skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Sure, in theory you could replace an existing console with a tablet that has HDMI out and a range of bluetooth controllers.

The selling point of consoles is that they provide a game playing experience right out of the box. You know that the hardware in the box will be capable of running games for some time. Compare this to an android tablet or iOS device where there is likely to be a replacement in a year with uprated graphics and suddenly game developers don't want to support your old thing any more.

The Xbox360 also ships with a controller that is standardised so will be well supported by all games and you know the quality is reasonable rather than having to dig around looking for third party peripherals.

A dedicated console also has to make less concessions for portability and power. An Xbox360 is not expected to have to run from a battery and if adding an extra pound on inch of thickness to the design helps reduce costs then it is usually a clear win.

OTOH this makes a nice change from "PC gaming is dead, consoles will take over" that I hear every so often.

The next big seismic change in gaming is likely to come from devices like the occulus rift rather than tablets.
How does this compare to jansson (http://www.digip.org/jansson/), aside from just being a parser?
Android is utilizing this style on their new apps/menus. It looks great.
"Dvorak, with a larger support failed."

If by failed you mean widespread adoption. But I have been using Dvorak since 1999 on a variety of platforms without a problem. It's a personal success for me.

"the trouble it is for them to manage different keyboard layouts in their head. I wonder if that's the same for dvorak layout users."

It's only on extremely rare cases that I've been forced to use QWERTY (such as at a public library) and when doing so, it hasn't been hard. So I don't have to manage different layouts in my head. I only use Dvorak, and my hardware and software supports it.

That said, I don't do any heavy typing on an iPad...
In the early 1980s I was doing an electronic engineering apprenticeship and was tasked with wirewrapping a backplane for part of a flight simulator. It was a big panel - a stand-up job to do the work - and it took me the best part of a week to lay out and wrap all the wires and it was with great joy that I passed the panel to the electrical inspector for examination and testing.

A day or so later, back came the inspector with a grin on his face and he said "I have some good news and some bad news..."

"The good news is that your panel has passed acceptance testing" - Yay!

"The bad news is - they come in pairs..." :-(
im on an iMac using Chrome (with a magic mouse).

Had the exact same experience, otherwise, pretty nice.
this is sort of the same thing i went through, except without 4 years of slogging through an academic position (i applied to two and achieved neither). there are, i think, an untold number of Ph.D.s out there who, like me (and the guy on SE), wound up not liking the realities of their field's practice but enjoyed the study and material.

i changed fields, but for this guy on SE, who enjoys algorithms and complex data, there are a wealth of openings right now to study all sorts of data in fields to "do good", including genomic and life sciences, weather, and much much more.

to anyone considering a Ph.D. in a field, i suggest you look beyond the material and instead look at the day to day of the field you think you want to get into (e.g. academic research) and train for it, and decide if you want to do it. if you don't, consider still getting the Ph.D. and exploring other things to do with it. i'll be honest, i don't think anyone would have given me the time of day in a new field without my Ph.D., so even if you change fields radically you'll still get doors opened to you!
If you check the article you will see that every charger has an Amp rating (like: 2 Amperes). This has a direct impact on the charging rate (provided that the device can handle it). Charging a device at 5V@2A is twice as fast as charging it at 5V@1A. An USB 2.0 plug can usually provide 500mA (0.5A), so the USB charging is slower than using the plug.

In real life charging is also limited by the battery temperature for safety reasons. If the battery becomes too hot during charging (because of the environment temperature, poor ventilation or just because the device has a huge consumption while charging) the charging will stop and will start again when the battery cools down. This is why we do not see chargers with bigger Amp rating: the batteries are limited to a current that doesn't get them too hot.
The MOOC Juggernaut: One Year Later
How did "2012" get in the post title? I noticed some of these trends are carry-overs from past years (focus on simplicity, the use of large photo backgrounds, the emphasis on typography, for example).

But in re-checking the site I didn't see any claim that these are somehow trends of 2012; in fact, they say, "Let’s take a moment to look around some trends we witnessed in last couple years."
Uops! Fixed.

