skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Depends on the person, a few years ago I spent over $10k in a year on other people[1], I bought people iPhones, TVs, laptops, flights, all manner of things. I was only making $100k/year at the time. There are people making 5x that who would never spend that much money on other people... it's entirely plausible someone could be making an average tech salary and have no problem arbitrarily handing out "expensive" things if they don't really care about money.

[1] I got over this awful habit and no longer do it, thankfully.
Online: Windows 8 is different! Everyone panic.

(Anecdotal) Reality: Everyone that uses Windows 8 manages to get past the interface changes within the first day of use.
But then Ken Rockwell has made rather a career out of making little sense himself, so a parody almost needs to be entirely self-contradictory in order to register as a parody. (Basic JPEG on a D70 is good enough for anybody, but you really do need a Hasselblad. Er, come again Ken? I have to fix photographers who try to believe everything he writes.)
When A Festival Has Nothing To Do With Music
Tony Blair's companies agree to pay interns
This post feels too short for the argument he is pushing. If the surface is a laptop killer, what is radically different about it compared to the other countless tries of putting a keyboard with a touchscreen ?

I am asking genuinely, because I haven't touch or seen one yet. So far the reviews aren't stellar, there seems to be the same shortcoming as before (always moving between the keyboard and the screen to type and click on things), and the software doesn't seem to push the limits of what you can do on a tablet.

My question would be, my parents hated using an iPad with a keyboard, would they be better off with a surface?
I took a leap of faith and signed up without seeing anything beforehand. I hope it'll be worth it.
I still think that by focusing on drones as a unique form of surveillance the focus is being diverted.

In concept there's no difference between a police department flying a helicopter with an electro-optical surveillance turret and it flying a UAV equipped with the same. Why is one ok but the other not? It can't be about UAVs flying higher up so they can't be seen or heard, as helicopters are becoming quieter and sensors better so that they can view scenes from much further away without being heard either.

Similarly there are vehicle-mounted optronics masts available to police departments that can capture video footage of areas kilometres away. I know of an arrest and successful prosecution that happened recently in South Africa that relied on video of a crime that was captured by one of these vehicles 3.5 km from the scene.

The real issue here is persistent video (mostly aerial) surveillance, something which has theoretically been possible with police helicopters until now but has not been done because the logistics make it impossible. That will not necessarily remain true forever.

Fact is UAVs will be used by police departments under the same authorisation and rules that make it legal to use helicopters, purely because the cost and flexibility will be irresistible, so trying to ban the domestic use of UAVs is doomed to fail.

Instead, there should be public pressure to strongly regulate how, when and where police departments can collect video and what they're allowed to do with it. That will have the benefit of not only restricting what police UAVs can do but also police helicopters and vehicle-mounted optronics masts.
> Sitting in classes listening to an instructor spend a whole week explaining how a "for" loop works to students who for the most part won't be able to successfully write their own "for" loop by the time they graduate (with a 3.5 GPA in CS).

That may be true at some places, but certainly not in the intro curriculum at the UofC. The intro course for majors with no background uses the Scheme-based How to Design Programs curriculum, which doesn't even _have_ a for loop :-)

The honors intro, which I assume this student would enroll in, is a quite challenging curriculum, expecting students to learn scheme, haskell, perl, bash, and some basic parsing tools over the course of a quarter. And do reasonable things with them.

So, while I'm certainly biased as a grad student here at the UofC, I could promise the student they won't be getting slowly spoon-fed language features. Even if they took the intro CS curriculum for non-majors in the sciences.
Hmmm. did he have any indication of cost?
Not sure why, you don't need to be rich to want a good chair when you spend hours on end in one. Of course you do need a bit of disposable income, but it's a question of priorities and necessities. I've been foregoing cars for a decade now because I try to live close to work in places where there is sufficient access to public transportations, it's a hassle for some things (going back to the family, fetching "big" groceries) but it avoids other issues and saves money which I can spend on more books or a better chair. I got myself a humanscale liberty a few years ago, I found it a good investment and amortized over the years I've owned it, it hasn't been that expensive. More expensive than getting a $20 chair every year, but it still looks and feels mostly brand new.
I am sure he meant profits
'There are lots of good restaurants in Europe and the Caribbean.'

