skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The BEST thing about a MacBook laptop, in my opinion, is the trackpad. The ability, even if it's only partial, to scroll with gestures, move things around by "dragging them" with 3 fingers, and so on, is simply so much nicer than any use of a mouse.

I don't really know why, I just know that it makes me really happy to use the trackpad. It feels natural.

This, to me, is a sign that we are definitely heading towards something that involves Touch to a much larger degree.

I can't imagine touch being on every computer monitor, because my arm would get tired. I mean, I'm now leaning back on my chair with my keyboard on my lap, with my monitor pretty far away - I wouldn't be able to do that if I had to touch the monitor. Still, the world of computer interaction is going to be a very interesting one over the next few years, that's guaranteed.

These are really great times we're living in.
Yes, and it's what Apple under Jobs has always done - they made it easy to use (where easy can mean: easy on the eyes, easy to perform tasks with, easy to buy, easy to turn off,...). And yes, it does not mean anti-complex, at least not for the iPhone - take a look into the settings screen, it's become quite huge by now.
"Also why waive fees rather than make a donation to the Red Cross or other relief organisations?"

I'm not sure what is the point of asking this is. Lessening the cost of accommodations for people in these areas can sometimes have just as much of a direct influence as donating to a relief organization. Airbnb could've easily taken this opportunity to raise the fee due to say, rising demands (ahem... Uber) or done nothing at all (because they have no obligation) but instead opted to make it slightly easier financially.
No price drop for US West California though?
The only evidence that these are done using Google Glass exists in the author's mind. He perceives Google Glass (and somewhat misunderstands the technology) to be this all-seeing eye of Google that will constantly record and stream everything. Mostly he sounds like a wacko.

Since there's no public units of Google Glass running around, the author is either lying or is asserting that some member of the Google Glass team is running around with a prototype unit and harassing security guards and walking into people's homes.

Really, it looks like a GoPro or some other small handheld unit. But this is a guy who calls himself "Grand Poobah of The Smartphone Wars" and talks about how great Apple is in an unrelated post or topic. So we can take that with about as much seriousness as it deserves and move on.
I'm still not convinced that "touchscreen computers" will help with general purpose content creation.

I have yet to see how touching the screen will help me write software (or a word document for that matter) better or that my finger is precise enough to design with.

Content consumption, web browsing, social sharing, all that stuff sure. I have modern smartphone and a couple tablets - they're pretty awesome. But bringing extending the touchscreen paradigm to the machine I use to do "work" - I'm just not seeing it yet.
Hi all
I posted the blog link (by Brian Hall) as I thought his take on it was interesting (if inflammatory). I read the original Seattle PI article it links to. I note that the cameraman does not in fact use Google Glasses and apologies for passing on false info. Thanks to the other posters for their detective work.
Kinda glad that my sarcasm went mostly undetected, otherwise it would have been downvoted to oblivion.
I'd say this is counsellor friendly. One of the most impressive things was that he was willing to acknowledge sources - basically he gave credit where it was due. This doesn't take away from his essay, instead it shows that he can use existing ideas in an original way.

I hope he gets accepted! I tip my hat to the author.
Out of curiosity, what's wrong with C++? You can always -fno-rtti -fno-exceptions disable everything, then avoid classes and templates.
There is a fundamental difference between throwing an exception and returning null. From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exception_handling: "Exception handling is the process of responding to the occurrence, during computation, of exceptions – anomalous or exceptional situations requiring special processing – often changing the normal flow of program execution."
One should throw an exception when an anomalous situation appears, e.g. I can not connect to the database. Whereas returning null / returning an Option means that this case needs to be treated in the normal flow of execution, e.g. asking a Person-object for it's spouse. It is perfectly reasonable that a random person isn't married (so throwing an exception is wrong) but at the same time it should be impossible for the caller to ignore.

> It might be overlooked. But is it too much to assume that someone making a call will check the parameters and the return type?

