skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It's all pseudoscientific bullshit, of course they're not going to be specific. You'd be just as well off listening to any of the religious "end of days" rants.

Edit: Here's the actual paper: http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v486/n7401/full/nature1...

I'll reserve my full judgement until I've read it, but I don't have high hopes. It seems quite odd to invent an entirely new scientific discipline in one fell swoop along with making such a bold prediction.

PPS: After reading the paper my opinion is that this is far more pseudoscience than not, by a wide margin. There are some points worthy of further study (biodiversity studies, effects of the impact of human activity comprising a large and growing part of the world's energy budget, changes in ecosystems due to fragmentation due to human activity, etc.) but this paper steams by those topics at a thousand miles an hour. There is no theory here, only the vaguest outlines of one. Even the core terms (state, state shift, forcings) are vauguely and generically defined, if at all. There is no model, no predictions, and no evidence.

Flatly put the ideas put forth here are non-falsifiable. At its simplest "state shift theory" can be boiled down to "change causes change, sometimes permanently". Figure 2 is a graph which plots "global ecological state" against "global forcing". There are no numbers and neither term is defined either quantitatively or qualitatively. As a side note the essay references the now debunked theory of Mt Kilimanjaro's glaciers melting due to global warming, despite the lack of evidence of local temperature increases there (the glaciers have been sublimating away and snowfall changes have failed to replace the lost material.)

Nature should be ashamed to have printed this, even in an editorial context. It is so lacking in hard scientific rigor and so generic and amenable to any interpretation (there is no evidence presented whether "state change" could be beneficial or detrimental to humans or to Earth's species) that it doesn't belong within a thousand meters of a journal as prestigious as Nature. There is even a chance, though admittedly slim, that this could be a hoax, the work of someone who wishes to discredit the scientific establishment of today and its seemingly infinite ability to bend its standards and tarnish its history to print anything so long as the conclusions are politically correct (human population reduction, switching to "green" energy and "sustainable" agriculture, etc.)

These topics are too important for us to abandon scientific rigor in our attempt to understand our world and how it works and will change. We cannot afford to slip into an era of superstition and ignorance where conclusions are assumed and evidence is irrelevant.
Like this https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/1.4/intro/tutorial01/

or this http://ruby.railstutorial.org/ruby-on-rails-tutorial-book
The root issue isn't his fanaticism, but the manner in which he chooses to articulate it. He is so dogmatic about even the most inane minutae, that he turns much of his presentation into a self-satire (if it was not for the fact that his presentation style is so dull and pedantic...which it is. As public speakers go, I have never been wowed by him; even Bruce Perens, who is by all accounts the Emo Phillips of FOSS, does a better job).
http://stream.qtv.apple.com/events/jun/126pihbedvcoihbefvbhj... works in iTunes for Windows.
OK, so I set my DPI to 200% to check, and I found errors in every app I tried (list below), except for Dropbox, and MonoDevelop. Mostly the errors involve not everything scaling up; certain images or pieces of text will be too small.

That said, it was all purely visual stuff, and the errors were more subtle than I was expecting, so maybe my prediction was a little strong. Though if you track off the beaten path, I'm sure it gets worse - that VB6 App you use to track warehouse supplies may be completely broken.

I tried whatever I use day to day:

Opera, Firefox, Skype, MSN, FlashDevelop, Unity, VLC, UltraEdit, Dropbox, MonoDevelop, TPCView, SmartDefrag
This is naive as it fails to consider that Amazon has probably made a considerable loss on the Kindle hardware business to create this market the OP is lucky enough to participate in. This investment alongside the investment in their own AWS infrastructure is why there is a reasonably sized market for ebooks right now. Also how about the cost of cellular data?

The cost might be a little high but if you don't like it, you have the choice to take your business elsewhere.
This is confusing. Here is someone with a FANTASTIC first outing of a book and he's whinging about it?