Well, eating a croissant and a glass of Bordeaux wine will burn a hole in the pocket though :-)
go to chrome://flags and turn on smooth scrolling, It's much better
With so much face-time with startups and those wanting to invest in them, did you spot any pain points that could be eased by services you could offer?

As simple as packaging up paper-work or arranging trips to China to talk to manufacturers etc?
Maybe its obvious to others, but I think most philanthropists want to make sure their donation is unmistakenly theirs, attributed to them and highlighted with their name. This way you maximise all those nice social benefits to giving. Just setting a hands-off donation to Givewell doesn't reap quite as much.
I spend boatloads of money (this is Brazil) in an ipad telling me it was a productivity device, but its really a consuming device. The more I use touch devices, the more I realize the superiority of mice: I really hate how my finger gets in the way on the ipad. Meh.
Uni is not just about the lessons. And you can always skip those lessons, or do other work in it.

Although there should be a way to skip the intro courses. But stuff does get interesting later, I got to write a compiler, write the same program in 4 different languages, learn how a CPU works and is designed, program in COBOL, functional languages and write software to interact with hardware. I would never have done that without Uni.
My guesses on how to be a Level 1 programmer based on the examples:Do a lot of Math and stay in academia.
7400 logic is fairly cheap. the biggest cost was probably getting the boards made.
DC's Newest Technology Accelerator Is Changing The Way Things Are Done
I welcome this new type of device - a small touchscreen with an optional keyboard (and a mouse?) - warmly. But I would like the future to happen with open systems, not some US corp acting as a gatekeeper for all my content.
He's not arguing that The Surface is a laptop killer, he's arguing that the hybrid touch/keyboard idea is a laptop killer.
It also depends on execution. However bad surface RT is, I'm sure it won't be as frustrating to use as an Asus transformer (both the initial version as well as the prime). I've used both of those for a week only to return them without 2nd thoughts.
“Some idiot in our organization or in the Media Lab had disabled the camera, and they figured out the camera, and had hacked Android.”

Sounds like a great guy to work for. #sarcasm.
I can unreservedly recommend the book "How Apollo Flew to the Moon":

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Apollo-Springer-Praxis-Books-Explora...
UFC:Dilemma: Jon Jones wants Dan Henderson - Anderson Silva wants St-Pierre
While I agree with your general point, it is worth remembering that in the last 10 - 15 years battery life, processing power (in small devices) and the capacitative touch screen have improved dramatically.

It's a little bit like comparing the first truly practical cars (Model T vintage) to the very first cars and saying that they haven't done anything revolutionary.
I can relate. I'm also from the UK and in the final year of my comp-sci based degree took a module titled 'Web Application Development'. Cool - we're going to be building a web app, I thought. Wrong - it was an introduction to HTML, CSS, and javascript. We didn't even have to make anything, just write snippets. In the final year for fuck's sake. What a waste of £20k.
Abstraction: The Rule Of Three
The issue here isn't that you need to do something better to critique what someone else has done. You don't need to write a book to have an opinion on a book.

The issue is that it adds nothing useful to the discussion.
I thought this was pretty insightful:

These programmers have given themselves the real freedom zero: the freedom to decide for themselves what they want to work on.

That is what it means to be successful. If you don't decide for yourself how you work, what you work on, and when, you're not a successful person. Perhaps as a statement about the shoddy state of our society, he includes the assumption that one has to be a business owner-- and rich-- to get there (which is not strictly true, as Valve is establishing with the success of open allocation).
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I'm considering signing a couple of my employees up, but I'm reading the description:

you'll be expected to learn and use grep, ssh, apt-get, tail and man

I also see that restarting services is in there.. however I don't see anything that tells me any details about what the course actually covers.

