skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I feel like most people are OK with a certain amount of ads when they're getting a free product.

The problem seems to me that a publisher with one ad makes 1x dollars. Then a marketing genius comes up with a great idea, lets put two ads on the page and make 2x dollars! The 2x dollars maybe lasts for a little while until the advertisers realize they aren't getting 2x the sales so the value of the ad goes down. Marketing genius gets another idea. Hey, how about three ads? Four ads? Pop-up ads..?! Now you just have an overload of cheap, crappy ads that everybody hates and people start figuring out ways to block them.

A better solution would be for smaller number of ads with higher cost to the advertiser. They would all be more valuable and get more clicks because we're not so over-saturated with ads.

I don't see how it could ever be that way due to human nature, greed, etc. But it would make a lot more sense.
Your list reports Computers/Internet as a separate category from Telecom Services & Equipment, and Computers/Internet beats out Oil & Gas on the 1998-2012 list. How much of Computers/Internet should be counted as Telecom?
The US government has no such exemption. They can't put an agent into a domestic company unless there's some evidence the company is deliberately breaking the law.
Since there's no immediate explanation I imagine someone will click through to the comments to find one. This really should be at the top of the linked-to page (if the author is present to see this comment).

----------------

The Navy Electricity and Electronics Training Series (NEETS) was developed for use by personnel in
many electrical- and electronic-related Navy ratings. Written by, and with the advice of, senior
technicians in these ratings, this series provides beginners with fundamental electrical and electronic
concepts through self-study. The presentation of this series is not oriented to any specific rating structure,
but is divided into modules containing related information organized into traditional paths of instruction.

The series is designed to give small amounts of information that can be easily digested before advancing
further into the more complex material. For a student just becoming acquainted with electricity or
electronics, it is highly recommended that the modules be studied in their suggested sequence. While
there is a listing of NEETS by module title, the following brief descriptions give a quick overview of how
the individual modules flow together.

----------------

Slightly larger Module descriptions can be found here: https://gist.github.com/4053057 (didn't want to pollute commentspace by pasting it all here)
Software should absolutely come with expiration dates, if they can be determined in advance.

There are many practical problems, however. Here are a few that come to mind:

(1) Upstream components/API's often don't have explicit end-of-life plans or expiry dates.

(2) Often, when or whether you shut down or breakingly change an API depends on business conditions that are impossible to predict in advance.

(3) If you publish an expiration date and your competitor doesn't, people might (usually mistakenly) believe their software is meant to last forever. Honesty about your product's shortcomings, while ethical, can cost sales if not everyone follows the same ethical standards. Regulation can help; nutrition information on food, for example, is federally mandated in the US to be present in a specific format. (Although I believe this only applies to food sold in interstate commerce.)

(4) A "best before" date may force a company to use resources to support a failed product. If you learn the hard way on launch day that only three people and a dog are willing to buy it, normally you would just discontinue the product and move on to something else. But if you've promised it will work until 2016, you're still going to be spending development resources supporting new OS's, library versions, upstream API changes, etc.
Good comment! Although it seems like it MAY have that application, the facts seem to be conveniently parsed.

That being said, after trying to watch some football on the internet today and being told I need a cable subscription, it seems like the more people try to prevent piracy, or in this case just legally not paying subscription fees, the more it pushes people towards it. Or worse yet (for medial companies), people decide that it's not worth the effort or even pirating it, and decide to just do something else, as I did. Sure, some people would be encouraged to buy cable, but some it certainly just hardens their resolve not to pay for the crap they put on TV.

I like sports, but I'm not paying for 90% Honey Boo Boo and America's Top Model to watch the 10% football and other worthwhile content that they have on!
> Not computer users, just the windows users.

Well, on a new Ubuntu installation the first thing I have to do now is:

sudo apt-get remove unity-lens-shopping

But still way better than the crap windows users have to put up with.
A fresh install of Windows is about 10 minutes from a USB thumb drive, which is not much longer than unboxing the computer, I guess. At least that's how I solved that problem usually ;)
As I mentioned elsewhere, doing a clean Windows install is difficult if the only means of reinstallation you have is the bundled "recovery DVD" which puts all of the shit right back on there.

