skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Last I checked, we haven't had a civil war in a while. If we had a decently sized "massive expansion of government" on, say, a planetary scale (for a planet-sized problem), wouldn't that therefore lead to less wars?
Scientific computing, system modeling, numerics, CAD/CAM, visualization, developing highly concurrent software, event processors, rendering, machine learning (esp vision/video/spatial stuff), genetic algorithms, databases, GIS, crypto, traffic processing, theorem proving, compiling stuff, exploratory data mining. Gaming, maybe. I routinely saturate my MBP's 4 HT cores. It's also nice to develop on the same architecture you'll deploy to; helps with concurrency tuning.

Not that you can't run these on smaller devices; these are just easy ways to use up a lot of CPU.
Why load up at all then?
Amazon Digital Markup: 129,000%
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.

I mean for one thing, despite all the awesomeness that is Ivy-Bridge, 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.
I don't need to name more than 3 devices. You said the ENTIRE LINE was overpriced. You were wrong about that.

You're also wrong about "the industry" not taking long to surpass the devices in question; they have had 4-5 years to surpass all the devices I named. Ultrabooks still haven't surpassed the Air or beaten its price point, and Android phone hardware hasn't surpassed the iPhone or beaten its price point, etc.

You're just wrong. Own it. I own the latest MacBook Pro and used to work there, too, btw. :) I didn't accuse you of being anti-Apple. I said you posted an inaccurate, anti-Apple rant. Which you did. Peace.
Another 17" lover here. I think when I get one of these new ones -- which I will have to, at some point, I guess -- I'll also get a dental loupe so I can really use the resolution.

(Example: http://www.phillips-safety.com/store/product_info.php?cPath=...)
What is a specific scenario, aside from the climate change scenario we all know about, that could lead to collapse that's discussed in the paper?
Actually "1858" - the base for Modified Julian Days.

Although ironically MJD was invented in around 1958 to cope with a computer limitation.

vms is also famous for having one of the system time settings specified in "micro-fortnights"
It's definitely safer with a whitelist, however it is still riskier than not shipping Flash at all. A limited exploit might get around the whitelist, and then use any second exploit of Flash to break completely through.
I read recently that the Mac Pro accounts for less than %2 of Apple's Mac sales.

Since thunderbolt basically is a PCI express cable, there's nothing to stop people from building external cases that can hold PCI express cards, like the Mac Pro can. Since thunderbolt is becoming prevalent across the line, I can't really see a need for the Mac Pro so much anymore.

True it is nice in some situations to put all your hard drives and all your PCI cards in one box, but at %2 of the total sales (by units) the big old tower is less relevant these days.

The other thing the Mac Pro had was the highest end of Intels CPUs. If the sales aren't making the engineering effort worth it, then the answer Apple's intending people to take may be a high end iMac.

I edit a lot of HD in Final Cut X on my 2 year old Macbook Pro, and background rendering seems to have no trouble keeping up. I've not really felt CPU constrained in awhile with HD.
The data is from FF4 beta. So I think you're right, these are not your average users.
My problem with that line of reasoning is that the company has (had) over $100 billion in the bank. They have no reason to de-prioritize any area of the business that's making a profit. They have enough resources to pump into all their profitable lines of business and more.

Is the potential of pissing off dedicated customers worth the money they'll save? What will they do with the money they save? Add it to their unimaginably large mountain of cash?
Video game audio. He does all of our audio work. Sound effects, voice over, music composition, etc. I asked him what audio he used and his answer was Pro Tools, Digital Performer, and Peak. He's got a super top of the line Mac Pro that's only 2 years old and he's been salivating at the prospect of an upgrade for a long time.

He was extra pissed that the new machines don't even have Thunderbolt. He has many hundreds of gigabytes of audio libraries on a variety of external storage devices and just having Thunderbolt would be a pretty decent productivity improvement.
"everyone should have a laptop this advanced"

Now where have I heard that sentence before?
Dude, did you read the thesis? It's the main blue part at the top, like every paper in Nature.