You also don't mention what flavor of Linux you're using for teaching.

Also, launching this, and then starting the lessons only 1-2 business days later? You either don't want a lot of people to sign up... or I can't think of another reason to do that.
What about doing actual work? This revolution of touch, which has come to desktop with Windows 8 and Ubuntu, scares me a bit. First because I feel that professionnals that use computers daily are not really considered and second because with touch devices, the emphasis is on consumption rather than creation.
I have an external blue tooth keyboard for both my iPad and droid phone. Not having it integrated into the device is clunky, at best. Especially considering my keyboard and stand take up more space than the tablet itself. It's not elegant. Would love to see Apple come out with a sexier, more integrated, slim keyboard cover. Also, multi-tasking on the iPad blows, hard. It's better on my Android phone.

My neighbor got an Asus Transformer (the T300 model or what ever it was called). It's definitely slick and I could type quite well on it. Can't wait to see how the Win 8 RT app ecosystem plays out, because I like a lot of things MSFT is doing with their multi-tasking and side-by-side apps. Having good multi-tasking hot-keys on the keyboard is a big boost in productivity. Get me a good RDP client on it and I could find it very useful for a lot of work scenarios.
Is it really necessary to "score" the life-work of programmers? People change and go through stages of life and career. Everyone starts out as a "bad programmer" and/or has stretches of professional problems in their career. It just seems crass to attempt to categorize this into "levels" like on a video game or something.
"I dream of a ARM-based netbook with exceptionally good battery life, an E-ink display"
From Geek to Nerd: Quidditch Association releases safety pre-report
I was lead to believe that those screens were just used to monitor TV ratings!
Will "experimental" election software patches affect the Ohio vote?
"Thuster"?
This is pretty light. Take a look at the calculator at FreelanceSwitch.

http://freelanceswitch.com/rates/
My main goal for this month is to start applying lean manufacturing principles to my life. I'll be recording all my activities (on paper, since I'm probably the last programmer without an iPhone or Android device), the results of my efforts, and building value stream maps for the important processes.

This will be for all aspects of my life - work, social, health, etc.
So you wrote the Waldo essay, eh? I wrote the present essay. Good luck to you, and good luck to us all.
Couple of thoughts:

- not everybody can buy like Jeff all the new devices and get rid of the ones that don't stick, that's rather a special way to choose devices.

- I like Jeff's reasoning with the upsides and downsides of a lack of keyboard: the keyboard sort of gets in the way to do spontaneous things but for now the non-physical keyboards are not good for writing and editing long chunks of text. So it makes me wonder: wouldn't a tablet with a stylus and some good hand writing recognition software beat? After all, you can see a touchscreen as a better mouse - an evolution of the mouse, if you want. And if you want to write some text, like an email, doing it with your hand writing doesn't look too bad. Maybe it will really beat the keyboard for writing in Chinese or Japanese (disclaimer: I can't write yet in those languages). Of course if you want to use those devices to write code, it will be damn hard to implement the equivalent of the keyboard shortcuts for an hand-writing system.
I'd be interested in this if it were proven, but you should do a month free so people see what they're getting before they pay.
That Logitech doesn't have a trackpad.
My Home Office Chair
Superneat project. Now someone needs to synthesize a CPU and build a big enough discrete fpga to run it (very slowly) on.

A few comments for those playing at home: 1) Use less solder. When you get boards done at the pcb house, they usually put a solder mask. There is enough solder on the pads that you can solder SMD parts without adding more.

Just flux it with a fluxpen, lay the part on top, and remelt it. Much neater and much faster. You just have to check that there is actually enough solder on the pad to make a solid joint (a light and a magnifier help to verify).

2) Always clean the flux off, even if it's no-clean.