As per the arrangements, I agree. I was just trying to replicate the original demo.
Hitler did fall into the battleship trap, grossly underestimated the value of long range aircraft and fighter aircraft, relied heavily on fixed fortifications like the Atlantic Wall and the Siegfried Line, both of which were easily bypassed, etc.

He squandered his men by not allowing them to retreat and regroup, again thinking like it was WW1.

Of course he would have lost anyway, but he could have made it much harder.
"Use LTS" is fine in theory, but doesn't work in practice. The 2010 LTS has ceased to be useful (for me), and the 2012 LTS is buggy and unpolished. I see a false dichotomy - the normal releases could simply be more stable. Quite easily too, e.g. by not messing up the Debian way of doing things in many places.
Too bad Firefox really sucks with it.
I often make this point and people often tell me "just use an LTS". But that's not my point; my point is, if I use an LTS, I can't (easily) get new versions of software I need. Upgrading one piece of software necessitates upgrading the entire system. Because of this, it's impossible to live in a stable and bug-free OS, because the core is always shifting underfoot. On a Windows system, does upgrading Photoshop also upgrade your network drivers? Of course not, but it does in Ubuntu (and most Linuxes).

Shuttleworth's mistake is his intent on releasing alpha- and beta-quality software every 6 months, but without giving the community the easy and foolproof ability to pin certain software at certain versions, so they can get updates to some things but not others.

That's why people got mad at Pulseaudio, at Unity, and (partly) at the half-baked Amazon stuff: because the very structure of Ubuntu and Linux forces these things on them, and they didn't have a choice if they also want the other shiny features of release X.

Edit: Also, I was personally mad at Pulseaudio because when it was included in Ubuntu, it was so broken on my laptop that I literally had to hotkey `killall pulseaudio` to a keyboard shortcut. That's how bad it got, and it was like that for 2 releases!
This works like magic. Wonder if there's a hidden cost or something. Too good to be true (Just phoned my sis in the UK and me mom on a greek cellphone!)
I've been hearing good things about Elementary: http://elementaryos.org/discover
Yes, we do. I've just reported an issue with this page (a crash), and we are specifically working to improve our blur algorithm (which is use to make the box-shadow in CSS).

afaik, it's not a specific position to read the CSS posts that make the front page on Hacker News, but a lot of people read HN and other similar websites, and we usually open tickets and/or bug the right people.

Because Mozilla is an open organization, you could even file a bug [1], or come and tell us on irc [2], if you care. That would be much appreciated and falls into the category of things people have to do for us all to get a better Firefox.

[1]: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/enter_bug.cgi
[2]: irc.mozilla.org, #gfx for rendering speed, #developers if you have no idea why it is slow
I'm not advocating the repeal of the First-sale doctrine. It's the abuse of the doctrine that is troublesome. The doctrine should protect non-commercial isolated sales of goods by consumers. But when the sales transition into a larger scale business is when the problems only begin.

Gray markets can be devastating in an economic capacity (revenue, profitability, brand equity, sales channels, consumer satisfaction, warranty costs, r&d) and in a social capacity (consumer safety, environmental costs, tax revenue, organized crime)

Below is a very small sample of the negative impacts of gray markets:

http://www.kpmg.com.hk/en/virtual_library/Information_Commun...

Osawa & Co. v. B&H Photo

United States v. Hill

Fagan v. AmerisourceBergen Gorp.

Lynn v. Serono Inc.
What will replace it? Hopefully better journalism...
Feel free to hack the code and implement these layouts. Should be pretty easy ^^
Eulogy for Corwin Hardham
That's an intersting way of looking at it.
To be specific, the rework of the blur algorithm (which is a key part for rendering an element that has a {box,text}-shadow) is bug 509052 [1].

[1]: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=509052
Being a dvorak user, I must say, the "rolls" are extremely comfortable and fun.

I love typing the words church, tenth, school, etc.
"Fluff" is all that relates to the mainstream tech news. Basic Litmus test - is it something that Engadget/Arstechnica/etc would pick up? If yes, then I'd rather not see it here.