It says that local ecosystems are known to go through critical transitions, and that what's make these transitions remarkable is that the tipping point is so hard to identify or predict. They are extrapolating this and saying that a global tipping point may exist as well. That's it.

You are right, it's incredibly vague and there isn't any awesome undeniable evidence. That's the whole point of the paper. "Hey guys, we might be screwing up our shit more than we think, we need to start taking more measurements" is basically the entire gist of the paper.
Rockin', dude. If I take you up on this I will absolutely let you know. :)
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4095602
Link doesn't work?
What is the "firefox button"? Does this exist in the linux versions?
I was bummed, too, but I can also see why Apple doesn't put as much effort in to the Pros anymore. First off, those machines are meant to have longer lifecycles given their bumped hardware. So when you take that in to account, the biggest piece of tech I can see missing is Thunderbolt, but the Pros are meant to be hooked to bigger things with fibre cards and other Ethernet connected SANs. As for video, being the expandable machine means it will probably have extra GPUs with their own, non-Thunderbolt video cards in, so it's completely erroneous. As for the software updates, Mountain Lion will run just fine, as will the updated versions of the pro apps.

I'd love an update as much as the next guy, but I take solace in the fact that my machine is a little less outdated than it can be, and understand that Apple is smart enough to know where their bread is buttered these days, even if it sucks.
If a product is still profitable, why discontinue it?
I don't think they had to rewrite the entire OS when they switched to intel. It only took 1 person over a span of 6 months to do the "conversion", and that 1 person was just doing it for fun. It wasn't until he finished that Apple decided to use his secret project as part of something bigger. I believe the wife briefly talked about this story on Quora. You can probably find the story if you google "marklar"
Late to this thread, but I posted this on May 31:

Facebook: Did they just pop the bubble and screw twitter?

http://abnerg.tumblr.com/post/24119345098/facebook-did-they-...

Two outstanding questions:
1. Can we be done with the advertizing business models please?
2. How much did the Facebook IPO really shift the private equity market?
I'm curious, why is it not possible to buy pre-configured, off-the-shelf dual or quad CPU PC systems?

I know that you can get dual CPU server motherboards and build your own system, but as far as I know no one sells a pre-built desktop system that looks anything like the Mac Pro (spec-wise).

EDIT: Looks like I was mistaken. You can get high-end PC workstations.
Well, for one, it's huge. I'd love to see a smaller package that could still hold as many internal drives and PCIe cards. Something that could sit comfortably on top of a desk or be easily rack-mounted would be nice.
It's almost amusing that this summary (don't have journal access, so haven't read the paper) doesn't bother to name any negative consequences of this so-called "planetary collapse". It's just "Shit. Bad stuff will happen. We're all doomed.", without even saying what the bad stuff is. Are they worried about agriculture? Species extinction? Disease? They don't say. How on Earth are we supposed to evaluate the likelihood of claims without knowing what the hell the claims are?
Agreed - congrats guys!

And Alex, just checked out Bitgym - great idea. Will be trying it next time I'm on the treadmill!
RestGit - Deploying APIs from My Github
> The world is moving towards polished aluminum etc.

I sure hope it isn't. The future cannot possibly be so grim and cold to touch.

It's funny how pre-conditioned some commenters are to love shiny&sparkly things. Many complained about "ugly" but nobody noticed the poorly positioned cheap touchpads, cheap glossy LCDs, flimsy lid hinges, excessive weight, you know... stuff that actually matters. Of all things missing you're only asking for "more aesthetic"? :)
Wow ... there are so many possible answers but I would definitely start with Javascript. Don't learn the whole language, just the "Good Parts". And that would be my first book recommendation - "Javascript: The Good Parts".

