skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
When I read this I thought they really meant flash in a general way like USB sticks, heh, not in an underlying technology way. I've read of several people doing such a thing but it seems to be a unnecessary hack anymore. (see http://analogbit.com/node/4 )
Isn't it obvious that your example is different than "My $3000 MacBook Pro's SSD died the other day. I tried to open it up and replace the SSD, but they deliberately made it impossible for me to service. I had to buy an entire new computer!"

Sure, you can pull out a microscope and complain about how you can't fix your SMD components, but the vast majority of consumer (Apple, even!) laptops have previously been very easy to upgrade or repair and now that's different. SSD/hard disks have always been hard and there isn't an expectation that they are user serviceable.
> They have a good thing going with the iPhone and iPad devices which are both non-upgradeable: consumers are compelled to buy a new device every couple of years or so.

This is no different than any other phone, it has nothing to do with the upgradability (which arguably is better for Apple than other phones since Android's OS upgrade path is slow at best and absent on a lot of devices).

Phones get upgraded every couple of years because the technology is changing so quickly that there are large differences between the models and with carrier subsidies the upgrade cost is minimal. If the iPhone had a removable battery or a SD slot it wouldn't cause people not to upgrade to the next model.
`grep -r` works pretty well, too.
There's a fantastic intro to modern game cheating and cheat detection here, for anyone interested: http://www.altdevblogaday.com/2012/04/02/extravagant-cheatin...
What do they mean 'virtually non-upgradable'? It's actually non-upgradable!

Annoying that I can't upgrade the RAM though, that's the only part I've changed in recent years - because it's so much cheaper DIY.
It's crazy how fast the prices are dropping. I feel like they dropped by 40% in the last 6 months. The cheapest 2.5" drive available on newegg is now a flash drive. It's probably hard to make a spindle drive any cheaper than $50 for laptops. I have a feeling the prices are going to similar to usb thumb drives soon.

It's under $1 per GB on SSDs now, which is definitely affordable for average consumers (around $90 for 128GB).

I bought a 256GB SSD in Feb this year for around $360. That exact same drive is now $260.
This + RubyMotion is getting dangerously close to Heroku for apps. Not sure what that means exactly, but I'm super excited.
I used to own gotacrush.com, before I sold it. Bought it for a couple hundred. Not sure if that was a bargain.
Well, you should have it under warranty in which case it's not your problem. And if it's not under warranty - it's time to buy a new one anyway! ;)
Apple is a primal predator of a corporation. It's lean, aggressive, and doesn't take any crap. It writes it's own rules, because they can. And it's working for them. You can complain about how "hard" this is, but this is the type of drive and operational organization you need to become the consumer tech powerhouse they've become today.
Thanks for your feedback. Yes the challenges is getting businesses to trust this platform, being PCI compliant etc. But as a consumer, I would love something like this. I am sometimes surprised at the horrible bill payment systems that some of these guys have. For example, I once bought diamond ring for my wife (fiance at that time:) and used some special offer through a bank with 0% interest etc. Their bill payment system: only a phone call and paper statements. This was 2010. Just to check my balance, I had to call them everytime. Only way I know that they got my payment was to check my bank account and the check cashing.
Matt, now I'm working only with API and I couldn't agree more with you.

Last year I worked with a very big and monolithic Rails app and all the time I was wondering about move it for services but it wasn't possible.

I'm almost convinced that we can write service layers with a very consistent API and use Rails to consume it as a client. The HTML interface should be only another client.
But that's just it – why do you jump to the conclusion that one must rely on luck? One mistake doesn't necessarily indicate a pattern.

I challenge you to name one retailer or other customer-facing that has never had a single problematic interaction with a customer.

