using incredible amounts of man hours dealing with spreadsheets madness. There is no knowledge of the basics of programming or even simple SQL. This means that things as simple as a "group by" become a total nightmare: try to "group" data from 100 entities around the world sent in 100 Excel email attachments. Try dealing with people that put the "Intraco selling expense" in the wrong cell or things of that type. Again, with 100 entities/files. This is a big part of the reason people end up overworked... especially in such fields as finance.

The reason why it is true also the reverse is that for how much BS programmers may see in the business/finance world, there is a part of sense to that madness. But it takes time and patience to see it. Mostly I don't see "real" programmers/geeks having that kind of patience. So, if any enterprise product wants to solve the data nightmare in which all Big Corp live, a reach to the business people would be a good first start. But that is tricky and difficult from both sides.

Well, long post, but a nice issue that needs some good solutions. If anybody is interested, I work in finance (...) and I do love programming, I am quite interested to discuss this topics.
I'm using a zenbook and with the 3.2 kernal (included in ubuntu 12.04beta) almost everything is working great. There is a small change that is needed to enable suspend, but otherwise everything works out of the box with no extra drivers needed (including wifi, two finger right click, camera, 3d graphics, etc.).
I think there is no question that being able to define new types is important. I don't, however think it's clear that having to pack operations that operate on the types into the types themselves is a good idea in general. Your example is easily handled with a simple type class in Haskell e.g., and no there's it's not "essentially a class" in the OO sense, as new operations can be freely added without modifying the type itself.
Just work = without tinkering.
My guess for the helicopter is maybe... speed/surprise? Or maybe the kiwi police were showing off for the FBI...
That's a bit of a simplification. Because VoLTE is still being standardized, phones must keep multiple modems active and multiple receive portions of the transceiver ASIC powered on in order to be able to receive voice calls when on LTE. This can be mitigated some on UMTS, because I believe a LTE device can get paged over to WCDMA when a voice call comes in through CSFB, but that cannot be done with the current deployment in traditionally CDMA networks. There was a proposed standard for CSFB to CDMA 1x voice, but I don't think it was adopted by any of the carriers due to some concern with call setup delays and delays to being able to deploy LTE.

Aside from that, you're perfectly right about how power-hungry the current LTE implementations are, because they're early implementations. They will get better as time goes on, within reason.
M-v, C-v, C-a, C-e?
I've always had the impression that UEFI was a real improvement over the legacy x86 BIOS we've used for forever, but this article makes me wonder if it will just make things more complicated (especially for Linux and BSD users).

Does this article make UEFI sound more problematic than it actually is?
That seems surmountable. Surely the slidiness is tweakable, at least at the design level. Even if it was just faster, that would help, wouldn't it?
BBC Future (international version)

We're sorry but this site is not accessible from the UK
as it is part of our international service and is not funded
by the licence fee.

Anyone got a transcript?
It's the implementation of UEFI/EFI/TianoCore that I find most problematic, and not the idea of having a console operating system.

I work regularly with servers that provide most or all of what EFI does, and within the console, though these servers provide it with considerably less confusion and hassle.

Having an embedded console can be very handy to have a functional operating system available in the firmware. Whether this is troubleshooting the server, or the boot process, or baseline server configuration without having to fire up an operating system or a diagnostic.

What's not so handy (with EFI) is the complete grab-bag user interfaces, nor the confusing array of consoles that can exist (the Shell, the menus, the BMC, and increasingly often a management widget), nor limitations around the callbacks. And the byte-code engine concept that was intended to avoid having to implement console (and boot) drivers for each new widget never really got traction.

Simply having boot drivers available as callbacks for the operating system would have been very handy for folks writing or porting an OS. Debugging in the bootstrap environment stinks.

IMHO, EFI just isn't a well-designed user interface. It seems to be a scatter-shot collection of pieces that were duct-taped together into a technology demonstration. And I'm not entirely certain the folks that originally built EFI ever intended the manufacturers present it to the end-users to use it as the primary console, either.
I have r830 with Arch, so a less-ultra but quite similar stuff -- everything works, after some tuning it can eat only 7.5-8W during normal activity (with Compiz).
Not all the cave dwellings have nicely bricked exteriors and modern interiors:

[1] https://secure.flickr.com/photos/sookyeeyap/sets/72157602311...

[2] http://yapsookyee.blogspot.com.au/2008/03/ningxia-part-1-dir...