Alternatively, since the comments on HN can be of a value - have a separate section for mainstream tech subjects. Like the Ask page. And call it Fluff :)
Our immediate plans don't involve maintaing country specific domains. We might revisit this if/when DDG is available in additional languages.

Also, some users don't like that country level redirect and prefer the .com.

One solution, which does require a couple of steps is to use our Cloud save & save your settings anonymously in the cloud.

At the bottom of the settings page (https://duckduckgo.com/settings.html), you can enable cloud save, there is also a FAQ.
EFF Wins Renewal of Smartphone Jailbreaking Rights
Whoa, deja vu right there and "ivanm" did try his best to help me too.cool guy. cabal still doing that, hunh
Thanks, I've been looking for something like this for a project I have (https://github.com/caldwell/daemon-manager). I did a survey of all the JSON libs for C and C++ about a year ago and found reasons to dislike them all. This actually looks like a reasonable interface, the code itself looks good so far, and I love the fact that it is just a couple files I can drop in.
Exactly, you can see the up-to date numbers here: http://www.ceps.cz/ENG/Data/Vsechna-data/Pages/Preshranicni-...
Timehop and Don Draper
(100 - ε)%

I like this very much.
Another more accurate description that comes to mind is describing where you live:
CountryA XOR CountryB
I am not comfortable with the criticism of PA in the first place, since Fedora switched to it at about the same time but didn't botch it. In Ubuntu land PA apparently caused huge problems but I honestly did not even realize when the switch happened in Fedora.
what is this?!
Show HN: Happy birthday androidweekly.net
"I read these tech pundits and journalists discussing how hard it’s gonna be for the general public to learn the new UI of Windows 8. Nonsense." Duh either he is a genius who is reading pundits and journalists at age of 3 or either they bullshit me!
Fare enough.

> If that were needed for Go we would have failed.

Why? Even with Go there are many ways to do certain things.

I can imagine given the language's youth not everyone would write the code the best way.

I know the few times I did some Go coding, I was most likely not good enough to the canonical style.
This is way too many needlessly rude words for what it's actually trying to say, but the underlying issue is one I've experienced.

I find it really interesting how a the success of programming language (or project) is a combination of multiple factors that aren't necessarily correlated -- like for example, the Haskell community is full of really genuinely nice people while the Linux kernel community is full of screaming. Or how lisp is famously great except that there's multiple incompatible implementations; there's nothing about lisp itself that causes that. And similarly in this case: there's nothing inherent about Haskell that required the versioning mess it seems to have* .

In all these cases there are some weak correlation: perhaps the research origins of Haskell led to a culture of respectful disagreement, perhaps the flexibility of lisp implies more differences of opinions, perhaps extra-powerful static typing leads to more breaking APIs on version bumps. But that's not enough to fully explain it. A lot of it is just how things turned out.

In an imaginary world I'd be able to just read the language spec and have enough info to judge whether to base my next project on something, but it turns out there are all these "soft" factors that matter just as much.

* You could imagine for example a different design where you get a separate copy of all needed libraries for each project so that they never stomp on each other (like what the various fooenv tools do for ruby/python/etc.). It has different tradeoffs, sure, but it at least superficially seems it would reduce frustrations like in this post.
CALL -151

and then everything comes to mind :)
That's OK, it's been a perfectly civilised debate after all. You're making a fair point insisting on a distinction between implementations and the spec. My initial posts were very unclear in that regard.
For the second step, GiveWell (http://www.givewell.org/) does a good job of sorting out some top charities.
Week 10 Ruby/Rails Q&A
Heroku deploy fixes and how to repair/rebuild your rails migration
PROOF: GOP Party Bosses Rigging Elections For Romney
Happy birthday guys!
New York City grew over 500% since the advent of the mass-produced automobile. It has grown ~30% since the advent of the internet. The car may have distributed our density a little more evenly, but it has not diminished the importance of cities. We will always continue to live, work, trade, eat, and buy in cities. It is one of the trademarks of our social evolution. We also continue to work during the day and sleep during the night, despite the advent of electricity. We go to work in the morning, and we return in the evening.

