skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Agreed. Sometimes I wonder whether it's a "no-one needs more than 640KB" statement to say that I can't imagine needing a TV bigger than the one I have now. I forget how big it is, but it's 40-something inches, and feels like a good fit for the size of my living room. Am I ever going to need one that spans an entire wall? It just seems impractical. I do notice problems with the 1080p display of my TV, but that's compression artifacts from cable TV, not the resolution.

There's a law of diminishing returns with this stuff. "Double retina" would be considerably less interesting than retina displays were when they first came out, because the difference would be so much less perceptible.
>>> the library containing every possible book contains no information

Slightly tangential, but this reminds me of an old saying I used to apply to both my paintings and my music. (and my critique of others)
"Emphasis on everything is emphasis on nothing"

I think it goes along with that idea that if everything is there, there is nothing to discern it from anything else. And thus it becomes bland, and contains no real information (or emotion, as would apply to music/art). Leading me to another thought, if emotions can be encoded as information though music, is there a way to digitize this? (The easy answer being yes, hello 1s & 0s) But I think there is more thought in there to be had...

</stream of consciousness> sorry I got lost in there for a little...
Just an FYI for those in DC: on that calculator, Washington is listed under the state of Virginia. Geographic boundaries are tricky business, but c'mon, CNN. You could at least pretend District of Columbia is a state.
You really need to amend that suggestion with "I am not a lawyer" ...
This diagnosis is exactly correct and completely useless to the user, and is the hallmark of the Linux hardware experience.
The conclusion does not follow from the premise. The fact that "pi is an infinite, non-repeating decimal" (while easily provable true) does not imply that every number combination exists somewhere in pi.

For example, if you removed all the 7's from pi, producing a new number, (i.e. 3.1415926535899323... instead of pi, which is 3.14159265358979323...) the new number would still be an "infinite, non-repeating decimal." But if your encoding calls for a seven in the date, time, or manner of your death , the new "infinite, non-repeating decimal" no longer contains it anywhere.
> As if I don't understand how compounding my raise percentage works over the course of my career

That only helps if your raise percentage exceeds inflation. Otherwise, you could actually find yourself worse off. e.g:

$100K earnings + 2%
$50K living + 3%
--------------------
$59,756K after living expenses after 30 years.

$70K earnings + 2%
$20K living + 3%
--------------------
$77,177 after living expenses after 30 years.
Courses are certainly sponsored by a business. Are you an employee of another business or sole proprietorship? Did you enter into a contract for educational services from coursera at no cost? Then it sounds like it applies to me....
You're correct. Python objects have methods that explicitly take "self" as the first argument. In Java and C#, self or "this" is implied. They all are single-dispatch languages unless an add-on library is used.
I wonder how many of non-adopters use jailbroken devices.
Do You Love Silicon Valley?
I've never had a single issue with the in place upgrades, and no putting home on another partition is not sufficient. Lots of stuff in /etc has been customized and that would need restored as well. I've been through half a dozen or so and they've always worked fine for me.
It's likely in response to Ubuntu's controversial new "feature" of including Amazon search results in unity search (http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/09/24/ubuntu_amazon_sugges...)
Why Will Finland Fail?
I like the formula they present that genius = creative productivity = genetics, opportunity, and effort.
When it comes to food, I disagree that NYC isn't significantly more expensive. It is true that you can find cheap street and fast food in the city, but there's no way you could stand eating that all of the time just like any fast food. Groceries are more expensive than other parts of the country and you are often dependent on several stores for getting the kind of goods you want unless you live in Manhattan near a big store like Whole Foods (a store which is expensive). In terms of salary, only white collar and union jobs have any kind of salary adjustment that helps with the cost of living.
Many are "not available on your device".
hilarious compared to Software Engineering Salaries in Europe...
id like to hear if there are any European Software Engineers (not PMs or any leading role) that earn more than 70k EUR pa.
Antiscience Beliefs Jeopardize U.S. Democracy
"So if your eye can't tell the difference between 720p and 1080p on nearly all modern televisions, what's the need for 4K?"

sums it up. and, I sort of agree too, although I generally believe it's because of the capture camera and the compression software.
When I look at videos recorded by 4K cameras but at 1080p, it does look better than 720p.
When I look at 1080p videos recorded by 1080p cameras, I rarely see a difference with the 720p version.

