skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think that’s a fine statement to make if you qualify who “we” are. If you mean people concerned with practical objectives, you may be right. I caution against rhetoric that might be mistaken for suggesting that your point of view encompasses everyone reading your arguments.

Fair point. That line was actually meant as a direct response to cstross's "We need people like RMS," but I botched the parallel construction. The "we" there should be the same "we" that cstross was talking about.

one thinks of moral arguments as a way to achieve practical goals, while the other thinks that practical arguments are a way to achieve moral goals

That's an interesting way to think about it, but for me at least, neither of those characterizations is accurate. I think practical arguments are a way to achieve practical goals. I oppose the philosophy of the FSF, because AFAICT, they're making moral arguments to achieve moral goals. You seem to consider morality and practicality to be two sides of the same coin, where I see them as quite separate.

What I dislike about the RMS position is that it seems to consider tinkering, and perhaps geek culture in general, as inherently good and goals in their own right. I take a more utilitarian view: tinkering is good insofar we benefit from the results. (That "we" is very broad by they way. Users of technology and humanity in general.)

[turns out I can still edit the gp, so I fixed that line]
How the fuck is it a "downgrade"? You get higher resolution.
They sell a thunderbolt->gigbit ethernet adaptor for $30 with the air pro.
I'm assuming that they only tracked mouse usage, but I would assume many "advanced" users would make extensive use of the default keyboard shortcuts. I wonder if it could skew the data.
I bought a Motorola Lapdock for my Atrix for £50 (about $80) in a sale. It seems really cool but hardly gets any use as I have a real laptop with a proper desktop OS.
Bad developer might get rich, good developer will never get rich.
The scroll bar numbers make me further believe that OS X Lion's scroll bars are a bad design. My computer is not a tablet... saving ~10 of 1920 pixels is not something I needed or wanted.
VAT is "easy" in the sense that it is easy to figure out, but it is difficult in the sense that the administrative burdensome exceeds the burden associated with a sales tax by many orders of magnitude.
TB display is 1) glossy, meh 2) only has the Apple connectors, so it's not usable by non-Apple equipment at all. Even when you use exclusively Apple laptops, it's a pain to not be able to plug servers/etc. into them temporarily. It's also too big to carry -- one use case for this kind of thing is to set up somewhere for a couple days (hotel room, consultant at a desk, etc.), where bringing a laptop and small dock is reasonable, but a 27" display, not as much. There's also the somewhat-longer replacement cycle on monitors; I'm fine with Dell 3011s or even 3008s from...2008, but all my laptops are 2011+.

Even when setting up hotdesks for guests, it's unclear if you could put just a TB display in them -- enough people will have non-TB macs, or non-macs, to require something else. Maybe you could have some percentage TB display, but a good third-party dock + a display which can take multiple inputs (DVI, HDMI, MDP via adapter, TB to adapter to monitor) seems like a better choice. Uglier, yes.

For personal/home use in a dark room with only 2011+ macs, and if you have a spare 15" for other temporary use, then sure, it's a good option.
17" models seem to be disappearing all over. Lenovo has dropped them from all product lines except the "Essential G." System76 has dropped their 17" model. Since I've been thinking about getting a 17" Linux laptop this is getting a bit annoying.
The actual quality is damn good, to me at least... I am still using a macbook pro as my daily that must be at least 6 or 7 years old now. (Intel core 2 duo) Maybe I am lucky, but it has been around the world with me many times, dropped and had 3 full glass spills into the keyboard. (2 were milk) BP size spills, as in, liquid was flowing out the back and the felt of the cd drive and also somehow the inside of the screen has stains. It still runs with no problems. I bumped up the ram and hard drive, and have been through 3 batteries. I have replaced the keyboard after one of the milk spills. The more we go through together, the harder it is to part... Retina screen sounds good tho.
Some notes on the recent Windows Azure launch
From the original linked article: "It explains the jobless recoveries of the past and how each recent economic cycle produces higher money figures, yet lower employment. It explains why we are seeing debt driven events that circle the globe."