Combine those two unavoidable traits of human existence and we get what is called Rush Hour. And it is not going away. At best, driverless cars represent a minor improvement in the pain of rush hour, but it doesn't abolish it...nor does it rid us of the need for public transit. There are simply too many geometric facts in the way.

1.3 million people commute to Manhattan every weekday. At 1.2 cars per person (typical for a morning commute) that is still more than a million cars fighting for some 2000 miles of road space. Even without any need for parking (assuming they would all be taxis, which is unlikely), that is still 1 car every ~10 feet of road length...including intersections. In other words, geometrically impossible, unless you want to argue that no bottlenecks would exist anywhere (such as intersections or bridges).

Driverless cars will be nothing more than a minor improvement in congestion and parking costs.

Where the real improvement comes from is driverless trucks and buses. A driverless truck reduces per-mile costs of road freight by about 40%, while allowing for 24hr days (13 more than the max possible with one driver, and 15 more than the average), making all road freight more than twice as fast. That is transformative for commerce. And for city buses, 85% of the cost is going to drivers. We could literally be offering buses at 4x the frequency at the same cost. That is transformative for cities.
Just out of curiosity, was json-parser one of the ones you looked at? If so, what did you dislike about it?
The Wikipedia explanation is a fine one. To simplify -- it's when you observe a variable moving through through a space. In programming this means taking a coordinate or set of coordinates, and repeatedly feeding it into a function that will move the coordinates to a new location.

In this case, the heart of the function is:

x = ((sin(xSeed * y) - cos(ySeed * x)) * width * 0.2) + width / 2

... and the same for "y".

(http://jashkenas.s3.amazonaws.com/misc/deJong/docs/deJong.ht...)

In our attractor, every time the coordinate pair lands on a new spot, that spot is exposed to a little bit of light.

What you can do for "x" and "y", you can also do for "z". If you generalize the deJong attractor into 3 dimensions, it looks like this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PrXe4RwtZpQ
That is an inflammatory comment without any real basis. Nobody is selling any community to Amazon, that is plain and simple bullshit.

Let's call things by their real name. Was the move to add the Amazon powered search a mistake? Totally, especially since most of the Ubuntu community are tech folks like us who are specially averse to this sort of things. However the actual effect is almost zero, since it is very easy to disable. How is this, once again, selling the community?
For those that are curious to know more about the product demo Mr. Doob was trying to emulate, check out these three articles:

http://techcrunch.com/2012/10/16/famo-us-reveals-more-detail...

http://techcrunch.com/2012/09/10/famo-us-is-a-gaming-engine-...

http://venturebeat.com/2012/10/12/famo-us-shows-off-a-magica...

There are two video demos available on http://famo.us/ and you can sign up there to stay informed about our progress and know when we publicly release our library.
Yes, single-expression functions are a subset of all possible functions... but that's not exactly what I was getting at. I put "proper" in quotes just to signify that they have subtle differences that, from a purely type-based abstraction, are different from named functions. For example, you can't serialize (pickle) a lambda function.
Not true. Stop lying. Are you eg familiar with the actions taken by the Iranian government which made it possible for people in rural areas to send their daughters to school? Being extremely traditional they were afraid of sending their girls all alone to school. Iran has a very high number of educated women thanks to the policies of the Iranian government.

(edit: yes women still have advances to make in rights vis-a-vis men in Iranian society, but you can hardly call that "war" more than a natural struggle for power between the sexes in a society)
cabal-dev is close to giving you a separate copy of all needed libraries for your projects. It just doesn't do it for dependencies of your dependencies
These services are now being built into TV's themselves themselves.
I'll bite. How in the world do you consider driving to be wasted time? Don't you think while you're driving? Don't you work through problems in your mind? Don't you rest, listen to music/radio? Don't you have interesting discussions with fellow passengers?
Never heard of it before yet it looks really good!! One thing though, I would really like distro's to distance themselves from the Apple look-n-feel. I think UI innovation only happens if people is willing to try different approaches. But at the same time I realize am not the normal user, I guess that if it brings more novice users to Linux is a good thing in the end.
I had a Pong tournament... but Pong is "dead".
Jack Dorsey: Simplicity and Order for All
"Army: Water found to be wet"

"The US Army discovers a bear shitting in the woods"

This is incredibly, painfully obvious. Why is it on HN?
a country with relatively unstable government is making progress toward having ballistic missile capabilities

Is unstable a euphemism for bad bad bad or do you actually know a damn thing about Iranian stability?