Now for the screen size, it depends on the room size, but, when I go to my friend with a 100 inches projector (as in its the final picture size on the wall), that's definitely appreciable :p

Also, 1080p stream already makes me hit stupid ISP data caps, 4K, well, uhm, not sure I've got the bandwidth anyway :)

See also: http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL5BF9E09ECEC8F88F
I don't really know where my opinion falls with this interview. The young man seems to be cognizant of his family's wrong doing, but as some have said this could all just be a media stunt.

What I do know is that this young man has inherited a horrific past, and if what he said in the interview is true he is attempting to make up for it. That is all any of us can do. People are born into situations, and that isn't anyones fault. It's what we do with that situation that matters.

I hope for his sake, and North Korea's sake that he is able to follow through with the goals and dreams that he shared.
The only reason I want 4K to be adopted is to fight the backward slide of monitor/laptop resolution. Couldn't care less for TV.
I'm not sure it works that way. Just because you can't see pixels individually doesn't mean the overall picture quality won't appear better. I'm too lazy to do the math, but I'm guessing on a 25" screen, by his math, I wouldn't be able to see an individual 480p pixel, but I'd still take the Pepsi challenge between that and 720p.

And sure, a high contrast 720p screen might look better than a mediocre 1080p, but that's not a fair comparison. It doesn't mean that given equal quality, higher resolution isn't better.

The real reason not to buy a 4k TV is that content is non-existent and probably will be for a few more years at least.
Thanks, this explanation makes more sense than your original comment.

I agree with you on everything. These days, the number of new Vim users who switched because of some misinformed and/or shiny blog post is staggering. People now seem to just jump from one ORM or VCS or editor or framework or DB or design pattern or language to another twice a week. I wonder what would happen if nobody was there to tell them what to do?

Being a good dev is totally independent on the tools: everything that matters is in the head.

I like Vim because it shortens the path from brain to code quite dramatically. But it's definetely not a pre-requisite for being a good dev (which I don't pretend to be, BTW).
> I don't believe iOS AppStore bundles have every been stripped. I'm not even sure they could be since they're signed (unless you jailbreak).

My understanding is that when you submit your app to the App Store, Apple actually re-sign it with their identity instead, so I guess that theoretically they could remove resources from your bundle and then sign it again, before sending it to your device. But they don't do this.
Say what you will about Compaq, Grid and others, actually seeing a running Metaphor Computer System in production was the same as time travel to the future.

Standing in a room full of text-based devices in 1985 and looking at Metaphor's graphical interface, wireless keyboard and mouse, ethernet backbone, laser printers, and folder-based O/S was stunning.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metaphor_Computer_Systems

http://www.johnweeks.com/tour/metaphor/

http://www.johnweeks.com/tour/metaphor/slideshow.html
Minneapolis has a weird thing going on that skews the salaries to the low end of the scale. People just don't move. I've tried to recruit a couple friends who are really unhappy in their jobs, and they don't want to even hear about it. Literally: they hate their boss, the work is stale, the commute is an hour each way, the salary is low - and yet, they won't even consider a job that offers a 30% raise, half the commute, newest technologies, a $5k equipment package, work from home twice a week, etc. It's mind boggling, but there it is.

In my experience, the higher salaries are easily available. I've been consistently offered much more than $70k and the recruiters are desperate. So I'd say the job market in Minneapolis is actually quite hot - it's the talent that doesn't take advantage of it.
Agreed. Certainly I can rationalize losing healthcare for a period of time, the risk could very well be worth it. Risking inadequate care for my wife and kid is a much more difficult proposition.
This article seems to assume that in order for resolution to have an effect on perceived picture quality, you need to be able to discern individual pixels in the image and I haven't been convinced this is the case. Couldn't the image just "look sharper" without the viewer being able to pinpoint the extra pixels? Anecdotally, I can instantly tell the difference between broadcast 720p and a 1080p Bluray on my 50" from 13 feet away, but that might also be due to compression/encoding/etc.