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4695587

Apparently it is too much to ask, even if the program is performing something super-important for security like SSL.
1) Your funding goal is ridiculous. $69K, really? Four engineers could not pitch in to get that much?

2) Your highest investment pledge ($10k or more) is an insult to the investor. They will essentially pay for 1/7th of your company, while getting no % of your company in return.

3) Your presentation is OK, but you really need to put microphones closer to the speaker.
Congrats!

Related video: Werner Herzog reads "Where's Waldo", it's a really chilling story! http://youtu.be/EvWh6PMi9Ek
This.

the touchpad on your laptop is around the size as the screen on your smartphone. They use hand/wrist-sized motions. This is fast and efficient.

Scaling a touchscreen up to laptop or desktop size is a completely different set of motions. Your whole arm gets involved and your fingers have to travel much further to achieve the same motion.

I think the mapped indirect manipulation of a trackpad makes a lot more sense from a human factors perspective.

[edit clarity]
Wrong foundation? No. Foundation you don't want? Sure.

Try to remember that Hindley-Milner is very hard to do outside of functional languages like ML and Haskell.
Aggressive, strategically mis-placed, expansion. Other airlines, e.g. Spirit, are expanding profitably on their ultra low-cost carrier (ULCC) model.

The airline industry is being commoditised - Virgin America is trying to move against that trend [1]. What is happening is more fundamental than ill-timed expansion; it's a rejection of Virgin America's core hypothesis (U.S. air travellers will trade low prices and a bit of convenience for a delightful experience). An analogy could be Verizon trying to swim against the global trend towards carriers becoming dumb pipes.

The new routes Virgin America is opening are losing money; Virgin America is presently rolling back select routes [2]. This lends is more consistent with a bad strategy versus 'unlucky exposure to unforseeable systemic factors' hypothesis.

Further evaluating the specific factors to Virgin America versus expansion-related woes hypothesis, one notes that Spirit Airlines (NASDAQ:SAVE) spent 3.6% (44.2%) of revenues (operating cash flow) on capital expenditures in 2011. Delta spent 0.1% (8.2%). Average CAPEX/Revenues spread between Spirit and Delta from 2008 to 2011 was 3.5% (Delta has been out-spending Spirit in 2012). Spirit is generally profitable.

Virgin is betting on a strong consumer or business travel spending recovery in the U.S. If that happens , temporarily depressing costs will work out fine if it can stay solvent long enough to be proven right. If the recent shifts are structural changes, however, they're out of luck.

[1] http://www.economist.com/blogs/gulliver/2012/10/virgin-ameri...

[2] http://www.businessweek.com/news/2012-10-17/virgin-america-t...

[3] http://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1498710/0001498710120... Spirit Airlines Q3 10-Q Filing
If you zoom all the way in, it's blurry (I know, I waited for the tiles to load). There's no single-pixel detail. That means it's not really a 9-gigapixel image, you can easily reduce it by 2x2, and make it a 2.3-gigapixel images. Save space, bandwidth and time for everyone.
I guess its the fear of non-existence. Of course once we are dead its not a issue, but whilst we are alive its something on some of our minds. (not wanting the party to end)
You're thinking only about the end user - what I'm talking about is more encompassing than that. Toothbrush companies want metrics around their product. Users are going to soon be faced with a choice to either purchase a smart product that measures these metrics or buy the old cheaper one that doesn't. The way I expect mass adoption to occur is from the possibility of selling this data and passing off a percentage to the users. Your toothbrush will reward you for brushing your teeth not just with a nice sound or trivial leaderboard but by real world products, discounts, etc. If you always brush your teeth, you get notified that you can get your next toothbrush 40% off. The company will be able to do that because you gave them far more money with the data you provided them which they could sell to toothpaste companies, dentists, researchers, candy companies, etc There's a lot of parties who might be interested and this is hardly the best example.
Just guessed the domain name, since they won't be using .com or .net anymore: http://me.ga/ redirects to that page, I hope that is the domain that they use since its pretty short.
"Multi-centric data warehousing"? I don't think Kim knows what the term Data Warehousing usually means.
Pretty sure this view is correct. Philantropy in general isn't very big in Scandinavia (at least from a private level), but at least in Norway most of it ends up being directed at developing countries. I don't think I've ever heard of someone giving money to domestic education outside of religious communities.
Euro media turns to Govt in Google fight
Quid Pro Bono: the Business of Employee Volunteer Programs
The rest of the copy of the campaign is also very poor, and makes me feel like OP is likely immature and that if I donated, my money would be poorly used. And the F word is what bothers me the least.
Status page updated (http://www.google.com/appsstatus):