3) Autorouters produce less than ideal results. If you start with an autorouter pass, you can then go back and tear up lines and reposition parts to use fewer vias and straighter lines.

When I first started doing pcbs I wanted to use autorouters, but the results were always ugly. I met a guy who had done a 6-layer ARM board in some old DOS program manually which convinced me it probably wasn't that big of a deal to route by hand. It's calming if nothing else.
On the other hand, this language appears to be working.
The most common failure mode is failing to show up
Rather than making a strategy around the first draft of my application,I just went with the flow.Helped me pen down ideas better without boundaries and further refinements were easy and effective.
because when you're poor you worry about food and medical bills, not chairs.

come on, it's not hard to understand that other people may have less than you.
Until it died a couple of years ago I had an IBM Thinkpad x41 tablet PC for several years. I loved that thing and switched between tablet and laptop mode all the time when using it. I now have an 11" Macbook Air, and while in many ways it is the best laptop I've ever owned, I sorely miss not being able to swivel the screen around and turn it into a tablet. My next laptop is definitely going to be some variation on the theme tablet/laptop hybrid.
According to the profile, you live in Ireland. PayScale says your salary should be at least in the 50.000 euro range.

I think you could definitely give a Nexus as a gift to your father if you wanted to.

It depends on whether you think it would be a gift he'd appreciate and use, I guess. I've given a laptop as a gift to my grandmother, and a Kindle as a gift to my uncle (we're very close), on a salary of U$ 10.000 yearly.

In both cases the devices were used extensively, and it was something they wouldn't have bought or couldn't have afforded themselves, and it made me very happy to see them use the devices (especially my grandmother, everybody was betting she wouldn't learn how to use it).
Like I said, in my case there were no changes, I only read from them. So I let the server cache the hell out of them and the entire site was fast because of it.
I suspect that for a lot of people, the temptation is just too strong so they would rather get rid of the thing than try to ignore, etc.

I'm doing this with Facebook. I know it sucks, I never get anything out of it but just the idea that something there is going on and I'm missing it, makes me want to login and check my timeline. It's stupid I know.. so instead of fighting myself I joined 1) the fact that I KNOW it sucks and I'm not getting anything from it and 2) that I can't be trusted to ignore life's stupid distractions.. so I deleted my account. I have not missed it any bit and I'm achieving my goal.
edit: The Logitech Ultrathin Keyboard cover is sort of similar, but because the iPad doesn't have a kickstand, you lose keyboard real-estate to make the whole thing balance. Also, you lose the 'fold open/closed' movement. And it needs its own battery and hence another wall-wart. Also: no touchpad.

Surface (with its kickstand) + thin keyboard cover is an advance on that. You've got something that folds open and closed like a laptop, but is about the same thickness as iPad+smart cover.
My first job out of Uni required me to write up little manuals, take them to the customer to show them how to upload products to their e-commerce site, check orders etc.

I'm not a programmer, but I'm fairly technical.

Anyway, actually sitting beside the user as they tried to do things makes you realize how important easy really is. This was using basically off-the-shelf software that I thought was pretty user friendly. But, anything outside of the manual and instruction could not be/was not done.

It isn't really about easy-hard. It's about possible-impossible. There was some Jobs interview somewhere where he described the early (then current) Apple/microcomputer progression in orders of magnitude.

people who could build their own computer from parts >> people who could build it from kits >> people who could write their own software on pre-assembled computers >> people who could use other people's software >> people who could use a GUI-based computer.

You could continue this line to ipad apps. How many people use computers but don't install software (daughters, IT departments, etc do this once per year)? How many use email that someone sets up for them?
Also bear in mind the Surface has a kickstand so it stands up on its own
So, is that a yes or no?

https://viewer.zoho.com/docs/urlview.do?url=http://curia.eur...

Shows they were fined in March 2004. That document is the confirmation, in June 2012, that Microsoft will be charged what is essential a late-payment fee based on a decision in 2008. They had 2 months to appeal.