With that foundation, you could learn Coffeescript, NodeJS, JQuery, etc. Since you're talking about server side software, Javascript combined with NodeJS will give you both client-side (browser) and server-side capabilities.

You should take a look at the industries you want to join when you graduate to decide what back-end language you should learn. If you're working in a Fortune 500 company you're going to see lots of Java/J2EE. RoR is highly touted but not as wide-spread as you might guess. PHP and Perl are still widely used and there are popular Python frameworks as well.

Have a fun summer and good luck!
Do you ever question that narrative? I know it's a widespread one, and it seems to make sense, but I'm wondering how many of those who bring it up have retraced the research or have the background to even be able to retrace it.

This is not a dig at you -- who knows maybe you did do the research, and if not, it's a probably a good and reliable strategy to trust the consensus narrative by default.
Feeling lonely yet ?
I didn't really feel like bitly and referly were head to head competitors, but the new "public profile" pinterest type functionality makes it feel more that way.

The only thing referly is lacking are really detailed analytics (the "Bitly Pro" stuff). I suspect they'll add that over the summer.
Actually, Linus doesn't use a MBA because it is beautiful. He uses it because it is thin, light and portable.
The New Retina Display MacBook Pro: A downgrade from my current MacBook Pro
some of the iOS developers at my work use them just so they can compile faster.
The retina display is a big jump in display resolution.

Not all areas of tech allow this kind of big jump. For instance, battery life, or spinning disk access times.

So the new display technology is notable in that regard.
I think Shayan Zadeh (co-founder Zoosk) gave a great presentation on this topic a while ago:

Part 1: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZPLtR38-xVY

Part 2: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MbhmvXGQehg

Part 3: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MbLpbzWsi4U

TLDR; Leverage platform, take advantage of what you're given, but don't become dependent on it.
I have a Sony Vaio Core II Duo laptop. I bought it 2 or 3 years ago. The thing runs Linux great. I don't know why all the hardware works including suspend/resume. Maybe it's just old enough that the Linux community finally got around to supporting everything on it. It's a Sony too, so it has adequate design. Those Thinkpads are ugly.
A souped-up iMac and some sort of thunderbolt 'bay' for expansion cards would serve the pro market, one would think. A large-scale touch display would be on the wish-list as well. That's my complete guess as to where they might be headed. I can't really imagine that Apple is unaware of how important the pro market is to their image, if not the bottom line. Consider the strong ties with Pixar – they must get constant feedback into what a pro setup needs. I'm betting on a big iMac/Pro update in the fall.
I don't think the "overpriced" myth would ever be dispelled. Apple produces premium products, and premium products are typically associated with higher costs. Until Apple decides to become the walmart of laptops, people will always think they're selling overpriced goods.

It would be interesting to run an experiment where someone is shown 2 completely identical products, but one is marked as premium. Would that someone think the premium product is made with inferior materials to justify the identical pricing?
Who says the Mac Pro line is profitable?
I think you'd do well to pick just one, learn it and then build an app or two that exposes you to the whole stack - from HTML to SQL. Web development is a big world, and the language used on the server is only a very small part of the whole picture.
You mean somehow applying resources even less efficiently than soviet economic planners?

Is that even possible? I bet if the USA had tried such a tactic all that would have happened is a more efficient allocation.

Imagine the covert spy economists giving a policy 'recommendation' talk.

"We should take all the grain a farmer grows over a certain threshold. Thus the farmer will not be blinded by greed and will work hard to increase production for the good of the people. And just to be sure that said farmers have stately love in their hearts, let us cause a great famine in our bread bowl." would say the American spys as they outlay their plan to ruin the Soviet Union.

The soviet economists upon hearing their own plans recited word for word would realise how brilliant said plan was not. They would then roll a D20 and come up with a marginal better plan.
Uhm, I couldn't find any 15" ultrabooks on their site, just a 14" one. Is that one of the tradeoffs you were talking about? Still a very nice machine!
The Firefox button is shown when the menubar is hidden (View: Toolbars: Menu Bar, on Linux). The menubar is hidden by default on Windows Vista and Windows 7.