The good companies are the ones that don't make it a pattern and the good companies are the ones that fix problems directly.
Why coders should learn to sell
> there's a reason that the rules of algebra are what they are

But which algebra, and which rules ? There are infinitely many algebras ( eg. Algebra over the field of reals, Banach Algebra, relational algebra, boolean algebra, sigma algebra etc. ) The "rules" are really constructs you decide that apply to the elements of the space that conform to your algebra. So for example the reals are a field that have ordering, so you can talk about less than and greater than, but the complex numbers don't have an imposed order and you'd have to first define a norm to map them onto the reals. The AltDragonBox with its own inconsistent arbitrary rules will still have some algebraic encoding. Whether that's useful to you is debatable. Like in my algebra I could overload plus to mean multiply and square root to mean divide by 7 and add -3 and then try to figure out what exponentiation works out to. It would be interesting...maybe not useful, but its still an algebra. Maybe you won't have closure...the elements may not end up in a field or even in a semigroup...its a nice make-believe algebra.
Your answer to "Apple doesn't make a decent desktop computer" is "hack OS X's DRM to install it on unlocked hardware"?
First off: clearly you're right. IDE's are very large, featureful software and there are lots of specific tasks they accelerate that you won't find addressed in the common CLI workflow. Finding "references to foo" is a good example.

But here's some stuff Qt Creator can't do (or rather, provides no particular support for -- you can always use it as a text editor, of course): iOS apps; Android apps; sending email automatically; kernel drivers; languages other than C++ or Javascript: Scala, Haskell, TCL, C#, sh, perl, prolog, lisp...; build and deploy a node.js app; fire up an AWS instance; build a binary for an AVR microcontroller and download it to a device; Verilog or VHDL editing/synthesis/verification.

Obviously I could go on and on, but you get the point. The command line environment? Yeah. It "does" all that stuff. And it does it in the same way. A Makefile for your VHDL project is going to look like a Makefile for your web app. The build scripts for your machine learning rig and your AVR hackery work the same way. You write your email in the same editor you use to write your C++ and CoffeeScript (and that you used 20 years ago to write your TCL!).

So sure: if you want to spend your career searching for "foo" in your Qt C++/QML projects, Qt Creator is a great choice. And the next environment you work in will have a new tool, that does all the same boring stuff in mostly the same ways, and you'll need to learn it again. Pick up the command line and get better at it and you'll find you've opened up a much bigger door (and you won't need to learn to use a new editor every year, to boot).

Is it clear now why there are some of us (with decades of make and shell and ssh in our toolbelts) who sit here and scratch our heads at the perpetuation of this nonsense?
Does math love emergence?
I'm certainly not arguing college is the only way, just the most common. I'm sure some people may figure things out through doing a startup, but in most cases (this Fellowship being an exception) they won't have as many resources at their disposal as they would at a college.
Fortunately there are better build systems available nowadays. CMake is a lot easier on the beginner, and yet it is used by large projects like KDE.
I finished to read the whole series so far. And it#s just plain impressive! While you can certainly argue some of its points, you can witness most of the points in real live.

Funny to classify co-wokers and bosses accordingly. or not so fun, that depends... :-)

Certainly one of the best reads on organizational psychology I know.
I'd be annoyed if my HD or RAM started showing signs of failure and I had to take it into a service center and have it mailed to a facility somewhere to fix it.
I don't think the votes actually go through on hellbanned users unfortunately.
Gravy: Add some sweet sauce to your Gravatars
Regarding type #2 as described in the article:

We discussed that problem a few times between the current batch of nReduce startups, more specifically there are a few social network projects (or projects with social network features) being developed and nowadays you'll have to strive for outright domination in order to have a chance with a concept like that. This is a tough proposition in a market where the willingness of users to sign up for (and invest time into) walled gardens is becoming very limited for understandable reasons. Which is sad, because I think there are still some great innovations to be made in this sector and the big players have no incentive to do so.

In our case, a few of us are probably going to try and solve this problem by having a federated model that allows us to have one large userbase of people that can interact across servers. This is where my own project fits in, so I'm very excited if we can make some inroads.
The biggest way that games attempt to catch players that are cheating is simply by scanning their memory space for changes that have been made, by seeing whether or not certain processes are running on the computer, whether extra DLL's have been imported into the application.