I'd be amazed if they didn't appeal a penalty charge of Euro 890 Million.

I can't find a reference to MS having actually paid the fine, they have paid others in the past amounting to more than this amount; it's just part of their cost of doing business for them I presume.

Anyone got a citation, a line entry in some accounts, a message to shareholders or something that one can look at to confirm payment?
Nice to find someone who's sharing goals with me. Though I have to admit I'm not exactly new in programming, my goal for this month is to learn programming concepts (algorithms etc.) in order to prepare myself for the switch to RoR.

I must clarify that I'm beginning with Python mostly because I'm having trouble finding good programming lessons that use Ruby.

This is a comment from a fellow HN user that I use for reference in material https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4709336
Also a Kiwi here and I think actually most of us are more concerned with the Police and Govt's apparent disregard for the rule and application of law.

Kim Dotcom is pretty funny and makes a good case for himself when he's given TV time, but the big story is how much damage the government will take over their buddy-buddy with the MPAA and all the insider dealings they've been up to. Dotcom has exposed a kind of corruption we didn't realise we had.
Agreed, 20 up front without a decent course layout is a bit of a gamble.
Facebook is testing Timeline layout with single column of posts
Hmm, I have been told by Amazon and confirmed in my testing that EBS is immune to the network throttle (unlike machismo to machine tcP, s3, etc)
+1

There should be clear regulations and the public should know what exactly is being done. That is what the EFF basically wants.

Other than that i think that using Drones for such purposes also can proof a good testing process.

You don't want to loose a drone over Iran, test it here under real circumstances.
How does this compare to VASMIR? Is there a chance NASA would start using this?
Programmers should just obey!
Do not think about the orders you get!
Are you a good patriot or are you against us?!?
Do not criticize your leaders!
OBEY!

Build a startup, try to get rich, and never ever talk about anything serious!
Stay hungry, Stay foolish!
Best of luck guys
AKA. "I can't afford to buy cheap". I also think that bed mattresses are worth investing in, since you spend 1/3 - 1/4 of your life in it, and being well-rested helps in being productive.
Very useful information, thank you.
I'd posit that the fear of death is really the fear of change.

You don't truly want to live forever, and lose everyone you know and will ever know. If everyone lives forever, then children will never grow.

Once you truly accept that change in not only inevitable, but extremely desirable, the fear of death is greatly diminished.
i love it :)
Mathworks Knot Contest
It works with the free VS-Shell runtimes, so in theory it should work with Express editions, but YMMV.
The one you linked is also a parody, maybe you meant this one? http://www.kenrockwell.com/tech/7.htm which was later "distilled" to just 2 levels http://www.kenrockwell.com/tech/2-kinds-of-photographers.htm
As a European, it can sometimes be hard to appreciate America's guarantees of free speech, especially as you only really ever hear about the "negative" aspects of it - Citizens United, for example.

But more and more it seems that countries that have nominally vibrant democracies are making certain types of speech criminal - I wonder if there'll be a groundswell of activism to get free speech retroactively enshrined as a right in countries where such a thing never really seemed needed before.
Beware of Fake-Antivirus "Win 8 Security System"
He is right about the future of interaction being touch + keyboard. I have been using my Transformer Prime for about a year now as a laptop replacement. It doesn't do everything I ask of computers ( but then again neither would any laptop ), but it does have this great interaction where I can switch between windows with the Honeycomb switcher app ( replaces alt-tab ) I can swipe between tabs in the terminal and use the touch screen to scroll back text. It is still the best device for reading any E-mails and its good at writing all but the longest. However the
coup de grâce of it is that I can use it for 12 to 18 hours without even thinking about plugging it into something. I can leave it unplugged for weeks and come back to a decent charge on it, and to my knowledge the only time I have ever turned it off was when I flashed CM10 on it. If the surface can provide those kind of experiences then I think its just a matter of time until it becomes a standard piece of kit for computer users.