Also, I'm not convinced that in the future we won't commonly have 60"+ screens in our homes. If you could afford it, why not have a true home theater? The bigger issue with 4K for the moment is getting actual 4K content.
At the risk of derailing the discussion, it's my understanding that the US government is not getting much in corporate taxes from Google either, thanks to a well-established practice of tax-dodging by funneling profits into Ireland.
At least such TVs might stand a chance of reversing the unfortunate trend seen in computer monitor resolutions.
Google's Hybrid Approach to Research [pdf]
I like it.. good job
What happens when wall sized "tvs" are high res touchscreens that can be used for multitasking?

To not make it sound too far fetched, what about your non touchscreen tv be wall sized. One end, you run one show and listen in using one bluetooth headset, another end your wife/roomie tunes in to another show with their own headset.

A third part of the screen's got kids playing video games, and a fourth has weather and news scrolling by.

When it's time to party, the 'wall' lights up with psychedelic colors and wavy patterns. When it's time to chill, it just glows with some subdued colors.

Press one button and it shows you a status of all your electrical appliances in the house on one part of the screen, the heat, the washing machine status, the ice level in the fridge..

It's not that hard to imagine more interesting uses of technology.
One way would be to make a deal with the bandwidth provider to not count the content against any cap.

I'd always imagined that if Apple ever gets into the TV business, they'd follow the model they've used with the iPhone and allow the "carriers" like Comcast and Time Warner to sell their customers fat margin "smart TV" plans. At that point, you can treat any content Apple streams the same way Comcast treats their own video-on-demand: unmetered.
I recommend not studying fancy stuff since you understand its root. Learn vanilla javascript first :)
What is more interesting to me is the way that the SOLID principles are expressed in functional languages. They are all still relevant.
COBRA covers you (costs go up precisely 1%)

When I was on COBRA, my out-of-pocket costs went up significantly more than 1% (compared to what I was paying for the same policy when I was employed).

Anechoic is right - anyone claiming they can't start a business in MA due to employer sponsored healthcare is just making excuses.

I didn't say that.
I wasn't just talking about street foods, I specifically mentioned the markets that have cheaper produce and meat than what I paid in Maryland. For household items there's dollar store type places with pretty cheap general products. You do have to shop around more. As far as whose salary is adjusted, I thought we were only discussing developers.
A Human-Powered Helicopter: Straight Up Difficult
gosh, this is more absurd than Texas's "praying for rain"
MishHaps - Get your lost phone back
It's strange because he wrote "making free software is not free" not "using free software is not free". This gives the impression that somehow working on ubuntu tweak is costing him too much money.
The fact we (consumers) don't need them won't stop us from buying them. It's manufacturers' decision, not ours.
Minnesota government bans Coursera online college classes
If so, a nice feature would have been to add the removal of this to Ubuntu Tweak
I wonder if you could argue some variant of the nyquist theorem justifies resolution significantly beyond our ability to discern pixels? (Just a random thought, as I know little about visual perception.)
Apple vs. Samsung: A peace treaty
When I bought my customized Thinkpad my credit card rejected the purchase as unusal spending. This was of course not Lenovo's fault but for some reason even after I got the billing issues straightened out, Lenovo still wasn't shipping my computer. I figured I'd give them a chance so I waited a week before finally calling. They were very apologetic and ended up overnighting it to me to remedy the situation. This meant I actually ended up getting my computer earlier than I should have since it usually takes a couple weeks to get a custom computer shipped. So as far as I'm concerned it was a very positive experience and I'll continue to purchase laptops from them.
I'll second 'Javascript Patterns', and add 'Maintainable Javascript' by Nicholas Zachas [http://www.amazon.com/Maintainable-JavaScript-Nicholas-C-Zak...]
Google woes
I currently have a 37" Westinghouse 1080p screen that I bought in 2008 or so. The TV industry would like to tell me what is wrong with this screen, and for some things they have it right, and some things have it wrong.

