skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
A few weeks ago I would have largely agreed with the post, but recently I had a bubble-bursting experience.

I'm currently in the middle of running an "Arduino for Beginners" workshop series at our local hackerspace. We have 25 attendees, 24 of them are brand new to the hackerspace. All the attendees are technically literate and interested, but only one or two are programmers or heavily into technology. Everyone brings their own laptop.

The first hour of the first session was almost entirely spent with everyone setting up their laptop with the Arduino software. At least 3 of the attendees took closer to two hours, both with weird Windows problems and driver issues and random slowdowns, unexpected software alerts, etc. One took more than the workshop's 3 hours to get running smoothly, her laptop finally deciding it needed to install many dozen security updates.

All four of the people whose Windows computers caused them such slowdowns told me "I barely ever turn this on any more, I just use my iPad/tablet and phone at home."

This is purely anecdotal and it's a small sample size, could easily be non-representative. But it did make me think, if I wasn't a geek and a hobby programmer/tinkerer then I'd pretty much just do email & web browsing at home, occasionally update/print my resume or write a small flyer.
Would I need a PC? Why would I bother to own one, especially if PC maintenance was of no interest to me?
Thanks. If you have any other ideas for improvement let me know. I've also open sourced the project at https://github.com/oscardelben/rubyxp
well, risk can depend on where and who your outsourcing like the people I'm hiring for example, they basically not that bad there was this one time that I mistakenly sent the wrong amount as payment instead of the peso for my Filipino workers in the Philippines I sent dollars which was a big difference. but in the end they returned the amount so honestly, if you want their number let me know I think some of them have no jobs yet. they're cheap you can pay $400 lease for 4-5 pages website they also do HTML and CSS coding with great designer. I love their work, check out www.terminaltractorsales.com
I've been arguing a variation of this for a while: http://jseliger.wordpress.com/2011/10/09/desktop-pcs-arent-g... . The basic issue is simple: PCs are really, really cheap, and cheap is good.
Programming languages, if they were girlfriends
I think the case they are describing is where the marginal cost is highly nonlinear and the price delta between two reasonable values is so negligible that the marginal cost isn't meaningful.

A 2MB file does not cost twice as much to email send to someone as a 1MB file; you aren't going switch to a different internet connection or email provider because of your file is twice as big. The first 1 byte is very expensive and every subsequent byte has no observable marginal cost until 20 orders of magnitude later.
I'm all for people making informed decisions, but I don't feel this article as being unbiased. Not surprisingly, it's marked for deletion: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion...
This is exactly the type of argument that doesn't hold. "tablets will suffice" Why should someone go for something that will be inferior, and simply suffice? "move to the console" Why would I want to play on a 7 year old console, which means lower graphic games? Your definition of general consumers actually applies to a very small amount, people who never do anything that could, in some way, be better off on a larger display, full sized keyboard, and more processor power.
Selling a put is a long position. If you meant buying a put, I'd assume that's against policy too. Or else that's a really simple loophole.

I totally agree with point #1 though. People should be able to diversify their risk.
> Well, there seems to be a market for Chromebooks.

And just like Surface RT, they wont be seen as a desktop replacement any time soon.
yup it can be done with CSS. you just need to outline the effects, you can also use java. depends on your choice
>But it did make me think, if I wasn't a total geek and a hobby programmer/tinkerer then I'd pretty much just do email & web browsing at home, occasionally update/print my resume or write a small flyer. Would I need a PC? Why would I bother to own one, especially if PC maintenance was of no interest to me?

I think this embodies a larger distinction: Are you mostly a consumer or a producer? The line isn't firm, but for someone who mostly consumes, a tablet or equivalent makes total sense for the reasons you enumerate.