The graph and data don't explain it, they merely demonstrate it.
Alright, I've just read the paper and I'm surprised that it got published in Nature. I mean, as far as crystal ball gazing goes, saying that "shit might, y'know, change in the future and stuff" is pretty reliable, but I'm not really sure how it counts as science.

Link to actual paper (may or may not work outside the ivory tower I currently occupy, someone please check and let me know): http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v486/n7401/full/nature1...

edit: Apparently it doesn't, but try this one (pdf)
http://www.stanford.edu/group/hadlylab/pdfs/Barnoskyetal2012...
Here's a forum thread posted by someone who's using a Supermicro Intel C606-based board with dual xeon E5s and 128GB of memory:

http://tonymacx86.com/viewtopic.php?f=169&t=55963

Looks like they had trouble getting the network functional, but everything else worked fine.

32GB of ECC ram compatible with a motherboard like that would only run you $300:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820161...

Apple charges $975 for an upgrade from 6GB to 32GB. Highway robbery.
Every team is different and in the teams that I have worked in, Git commits and Task Trackers don't usually contain the same type of information I present in a standup.

Git commits are way too technical for non-engineers and task trackers either have too much information (i.e debate on how to do X and Y) or too little information (i.e just a simple task title).
At least credit card debt has fallen across the board.

"The survey also confirmed that Americans are shifting the kinds of debts that they carry. The share of families with credit card debt declined by 6.7 percentage points to 39.4 percent, and the median balance of that debt fell 16.1 percent to $2,600."

http://finance.yahoo.com/news/family-net-worth-drops-level-1...
I thought Referly was pretty cool and decided to sign up and created my own link for the new Apple MBP.

But when I click on the claim rewards link: http://refer.ly/claim

It's telling me a different story (compared to on their main page - Earn rewards like whoa.)about getting the rewards.

"During the beta period we are not yet able to redeem your rewards, but we are saving them for you.

We'll let you know as soon as you can claim them."

I really felt like being Bait and Switch'ed.... Totally not whoa at this point.
The link does not work outside the ivory tower. (But thanks for posting anyway.)
I have two MacBook Pro's from 2007 which are still running strong. These are the 2.4 Ghz Core 2 Duo machines with 4 GB's of ram. They have been through a lot and I've had Apple fix various issues over the years on both of them, but disposable they are not.

I've replaced the batteries for them, actually, I've had Apple give me new batteries due to them failing early... but I've never had issues with Apple not servicing my laptop. They have dents in them, they have scratches from wear and tear, they have stickers all over them, but they still work extremely well. Still run the latest version of OS X, still run all of the software I use on a daily basis.

I used to own an iBook that I had purchased in 2004, an iBook G4, when I purchased my new MBP in 2007 I sold my iBook to my dad and he used it till 2010. The iBook is still up and running, it is simply too slow for my dads needs so he bought a new MacBook Pro and absolutely loves it.

This is basically a longwinded way of saying that I disagree with your assessment that they are disposable machines. The amount of life and longevity in a Mac are to be envied, and the way they hold their value even after a couple of years is simply awesome.
Show HN:My weekend project - IndexedDB API polyfill on WebSql.
Though I agree that it's good (awesome, even), it should be noted that only one of those ports is a LAN port. The other is WAN only.
OK, so what's the game plan?
Again, no Nvidia CUDA support for scientific computing. Not even faster ATI cards... I think my next workstation is going to be Linux on Dell or HP.
"Instant access to this article: $32"
I think people are ignoring the end plan.

Native Client isn't for running apps quickly. It's for finally letting Google create a sandbox that they can run their own browser in.

Probably won't happen until HVM support is growing at a certain level.
The World's Best (and Worst) IT Cities to Work and Play
Show HN: I made a java applet for some friends, you might like it.
From Neuron to Whole Brain
I would feel that way about Rick Santorum if (and only if) I wanted people's views to move closer to his. This is not a statement about his opinions, but about how his opinions influence the public discourse. Likewise for RMS.
Forking it and losing access to Google Play? I find that highly unlikely.