The author raises $8K on Kickstarter, sells his book for $10, and is complaining that the 'gorilla' is taking a bigger percentage of the take?

Using his numbers: of 73%/11%/12%/1% his money was $1117/$231/$333/$20 respectively. So he made three times as much money selling through Amazon as he did on the next closest service (PDF).

So what is his complaint? That he didn't read the contract completely? Would he have forgone selling his book on Amazon if he had? Assuming he was trying to get $7/book out of them would he have raised his book price to $15 to pump that price up? And what would that have done to his volume?

Its all well and good to posit that you could store your book on an FTP server at Hurricane electric but how would people find it? How would they read it?

And then why all this angst over the first few months? The kickerstarter [1] only funded in April, here it is June he has his book out, most travel magazines have like a 3 month lead time on their content, plus folks need to review it etc. What was he expecting? And more importantly since this reads like he is hugely disillusioned by the experience exactly why was he expecting what he was expecting? Didn't he 'get' that he could not have published this book at this level of success at all prior to Amazon?

[1] http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/andrewhyde/this-book-is-...
Progressive Cache Population
It allows us to hire the best people in the country.

World, no?
3g charges can be pretty hefty...
Fair enough, but yeah, there are a few clues as to who I am and the Svbtle network is becoming pretty well known at a quick pace.

I suppose that I could update my blurb in the sidebar to better explain, but generally speaking anyone who's reading that site is someone who knows me anyway. Getting linked on HN is fringe case for me.
Yeah, flash is still super pricey. I run a pair as well in my mbp. The ability to configure lesser options to make it cheaper counts for something as well.

With Apple you are stuck with very few yet pricey base configurations to start from.
I've tried using the 125% and 150% DPI modes in Windows 7 on a 1080p display and the support is still rather primitive. My HP ENVY 15 actually shipped with 125% mode enabled by default. Lots of icons, graphical elements, and many fonts become blurry/pixelated when enabled.

I'm guessing a reason we haven't seen high DPI screens from Dell/HP/Sony/etc is partially because the Windows OS doesn't really support it that well just yet. Hopefully things have changed in Windows 8.
I wouldn't count on that, because I actually had to update my macbook air just to get the Almighty Thunderbolt Display to work. In fact, my previous MBA (2010 generation, display port)didn't even power the thing up (it's powered exclusively over thunderbolt).
Moderation as the Exercise Sweet Spot
Intel -- Executive claims Android isn't ready for multi-cores
Except for the part where I can fire up a $19.95/month Linode instance for running MySQL, sure.

The advantage of Amazon is not cost, it's flexibility and ease-of-use. Questionable ease-of-use at that, given how horrid their web UI is.

The vendor lock-in is concerning as well (not for RDS, more for other things).
This illustrates the issue I highlighted in another thread: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4097141

The fact that Apple keeps hardware and, increasingly, software, so tightly controlled leads to a situation like that of this "new" Mac Pro. If the Apple hardware ecosystem were open like that of Windows you'd have major companies all over the world evolving the platform in wonderful ways. Performance would go up and prices would come down.

There are lots of use cases where the user couldn't give a crap about a nice and polished enclosure. You are paying dearly for design you don't need. If you want to pay for design, fine, do so, but to a lot of us it means nothing.

Case in point: We have several workstations setup for Finite Element Analysis of heat and fluid flow. They are dual quad core i965 Extremes. They run overclocked at 4.0GHz with memory overclocked to 2.0GHz. They have 64GB of DDR3. All fluid cooled. Tons of storage as well. They also have dual NVidia graphics cards and sport three 24 inch 1920 x 1200 LCD monitors. Total cost, about $3,500. Including the three monitors and the OS hard drive.

These are monster machines in terms of performance and they still cost less than a Mac Pro. We have three Mac Pro's as well.

I would really like to see Apple open it up. A lot of interesting things could come of it.