For almost anyone who produces or aspires to produce, however, I don't think that laptop/laptop-with-docking-stations/desktop-style machines are going anywhere, for the reasons that are being articulated throughout this thread. I especially like the guy with four monitors. Personally, I only have two, but one is very large, and even then I'd like to imagine that it's not the size, but how you use it.[1]

Again, I don't think this distinction is hard and fast, so the person who just wrote their own operating system, followed by a 1,000 page fantasy novel, on their iPad can reframe the comment they're about to make. But I do think the distinction serves a useful purpose in talking about where things are going.

[1]Technology porn photos, for interested parties: http://jseliger.wordpress.com/2012/09/23/the-geekdesk-writin... .
> Out of curiosity, what legacy Win32 apps are you actually looking to use?

Well given that every Win32 app is a legacy app as far as Surface RT is concerned, I would say "all of them".

Oh, and you can too run legacy Win32 apps on OSX and Linux, Wine and Virtualbox being two prime examples of how.
So because all evidence points to the contrary, the U.S. concludes that Iran was behind this? That makes sense.
Top changes in Tor since the 2004 design paper (Part 2)
This is part 2 of Nick Mathewson and Steven Murdoch's series on what has changed in Tor's design since the original design paper in 2004.

In this installment, we cover changes in how we pick and use nodes in our circuits, and general anticensorship features.
No. A number founded by siblings though, and they do well.
Looks interesting. Any other recourses?
His point is that there's no great time to announce layoffs, and it's perfectly acceptable to announce it or any other bad news at a time when it will get the minimum media attention. Everyone does it, and it's in the best interest of the company.

Besides, whom does it really help for the news of layoffs to get lots of play? If there's a salient case for this move being sleazy, it only holds up if he's actually wronging some party in the process.

The only argument I can really think of is that the more other employers that hear about it, the easier time the laid-off have finding jobs, but that's a very tenuous argument to make
> Photoshop and Lightroom aren't available on Linux; Linux is generally still considered a viable option as a Desktop replacement by a lot of people. Anything that used to be Win32 only and is now on OSX or Linux was also "written from scratch", and any product that has had the demand has been able to do it.

Don't move the goalposts: you "what legacy Win32 apps are you actually looking to use?" I responded with some common ones. Let's go simpler then: dropbox is a "legacy" app that you cannot install.

The conversation was in the context of desktop operating systems, you yourself said it: "Is it not true that Linux and Mac OSX are viable for new desktops"

You can debate for hours if linux is "viable" for desktops (Year of the desktop! 1999, 2000, 2001, 2002...) but that just confuses the conversation further. It's impossible to argue that WinRT is.
Easily Add Payments to your Django Site
>Instead of sending each packet immediately, don't you need to accumulate n packets to encode as a group?

The way coding works is that you divide data in to n data packets and then calculate c coding packets, and then you can lose any c out of (n+c) packets and still reconstruct the data. You need to see all the data packets in a group before you can finish calculating any of the coding packets, but nothing stops you from sending the data packets immediately.

On the other hand, non-hardware-based error correction that allows for recovery from a large amount of data loss is relatively processor intensive, and the processors in a lot of network equipment are very slow. So you can easily see an increase in latency, not because the packets take longer to send, but because the processor in the network equipment is too busy calculating error correction to timely forward your packets.
Just out of curiosity, are you a core contributor to the gitlab project? Or did you build a SaaS around the existing OSS work that had been done?
Tim Schafer: Stop laying off your employees once a game is done
I'm a little confused. I thought windows RT didn't have a 'classic mode' - and all apps were metro-style?
A tool to search and highlight multiple keywords in copy-pasted text
CrowdSource raises $12.5M from Highland Capital
> United States intelligence officials say the attack’s real perpetrator was Iran, although they offered no specific evidence to support that claim.

US says Iran (or any other middle eastern country) is behind something evil without any evidence? I'm shocked.
Mini-filters are FS level as are VFS solutions. How do you tell a thing that sits at the VFS level about multiple devices? You could probably do it, nothing storage engineers solve is unsolvable :)

It certainly seems unnatural.