They already control their devices, TouchWiz isn't simply a different launcher - what more control could they want (at such great cost)?
There is a typo in the first sentence: "This will be the companion course to my new book, "Learn C The Hard Way" whch I'm working on right now".

You probably want to fix that.
Can't you throw linux on a mbp?
> Modern smartphones have it right -- the user downloads an application, typically written in native code (or pseudo-native, for Android), and that application has only very limited access to the system.

But those access limits are enforced in similar ways to the access limits imposed by browsers on web content, and they are regularly broken in similar ways too. Just like a browser, the attack surface of a smartphone OS includes image rendering libraries, font rendering libraries, 2D and 3D graphics engines, media codecs, and, umm, JavaScript and HTML rendering engines.

Systems like iOS and Android have copied (and improved, I will freely admit) one of the web's most important features -- what the brower calls the same-origin policy. It's the idea that one developer's code doesn't automatically have access to the data from all your other apps/sites. But modern desktop operating systems still don't have this feature, which is one reason desktop users are still way more willing to use your web site than they are to download and run your native application.
http://www.reddit.com/r/hackintosh/
giflib is probably his most important project in terms of how many people use it

gpsd is probably the project he's working on right now with the most potential for widespread use and importance

forgeplucker http://home.gna.org/forgeplucker/ (oddly not linked at http://www.catb.org/~esr/software.html) is probably the project he's working on right now that's the most interesting (and ironically something i expect RMS would be a huge fan of)
Apple doesn't pretend anything. You're just making reasons up. They didn't state any reason for not providing iOS 6 for the first iPad. They are a company. Common sense dictates that if they saw a viable reason to invest the resources into the first iPad, they would have.
Certainly all the features consumers want aren't on 2.3. The latest and greatest android is 4.x and it has lots of nice features. 5.0 will be out soon with more good features.

Even if 2.3 was amazingly awesome and way better than anything else available, 20% of Android is still on 2.2.
Per http://www.macrumors.com/2012/06/11/apple-introduces-next-ge... , "up to 16GB of MacBook Air-like non-upgradable 1600MHz RAM."
Interesting, but note that it's a 2010 study. See also https://testpilot.mozillalabs.com/testcases/betaui
If I had to guess, Google will attempt to get it into the App Store before iOS 6 is released. Apple will probably end up delaying approval of the app for a few months after iOS 6 to let users become accustomed to using their own solution.
Environmental Studies major here who used to argue this type thing a lot online. Soundbite version of my general position:

It's the end of the world as we know it. And I feel fine.
You automatically assume hardware is trash when it doesn't support the latest OS but still works just fine with the older version, and you're blaming Apple for a throw-away culture? I think you need to look in a mirror....
They have been heavily involved in OpenCL for a while though, which is not tied to any specific graphics card manufacturer, or graphics cards specifically. There are some pretty nice OpenCL tutorials here btw: http://www.macresearch.org/opencl
They have a crystal ball?!?!
Not a bad guess but I'd be interested to actually know the details. Making it all by hand would be problematic for reasons beyond the sheer volume. How would one find a deep, diverse set of images of people pointing? How did the creators ensure they had images to cover all possible pixel positions within a certain proximity? It seems like it would take reviewing many more than 900 images to produce a final set of 900 that includes even coverage.
Apple seems to have moved away from disallowing apps for "duplicate core functionality" - we have GVoice, Sparrow, Camera+ now. I don't see how they could not allow it.
What an incestuous world the NY/SF tech scene must be if this is true. Well it might be true if you're a veteran VC. I can't see it being true for anyone else.

Tech is a pretty small world in general. These hubs may have more people overall, but they are also highly involved, highly connected people. A degree or two of separation is very, very common.
If you go to the bottom end, I suspect that there are a lot more 1 man consulting shops than 1 man software development shops. Yes, there are a lot of app developers out tere (a new phenomena that you didn't see much of 10 years ago), but there are a ton of people who do contract work for companies with one-off needs. Software that typically never is seen outside of the organization that asked for it.