'We believe about 10% of Google users experienced difficulties reaching Google for six minutes this afternoon starting at approximately 2:41pm PT. We apologize to everyone affected and have worked hard to get our services back to normal as quickly as possible.'
This doesn't work via the hot standby/follower mechanism because one needs access to a user with the replication role, which Heroku does not provide. The snag for that is that that stream is architecture, operating system, and postgres-minor-version specific, and that is why we generally do not feel inclined to support that as an interface.

Postgres is learning logical replication that doesn't have these restrictions. I sure hope it can make 9.3 -- there's still a lot of ground and risk to cover -- and maybe that will deliver hope of what you seek.

In addition, the archives (base backups and archived logs) would also have to be exposed to deal with clients that may have been disconnected for a reasonable period of time, and using a direct interface to that at the storage level is not something I think is very pleasant or maintainable, because I want the freedom to change our archiving layout as we see fit to enable disaster recovery/followers as-is. I think converting those archives to streaming protocol traffic is the way to go, but this doesn't handle the issue of base-backup propagation, which is a serious blocker.

So, there's a lot of work to do all around...if anyone thinks this general kind of work is really interesting and perhaps would like to work on it on Heroku's behalf, he/she might want to consider emailing me at daniel@heroku.com.
To be happier than I have been in October.

To finally give up smoking, which has been a defining struggle in Oct.

To stick with the 5:2 diet.

To do something cool and actually finish it.
Funny how its called dpi... Wouldn't ppi be a better metric?
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Great point. There's a counterpoint to this "reverse commoditization" in my home country: Norwegian. Norwegian aggressively pushes for newer planes, lower fuel costs, lower staff costs, less bureaucracy, less legacy processes and less overhead in every step of the chain. They don't take it to the extremes that Ryanair does, but the more nuanced approach seems to piss passengers off less.

Norwegian consistently kicks its competitors' asses (one of them state-owned), because rising fuel prices is pushing margins for all airlines. Having a small edge here means everything when you're competing on price, which is what passengers go for.
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Free material of our Advanced Javascript course (in spanish)
> It is perfectly reasonable that a random person isn't married (so throwing an exception is wrong) but at the same time it should be impossible for the caller to ignore.

The whole discussion started from the claim that Haskell makes the NullPointerException/NoneType non existent. And I am just saying it isn't any different from how you enforce it in any other language - you either handle nulls or throw exceptions.

> (so throwing an exception is wrong)