Most of those appliance solutions (and probably Fusion Drive for that matter) implement their mojo at the block level and provide block device interfaces. This is to aid their seamlessness, it makes them a lot more straightforward to implement and it makes them a lot more flexible. I would have trouble believing it would be simpler to implement it at a mini-filter/VFS level.
I'm sorry, but that's just not true. There have been 1000+ replications / reports of excess energy from this very same "anomalous energy effect" - the hard part is the how and why.

See the very same Joseph Zawodny speak of "It has the demonstrated ability to produce excess amounts of energy.." in a much more candid way: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JBlKc0TaqPs

For a good compilation of LENR related evidence, see this presentation from ICCF-17 in September: http://www.slideshare.net/tylervan/lenr
And "just" a 32x increase in flash size.
icarus is slow and has no intention of supporting SystemVerilog, last time I checked. Other interesting projects:

http://pyhvl.sourceforge.net/
http://www.myhdl.org/doku.php/start

I couldn't get pyhvl to work, reported a bug, and got no response.

For verification there should have been effort expended on creating libraries for existing high-level software languages and on interop between those languages and simulators, not on creating our own iffy language (SystemVerilog), and then a huge library to work around all the deficiencies and impedance mismatches between the language and the problems we are trying to solve (UVM).
GooPhone announce $99 GooPad mini iPad mini clone - Gizchina.com
Is the destination file generated for the sourcemaps correct ? It seems to point to the destFile, instead of the sourceMap
I'm surprised that the benchmarks for the Momentus XT are so good, especially since it only has 4 GB (8 for the newer model) of SSD. It would seem that in theory it would be better to just add 4 or 8 GB of DRAM to your main system, but apparently the drive only caches non-sequential data that isn't likely to be read quickly from the platters. I'm thinking of trying one on my aging MacBook Pro.

Anyway the Apple approach should be better because of the bigger SSD and more intelligent caching available at the OS level.
Barnes & Noble says PIN pads in 63 stores hacked
UsesThis: Rob Pike
An Open Letter to Ann Coulter
Mini Defensive
The Apple iPad Mini & The Future Of Mobile Advertising
"Safari can't verify the identity of the website 'static.ak.Facebook.com'?"
All third-party RT apps have to be Metro-style. Microsoft granted themselves an exception to that rule for Office RT and IE.
But will PCs stay cheap?

If more and more people find it simpler and easier to satisfy their computing needs with devices like smartphones and tablets, there could easily come a point where economies of scale start working against PCs, accelerating a decline into a niche "producer" device.

Personally, I think hybrid devices are likely to prevent that because they'll be a better fit for the many users who primarily consume but still occasionally produce, but that's a separate argument.
Looks really great, congratulations.

A few things I picked up on though:

1. Couldn't toggle Absolute/Relative after I had placed a tooltip.

2. If you position your tooltip then click the "Display Next Button", the arrow moves, but the positioning stays the same (with a side arrow). Just a UI bug.

3. Instructions on the syntax to use for javascript event field.

4. Binding to an element would be nice.

5. Having the "Next" button move on to the next tooltip, hiding the old, and displaying the next. I think I'd like to use that flow rather than seeing all the tips at once.
To put it very bluntly - most people don't give a damn. If a game is fun, it's fun. They don't need the latest and greatest graphics with all the concomitant driver nightmares. They don't need a 2 or 3 year update cycle. They don't care about some vague possible state of "better off". They want to get stuff done, and they need tools that are good enough to do it.

The key word is good enough. And for the vast majority of consumers, tablets & phones are exactly that - good enough. Heck, I make my living writing software, and I barely flip on my home machine any more - bluetooth keyboard, tablet, and ssh are good enough.
I believe this classification was made because RT gives developers a familiar and powerful platform.
PS3 LV0 Keys
Article says:

> Next IBM restricted the workers to 40 hour weeks so there would be no overtime.
> VP approval was required each time someone was needed to work overtime. The net result was all the server admins worked exactly 40 hours a week and for 15 percent less pay.

