skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This scares me, because of the likely conclusion: people who DO need a desktop will end up paying through the nose.

If no-one's buying PCs any more, the price will go up. As the price goes up, all the tasks that you'd do on a PC become more inaccessible.

I'm not looking forward to a world where if you want to edit professional video, do 3D animation or do games development, you need to shell out $10k or more for a machine first.
Original study:

http://berkeley.intel-research.net/arahimi/helmet/
So what? The trend of our computing devices is that they get smaller as they are getting faster. As they get smaller, we are able to create new form factors. The tablet is just another form factor.

I imagine battery tech is going to be holding back tablets and smart phones from being true desktop replacements for a while. The markets want long battery life, not a desktop replacement.

Lots of link bait over an article for a trend which is as old as computing.
For development, design and other forms of work, the current generation of smart phones and tablets are clearly not up to task. But it makes you wonder how long before one of these things can run an XCode, Eclipse Visual Studio while wirelessly connecting to a monitor (or 3), keyboard and mouse. I think the biggest issue is really the lack of a traditional file system and ability to host a local web or database server on one of these machines. Neither of these are impossible to overcome given enough clever engineers, especially if the face of server side computing itself starts to change. As long as I don't have to type code on an iPad virtual keyboard I'm pretty excited to see whats coming.
It would be really cool to have this in epub/mobi format...
it uses webkit inside, results will be the same as for chrome
Unfortunately the title of the article was sensational and inferred the former, whereas the latter is more likely
The text is fuzzy and blurry. You may not see it if you don't zoom in (to 100%), because your browser will apply crappy resizing filters to the whole image, so both browsers will have the same look.
So you don't want to go into a world of proprietary console development? I hear those development machines are quite expensive.
I've always thought that a laptop-tablet hybrid of the sort Lenovo makes is the best form factor[1] for mobile computing. A physical keyboard and trackpad you can fold away when you're not using but that you always have with you. I used an old x61 tablet that I got dirt cheap for years, and for things like watching video or reading comics or long-form text documents, being able to fold away the base is great.

Are there any machines in this form factor aimed at a general audience? A modern multi-touch tablet screen with a pivoting keyboard and mouse base?

[1]http://shop.lenovo.com/gbweb/gb/en/learn/products/laptops/th...
Yandex+ is Ya.ru, works from 2007.
I have a question for you if you've got a moment: what part of Minecraft is your son most involved in (eg: playing with his friends, creating modifications, building cool things alone)? And if he's involving in playing online, do you know if he has any involve with Minecraft communities?

I'm getting the feeling more and more recently that Minecraft may eventually become what BBSes were to the 90s: a way for "new" to the internet people to get involved in the community side of the internet (vs. just being a "consumer") and by extension the technical side. We (the Minecraft forum) have 10s of thousands of teenagers that are now programmers contributing code and creating things just because of Minecraft, people that probably wouldn't have got involved in programming this early in life otherwise.

I'm curious if that sort of effect extends beyond those actively involved in the official Minecraft communities, but I have no real way to find out as my reach only covers the Minecraft forum.
I see several comments saying that welfare is worth this tax rate, that is a false dilemma. There are no shortage of countries in Europe with all the welfare you could wish for with a capital gains tax rate around 30%. And with the inner market there is no way for French authorities to stop companies from these countries from targeting the French market.

So, welcome to Sweden!
> and almost always carry a keyboard to go with it, then really aren't you saying that a laptop would be the right solution?

Not unless the keyboard is detachable, like e.g. the ASUS Transformer series. I carry a 7" tablet with me. I use it as a tablet to read stuff. The form factor means it's easy to hold with one hand. I also carry a keyboard with me, mostly because that makes it convenient to use for emergencies when a server goes down etc. and I want to be able to type faster and not have to prop the screen up. But 90% of the time for me the keyboard is dead weight. That's fine in my bag. It's not fine if I'm holding the device up to read on a crowded train, for example.

Increasingly I'm also finding that my typing speed on my phone and tablet is getting better rapidly. Especially with special-purpose keyboards like SwiftKey that has very good prediction, and so I resort to a hardware keyboard less and less.
Long live the PC, and by that I mean the phone/tablet that I will connect a monitor, keyboard, and mouse to when at the office or at my desk at home.

http://www.ubuntu.com/devices/android

If this was in stores today and handset manufacturers had good compatibility, I would make my next PC whatever the newest, top of the line Android phone and be relatively happy.

That said, this headline is sensationalistic nonsense. That setup would still be a PC, in fact it would look remarkably more like a PC than our current laptops we are lugging around (external monitor, keyboard, mouse, connected to a tiny "tower").
Not true. http://www.bahn.de/p/view/buchung/auskunft/puenktlichkeit_pe...