(Ningxia - Zhangjiashu village, by Sookyee)

The most interesting aspect is how quickly China is changing. Within a single generation, families have moved out of "holes in the mud" to village houses. Satellite TV and mobile phone coverage is also apparently available in Zhangjiashu village (and other similar remote villages).

Cave dwellings or yaodong still exist for some poorer families. “I used to live in a cave dwelling when I first got married,” said Ma Yan’s mother, Bai Juhua. “Very few people live in one of those anymore. Recently, a few of them collapsed because of the rain. Thank goodness nobody was hurt.”

...

They may not have drinking water, no proper toilet, no food…but they will definitely have mobile phones and satellite dishes for their TV.
You know, I wanted to do something very similar with my university's installation of PeopleSoft - but my intent was more focus on improving the UI and frontend than backend. But I have to ask: how did you get a copy of PeopleSoft?
Me too until I found that Fn+Up/Down,Left/Right do what you want. Also Fn+Backspace to delete.
All his money has been seized. He might not get it back. Some countries separate out the mis-handling of a case form the actual case.

"Fruit of the poison tree"[1] doesn't hold in the UK, for example.

[1] (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fruit_of_the_poisonous_tree)
Affiliate Marketing Startups on the Rise
What is the touchpad flaw?
Yes, finding notebooks with good screens is very hard nowadays, and Apple is one of the few that's still shipping them. While I don't like their business practices, my next notebook is still probably going to be MacBook.

I seem to remember some bug with macbook touchpad handling in linux, something that made the cursor jump around when the touchpad is switching from one finger to two finger mode and back, and it made two finger scrolling impossible. Anyone knows if that was fixed?
There is already a thread on this on the front page: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3718922
This brings to mind ResolverOne - a spreadsheet that "compiles" down to python. Basically they had a similar insight - that people who do heavy excel are essentially programming. So they made it easy for devs to convert the spreadsheet to programs by allowing them to be converted directly to code/workflows.

I met those guys at PyCon a few years back, and they provided some cool insights that jive with this article:

* A spreadsheet is essentially a functional program

* Why ask biz/financial analysts to work in a paradigm other than spreadsheet - its been honed to their task over decades now, instead programmers should better work with it.

* There are very cool human-in-the-loop workflows that can come out of this symbiosis, let the computers do what they are good at, and the people do their part, rather than force one into the role of the other.

Note: I'm not involved in Resolver systems in any way, I just think they have a neat product. Serious questions are probably better directed to them, but I think they are HNers too, so maybe they can chime in.
Async I/O and Fork-Join
I know there have been several chording patches for sam, but I don't think any of them work reliably.
50 (mostly) free social media tools you can’t live without in 2012
At Goldman Sachs they have a programming environment called SecDB that most business is done in. The language, Slang, is a dynamically typed scripting language similar to Python/Ruby.

One of the many reasons Goldman's strategies group has been so successful for the past 15 years or so is because they don't hit a productivity brick wall of emailing broken excel sheets to each other the way many other financial orgs do.
From the users stand point; it just gets jumpy; and your input doesn't match the output.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8ak20j48w1A

If you have ever used a non-laser tracking mouse on a wood surface you have a good idea of what its like.

What appears to be happening is that there is a short from the output of the touchpad to the motherboard. Removing the little piece of foil that appears to be 'grounding' the trackpad from the screw 100% fixed it (for me).
you can't imagine a simple physics problem? i understand that they DID travel through an atmosphere, but the basic mechanics involved can be understood just using projectile motion equation without taking the effects of air drag.
The F.A.A. says it will take a “fresh look” at the use of iPads on planes.
Likely bowing to public pressure, the F.A.A. has agreed to take a fresh look at the use of e-readers and iPads on planes during taxi, takeoff and landing.
"Even though the motivation may have been pure -- to make people care about the real human costs of our consumerism -- in the end the lies have detracted from that cause."

Exactly.

I'm all for the careful taking of artistic license to convey the emotional truth of a setting. But license extends only to one's impressions of a scene, and not to the factual details. There's clearly a line, between the "truth" of one's impression and outright fiction, that Daisey -- and others like him -- feel pretty comfortable crossing these days.

For example, let's imagine that I've just come back from touring a very dour, depressing factory in Shenzhen. The place was subject to severe security measures -- creating an atmosphere that would have been quite striking to any foreign visitor like myself. In order to express the emotional impact of what I saw, I might consider the following two sentences:

"The factory was under such tight surveillance that a patrol of armed guards around its perimeter wouldn't have seemed out of place."

or

"The factory was under such tight surveillance that armed guards patrolled its perimeter."