I'm assuming they weren't physically allowed to work for more than 40 hours a week and I wonder why it's perceived as a bad thing.
In projects like these, I wish more of the front end design put more attention on the generated content. I would like to see the latest (or latest and most upvoted) annotations so far and be able to click through to the relevant video part. I am not interested in scrolling through in hopes of finding content, especially as I watched the debate already.
YouTube To Allow Offsite Linking Via Video Annotations
yep, also noticed this. now reviews are on engadget, techcrunch, anandtech and everywhere else. guess they try to dilute ipad mini pr
Thanks! We'll look into those issues; additionally, we'll be adding a bind to element feature in the future.
The cloud model would seem problematic for this
much data, given the bandwidth constraints of many users.

For my DSL connection (3Mbps/0.8Mbps) I would need to
saturate my outgoing bandwidth half of each day
to upload 4GB. And I think that these numbers aren't
far off from the global average.

If this is going to be a viable product, I don't
understand at why the developers wouldn't provide
a local storage model. Without that, I for one
would have zero interest in the service as described,
particularly given all the other concerns of handing
over this much intensely personal data.
> Why would I want to play on a 7 year old console, which means lower graphic games?

I think that's the reason why I love consoles - I haven't had to upgrade my gaming machine since 2006. And looking at the games I've enjoyed in the last 12 months - Skyrim and MW3 (for purely multiplayer funsies) I don't feel like I've missed anything having an ancient machine.

And don’t think I haven’t logged many hours playing either. A console doesn’t mean I’m just casually playing games - I take a deep delight in sitting down on my couch with a beer, dog by my side, and blapping annoying teenagers online whenever I get the chance.
More precisely, the exception is for preinstalled apps.
Rdigitalife: Jesse Hirsh on the rise of new digital currencies
5 Reasons You Shouldn't Buy An iPad Mini
Researchers Demonstrate Swarm Robot Behaviour Coordinated By Flying Drones
Social capital with Paige Arnof-Fenn
Yeah, any sort of trading instructions, even a binding instruction like "Sell my shares a year from today, when I won't be under lock up", is considered suspect for insider trading.

A 10b-5 plan or similar is the only legally safe way to act during a quiet period.

But trading during a post-IPO employee lockup, when there is no insider information concern, maybe isn't as tight as "the week before earnings release". Seems like it shouldn't be legally. But employers certainly would order their employees not to trade.

There was a nasty loophole/scandal a few years back where people would set up a legal auto-sale plan like "Sell 1000 shares every week", and selectively cancel the plan on weeks they didn't want to transact. I'm not sure what became of that.
So they seem to be trying to differentiate this from a typical HHD (besides the fact that it's two separate devices) by saying it's "not a cache", but practically speaking, are the benefits of "not duplicating" really worth it? Sure, you get 12.5% more space that way, but it seems like the performance implications would be almost exclusively negative.

On a typical HHD, under typical circumstances, all writes go to the SSD, and are copied to the HDD later on. So far so good; Apple's solution will do the same thing. And stuff being read gets copied to the SSD in both cases. Also great.

Now, suppose a file is loaded to the SSD and we never write to it. Now the SSD gets full, and the file has to be moved off of the SSD to make room. On a typical HHD, all that happens is the file gets deleted from the SSD. It's still on the HDD, so no further action is necessary. But on Apple's Fusion Drive, this file will have to be copied back to the HDD.

Considering that some of the largest kinds of files (e.g. videos) are exactly the sort of thing you will want to put on the SSD and not modify, this seems like a pretty terrible idea.
I don't think that's true at all.

