skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
A 20 Billion market cap is quite large, even with so much cash on hand, it would still likely take several PE firms to team up and take it private. It would amount to one of the largest PE deals in history.

I don't think taking the company private would directly solve any of Dell's problems, but it might help them shore up some internal inefficiencies.

Historically, Dell has been successful through its efficient supply chain and ability to reap high margins from low cost/high volume PC manufacturing.

In the long run, I don't think staying this path will be sustainable for Dell. Asian manufacturers are rapidly taking stage as the go to hub for cheap PCs and manufacturing.

Instead of trying to leverage rapidly diminishing returns on optimizing efficiencies in PC manufacturing and supply chain, Dell should focus on the (painful,expensive) transition towards shifting its focus towards enterprise tech and enterprise consulting.

Opening a venture arm is a step in the right direction towards gaining a foothold on some new tech verticals.
Too: proprietary solutions cannot (at a sustainable price point) compete with the quality of free.

As someone noted -- there's a development model which shares the load among many eyes, and produces higher quality work as a result.

There are a few other mechanisms at work, but the upshot is that for utility, and even a fair amount of specialized software, there's no longer a marketplace for the software itself.
I tried as well. There does not appear to be a download link available anywhere for free. Everybody keeps saying you can download it, but I don't think anybody actually has in quite some time, and nobody has posted a link.
I don't know about Windows folks, but as a Linux user I rarely touch the mouse except while using a web browser, and point-and-click is all I need there. In fact my Thinkpad has a convenient middle mouse button just above the track pad that's super-convenient for opening links in a new tab.
Um. Seriously? A unique individual with one of the most brilliant, funny, audacious and original voices on the Internet and you'd like to see him sued out of existence? Because uh ... the Internet's not big enough or what? Wow. Just wow.
Looks like you can't determine the length of something like a web page with the unity scroll bar.
AMD makes 16 core Opterons (codename Interlagos), however they're slower than the latest 8 core Xeons.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opteron#Models
You think that's air you're breathing?
The authors do not say "drastically lower our population very quickly" anywhere in the paper. The closest I can see that they come to saying this is in the conclusion, where they talk about, "reducing world population growth and per capita resource consumption" (among other things) as being "vital".

Please save your accusations of irrational, hysterical agendas for them that advocates hysteria and the abandonment of reason.
Oh for fuck's sake, just read the paper:

BOX 1: Past planetary-scale critical transitions and state shifts

Last glacial–interglacial transition18,24. The critical transition was a
rapid warm–cold–warm fluctuation in climate between 14,300 and
11,000 yr ago, and the most pronounced biotic changes occurred
between 12,900 and 11,300 yr ago24,27,30,54.

The major biotic changes were the extinction of about half of the
species of large-bodied mammals, several species of large birds and
reptiles, and a few species of small animals30; a significant decrease in
local and regional biodiversity as geographic ranges shifted
individualistically, which also resulted in novel species
assemblages37,49,53,54; and a global increase in human biomass and
spread of humans to all continents27.

The pre-transition global state was a glacial stage that lasted about
100,000 yr and the post-transition global state is an interglacial that
Earth has been in for approximately 11,000 yr. The global forcings
were orbitally induced, cyclic variations in solar insolation that caused
rapid global warming. Direct and indirect of effects of humans
probably contributed to extinctions of megafauna and subsequent
ecological restructuring.

So: collapse means widespread species and biosphere change, extinctions of large mammals. All this with relatively small forcings due to solar radiation changes.
I could see that being confusing to people. "iOS 6 includes Ultra Photos! But not on your device. Yes, you do have iOS 6, just not the good iOS 6."

My parents have an iPad one, and I've used an iPad 2 at work. I've got to say I'm not that surprised, as the thing is clearly constrained as it is. It's over 2 years old, so it's not like they just suddenly abandoned it. And you can still get iOS apps for it for quite a while. I know there are apps I use that still support iOS 3.
that depends on how mountain lion implements the high dpi mode.

when using linux or windows on it you will get full resolution,

osx will be a blend, icons such as close/minimise... will be scaled up but the actual content will be crazy rez..

just wait until it comes out before you say it is only 1440x900 which it is NOT.
Agreed. I don't compliment people very often, but countering the suit by raising money for charity - combined with his usual humor and quick wit - was a masterstroke.
Actually, at this moment it doesn't look like it's possible:

http://applesliced.com/ask/how-do-i-increase-the-system-font...