Both sentences convey the "emotional truth" of the scene, but the second is quite obviously a falsification. What troubles me is how free people today feel to go with Sentence 2. In fact, leaping that seemingly fine line places the entire story squarely in the domain of fiction. And the work should then be labeled and presented accordingly -- both by its author, and by those who exhibit it on his behalf.

To your point, even if 90% of Daisey's story is factually accurate -- even if 99% of it is -- that little bit of fabrication calls the validity of the entire piece into doubt. And that's a damned shame. It's so easy, and so tempting, to take one small step and wind up over a gaping brink.
I honestly don't understand the driver issues - I've installed Linux on a number of different machines, and I've never had any driver issues myself (certainly not when using a preconfigured DE).

That said, I don't think the MacBook Air is the only (or even the best) solution for an Ultrabook. I've heard good things about Lenovo's series, and while it's not an Ultrabook, my HP Envy has always run Arch Linux splendidly - I couldn't be happier with it.
One of the better treatments of __get__ and __set__ I've seen. Descriptors are deep and powerful magic, and a bit complex, but when they are appropriate, they are less complex than the alternatives, and allow for cleaner interfaces.
My point is that there is nothing* preventing any native app from including code to update itself. Over time, I believe that more and more native apps will do this. For example, Firefox is moving in that direction now.

* Except for in the case of iOS. Apple has a policy that apps are not allowed to update themselves. But there's still no technical limitation.
In a way it's easier though. Now I instinctively remember to plug in my phone every night, whereas on a dumb phone I wouldn't have a good routine for charging it and would often have it die at inopportune times.
The "Small Steps" It Takes to Build a Multibillion Dollar Business
The human race excels at engineering shovels and hammers, knives and other primitive tools; for anything more complex than that our capabilities are still pretty much infantile.

Give it a few thousand years. If we can manage to survive it, the miserable suckiness of our software will taper off.
What a fabulous perversion of the licence fee concept! The fee is meant to enable the BBC to provide independent journalism in the UK, and so they now decide that something that's not funded by the fee is not available in the Uk???

How bizarrely stupid.
We definitely agree there.

Uncommon phrases are not that difficult to think of though; my own example is the only hit on google for that phrase.
I've found that my SG2 battery lasts far longer when I enable Power Saving Mode it's a great feature. I get a full "day" out of it i.e. about 10 hours.
Common as well in first-millenium middle-east, as in Petra[0] or Mada'in Saleh[1], and there were quite a few cliff-dwelling people in precolumbian north-america, the most well known probably being the Anasazi which had well-known under-outcropping dwellings (e.g. Cliff Palace) but also actual cave dwellings like Tsankwawi[2] or very-close-to-cave dwellings like the House of Many Windows[3].

[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Petra

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mada%27in_Saleh

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tsankawi

[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:House_of_Many_Windows.JPG
This is a lot of words to pursue a false premise. There's nothing inherently more battery consuming about 4G. It's just the way the current phones chipsets are done.
Fair point but the 9700 is over 2 years old - and when it came out it had better battery life than the competition. The 9900 which recently came out has better specs and still a good battery life. What's killing Blackberry IMO is that it's nowhere near as good a pocket computer as iPhone or high end Android devices. The apps are much more difficult to install and upgrade as far too many reboots are required. And the difficult app development environment means there are far fewer apps.

I think consumers have spoken: "We love great pocket computers and we're willing to sacrifice voice quality, battery life, and data efficiency to get it."
I'm Canadian.

I guess we're both guilty of being ignorant of distant lands.
"Torvalds"

Do you have a link?
You wrote that this was the first time you had ever made any contributions to a project. You therefore have no idea of what is expected for this situation. You state that it wasn't what you expected. You haven't explained why what you expected is reasonable, vs. being the views of an irate snowflake.

You also omitted what you did, other than waiting, writing a blog post complaint about it, and linking to your own post from Hacker News. In it you characterized your viewpoints as something which should generally be applied to all projects, when it's mostly applicable to those which want to encourage participation by new people.

And yes, your term 'commandments' is very strong - you take on the persona of lawgiver when you use it.

A longer discussion of some of the issues is at http://producingoss.com/en/managing-volunteers.html .
Region locking is not limited to only the BBC. Region locking is just run of the mill stupid.