The thing is, that once code is running on my machine technically the game is over and it becomes a huge cat and mouse game. I can choose what to execute and how to execute it. Sure it takes time to figure out all of the different ways that you are trying to detect it, but I have control over my machine and thus can make it do what I want.
Uh, the kid still has the app. Yes, there's worry that an update to iOS might break it, but that hasn't happened yet and either the developer will have a fix ready or they won't. If they don't, then it doesn't matter that the app isn't up - there's no fix to be had for it anyway. If they do, then Apple could restore the app at that time.

I hate the restrictiveness and power imbalances of Apple's ecosystem probably more than the next guy, but the headline here is flat wrong - the kid hasn't lost anything yet.
Your extra calories always wind up as glucose in your blood sugar.
I agree that things happen, but I think people are often suspicious that a vendor is making life more difficult than necessary systematically on the supposition that "de jure" need not match "de facto".

Just a brief statement of intent and mechanism of the mistake would help in a public forum.
What more could they say? Do you want the name of the rep who made the mistake? Do you want them fired? Neither one of these seems remotely reasonable, but I'm not sure what else you could want.
It was a simple human error. Customer service agent was wrong about the policy. It happens.

You are making an assumption that it was human error. If it in fact was human error, they could state that and say that they also searched their database for the words Linux to make sure this hadn't happened with other reps.

[Added]: They could then make a public statement about the amount of times it had happened and the total refund they issued. If it happened to 100 users at $1,000/per user, then they could issue $100,000 in total refunds. Further they could state that installing another operating system does not ever void the warranty.
The author mentions that ack "allows you to use Perl-compatible regular expressions (PCRE)" in contrast to grep. I want to point out that grep does too, or at least the versions on Linux and Mac OS X, when the -E flag is used. I don't know if it actually uses the PCRE library or if it even uses the same character class shortcuts that Perl does, but it's at least modern in the sense that it uses (...) instead of \(...\) for grouping and {n,m} instead of \{n,m\} for specifying the number or range of occurrences, as well as + for {1,}, etc.

Edit: Slight fact correction. The author of this article led me to believe that ack uses Perl Compatible Regular Expressions, which is a C library that implements a regular expressions system whose pattern syntax is very similar to what's found in Perl. Now that I've read ack's website, I see that ack is written in Perl and actually uses Perl's regexps. The author must have just meant that ack's regular expressions are literally "Perl-compatible."
Not really.

.museum was introduced in 2001 -- and, presumably, took a while to get to that point. I imagine it was at least a few years in the making.

Yahoo didn't switch to crawler-based search (based on Inktomi, iirc?) until 2002.
A Rebase Workflow for Git
Personally I don't really care. I recognize this going in, and I recognize that there are many many other hardware options if I want to unscrew my laptop and dork about with the internals.

For me, I travel around a lot. Physical durability and integrity of the hardware, in the smallest possible form factor, is important to me. You don't often get expansion/flexibility to go along with svelte and rugged.

I'm sure it's only a matter of time before laptops become one giant COB (chip-on-board) manufacturing process where the whole "laptop" is a 10mmx10mmx1mm chip glued to the back of an LCD panel with some battery wrapped around it. And I'll buy one.
Do flash drives still have a ceiling for how many times you can re-write a particular cell? This is fairly common lore and the article didn't mention it.
A Max Payne parallel universe!! I would make myself into a zombie character. With super fast running and the ability to bite people.

in any case, it sounds like this could actually be a little more fun. I give it a 50/50 chance of working how they anticipate.
Very true. Best of luck.
Ten years ago, a computer's useful lifetime was measured in months. Hardware specs were advancing so quickly that a two-year-old computer might not be capable of running newly-released software. RAM, disk, and even CPU upgrades were necessary to keep up to date.