What I actually want changed:

- Significantly deeper darks and better contrast. Playing a dark game or movie is frustrating compared to my Dell u2311 monitor. I really want an OLED display (I think) to fix this once and for all. A black screen should not light the room with backlight leakage. THIS IS NUMBER 1. Everything else is secondary.

- Less TV-included blur. This TV came out before the 120/240hz ones, so perhaps that fixes it. In a fast action movie, I want the blur to come from the 24fps film, not from my TV's poor drawing of the pixels on the screen.

- I'd like slightly bigger. I bought this to pimp out my 180sq/ft studio apartment. Now my living room alone is 2x that size will a properly setup 5.1 surround system and plenty of room. I could dig 60" or so.

- More HDMI inputs. This screen has one. Yet I have about 6 HDMI devices that I'd like to use. Currently, I'm manually swapping this.

- Optical audio output. Kinda a weird one, but I've got a 5.1 receiver that doesn't handle HDMI. Otherwise, its fine. I'd like to run HDMI to the TV and have the TV output optical audio 5.1 for the receiver.

That's it. I don't need 3d. In two years, I still won't want 3d. It isn't a feature to me! I don't need built in Netflix. I don't need an internet connected TV. I don't need 4K. The main thing above that's actually not shipped AFAIK is OLED. That's it. Just finally ship OLED screens at a decent price!
Wow, Thanks for the comments! Very insightful...I like the idea to sell medical products on a subscription based model...it has some schleps related to it :)http://paulgraham.com/schlep.html
Rails scaffolding provides a language (the rails comma done apps) that sets up MVC. Rails itself has code that follows the pattern. The code you write in your app doesn't follow the pattern, it fits into it.
The phone one is poor usability. Why is the text indicator half way through the input when it inserts text at the beginning?
Thanks! I'll add more stuff very soon.
I don't like the idea, because it goes against net neutrality of course.

It's not, deal with X, customer don't pay for data! nope.

It's deal with X, customer pay extra, and he's:

1/ forced to pay extra for the 4K content in that case, else data cap explodes and that'd cost even more

2/ his choice is limited to partners
Stop Trying to Protect Your Business Ideas
Vim doesn't make me feel like John Carmack.

It just keeps me sane. It just saves me from "arrow, arrow, arrow, arrow, arrow, backspace, backspace, backspace, backspace, backspace."

Editing python it's fine. If I was going to write c++, I'm sure I'd pick up an ide. With a plugin for vim keybindings.
I can't speak for California but for New York vs. Minnesota, the taxes breakdown is roughly: 50% in NYC vs. 35% in Minnie. When you look at mortgage deductions - a far more common scenario in the "rest of the country" - the difference is even greater.
Phone number input doesn't work with num keys.
I was trying to say that using higher-order functions (or functions taking objects) is not automatically a design pattern; a pattern must consist of a larger group of code. Patterns show up where abstractions provided by language are not powerful enough to capture analogies.
(Mis)Judging Female Scientists - where are the attractive ones?
Europe’s giant science cloud: give people data and good things happen
Much agreed. When I used delete word it's an accident ~70% of the time.
Denmark has a reputation for being the most flexible job market in northern europe. I wonder if this strategy has payed dividends basedon your experience
Old content is also unlikely to end up being re-encoded to a size above 1080p. Old TV-shows are already having problems getting to 720p, and shows like star trek has to re-render things to get up to 1080, and shows like babylon 5 has yet to make it to the 720p mark.
"Couldn't the image just 'look sharper' without the viewer being able to pinpoint the extra pixels?"

Yes. The movie Baraka was shot in 8K. When they released the remastered DVD it looks much better for having been shot in 8K first, even though the end product was only at DVD resolution. It's not just a matter of how many pixels you can see, the very fact that there are more pixels in the raw footage means the colors will be more vibrant and accurate is the final product. If nothing else the existence of 4K TVs will cause directors to shoot in 4K, which will make the end product better regardless of how many pixels you can actually see.