Maybe Mountain Lion will change that?
It was basically designed for Visual Studio 2010 to use ClearType anti-aliasing yeah

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consolas
Yes. I too am dismayed.

There used to be something called MIME. There used to be separate specialised applications for different tasks.

Guess what? There still are.

Browsers have long had the ability to decode image formats. That much we expect from the browser.

But audio? Video? "Web sockets"?

There are better applications to handle these formats and tasks than a web browser.

When I want to listen to audio, I use an application that is designed for that.

When I want to watch video, I use an application that is designed for that.

When I want to open sockets for peer-to-peer communication, I use an application that is designed for that.

Everyone knows browsers suck for downloading. So why are we using them to download content (whether to a file or to a buffered cache)?

Download the content using a program that is designed for downloading.

View/play the content with applications designed for those tasks.

Anyone who would criticise this approach is criticising the "UNIX way". Do one thing well. But watch how people will criticise it.

Yes, it is insanity.

These browsers are always going to have performance issues. If you want the best audio, video, peer-to-peer, etc., use applications that were designed for those purposes. As simple as possible. Simple applications. That is how you achieve performance, reliability and security.

"Do-everything" browsers and Javascript are not not worth the risks they present.
You are completely missing the point. They do charge a commission. The problematic part here is that this $2.58 is called "delivery fee". Im sure all the ecosystem costs a lot of money, and they are free to charge whatever they think the ecosystem is worth, but calling it "Delivery fee" seems disingenuous.
Agreed. I've noticed on my 12-core Mac Pro that until I had 2 gigs of RAM per core, building a large C++ codebase would cause extreme disk swapping to the point where the OS would freeze (even with a super fast SSD).

The situation wouldn't be as bad on a 4-core/8 hardware thread MacBook, but you start throwing in virtual machines and various other processes and 8 gigs of RAM starts to look pretty anemic for hardware marketed to the "pro" user.
I agree with all you said except the software being the icing on the top part.

Apple knows its the end to end experience (software to hardware).

Apple is just fortunate to be in the very small category (if not the singular player) of companies that have great depth of talent in both the hardware and software realms.

This and the market they cater too (those with the money to spend) allow them to pick either pushing the hardware or the software forward and make a killing not having to move on the other end.

I say this as a person who hasn't bought an Apple product in 10 years in protest of some of their business practices:

- draconian App Store developer policies,

- 1984- esq lockdown on their platform and employees,

- the ridiculous markup on their devices, etc.

but who isn't dumb enough to not pay attention to them because they are some of the sharpest folks in the industry.
U.S. experiences second warmest May, hottest spring on record
Can you elaborate? I don't find his humour overly humourous but each to their own.
I disagree. Apple is both a hardware and software company, and I would argue that most of the decision to buy a Mac lies in software, not hardware. People don't say "I need this computer because it has an aluminum case"; they say "I need a Mac because it's easier to use."

Not charging for minor updates doesn't mean they're giving them away. It means they've already rolled the cost into the original sale price.
I can predict your political orientation with fairly high confidence based on this comment alone.
Try the one tab test! You might find it's less distracting.
I currently own a glitchy T520 that Lenovo has been increasingly reluctant to service as it periodically refuses to turn on. It's been in the shop 4 times.

2-6 on my list are not complete garbage, they're all problems I or other friends I've worked with have experienced with various Lenovo boxes over the last year or so. I actually got Bumblebee/Ironhide working on my T520 without issue, but I couldn't ever do what everyone else could do: get the DisplayPort out to drive an external display. So effectively I was limited to VGA-only for a second monitor (and running Ironhide in such a condition caused a system freeze).