Because their hardware is not subject to competitive forces, we will now be stuck with a less-than-desirable incremental update for probably three years, if not more.
"it ensures that it stays open and that improvements are given back"

Actually, this phrase can be understood in two ways:

1. I want to ensure that the software is improved and the improvements are shared.
2. I want to ensure that the if the software is improved, then improvements are given back. If it's not happening, I prefer it not to be improved or used.

The difference between these two are the difference between OSS and FSF. I think the latter doesn't have better moral claim at improving the world than the former, since it bundles positive environmental change (making better code available for more people) with control over other people's behavior (I won't allow you to benefit from the change unless you act as I like). It's like one person giving to charities with no preconditions and another giving only to charities that support his political views. Both approaches are valid, but the latter doesn't have a base to feel morally superior to the former.
It'll show up here too http://www.youtube.com/user/Apple/videos

That or give me 30-40 minutes to get it and convert it (its 2.18g O.O)
Don't forget about people that don't reside in the United States
Sure. The right to tinker is required for actual tinkering, and a right that's never exercised is pointless. Regardless, I don't consider the right to tinker an end in its self. The pleasure of tinkering is utterly unimportant compared with the good that a tinkerers work can bring into the world.

But who said anything about the pleasure of tinkering? I don't think that was ever RMS' position.

As for freedom of speech, I think the analogy is flawed. The technology equivalent of speech is invention, and the freedom to invent doesn't require anything like the GPL. The freedom to tinker is more like the freedom to copyedit somebody else's work. And hey, I'm for it! Remix culture is great stuff. But it's not in the same league as freedom of speech.

That was specifically about X vs having the right to do X; I didn't meant to make a broad comparison between them. Subjects in analogies aren't supposed to map 1:1 in everything.

When it comes right down to it, though, I don't consider freedom of speech an end in its self either. The value of free speech is the sort of society it produces, not the speech its self. I favour limits to speech when the effect of that speech is not a net good to society. Now, those situations are few and far between, but they do exist. Yelling "fire" and all that; our legal system has a long and nuanced tradition of weighing the issue in various situations.

But "fire" is an exception mostly because Free Speech is supposed to protect political speech and we can say in a mostly objectively way that "fire" doesn't fit.

But what about political speeches that are arguably not a net good to society, like e.g. calls to pointless (in your opinion) wars? Should they be banned? If not, why not, and aren't you contradicting yourself?

The point is that dogma and fanaticism are counterproductive, whatever your goals are. The FSF is certainly not alone in this.

Another word might be idealism.
I have found A/B/n testing to be very helpful. The more you can track about the users interaction with the page before a successful or failed conversion the better. You can use this info the determine where along the line users are falling off the path you want them to be on. After a few days to a week (depending on traffic) take a look at the results of the A/B tests and eliminate what isn't working. Apply the lessons learned from the in page analysis to build a new B test and repeat. I've found that over the course of a month or so following this method I can double and sometimes triple my conversion rates. Sometimes the smallest details that you wouldn't have predicted make all the difference.
You're talking about something between fire sale price and liquidation value; this far under-states value from an economic perspective. It is the equivalent of saying AAPL isn't worth $571 because if literally every holder of Apple stock decided to sell today they wouldn't get that price. It remains plausible that an astute family selling their house in 2006 or 2007 would have captured most if not all of the premium in their home's value to today's prices.
Is there any way to fix the keyboards on the new Thinkpads? I read somewhere about some people replacing the keyboards on the last line of Thinkpads with more robust ones. I was thinking of getting one of the new ones but hearing this stuff about the keyboard is a real turnoff
Sure, just not a fan of the premium price. I'd be willing to pay it though for that pixels-per-inch.
Marco actually wrote a nice article about this: http://www.marco.org/2011/11/02/scaling-down-the-mac-pro

Personally, I wouldn't be entirely surprised if Apple was just keeping the Mac Pro alive long enough for third-party Thunderbolt accessories to catch on. Once you can plug in all the expansion you needed over Thunderbolt, what's the point of the Mac Pro? Just faster CPU and more RAM -- so maybe they'll release a special Mac Mini that's like a normal Mini but with Xeon processors and a ton of memory.