On Windows the Firefox button is orange and is integrated into the window's titlebar. This is not yet implemented on Linux, so on Linux it just appears in the tab bar.
Re-read what I wrote and think about it. I knew it would be open for creative interpretations like yours.

I did not attribute the Internet to Microsoft.

What I said is that "Microsoft enabled an incredible level of global competition" and it is this competition that, in turn, allowed the internet to evolve into what we have today.

Yes, networking existed way before MS.

Yes, TBL wrote the first browser on NS.

Yes, MS played catch-up with browsers.

That is not the point.

Linux didn't begin life until 1991. By that time the MS-ecosystem-driven PC evolution was very well under way. Linus Torvalds wrote the initial version of Linux on a '386 based PC. By that time PC clones ruled the world. The evolution had gone through the 8086, 80186 and 80286 processors. Machines cost a fraction of what the original true IBM PC cost, were faster and did a lot more.

None of this would have happened with a closed hardware model. In fact, it did not. Apple was around at the same time, of course. They focused on keeping it all to themselves. MS, in turn, just did the software and let everyone else figure out the hardware. Yes, it was chaotic but it worked.

As the internet begun to heat-up it was Linux running on PC hardware that made it explode. The internet required hardware to grow and explode into every corner of the world. It was the cheap PC hardware that resulted from the evolution of the PC around the MS software that, among other things, enabled the internet to explode like it did. Nobody can even attempt to credit Apple with any of that.

Again, I am not anti-Apple here. Among other things, I develop iOS apps and have a nearly equal number of Windows and MacOS machine in the shop. I will likely buy more Apple hardware in the next few months. No issues there.

My original post was not about bashing Apple, it was to highlight my concern for the increasing closed-everything (not just hardware) approach Apple is taking --which is a fact. In some cases it is almost despotic. As a developer, that concerns me a great deal. As a consumer, I prefer to see competition at all levels. I'd really like to see Apple open-up.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Linux
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Apple_Inc.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_personal_computers#The_IBM_PC
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_browser
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_web_browsers
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WorldWideWeb
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mosaic_(web_browser)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_web_browsers
Definitely a trend. I wonder if the iPhone will see a micro SD card reader? I don't think so. It would render their good, better, best model useless.
Verix: Dimensions: 15.6" (w) x 10.5" (d) x 2.2" (h) Weight: 7.10 lbs
MBP: Dimensions: 14.13" (w) x 9.73" (d) x 0.71" (h) Weight: 4.46 lbs

A plastic monstrosity. For me, this is a non-starter at any price.
I dunno about you guys, but as a college student that frequently takes internships, I move every 4-6 months.

Having a really powerful desktop that can be thrown back into its (incredibly well designed) original box and shipped here, there, and everywhere while continuing to work perfectly and housing all my disks has been awesome.
Well, right now my 2010 MBP is driving my cinema display for just reading email and stuff and is baking hot on the bottom. This is the trade-off with this newer machine, I suspect. It packs a ton of power in a smaller space... that just generates a lot of heat.
I think they might be trying to use Thunderbolt to replace the Mac Pro. It doesn't fit all use cases, but the new MBP with a Thunderbolt display and external drive array would get pretty close for many users.
Wall Street underwhelmed by Apple's announcements
I haven't checked since this mornings refresh, but at least here in AU, there are some arguably cheaper options to the Air. Where the Air excels is giving you a nice machine that is also really well made + all the little niceties of Mac hardware like Magsafe, backlit keyboard, ambient light sensors.

Also Apple is actually making a nice profit on their machines.
Why not just use a top-of-the-line iMac with 32GB RAM? It's not officially supported, but it does work.
Humor: Texting with XCode
If you're into home recording (who isn't, these days?), this is a huge blow. When your Pro Tools/Cubase/Logic project has 40+ tracks of high resolution audio files and several high quality real-time plugins processing each one of them you really need a lot of CPU power.