I am sorry, but I don't play the "throwing an exception is wrong" game. I use it for actual exceptions, control flow, must-handle scenarios. I don't see how exceptions are defined has to do with how I use it if it makes my program logic clear or translates to my intent. The only reason I think before using exceptions for things which aren't exceptions is the stack which is saved, which most of the times so minuscule that it doesn't matter. Ruby has the best compromise as in it defines catch..throw; most of the languages don't so I resort to using exceptions.
Its good for small users. How does 0.0x effect a saving for others.
We've been doing this for over two years now but we're getting closer. Should be out this month.
Ruby 2.0 patch that could make Rails startup 2.2x faster
I completely agree with you. I just want to get this one point off my chest though: why do people put so much stock on Jobs' public pronouncements? He was wrong on so many occasions, either on purpose (to conceal Apple's intentions) or just plain mistaken, enough times that his statements really are pretty much worthless for any sort of evaluation of current tech or prognostication about future. Average people maybe can keep holding him up as a faultless visionary but HN should see him as he as: less a visionary and more just someone who liked to always present a front of total certainty, regardless of whether there was something or nothing to back that certainty up. I.e. Jobs was a salesman primarily interested in selling Apple products in the short-term - not a deep-thinking omniscient prophet.
Yeah, fair enough, I've struggled with the same fear. I want to stay alive as long as possible too.
All of the disk performance benchmarks (iops, throughout, buffered vs unbuffered) I ran on ephemeral disks matched exactly the performance of ebs. That could be a coincidence that my tests ran only on machines without local disk, but more likely ephemeral disk was really just EBS in most cases. So it always seemed like a silly or even misleading product to me.
Keep in mind that the University of Chicago is considered roughly a top 10 university (tied for 4th, if US News is to be trusted, which of course it should not). The 25th percentile of admitted students is at the 95th percentile of SAT scores. Rest assured, 80%+ of people who are admitted into the University of Chicago know how to write a decent essay (the other 20% allowing for athletes and development cases).

That being said, I don't find anything wrong with his writing, especially since he is writing a short technical explanation rather than a reflective memoir.
Though this doesn't totally solve your issue, the design is responsive, so if you're on your Mac, you could narrow your browser window to make the body text a little easier to scan. I mean, you shouldn't need to do that, but...
It would be interesting if they could get rid of "types" concept, and just let people pull together memory, ecus, and storage on demand.
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behaviour is not wrong. bindParam method requires a variable reference not a value. all passed references are replaced on execute. so the behaviour is not unexpected.
Your right about the $69K thing, i'm surprised 4 engineers couldn't get together this money. Odd. If they were asking a for a million then the whole thing makes a lot more sense.
That would be a provisioning nightmare, trying to figure out which partially-used-up box to place a new instance into. Much easier to slice them into fixed sizes.
The concept of internet forums has mostly been gathering dust for the past ten years while the ways people discuss over the internet have changed profoundly, so some re-imagining is definitely in order.
I've never seen ephemeral disks die during an EBS outage. Also, they don't cost anything for I/Os.
Of all the stuff you mentioned, the only things that might make sense in a CS MSc programme are big-data (assuming you're talking about the really interesting parts of it, and not a Hadoop cookbook), and parallel/distributed programming (again, assuming you're interested in designing distributed algorithms, etc).
The rest are just skills, and do not belong in a CS MSc programme, particularly one you describe as 'particularly academic'.
"per se"

(BTW, thank you for saving me the necessity of reading past the first page of the article.)
Seems no one has made any real serious attempt to really modernize them.
Steve Jobs and Woz got their start selling Blue Boxes that let you illegally make free phone calls. They just never got caught.
Jersey online
when you have to fall back to charging for relevant content, I think it's fair to say that your model is broken.
Even assuming that such a spending recovery would benefit consumers as a whole by ensuring the availability of premium services, to paraphrase Keynes, the customers can remain irrational longer than Virgin can remain solvent.
* play around with C->Python interface. (http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/8497)

* complete the wedding preps before Nov 28

* give interviews and find a job
This gives me hope!

It's not that I'm planning on rocking it like this often, but it's really practical for when you're moving between rooms and have a lot of other stuff to carry.

Home to measure my jeans pockets I guess.
Having this all the time seems really verbose compared to exceptions:

if err != nil {
return nil, err
}
37 Signals generally create web apps for small businesses, so I suspect an email client/service would be a little too general for them. Jason Fried also says, "This new product eliminates the hassle of one thing in particular", which suggests that there's one huge pain point they'd like to solve with their new product. I can't think of what one particular pain point would be with email - a solution to email would probably involve solving a lot of tiny problems.