They have a "Mac mini server" today, and they've had an "Xserve cluster node" in the past, so it wouldn't be completely out of line for Apple to release a special version.

A lot of us wouldn't find it ideal, but it could be an answer to the "I need a Mac with 32GB of RAM" question, and Apple does seem to prefer all-in-one boxes that users plug their own external accessories into.
Actually I fired this up in firefox 13 on osx and it started streaming. So apparently safari or firefox (at least 13).

Wasn't expecting that to be honest.
Which monitors did you buy? How did you get them so cheaply?
I assumed that "criminal defendant" referred to MU/DotCom, but then I find myself unable to parse the sentence into something meaningful. Can anyone explain please?
@tgrass: I agree.
At a guess: the author feels ripped off in the same way I feel ripped off when I buy an airline ticket and have to pay $25 to check a bag, $12 for a sandwich, etc. If amazon's fee is $4.50 they should say so instead of burying a cost almost equal to their quoted fee in fine print.

Edit: also, amazon grants themselves MFN status [1] at the authors' expense. So they exploit their market size to make sure authors can't make up for the kindle being nearly 100% more expensive than competitors.

By "price-match" we mean where we sell the Digital Book in one
or more of the Available Sales Territories at a price (net of
taxes) that is below the List Price to match a third party's sales
price for any digital or physical edition of the Digital Book, or
to match our sales price for any physical edition of the Digital
Book, in any one of the Available Sales Territories.

[1] https://kdp.amazon.com/self-publishing/help?topicId=A29FL26O...
The Oatmeal Fights Legal Threat, Raises $20,000 in an Hour
Well you said it yourself - if you don't want to pay for a fancy case - don't get a mac...
As every banker knows, debt is an asset.

The bubble said everyones houses were worth 20 gazillion dollars. One person is persuaded to sell thier house
for 10 million dollars, another borrows 10 m to buy it.

The seller is very happy, The borrower is obligied to repay and the bank borrowed 8 m in someone elses cash and invented theremaining 2.

Is there an economist who could tell me what that 2 m that gets created by bank lending actually does to inflation ?
The only problem I could see would be if Amazon sales were cannibalizing other avenues, leading to a lower overall profit. But I'm sure even if this is the case, Amazon's volume more than makes up for it.

So yes, this rant is pretty pointless. This is the way every marketplace works nowadays: iTunes or Themeforest are the same. They take a big cut and reinvest the profits in marketing and advertising to grow the marketplace larger (and thus generate more profits for you in the long run).
There is no way that the average purchase costs $2.50+ to deliver, even amortized over the lifetime of the book.

Amazon can charge whatever they want; I just think they should be transparent about what people's net pay will be. It's disingenuous to advertise that you take a 30% cut plus "delivery costs," and then mark up the "delivery costs" to over 25% of the average book price. Apple uses a similar paradigm (processing fees do not come from their 30%), but they only deduct the actual processing fees.
I thought the claim was that the earth's environment is subject to critical transitions, that critical transitions are by their very nature highly disruptive on all levels of a system, and that if you statistically map the environment then it looks strongly as though we look like we are approaching another one rather quickly.

The thing is, if we are approaching a critical transition then it is very hard to say what the precise outcome would be as the whole point of these events is that they are highly chaotic. Is a bit like asking where a particular molecule of water is going to be after boiling a pan half dry.
Looks like your ctrl+f isn't working.
"What is the marketplace doing to earn this percentage of my sales?" seems to be a common question asked by sellers. The last thing on their minds it would seem is the fact that the marketplace is selling their item for them and providing the infrastructure so that they don't have to handle all that PITA interaction. This is especially true of Amazon. You get a lot of value by selling on their marketplace. The high number of sales, delivered to a device that many people own and enjoy using to consume content, the trust associated with the Amazon brand and the reviews by "real people."
Chrome's sandbox is not equivalent to having a separate jail for every web site. It is designed to prevent web content from attacking non-browser apps and data, not to prevent one web page from attacking another (though Chrome, like all browsers, has other mechanisms to do this).