As for the top end, Microsoft is a monster. But their model has not proven replicable by anyone else.

The ascendancy of consulting over software sales is also rooted in history. The first pure software company was the Computer Usage Company, in 1955. They were a consultancy. So was every other software company that followed for a decade. It was not until 1965 that Applied Data Research offered AUTOFLOW for sale. (The company was predominantly a consultancy.) And it was not until they filed a lawsuit that forced IBM to unbundle software from hardware that the industry as a whole accepted that software was something that could be sold. (Previously you bought hardware and software came with it.)
Source? My capslock is a control key and I use it heavily so I feel like I'd notice a 200ms delay, which makes me doubt it's done in hardware
Practice Mental Contrasting to Increase the Likelihood You’ll Complete a Project
Wow, I never thought about it like that. Imagine how much earlier the cold war would have ended if American actions effected the allocation of Soviet resources?
;)
The paper is pretty calm and careful about predictions, as far as I can tell. What assertion from the paper (which is behind a paywall at Nature.com, but can be found free online via sneaky methods like googling the title), specifically, do you feel is unsubstantiated or overblown?

Current models of the entire planetary ecosystem are admittedly quite primitive, but they often have proven to be predictive. That which is predictive and reproduce-able is science, by my reckoning. And, this paper is drawing on expertise across an extremely broad spectrum of real research, not merely models or educated guesstimation.
The CPU offered in the lowest Mac Pro today is the W3565, a "Bloomfield" model, based on Nehalim-B. For the record, that is now three generations behind, being behind the W36XX "Westmere"/Nehalim-C Xeon chips, the Sandy Bridge Xeon E3/E5, and the Ivy Bridge Xeon E3. A quick Googling cannot give me when the Ivy Bridge E5s are due out, but probably not soon.

EDIT: Apple does offer "Westmere" Xeons, but only as 6-core CPUs, which when looking at the website, is all but the cheapest option.
The Beatles Productivity
Too expensive... really too much
What's with the "This being Europe" being repeated over and over?
I noticed that, too -- adding a snap-on case to the Air solves that, at the expense of making it slightly thicker. However, I strongly prefer the texture/grippiness of the case, and it protects the laptop from a lot of damage (I still use a sleevecase, but I've had the laptop fall ~3m, cracking the plastic case, and otherwise fine). The cases have little feet on them, too, which raises it up to protect the connectors.

(http://www.speckproducts.com/satin-macbook-air-case-13-black...)
As successors to the Verix 2.5 and the damn-near-a-desktop Chimera, the Verix 530 and Mir 730 updates are both available with up to i7-3920XM (2.9Ghz) and can be configured with up to 32GB of RAM. They come in a lot cheaper than those new MBPs, too (but retina displays are nice).

I haven't used either, but I see good things about ZaReason, and I have been a little disappointed in my System76 Desktop (though I did heavily customize).
Scaling to 800x600 on a 1024x768 screen looks awful. I'm not sure that scaling a 2880x1800 screen to 1920x1080 is going be distinguishable from native resolution for anyone with eyes more than 15 years old.
No thanks I'd rather not sign up via Facebook.
Sorry to hear that - your rewards won't disappear, we just have been going a little faster than planned and need to build the redemption process. In the meantime, feel free to email me at danielle@refer.ly if you earn more than $10 and want to claim your rewards and we can do that via PayPal.

I'll add that to the site too. We're not cool with the bait and switch, so I'm glad you gave me that feedback
The alternative to a convoluted tax system which treats everyone fairly (analyzed in the context of each individual provision, not overall) is a simple tax system which treats everyone equally poorly.

Taxes are like C: a low-level language for effecting systemic policy. Under the U.S. Constitution, it is one of the primary vehicles through which Congress can enact national policy (the Commerce Clause generally being the other). If you do not need low-level access to the "hardware" of society, you use something other than taxes, but recognize that attempting national policy will be incredibly more complex and/or inefficient than using the proper "language."