Not acceptable. And the one game I do enjoy, Minecraft? Renders unreliably without Ironhide. So... yeah. I had display problems.

Not to mention despite the most assiduous reading of FAQs, consulting with powertop-savvy-friends, and appealing for help on twitter I never got more than four hours of light-use battery life from my T520 with the stock battery.

This, of course, ignores the nightmare ordering process, the late delivery, the snippy service, and the inability to FIX my machine despite having sent it back a few times now.

It's great you have managed to build a decent experience for your specific requirements. I'm glad, I don't wish my pain on anyone. And I really do wish it was better, I miss XMonad dearly. I miss a JVM with good performance dearly. I miss a sane linker dearly. But if your expectations are, "My laptop is fully supported and gets good battery life and does things a macbook would be good at doing" then you will be disappointed with Linux on the laptop, and Lenovo will not be an impressive vendor.
After seven years and an added 80lbs I've started exercising regularly for the past month. I get more restful sleep, I have more energy, and I'm happier. I liked that the article addressed the typical complaints and excuses that people have when first getting into an exercise routine.

I've lost 20lbs since I started about 30 days ago and would like to sing the praises of the FitBit pedometer/website and Scooby's Workshop (scoobysworkshop.com). The FitBit is sleek and has a great overall UX (in my opinion). I really like Scooby's website because his tips are practical and fact-based. Besides, who can't like a jacked 50yr old engineer?
Experimental Campaigns Pay Drivers to Avoid Rush-Hour Traffic
Help Us Win A Grant To Award 250 1M/1M Scholarships
Show HN: A Dating site for redditors
On the flip side both the iPhone and iPad have amazing customer satisfaction numbers so we can probably conclude that most iOS users like things the way they are. Why would Apple want to change it up too much? If live tiles or better task management were important we'd all be using WP7 or WebOS.
Because familiarising yourself with software that costs thousands of dollars for free is kind of fun?

The fact that I have at least part of the knowledge makes me more valuable for an employer.
The forward button breaks if you fork. Perhaps the browser would be better to lay a breadcrumb trail.
Help EFF Find Out How Your Local Police Agency is Using Drones
Unresolved anger issues much? Hint: the internet is big. If you don't like something, ignore it.
There are a lot of answers to this question:

1) From a UX perspective, we prefer to have the majority of the UI within a tab. We don't want to build up an entirely separate UI hierarchy outside tabs.

2) We tried putting native UI within a tab in early versions of Chrome, and it did not feel right. There was an uncanny valley effect. If the content of a tab doesn't feel like HTML, it feels wrong. And it isn't practical to emulate the feel of HTML perfectly with native code.

3) The Chrome team puts a lot of engineering effort into making the web platform as strong as it can be. We would like to eat our own dogfood when possible.
NASA Saves nearly $1M Per Year By Using AWS
It's funny how, I started getting annoyed seeing people still learning to code on books while free tutorials were starting to pop up everywhere on internet.

And now people are starting to charge for those tutorials. And I know people here in HN love Zed Shaw. But come on, there are hundreds of free great tutorials to learn C on internet.
>I don't think my position is extreme. I'm not advocating for a removal of all browser features, merely removal of those which are unrelated to the browser's core purpose of document navigation and rendering.

The view that a browser's core purpose is document rendering and navigation was laughably out of date in 2000. It is simply an invalid opinion today. Users and developers can and do expect browsers to be fully-functional sandboxed runtimes that can host everything from mail clients, to mapping applications to games.

But if you want your browser to be nothing more than a document rendering engine, no one is forcing you to use Firefox. w3m and xxxterm, for example, both fulfill this role quite admirably.
The scroll bar's size is still proportional to the document length, so I don't see why you couldn't.
How ContextLogic moved from Scribe to a cloud service to power their A/B testing
He's not a comic genius, he's a marketing genius. His comics are actually quite banal; everyone hates their printers, a list of reasons why makes us feel good but isn't actually funny.
OK, so for a $10 book, Amazon collects 30% for themselves, which is $3.