In August 2012, 99.1% of all stops happened within fifteen minutes of the scheduled time, 94.2% happened within five minutes. Looking only at long-distance trains, 75.8% of all stops where reached within five minutes of the scheduled time and 90.5% of all stops were reached within fifteen minutes of the scheduled time.
Can Scientists dance?
2 PhDubstup popping graduate researchers from Princeton and UCLA present their theses focusing on bacterial research.
I think of it as a step migration. With desktops you get the ultimate workhorse, best for heavy duty work (and this is now a small niche left with graphics and rendering tasks) You step down a bit and you get a portable laptop (its an ideal compromise). Tablet is a third step down with a lot of features cut down and as many pointed out its more of a content consumption device as opposed to creation.

Laptops will stay for a while as they sit brilliantly in between.I do see no evolution in laptops but I do see tablets catching up.
A lot of these comments comment on the fact that development is not available 'on the go'. Obviously one wouldn't carry round a keyboard and a tablet.

What I find interesting is the fact that powerful computing systems can fit into your pocket. I may be crazy, but couldn't we fit 2 projectors to this, get rid of the display completely and require two surfaces to project a display infront of you, and a keyboard/mousepad at your hands.

Maybe have both - a small display for simple tasks and projection for tasks that require a bigger display. Could we see a shift towards holographic display investment in the future? It's already available for keyboards...
Cyberattacks on 6 Banks Frustrate Customers
Yes, of course, there is some redistribution going on. But that's not the main explanation of the difference between say UK and France taxes. If you remove pension funding alone, you get very close between UK and France, I believe, although I have not checked the numbers (it would cost me around 17 % of my pre-income tax to contribute to the French pension system, so I am basing my calculation only my case alone with all the associated caveats).

As for letting people buy those services, this becomes more dependent of what you believe: I don't think it is that clear cut that there is no net benefit of having everyone getting the same basic health care in terms of costs, etc... A lots of what is costly in France is closer to insurance than anything else. Buying an insurance against disability is so expensive in the UK that nobody does it (which is why it is expensive in the first place). Since everybody has to do it in France, the system becomes much more viable since the pooling is very large.
Owning an iPad 1 and an iPad 3 ("new iPad") I'm always thrilled to see how they perform side by side. It's like night and day - unreadable, low-contrast vs. superb, super-high-resolution display; 5 seconds for opening Mail vs 0.5 seconds; almost tripled battery life (at least for me). For some aspects, it's an improvement of an order of magnitude within only 2 years.

I don't think such an improvement will be possible in the next 2 years, and the only incremental improvements in the iPhone 5 seem to support that. You can't really upgrade a tablet (yet - there is at least USB host support in most Android tablets), but consumers won't be as hard-pressed to buy an iPad 4 and 5 as they were with earlier versions. There is already the highest-sense-making display resolution, apps open almost instantly, and superlong battery life. What more can you ask for given its restricted use case of media consumption? It will again all be about software (Siri for iPad, tighter TV integration, perhaps OSX on iPad?) soon.
First: Don't spend the day on HN ;-)
Is there a reason you cannot just outsource this problem to AWstats/Webalizer/Google Analytics/etc? It's a hard problem, and those packages have done quite a bit of work to solve it.

(From experience, switching from - IIRC - AWstats to Webalizer reduces your traffic by a lot, as the latter's robot detection algorithm catches more robots. IIRC - it's possible that it's the other way round...)`
"Much better unemployment insurance" => I don't follow you, there's already one of the most generous unemployment insurance of the world in France.
TV is coming. Radio is dead!

Actually, radio is as big an industry as it ever was. Mobile phone and app sales may eclipse PC hardware and software sales, but the products are just too different to expect one to replace the other. Perhaps there is more money to be made in Mobile/TV, but that's just because it's a plain old risk/pay-off trade-off.
chrome.yandex.ru redirects to this page.

For those who don't know, they had a Chromium fork called "Хром" (literally "Chrome"), which they advertized for anyone searching for "хром" or "chrome". Then they renamed it to Yandex.Internet.
Ask HN: If I launch in the App Store will my Linode 2048 crash
I'm about to launch an app in the App Store that talks to a Linode 2048 downloading/uploading pictures.

Will that crash the server?

What should I expect in terms of resource consumption?
Wow, this is a better UI for Google's data than Google's own UI.
I don't disagree that the sales numbers for desktops are tanking. I just think they have a core use that is not going to move away along with the rest of the flock.

I'm not sure about using tablets with keyboard/mouse/big-screen. I haven't seen too much of it happening, and I'm not sure its really an attractive thing to do anyway for a lot of reasons from the office-practical (lots of plugging things in, harder to coordinate everyone, possibility of losing things, etc.) to the purely pragmatic performance-based (can a tablet do all the graphics processing for a big screen? What if you are using a big file - can your tablet handle it?)