I purchased a Thunderbolt display just a couple of months ago. I wanted to use it with my Macbook Air while waiting for the Mac Pro to be updated, feeling that not even Apple could get away with a $1000 display that was not supported by its super expensive high end computer.

I was wrong, apparently. Now I know what it must have felt like to have bought NeXT computers or Betamax VCRs.
Perhaps they would save more by discontinuing the line than they make in profits on it.
You can find results from the more recent 2012 heatmap study here:

https://blog.mozilla.org/ux/2012/06/firefox-heatmap-study-20...
They're still supporting the iPhone 3GS, aren't they?

If they had a viable reason to put resources into the iPad 1 and have it meet their performance and usability requirements, they would have.
How about analyzing a database of approx 400k car parts requests? Analyze key words, year-make-model, geographic location, etc?

I'm currently doing this to generate a chloropleth map for PartsLine.com. https://skitch.com/tzmartin/eydmm/partsline.com-rfq-to-fips-...
It's possible; they're called workstations.
This is what I would love to do, learn a language while making something useful, sounds like a daft question but can anyone suggest a app to build and maybe where to start? Rest I can pick up. Again comes to the question what language do I build my web app in?
Apple could use the same data standard as Google does already:
https://developers.google.com/transit/gtfs/reference

I'm sure the transit providers would be happy to provide the same feed to Apple and Google, but it looks like Apple want to make something new and incompatible.
Qt is what it is because in the 90s and much of the aughts they needed to implement loads of their own stuff for support across many compilers and platforms. That's not really true anymore and using their containers and smart-pointers and so forth is now really annoying.

Anyone used gtkmm? That seems to be the one cross platform C++ GUI framework that doesn't try to re-implement massive chunks of the standard library and forsake modern C++ programming style and idioms.
If #2 is correct, wouldn't they tease a new release instead of introducing a new model? No sense making customers buy something only to release a new model out of schedule.
Thanks, I'll be sure to check that out.
Notable? Yes. Mind-blowing? Nah.
I agree. As it stands now it would make the most sense to learn JavaScript, then I would learn jQuery if I were you, then move into sockets and node.js. You could then use this one language for the frontend and server-side.

Don't learn Java. The applet is dead. [Java Hate]
I've been trying to get serious about claiming specific periods of the day for productivity, and have been trying to find a good way to allow my wife to still contact me in case of emergencies while otherwise preventing other distractions from coming through on my phone. The new Do Not Disturb features are exactly what I've been looking for, and I really like some of the specific touches like the ability to let people call twice to bypass the setting.
How we built our mobile device lab
there's nothing to stop people from building external cases that can hold PCI express cards, like the Mac Pro can.

Such a thing has been announced: http://www.magma.com/thunderbolt.asp

then the answer Apple's intending people to take may be a high end iMac.

Maybe, but the 3.4GHz i7 - currently the highest CPU in the iMac range - still comes in at 2-3x slower than the highest end current Mac Pro CPU.. and there are E5 Xeons out there already faster than those.
How could it not be? The engineering is all sunk and the margin is ~35%.
This was based on an old study from Firefox 4 Beta when the status bar was still on by default. (The study was in July 2010, when Firefox 4.0b1 was out; the status bar was replaced about four months later in Firefox 4.0b7.)

The "Customizations" number just means that 95% of users had the status bar enabled (i.e., did nothing and ended up with with the default setting) while the other 5% customized Firefox by disabling the status bar. It says nothing about how many users "used" (interacted with) the status bar.

Customization is not a good measure of usefulness. We know that 97% of participants never used the RSS button in the main toolbar in Firefox 4.0b1, but that doesn't mean that they all took the time to customize their toolbar to remove the button.