For a 19MB download delivered via 3G to a Kindle, Sprint, the wireless carrier, charges .15/MB, or $2.85/19MB. This is paid to Sprint, not Amazon.com. The article errors by comparing this fee to the cost for server bandwidth using S3 to come up with his markup value, but S3 bandwidth covers the internet only and does not include fees involved with passing through any sort of cellular network.
Having a rival is pure press (and SEO) mastery. Seriously.

It reminds me of the genius rap rivalries of the 90s and 00s which left both rivals better off in every way (press, album sales, fame). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hip_hop_rivalry
I don't mean 12 core, I mean 32 core. AMD is selling 16 core CPUs. And the Mac Pro is not a dual CPU, 32 core, twin graphics card machine, which is what I described.

here is one company selling them - http://www.titanuscomputers.com

I priced up a 32 core AMD machine with two 2GB Nvidia GTX 680 cards and it comes to just under $5000.
I wonder what I'm doing wrong, then. Almost nothing on my T420 worked OOB. I've written custom acpi event scripts for handling docking, monitor switching, etc. Forget about the Function keys... (okay, that last part may be xmonad-related)
Exactly. Apple may be figuring that if they could divert the resources currently devoted to the Mac Pro line to other products, they would be making a greater return.

Or perhaps they have something in the pipe but not ready yet. They've never been a company to tip their hand early.
Herve Leger Dress Sale
How much of Dell's business is low margin PC manufacturing today? Their stated intention is to continue moving heavily toward an IBM style services model rather than remain so dependent on computers. I'd place my bet on Dell being worth a lot more than $20 billion in the future, or a lot less. They can afford to fund their way into a very large services business and the PC biz should continue to supply cash for a while.

Michael Dell is worth $16 billion on his own. In talking about him taking it private, I was assuming he'd lean into it extremely heavily (putting most of his net worth at risk). And obviously he very well might have no desire to do such a thing at nearly 50 years of age.

Even if Michael Dell used $10b of his wealth, financed $10b of it with Dell's cash, and then got $10b in private equity, it would be extremely doable at a $30b take out price (or less given the very bearish sentiment on the stock).

If Michael Dell wanted to, I think he could take the whole thing out himself (leveraging the company cash ultimately as well). He currently owns around 12% of the company ($13.5x billion in wealth outside of Dell stock). In the current market weakness, he could probably gradually consume another 8% to 13% of the stock without hardly moving the price.
Try CTRL + L to jump into the location bar (that's if you have a keyboard.)

With regard to middle clicking, I assume you mean a scroll wheel on a mouse. Which some users still don't have! (I know it seems hard to believe.) Also trackpad users need to dupe this functionality somehow, and some haven't picked up on the shortcuts.
I'd say he is very passionate but not sure fanatic is accurate.
I believe the parent was referring to the very last part of the SFU article. In full:

> “Society globally has to collectively decide that we need to drastically lower our population very quickly. More of us need to move to optimal areas at higher density and let parts of the planet recover. Folks like us have to be forced to be materially poorer, at least in the short term. We also need to invest a lot more in creating technologies to produce and distribute food without eating up more land and wild species. It’s a very tall order.”
I pasted the quote directly from the article. Thank you for the reactionary downvotes.
Karen Millen Sale 2012,Outlet Karen Millen UK Dresses Online
Yeah their pricing scheme is atrocious.
Huffington Post: Peter Thiel (former Paypal CEO) Is Simply Wrong
Besides the "komedy k's" that was already mentioned, a kodiak bear is a very specific type of bear. More specificity is generally considered funny when you're describing a story in the form of a joke. Not only does it add tension by drawing out the conclusion, it implies the comedian has actually put some significant thought into the situation they're describing.

Not just a bear. Not a polar bear. Not a brown bear. A kodiak bear. The only thing funnier would be "a 8' tall, ill-tempered, honey-hating, monkey-fighting kodiak bear. Named Maurice."
Window management: I prefer cascaded windows (the bottom-left corners effectively start working like tabs - see http://blog.barrkel.com/2009/11/on-difficulty-of-setting-win...). Tiled windows are a waste of screen space; I have far more open windows than can ever fit tiled.