Salman Khan was certainly not mainstream (in general or in education) when he gave his talk on Khan Academy.
What is the context here? Are these the keys needed to sign executables in order to run on the PS3? Does this mean that there will be a homebrew scene for the PS3 or that one can run Linux on it again?
I thought Rosetta was released with the initial Intel Macs. Was it not? How long after the Intel Macs shipped did it take for Rosetta to ship?
*2-3 months. It's been stated a dozen times around here and elsewhere on the web, but with the Surface, Microsoft has realized the old Native American adage: "chase two rabbits, catch neither". The Surface misses the mark as a "no compromises" device. The tablet experience is stunted by the awkwardly long screen in portrait mode, anemic app ecosystem, and size/heft. The laptop experience fumbles with that kickstand that really only works on a hard, flat surface. The deceptive Windows desktop will be hostile to unwitting users of the Surface with Microsoft Windows RT edition -- since they will assume the desktop environment is backwards compatible with their existing apps.

On the bright side, it looks like a good first effort in terms of hardware and build quality. I'd really like to see Microsoft "go all in" and shed the Desktop environment altogether in its next iteration of the OS.
OK. so there was a guy. I still contend that contracts must stipulate the entire business relationship. If the contract did not forbid accepting money to fly people in his companion seat then fire the lawyer. If it did, then he's in breach of contract, and they can cancel, and sue for damages.
I don't recall using the term "PC", the discussion was about desktops.
Your definition of union is completely different from this conversation's definition of union. I wasn't even aware of your definition of union until I interviewed at this company that made software for unions as you describe them. Those unions are indeed exactly as you describe, and that company's customers used the company's software for tracking work of their union members, which were at what level of competency, even dispatching jobs, and so on. They were indeed tradesmen and craftsmen.

The unions discussed in this conversation are collective bargaining units that negotiate employment agreements with a single employer, and such negotiations are often huge, nasty, and difficult. I went through such a dispute with a telecom, and everyone not unionized had to work as a scab (doing the job of those who were unionized and not working). The union people would picket outside our building and insult us when we went for lunch, and we pulled 80 hour days to do their work (with fortunately amazing OT pay, and I was part of a team in charge of trying to automate everything in sight). But it was a nasty dispute.

The current NHL lockout that's happening is another similar union dispute, though you obviously don't see NHL players picketing NHL headquarters. :)
TJHolowayhuck is doing an amazing job with Express—paired with node and npm it's the way to go to get things done. Rails has still its place and does a great job but using node w/Express is just a great experience and the start of a new generation of web development.
Thanks! Always happy to please.
So what? How far ahead of the flights did make the reservations, and how far ahead did he cancel?

Are we really saying that the handful of wealthy people who bought unlimited tickets are to blame for AA's problems, and not the fact that AA appears to have been bad math?
Facebook retargeting, what Twitter should do next
worth noting there are more searches for genealogy type terms than for porn. /files in the whoda thunk category
Hi I also wondered for the context. Found this.
http://www.playstationlifestyle.net/2012/10/23/ps3-lv0-keys-...

Clarifies a lot of things. In short: These are more generic keys. More difficult to fix for Sony or even not patchable. Group was forced to do this release after keys leaked.
http://www.ausgamers.com/news/read/3249848/playstation-3-sys...
The Android X86 project — http://www.android-x86.org/ is probably your best bet for a Linux distro that functions well on a tablet PC. It's a port of Android open source to an x86 platform, pretty damn awesome. Still pretty flaky on multitouch support for the moment though, but give it some time and it'll eventually support it. I love open source.
stop posting political issues.
That's almost an Ubuntu logo on the f6 key. :P http://www.wired.com/reviews/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/tabl...
Many people happily use Twitter to talk to each other, entirely in public; many people will not care unless you can show them something they actually consider to be sensitive information that would be leaked by the lack of security.

I mean, to put this in perspective: my physical mailbox is secured by a pretty crummy key; it is sufficiently crummy that, early on when I didn't know which mailbox was mine, I found another mailbox near mine shares the same key.

However, if I really wanted to get mail out of the mailboxes, it would not only be trivial to pick any of these old and simple locks, but I bet I could get in to the back with a pair of pliers and put it back together without anyone noticing.

Yet, I don't particularly care: I don't have any of my bank/credit statements go to my apartment, and that's good enough for me, with regards to the security of my mail. If someone really wants to steal it from me, they could... but seriously: "should I care?".