In this sense, it is obvious why tax systems get more complicated: they take on more functions over time. This is the same reason that operating systems (also written in C) get larger and more complicated over time.
FWIW, my small app which uses MKMapView just to show a location - works fine on iOS6 as is. Of course. I'd guess that API (is and) will be backward compatible.
Ubuntu Unity has some neat tricks to make scrollbars more usable [1]. Instead of requiring users to hone in on the up/down arrows or the "thumb", hovering anywhere near the scrollbar brings up a widget that compactly encapsulates all this functionality. I don't care for Unity enough to start using it day to day, but this feature struck me as clever though radical.
I wish more universities taught courses along the lines of real 'hacking', or at least close to it. I just finished a course about Malware and Vulnerability Analysis/Reverse Engineering as part of my MS and it was fascinating. What is also interesting is that you actually have a fair bit of traditional computer science topics mixed in (SAT solving, algorithm analysis, compiler design, etc) but in a way that is so much more interesting than they are formally taught.
I haven't been able to determine - did their iMac line get anything? They all seem the same...

http://www.apple.com/imac/specs.html
http://web.archive.org/web/20110719193344/http://www.apple.c...
8GB of 1066 DDR3 was $400 from Apple until just recently. I laughed so loud in the office when I saw that on their website.
"This study concludes we better not exceed the 50 per cent mark of wholesale transformation of Earth’s surface or we won’t be able to delay, never mind avert, a planetary collapse.
We’ve already reached the 43 per cent mark through our conversion of landscapes into agricultural and urban areas, making Earth increasingly susceptible to an environmental epidemic."

I'm guessing this really means the land surface of the Earth, rather than the Earth's surface as a whole, as ~70% of the Earth's surface is water. Without access to the paper itself, I can't say whether or not this is an issue with the "media release" or the research itself, of course.
> People like ESR generally don't get taken seriously.

You realize that this is practically a textbook example of an ad hominem fallacy, right?
We're doomed, so load up on ammo, water, and forget about the conservation thing because it's futile.
$2,199 + 20% = $2,638.8 = 2,111€

Still doesn't explain a higher price.
As someone who appreciated the DVD drive because it could be removed and the space/connector used to install a second 2.5" hard drive, I see the removal of the DVD drive altogether as a negative.

This combined with on-board RAM and on-board SSD storage... are any of the components in these new retina display MacBook Pros replaceable?
How do you stay motivated when times are good?
Ask HN: How to protect myself as a 4th tech founder?
Hello,
I am a veteran tech person (backend developer) and was approached by 3 business people who know me from way back regarding an idea they had. They are looking for someone to help them implement it or at least a prototype with which they could ask for funds. The idea is viable and has something to it, and those people are connected in the right places to push this forward if they like. So unlike most offers gotten before this seems viable. My question is, if I decide to put the time and join them, how can I protect myself/minimize future risks (such as dilution), being a minority in this group [1/4 founder]? Are there any online sources or books how to handle such scenarios?

Notes:

* I am aware that the optimal way to go would be to find founders you trust, unfortunately some times for various reasons you need to settle for less.

* I assume there is no full proof solution, I just want to know what I can best.

* I assume most of those rules would apply for non-tech founders too, but what I am interested in knowing about (if such exists), are unique clauses that can protect tech founders in particular

Thank you and hope this will help others too
Yes, I was wondering the same thing. The difficult engineering problem here is first assigning pointing locations for every photo in the database. Because he didn't explain this step, I guess he just manually assigned each location for every photo.
How does one get foreclosed on while keeping their mortgage, insurance, and taxes current?
That is all true! Thanks for the clarification.

I believe the Ivy Bridge E5s aren't due until early 2013 at the earliest.
I find the landing page overcrowded and thus confusing. The two slides on the blue background change too rapidly and the download button is ill-placed and looks somewhat ugly. Viewed on a 1366x760 notebook display which may be responsible for most of the bad feeling, but it's still probably something you may need to look into.

I have never used a service like this before, but that can change in the future. Still as a Windows user, this service does not stand out from the others for me.

Hope you find this useful.
That's a good lobby from the tech people in Croatia. Hats off!