Disk space is a huge draw to PCs too. Very few people I know are happy to entrust their life's photo collection to an online storage-as-a-service provider. And I'm yet to see a good 'media center' (though I think they'll come along at some point).
Should employers care about Klout scores?
Ask HN: Is there a 12-step program to cut down on reading HackerNews?
I think I'm addicted.
Interesting concept, questions:

Who will kids be emailing? can they email anyone? can anyone email them?

How would you get signups for something like this?
I'm trying to get the pigeon symbology. The article says it's essentially the French word for what would be called a "sucker" in the US, so the people who are using it are obviously calling themselves suckers. But is this a protest of the French tax situation (i.e. French society is for suckers), or is a statement in defiance of traditional capitalist attitudes toward this sort of thing (i.e. perhaps we ARE suckers, but we don't care; we're still doing what we were before)? I couldn't get a sense from the article.
By the time you have to connect three different peripherals to your tablet in order to get the same functionality as a laptop, in almost all cases it's better to simply have a laptop, particularly if you're doing your profession.
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I see you. You think government paid for all those things. Let me correct your view: You and I pay for all those things (through government which takes it's own cut out of everything).
I charge to full if I will be using the device. If I am charging a laptop that I will not be using for a long while, I only charge it half way.

I try to minimize the number of charges so I usually use a device until the battery is mostly discharged before charging.

If this is wrong, please let me know!
DIY and alternative tablets can be desktop replacements, or close to it. But that's not the sort of mass market trend of which you can write these sorts of articles (though in China this may be a large trend compared to the U.S.)

Personally, this is just evolution of form factors. Nothing terribly interesting. As a techie living in Asia, I would either just buy a Chinese gadget (clone) which fits my needs or just build my own. In this sense, the PC lives on. ;)
You are aboslutely right. But that is not my value proposition. I have not finished desgining the first iteration of the product, so value proposition is still not defined. The points you mention are what I call my basic beliefs: privacy, no bubbles, API, social, and for hackers.

DDG does provide most of that. I know because its my search engine of choice. And the DDG team has made an amazing job. I love, love their product. But it still trying to do search like Google does search. I dont want to copy Google, the aim is to research other options/routes and build a service that provides a better service altogether.

It will be a glitch. I don't mind that. It will porbably fail like the Titanic, and be a public embarrasment for me. So what? Maybe the people will build the Google killer with be reading along and use my failure as a building block. One of the reasons Google goes unchallenged is because it is fucking crazy to even try and build something that will compete with them. If this ignites people to go and question Google (and Facebook, and Amazon, etc), then it was not in vain.
Could you name second bigest Android app store?

I think there are at least two problems:

1) average user will not download anything what's not in win8 app store;
a) There are extra burden to upload app to store and pass QA process (I think the only exception here is Google). Haven't you heard horror stories about clueless QA people?

2) there are extra warnings for apps that are not from win8 app store (like in Mac OS X). E.g. I find it annoying because I use relatively lot of tools that are not from app store. Again average user might prefer safe way over risky one and it is problem for indie (game) developers.
While quickly glancing over the HN front page: I read it as "Donald Knuth: how donut.c works." :)
Wow - what an unnecessarily personal and derisive attack.

No. It's simply a memorable name that allows us to play to the idea of Tinfoil hats protecting you - it's playful. The MIT study's results weren't relevant to why we named it that - it was the fact that it was even studied at all that's more to blame.

For the record, the security we offer is top notch.
For consuming content and creating very basic content a tablet is great. On a train or on the sofa a tablet is very nice for reading reddit and HN, watching some Youtube, Skype with the family, writing emails and basic document creation.

However for any real content creation a laptop is my primary choice. I would love an ultrabook like the Asus Zenbook or Samsung Series 9. An ultrabook will most certainly be my next computer when I buy one some time next year. I am waiting for them to hit the 10 hour mark which I am hoping they will do next year (already very close with the Samsung clocking in around 9 hours). I am happy to sacrifice some CPU and graphics power for an extra hour or two.
For the first months (years?), it will be exclusive for hackers. Thus the curl approach to invites. Non-hackers wont get what curl is.
Single Page Application Template Now Available
Oh god, what a news!))

Consumers are using smartphones and tablets while professional are using macbooks. Samsung is new Nokia, Apple is new Microsoft (even worse). Linux is server and Rails is PHP. What news what news..

btw, the burst of Wintel (and Java) bubbles is really a good thing - it is for a new wave of Arm/Android/Linux.