And who is Iran unstable relatively to? Congo? North Korea? Russia under Yeltsin?
Could you explain why is it significant that points seem to cluster around some specific trajectories / coordinates?
Thanks for pointing out those errors, I already fixed the one with the wrong conditional and will fix the realloc one in the next commit.
I'm being explicit with casting, because g++ and vc++ will throw warnings without it.
Yeah, up to a point, the maturity of a language's ecosystem matters much more than the quality of the language. That's the main reason I still choose Python for my web-related projects. Haskell, Clojure, Go, Racket or Arc might all be more powerful languages in principle. But in Python or Ruby, I can pretty much assume there's already a library to do anything I want to do with minimal fuss. For these niche or up-and-coming languages, not so much.

I'm disappointed to hear the Haskell toolchain is so problematic, as I was looking forward to trying Yesod.
It should be "JavaScript" not "Java Script" in the list of tags displayed on top in the technical category.

Edit: Just correcting to help, not mocking.
Beautiful work. What's your criteria for when to use flat and not?
PCs are dead, Consoles are dead, Windows is dead, Java is dead, basically everything that's not an iPad = dead.
That's great that it works for you, but 'widespread adoption'? Really? If you were to take a random sample of 100 computer users how many do you seriously think have adopted Dvorak?
For those interested, here is a neat video of a launch escape system working as intended during Soyuz T-10-1: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UyFF4cpMVag

It is the only time a launch escape system has actually been used.
(reposting my comment from Reddit)

I don't understand why he wanted to reinstall things so often; it would have been much easier (and certainly faster) to just install libraries once.

The first problem is that he didn't read any of the Cabal documentation. He complains that after upgrading his Cabal binary, that it still complains that an update is needed. I'm almost certain this is because he hasn't put the Cabal binary directory (~/.cabal/bin) on his $PATH. While this is arguably something that Cabal should be detecting and warning about, it's also not a requirement unique to Haskell -- any package manager that installs to a user's home directory will need them to change their $PATH.

Continuing on, he installs cabal-dev (good!), then proceeds to not use it. Instead, he tries to jam all of Yesod (a notoriously version-picky package) into his global package directory.

Then he uses cabal-dev to build his new site, and here's where things get weird. It should absolutely not install anything other than what his particular package needs as dependencies. If it's installing the world again, then there is something horribly misconfigured on his system.

Finally, I strongly object to Yesod being considered a "success story". While web frameworks are currently the hip thing, and Yesod is indeed a web framework, to my knowledge it's gained no significant userbase in part due to the huge nest of conflicting library versions that it depends on.

Here's what he needs to do:

# Clean up whatever mess he's currently made
$ rm -rf ~/.cabal ~/.ghc

# Re-initialize Cabal
$ export PATH="$HOME/.cabal/bin:$PATH" # optionally add to .bashrc
$ cabal update
$ cabal install cabal-install cabal-dev

# Assuming that Yesod is using standard Haskell packaging properly, this
# should install Yesod in its own little sandbox so it won't destroy the rest
# of the system.
$ mkdir my-yesod-project
$ cd my-yesod-project
$ export PATH="$PWD/cabal-dev/bin:$PATH"
$ cabal-dev install yesod

# Now Yesod can be used without fear
$ yesod init .
$ cabal-dev install
Mining Time-series with Trillions of Points: Dynamic Time Warping at scale
Felix Baumgartner: Mars is a waste of your tax dollars
Yeah downvote me, when confronted with a different set of facts, in the spirit of the free liberal society you advocate.
Looking at the source It seems it doesn't handle surrogate pairs e.g.,

["\ud83d\ude04"]