Chrome does not guarantee one process per tab, or even per origin. If you reach its internal process limit -- or if a page does something like window.open() that gives it a reference to another tab -- then it will render multiple sites in the same processes, not sandboxed from each other: http://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=81877
Having a great time with the book, sorry if I came off as whining.

A few notes. A high % of the KS money went into rewards (books printed averaged $20 shipped).

I did make 3x though Amazon, but if I had gone through gumroad, I would have done double the revenue.

Biggest tl;dr complaint is that as an avid reader of about a book a week I had no idea that authors paid both 30% of the total price plus the delivery fee. The other main competitors don't do this... just found it odd and wrote about it.
Tracking Not Required: Behavioral Targeting
What problem do you have with the chiclet keyboard on Thinkpad? For me, it is awesome, and ever since I started using one 18 months ago, my laptop buying criteria became "Is it a Thinkpad with chiclet keyboard?"

I am glad Lenovo switched all lines to chiclet keyboard in the latest refresh. I think it is a bold but calculated move.
I am sure every good developer should have crossed bad developer phase at some point in his life as a developer. Here is a different take on some of the points (sorry if you find offensive) -

Bad developer considers himself as a programmer, responsible for generating lines of code

Generating lines of code that still works is not bad and it’s not uncommon. As long as the developer knows the language and makes something work, it’s not a bad thing.

Bad developer understands only the technical problem at hand.

Bad developer is focused on building classes and methods and configuration files, but does not get the big picture.

Bad developer knows only the components he’s written.

It’s fairly common to have a workplace where the developer doesn’t get to know all the details because of restriction but as long as he codes the problem to spec and gets everything correct, he is not a bad developer.

Bad developer only sticks to what he knows.

Bad developer does not have time to learn.

Developers cannot be tagged bad just because they don’t learn technologies apart from what they are using. Some stick to one technology and they are pro in that.

Good developer pushes himself to create bug-free code; bad developer leaves it to QA to find bugs to fix.

Even developers termed good tend to let QA find bugs.

Bad developer completes tasks.

What more is required other than getting the task complete.

Bad developer will wait until the finest details are available.

Without proper specs defined, even a good developer will have a hard time finishing a task. The more you think and question upfront, the better it is to code.

Bad developer thinks only about the elegance of his code and leave the job of delivering value to others.

True, he did his part and now it’s up to other teams from the chain to carry forward.

A developer who can solve a complex problem in a code that is easier for any developer to read and understand is a good developer. A developer termed good who writes code that is harder to read and understand by any other programmer is bad.
Seriously, is there a patent on centering the trackpad? Center the trackpad, center the keyboard, and do not put a numeric keypad on unless you have found a way for me to type while still looking straight at the display.
> I really doubt you can get the same performance out of a MacBook Pro. Professional media software (audio or video) takes a -lot- of power. Trying to run through a big multi-track synth setup would probably bring a MBP to it's knees.

With audio, it is seriously child's play. Compression is about as CPU intensive as you can get with audio outside of voice recognition, and it just isn't there.

Video is mostly offloaded on to GPU's these days. The MBP GPU is definitely a big step down from what you can get on a desktop, but you can always get a dedicated bit of hardware that you attach to your MBP to get that job done. The real killer on video has traditionally been I/O. With SSD's and Thunderbolt, you have some alternatives.

> I still do not think that Intel can cram in the same level of performance into a 35W chip that use to go into a 90W platform just 2-3 years ago.

You might want to check out Moore's Law.
It seems like the telco's are the ones making out here. They charge Amazon some ridiculous fee to deliver the content and they charge the consumer for a data plan for the device.
Big-Time Techies Want To Turn SF's Bay Bridge Into A Glittering Light Show