And what about package managers? Cygwin has a package manager; combined with cygports, it has just about everything I need, resolves dependencies just fine. I also mirror both repositories locally, where the relatively smaller sizes (18G + 19G) pay off, and I don't have to be worried about internet connectivity to install an app.

Package managers on Linux (I run Ubuntu Netbook and Debian), Solaris (I run Nexenta NCP3) have given me plenty of headaches, mostly from packages disappearing from repositories, or repository servers going away. There's been times I've just wanted to e.g. update my text editor to the latest version, and started pulling on a thread that led to needing a new kernel - that never happens with Cygwin. Stuff starts failing to install because dependencies are no longer available. It's probably because I don't update enough, which is in turn because I don't want to break something that works (none of these machines are public facing); but I can go years between Cygwin updates without issues.

Look at the information density of Windows explorer details view - http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_2GNT8vlZj48/SK54tc5PEzI/AAAAAAAAAC... - I could never get Nautilus to display data with this density, listview items always had huge margins around every item in the details view, like in this picture: http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-NwFlqMh7ZG0/Ty3Qrbk2gqI/AAAAAAAAAd...

Driver issues: I don't have any, and I don't have to research anything! When I need a new machine, I just buy the latest hardware (for example, currently I have an Nvidia 680GTX), download the latest driver from the vendor, and it works. Linux? Just look at this fun here: http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTA4O...
If people are finding them too small, making a new bitmap font which is big enough to use on a Retina display is not an issue in the slightest.
The entire modern TV media industry has learned how much money/fame can be earned from exploiting overblown controversy It's the substance of about 90% of non-fiction TV shows these days.
> Compression is about as CPU intensive as you can get with audio outside of voice recognition

Highly polyphonic physical modeling synthesis is more CPU intensive than compression... then you start adding on many instances of complicated reverb effects, some effects that require fft/ifft passes, autotune, &on and on, all with realtime constraints (not to mention all of the copying of buffers and context-swapping that goes on with the way these systems are designed)... and you get a high-cpu monster pretty quickly.
In early March I was in Santa Clara for this year's PyCon. I took with me a white early 2006 Macbook which needed replacement for the bottom shell (it cracked and a piece fell off). Repair was to cost US$ 120, which I gladly approved. Since there was a recall replacement to be done, the replacement of the bottom case came at no cost. During the replacement, they damaged the cable connector for the keyboard, which was also replaced without cost.

In the end, I took a 6 year old computer to an Apple store and walked out with it looking more or less new, for free.

Apple's service is nothing short of amazing. I doubt IBM would have done that to your Thinkpad.
> which left both rivals better off in every way

yeah, tupac is rolling in money right now
> Easy reply messages / reminders accessible when you have an incoming call?

Reply via text has been a popular feature in custom Android ROMs for a while. Setting a reminder is new to me, though.
An ugly brown, as usual.
> A unique individual with one of the most brilliant, funny, audacious and original voices on the Internet

It's always good when one extreme viewpoint is countered with another extreme viewpoint in the opposite direction.
The real question is why would you want to be valuable to someone who uses Exchange and Sharepoint ;-)
Cool, but $1M is nothing for NASA. Their greatest gain in using the cloud is agility. They don't have to procure hardware months or years in advance. And they can run intense computing jobs real fast and release the instances. 1,000 hours of computing in 1 processor costs the same as 1 hour of parallel computing over 1,000 processors.
The iPad 1 has the same 256MB of RAM but it has to allocate more than double the amount of space towards VRAM than a 3GS. Also in general iPad applications have a larger memory footprint than iPhone applications. Those two factors combined pretty much doomed it. Most importantly Apple just decided to starve it of RAM. Very bad design choice.
China to Launch Two Women Astronauts Into Space This Month
"Because I'm a programmer, and this is what I do." (end of the readme)
Apple draws up battle strategy against Google at WWDC
Oops, I should have noticed that hash crap on the end.

So you like the Cosh too?