It's puzzling, because Jason points out that "the other products are totally free". Most web apps marketed to small business users, though, aren't free. Perhaps this product is targeted at a broader demographic.
I'm thrilled to see this project. Yes, $69K is clearly much less than they have invested to date. This Kickstarter is likely a PR platform for them, and a smart one.

I'm excited because it shows that more individuals are willing to take on far-reaching projects rather than build another mobile picture app. I hope some deep pocketed investors vet them and get them the resources they need.
Norwegian's core competency is still highly optimised operations [1] - their vision is "affordable airfares for everyone" [2]. Crudely illustrating the point, their operating costs page has 28% more words than their operations and market development page.

[1] http://annualreport.norwegian.no/2009/operating_costs Most gorgeous annual report section ever

[2] http://annualreport.norwegian.no/2009/this_is_norwegian
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...although conversely, if you're a Virgin Atlantic frequent flier then Virgin America is actually a half decent option, as you get status points with every flight.
Also, I think that mode does not yet support waiting for application of the deltas, only their flushing to disk. That will probably be added some-day, so this is close but no cigar.

In reality, what one could do now is check the 'snapshot' on the follower and the leader and figure out if a change has been propagated or not. This is exposed by the function txid_current_snapshot().

Latency of syncrep is poor, as you suggest, but throughput is about the same -- not everything blocks on acknowledgements from a standby individually, but rather standbys report their progress through a totally ordered stream of changes, and the leader will un-block a "COMMIT" (explicit, or implicit when not using BEGIN) when it sees that a standby has passed the appropriate transaction number (this is a small fib, because I think it think it thinks in terms of a different unit known as WAL Records/XLogPosition, but this is quite close to the truth).

So, for example, one session may only be able to commit a few times a second on a high-latency link, but thirty parallel sessions may not commit at 1/30th the throughput each, but given a case of very small commits closer to 30-times the throughput in aggregate of one client.

Also, 9.2+ has a notion of 'group commit' where this same dynamic (submit deltas, wait on a number to pass by) is applied for local writes relative to the on-file-system crash recovery log, the WAL, even though syncrep to another machine via network was added in 9.1 (i.e. earlier). This is much better at numerous small writes than older versions of Postgres, where it is likely that many backends would issue their own sync requests to disk rather than sharing one.
SoundTube converts your SoundCloud tracks into YouTube videos.
Yeah I have had that experience about 4 times now, like you said, when cracked its completely useless. I broke the first one by sitting the device on the top of a stack of books and research material and then proceeding to pick that bundle up. My thumb holding the nexus 7 and that was enough to put a split from corner to corner. I have given up on the device and Android. I went back to using my old ipad 1 which has been dropped and thrown about for 2-3 years now and not even a scratch or buff on the back and certainly no cracks or chips on the screen. I made the mistake of getting a nexus 7 for my brother and both parents and they have ALL had problems with it (each was about £209 in the UK). They are all getting ipads now.
$69K, really? Four engineers could not pitch in to get that much?

How do you know this is the entire lot? The engineers seem to have invested a fair chunk of cash or resources into this already.

I think this may be more PR (a good thing!) than a full funding drive.
BBs suck hard at everything but emails, call, texts and BBM. It's browser and map apps are appalling - and both are completely reasonable to count as "needs" in 2012.

> And it was made in Canada, not in a Foxconn-like plant.

They're not made in Canada anymore.
My fault as well, I didn't make clear that I did not actually believe that, but that the coincidence really lends itself to one.
Yeah, applications servers (read: web front-ends) can easily run entirely from memory, so it's annoying to have the rest of the OS dependent on EBS when it really needn't be. (Although to be honest I'm not aware how easy or hard it is to pull out the hard disk from a booted instance without customizing the kernel).
We need server failure detection system failure detection system then.