Except for gamers, this is no longer true.

Computers without user-replaceable parts are a natural outcome of the fact that users no longer need to replace parts. Serviceability wasn't a goal, it was a workaround.
Heroku had to coin some words of their own to "mask" the fact that their services are but engineering on top of the AWS stack (which isn't to belittle the effort involved).
I just star anything that needs response and leave everything in the inbox.

If you need it, you can add different color stars to represent whatever you want.

I don't understand why people feel the need to archive. Seems like procrastination through over-optimization to me.
>Why is "we made a mistake, we're offering to fix it" not enough?

Because I don't want to have to waste my time trying to drum up media attention when it happens to me.

>What more could they say?

Explain how this mistake happened in the first place, and what they are doing to prevent it from happening again. It doesn't help me that I may be able to publicly shame them into giving me an RMA. I want to know that I will, 100% for certain get an RMA without having to jump through hoops.

>It was a simple human error. Customer service agent was wrong about the policy

How do you know this? Who says it isn't policy to reject RMAs when another OS has been installed, and they only back down if someone creates a scene? Given those two possibilities, they need to demonstrate that it really was just a mistake, and that they are training their staff so it doesn't happen again. It isn't like this is an easy mistake to make.
This isn't like a brick and morter store at all, because Apple can remotely uninstall software. Just because they haven't done it in this case doesn't mean it's reasonable for me to give them that option.

Google can de-list things in the Play store, but I can just use the Amazon store, or download apps directly. I don't have to jailbreak my phone every time there is an iOS release to enable this.

'Open Source' != Free as in beer. Speak for yourself could easily go to a model like the QT library, where they sell the software, but give the source to a safe third party, with an agreement to release it under an open source license if the software is abandoned, or the company goes out of business, the source is released under a free license.

The reason I am going to sell my Macbook is that unlike a free OS, OSX can turn to crap within a few years. They could lock it down like iOS, or lose key engineers and have it turn into another OS9, where it is years behind the competition and full of problems. I like to keep my options open.
Yeah, sorry for the confusing terminology and context switching. I did not do a great job of communicating what the voices in my head were telling me.

I frequently talk about business in terms of flying an airplane. So I meant "burning cash" as I would mean "burning fuel" in the pursuit of getting from point A to point B. Didn't mean it in the context of getting a pile of it and lighting it on fire.

I was joking about the beer and wings bit.
I kept the title honest but I submitted it specifically because the article says, "But it may also wreak havoc on CIOs’ networks and connectivity budgets — better quality displays require more network bandwidth, which allows users to increase data consumption."

How can the WSJ report such nonsense? Bigger displays do not increase bandwidth usage as far as I know.
Do you forget that Amazon basically deleted books from your Kindle (1984) ? It was ironic and it was in the news and they had pretty much the same response (we were sorry). For newegg its probably going to be the same way. People forget if its a one in a while.
No, the customer just made a huge stink while their case was being reviewed and resolved.

Newegg didn't get to where they are by stonewalling RMAs as a matter of course -- quite the opposite.
he's using io.Copy in the main websocket handler, which is a generic, buffered routine for manipulating byte buffers. I don't know if the other implementations are buffered in this manner. It's likely that there are ways to improve the Go source.

Erlang is significantly more established, but I'm wary of judging technologies on their technological merits alone. Although the technical merits of Erlang are very interesting, I've been quite happy with my experiences using Go.
Ask HN: Quadrotor-based sky advertisements
Yesterday, downtown, I saw a conventional airplane pulling an advertisement behind it. It hit me then that a much more effective method of sky ads could be implemented with quadrotors http://i.imgur.com/3DfBn.jpg

4 quadrotors could hold an advert in the air statically, near heavy pedestrian areas.

Anyone think this idea holds any merit?
Cooperation, mutual aid, these are principles that life on earth has found to be beneficial.