Of course, there still will be x86_64/Linux server market for long (because its so cheap in terms of Price/Performance) and tons of MS/Java based enterprise crapware still need to be maintained, but that wave is gone long ago.

Surfing is a very nice model of IT business, btw.)
That is a very, very interesting project. High-end phones have had more than enough horsepower to run a full desktop environment for a few years, but getting the mix of phone and desktop software right is the tricky bit. Android and Ubuntu is a natural mix, and of course (nearly) all your Ubuntu software is just a compile away. Getting carriers on board is going to be a challenge for Canonical, but as soon as the source is out for this the custom modders (and I) will be absolutely all over it.

It would seem obvious for Microsoft to aim for a similar thing with Windows RT/Phone, but they've made a terrible hash of mobile for the last decade, and I don't think that their optimise-for-touch-everywhere approach to Win8 would work well with a non-touch monitor plugged into a phone. On the other hand, if Win8 gets as much of a kicking as I suspect it will, they'll be in full desperation mode with Win9 and something like this could be a major selling point.
That is somewhat the approach I'm aiming for.
Some metro and train stations have those in Japan too, though they are still somewhat rare sight.
> I think proof of independent invention should at the very least establish a presumption that the invention is not novel.

Proof of independent invention might not establish a presumption of lack of novelty, but it can help with proof of obviousness. As one author noted a few years ago, "The Federal Circuit has stated that, '[T]he possibility of near simultaneous invention by two or more equally talented inventors working independently,… may or may not be an indication of obviousness when considered in light of all the circumstances.' [Citations omitted] In other words, the fact that another person simultaneously and independently created the same invention claimed in the patent-in-suit can serve as an indication that the invention was obvious." \1

\1 Brent Yamashita [of DLA Piper], Secondary Considerations of Obviousness in a Patent Case: The Seldom-Used "Simultaneous Invention" Factor, at http://www.patentlyo.com/patent/2008/07/secondary-consi.html (omissions in original).
I couldn't find that too, so I watched the video. Very well made and answer all those questions.
Note: I love ddg.
Noted. Thanks for the feedback. Please request an invite. You hace some great input and would hate to miss it.
Patent US6368227: Method of swinging on a swing
> or any programming of any kind

I started programming on a computer that can be comfortably be emulated cycle exact on the cheapest tablets you can get today, so that's quite obvious hyperbole.

At my first company, we did most of our development work on a server that was shared between four of us, yet had 1/4 of the memory of my tablet, and which was about 1/10th the performance of current generation ARM's. Somehow had no problem doing programming work on it. As well as running paint programs (granted, none of us did much graphical design, but what little we did ran on that shared server using our local, much slower, machines as X terminals).
That is the first iteration of what will be built. I actually want something like it.
This made me chuckle but with so much interesting content, it really can be a genuine problem. I found myself spending a bit too much time on HN so enabled the maxvisit and minaway settings in my profile. I find that 20:20 is good enough to break up my sessions.
> By the time you have to connect three different peripherals to your tablet in order to get the same functionality as a laptop, in almost all cases it's better to simply have a laptop, particularly if you're doing your profession.

Bluetooth. MHL with the device providing power. One cable to give you power and display, and no cables for the other devices.

And the laptop still needs cables if you want a decent sized display, and don't want to run it off battery.
Another take on PCs: I used to keep a few Linux boxes around the house for CPU intensive processing. Then I started to prefer EC2s or Elastic MapReduce. Earlier this year for a side project I decided it would be cheaper and take less of my time to rent a large memory server for about a month.

I got rid of my last desktop years ago and have not missed them.
Couldn't a lot of these, including TFA, be pull requests to Bootstrap?
There's no need to completely prevent non-certified content from being accessed, you just make it a second class citizen, e.g. by making installation more difficult or restricting the access to native interfaces. E.g. you can increasingly fall back to distributing stuff that's incompatible with Apple's morals using HTML5, so customers don't need to switch devices to access some version of it.

Barriers to switching are falling as more people are using cross-platform stuff (first and foremost, web content and apps) but at the same time they are increasing as people get a large portfolio of content that is either not available or that they haven't bought for other platforms. E.g. switch from iOS to Android and lose access to game X that's not available on Android, app Y that's available but you only bought an iOS license and, of course, convenient access to your collection of iTunes music and videos.

Contrast this to a waning desktop era where most casual users seemingly only used and paid for three pieces of software (office, browser, something else) and had much of their other content in cross-platform containers (CD/DVD, MP3, Xvid, office files).
> Personally, this is just evolution of form factors.

Agreed. Ballmer was ironically right when he said "they're all just PCs".

What's perhaps more interesting than the form factor is the app-storification of software delivery. I have real concerns about a future where there's no market for hackable platforms.