Also, if you haven't seen Baraka I'd highly recommend it. It's widely considered the best DVD of all time in terms of picture quality, and it's also the one movie that Roger Ebert says we should show aliens to explain the human race.
Arrow keys don't allow moving the cursor
exactly, i'm totally confused on what he was trying to say.

is it like "i'm doing this for free, so ubuntu should not add any commercial features to the base software either"?
I agree, I will rework this part. The main challenge was support for IE on this one.
You make a good point, American English isn't the 'correct' English, but its the one that my American ears can best grade. I'd be terrible at picking up accents from different neighborhoods in London.
How Much Is Your College Degree Worth?
Yet another article written with total disregard for science.

Short article covering the usual bullshit about resolution and why apple retina is wrong, etc.
http://wordmunger.com/?p=1348

For those who didn't know, the eye can see over 10k pixels in an angle of a single degree (the fovea, right where we aim with our guns or bows, of course).

That means that in order for content and displays to provide you with the precision that real life offers, one should maybe consider a 40K TV instead.

In reality, the brain does a lot to interpolate and most humans aren't trained to make good use of their view anymore (how many of you are sharpshooters or combat pilots mhh?) and thus may not notice a difference at some times, especially when tired or in bad lighting conditions.

As I detailed in another comment somewhere, color accuracy is more important (IPS,OLED,..) than resolution because the brain cannot interpolate colors (quite logical indeed, how would you code that ? say that FFFFFF is more FFFA FFFA FFFC than FFFB FFFB FFFB ? good luck with writing anything else than random interpolation) and that means that focus on 4k TV should be secondary to focus on accurate sRGB TVs.

It doesn't mean, however that 4K or 40K is useless.
How To Win As Second Mover
I use select2 with bootstrap
http://ivaynberg.github.com/select2/

works impressively well for using inside forms.
Not part of the core language. Expressible as a library in the language.

See Steele's "Growing a Language" talk.
JavaScript is harder to learn for noobs, it's just easier to get "hello world" working than other languages. I don't think anyone with a good grasp of JS would ever recommend it to someone as a first language.
He uses the metric "if you can't see the individual pixels, then a higher resolution won't help", which is absolute and complete bunk. Improvements are noticeable well before then. Try this experiment: take an iPad 1 and put it far enough away from you so that you can no longer see the individual pixels. For me that's an outstretched arm. Now compare to a retina iPad. The difference is huge even though I can't "see" the individual pixels.

That being said, 4K isn't going to do much good with the typical 40 or 50 inch screen. Reports are that 80" is where the improvements really start to become real, though. Not surprising: at 80", the pixels on a 4K screen are about the same size as the pixels on a 40" 1080p screen. That's assuming that you don't sit further back. And you shouldn't.

There are reasons that IMAX is a much better experience than a typical theatre, and a reason why the large screen at the theatre is a better experience than the one you have at home.

- immersion, that feeling of being inside the movie yourself.

- peripheral vision. Movies properly framed for IMAX are zoomed further out than a typical movie. Your eyes are focused on the center of the screen, and the edges are only visible with your peripheral vision.

So yes, to really get the benefit of 4K you need to view Imax or similar content on it, sitting up close to a big screen. There isn't much of it, but perhaps there will be more in the future.
Thanks for the response. You make many really good points that I agree with, and many that I had not considered.
I think it's naive to asume we know how displays will be used in the future. Consider parallax barrier displays[0], an option for the navigation system in Range Rovers since 2010 so that the driver can see the moving map whilst the passenger can watch a movie. Two images on one display, also mentioned in the author's brief discussion of 3D television, would certainly benefit from higher resolution.

Perhaps displays of the future will allow for parallax perspective as you move around the display. Perhaps that'll be the first application of 8k television[1].

[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallax_barrier
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultra-high-definition_televisio...
Yes, it will be fixed. https://github.com/vlamanna/BootstrapFormHelpers/issues/1
Not unheard of, I know of at least one developer earning much more than this working for a bank in London. I had the pleasure of meeting another software engineer from Switzerland who's salary was around that figure.