Those things are not incompatible with selfishness. If I'm pursuing my own self-interest, I might quite rightly choose to cooperate with my peers for mutual benefit.

Conversely, if I don't pursue my own self-interest, what exactly is the point of living at all? It's not like intelligent life serves any objective purpose or end, other than that which we individuals imbue it with.
Poller is a very important factor but there are other things to consider as well depending on how fast you want to go. But sometimes 'fastest' is not what you should look at though.

Solutions like node.js, python, etc.. copy strings and buffers all the time and this can slow down the server considerably. They don't have an honest iov layer that won't copy data before passing it to writev and you cannot manage your own memory and create memory pools. These factors can have a bigger impact on performance than selecting the right poller.
Yes, that is true. Additionally I don't necessarily want to run a program on my computer that has that level of access to my system (and submit it back to someone elses server) in order to run a game. This is firstly for privacy reasons but also because the program could possibly be exploited by malware people who could either inject code into the app or use it to gather information about my machine that could be used to exploit it via a different vector.
Be Builders
It can be. If you believe that you cannot be truly secure in your freedom and well-being unless everyone around you is also secure in theirs, then helping people could be seen as "selfish". The problem is that we use the term selfish to mean whatever dickheaded move looks like it will net us some short term benefit. Without the ability to see all the indirect consequences of these selfish actions, we don't notice that the aggregation of them actually diminishes our overall well-being. Socialism, it could be argued, is based on selfishness as well, but paired with a recognition of our limited foresight and an attendant tendency to err on the side of mutual support rather than ruthless competition.
I agree that http://followup.cc is better than Boomerang. Though I like my home brewed Google Apps Script solution best of all, based on http://lifehacker.com/5825634/how-to-add-a-snooze-button-to-...

By using integers as labels I can snooze things for a specified number of days with just a couple keystrokes. And I'm not relying on an external service that way. Emails with the label "1" are not in my inbox today, but they automatically will be again tomorrow.
I am not sure you can make the claim that cooperation and mutual aid are "principles that life on earth has found to be beneficial", nor would you find a large body of either biologists or anthropologists rushing in to support said claim.

Life on earth has gone roughly four billion years relying largely on predation, competition and survival of the fittest. I think you will find symbiosis and mutualism to be in the vast minority when quantitatively evaluating "things that work in nature".

I'm not saying that means cooperation and mutual aid are "bad". I just find it interesting when people impose their personal morals on nature.
A lot of the extensions his company is offering seem to have a pretty limited range of potential customers.
Because, of course, a cartoonish description on the internet of hypothetical violence is indicative of "a serious anger problem". And I'm the Pope.

I bit the shovel thing from Patton Oswalt anyway. :)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LDCjIjsZp_Y
Mozilla and the National Science Foundation launch open innovation challenge
Intel SYSRET privilege escalation
That's not the point, I think you're misunderstanding my post. Either there is an official policy in place regarding custom OS installs (=certainty) or not (=randomness). It's not about whether a shop has problematic interactions and unfortunate screw-ups happening, because that's a given. The issue at hand is more specific than that.
RAM upgrades are fairly common. Most of my friends, even the non-technical ones, have upgraded the RAM in their macbook pros.

When I worked at Geeksquad we used to get people in all the time for RAM upgrades ($29 labor charge).

I'm still using an early 2008 macbook pro thanks to a cheap RAM upgrade.

Additionally there is a huge secondary market for macbook pros. Plenty of people help pay for their new $2k+ computer by selling their old one. That won't work if it's completely obsolete in 3 years.
I as a former not so good CS player can perfectly confirm that being at the recieving end of a i-shoot-better-with-pistols-than-anyone-else-with-sniper-rifles guy is frustrating. Back than i tried to avoid serers with to much of those guys.
There is no DRM on OS X. The only issue with Hackintoshes is drivers and hardware support.
Thanks for the tip. I always wondered what kind of battery life I could get if I tweaked things.