With regards an APT for Windows, I don't see how that wouldn't be possible to add to Windows as a third party thing. With a nice GUI and search and a default catalog of quality mainly OSS software with no toolbars or BS and have it also keep everything upto date.

That way you could just install it on all of your relatives who use Windows's computers and tell them just to download everything from either that or the MS app store.
What's confusing about Facebook's complete disregard for their users? In case you haven't been paying attention: http://pleasedeletefacebook.com
Good question. I'm pretty open on that. The primary reason we did it was that people were taking our (free) manuals and reselling them on eBay. I felt bad for the poor people who were paying money for something that we were giving away. The non-commercial CC license lets us tell them to knock it off.

Tim is absolutely welcome to publish every single iFixit manual on his site. Heck, I'll give him an archive file if he wants.

Bottom-line: We want the manuals to get used. Whatever we can do to help people fix things, we'll get behind. That's why we do the bittorrent download of all our manuals. (Speaking of which, it's a bit out of date. I'll see if we can get updated ISOs pushed out in a few weeks.) We handle sites that run advertising pretty generously—we're happy to share if they're adding value (usually by translating the manuals).

By the way—the license only applies to distribution, not use. Hundreds of thousands of techs use iFixit manuals to sell their repair services and make a living. Many of them do pretty darn well for themselves. They are all awesome.

All of our manuals are available via our JSON API, by the way: http://www.ifixit.com/api/
I'm sure the US doesn't need spys working in Google. I'm sure there is systemic collaboration with the NSA, to the point where they don't need spys "working" for google. Also, I think actual spys are placed much closer to personal sources of information, not technical. If that makes any sense. I guess I'm trying to say is, if you are going after computer information, you're going to get it from the outside. If you're going after people information, you're going to have a guy on the ground.
Oh of course IE8 isn't going anywhere, but there is no reason at all for people to be on 7. Can you explain why someone on XP would move off 6 but not go all the way?
Well, doesn't everyone do "their own" shared hosting? With ip4 getting more and more scarce, and before ip6 is viable, I'll definitely keep using named vhosts for stuff. Add in SNI, and it even works with SSL. Sort of.
I'm responsible for making sure 10 or so websites are professional and are ready to represent the brands of a $100+ million dollar company. It's a big responsibility. I once said I couldn't believe those idiots would trust me with that task. Does that mean I think my employer and my bosses are idiots? No. It's just a way of expressing humility and coping with the fact that a task comes with a high amount of trust and responsibility.

In my case and in Zuckerberg's the comment was made in private and never meant to be heard by the public. I think using this quote against him is a cheap shot and a total copout to avoid answering the parent's question in any real way. If everyone's private comments were held against them then every person on earth would be vilified. I'm no fan of Facebook but I am a realist and when you try to use that quote against him you come off as blindly anti-Zuck/Facebook.

So to rephrase the question, why do you think Facebook users are fools? And if the answer is "because mark said so" then I'm sure I can find Zuckerberg being extra complimentary of Facebook users and then I'd ask "so which quote do we go with? The one that suits your belief or would you prefer to come up with your own reason?"
very nice and thanks for contributing what looks like a good resource! I'd be interest to know how you went about organizing the research for this? I've read webkits WebCore source and its pretty enlightening did you go that way or was this really dissecting the agggh incredibly intersting spec docs?

Also as a minor note, I know this a rough draft but have you thought about the code syntax styling? Its not that its bad at all, its just I think it could be more readable with some color differntiation :)
That depends on what he used the e-mail address for. If it was strictly for romantic liaisons, it's no big deal. But if he used it for any other purpose (talking with his lawyer, chatting with senators, etc.), it would be a hell of a platform for social engineering attacks. In that scenario, the information in Petraeus' personal inbox is beside the point[1]; you can use the trusted address to get your hooks into something more interesting.

[1] Ignoring the blackmail value of the affair.
I worked on something similar to the MVP shown (not about jokes specifically, but a "gimic" dating site). The real problems have to do with gender imbalance, men shotgunning messages, and the fundamental issue with these gimic sites: attractivness is all that matters online. It really doesn't matter how witty you can make yourself appear (which, I'm not sure this site allows for that? seems to just see if 2 users have the same sense of humor, not how funny someone is), if you're not attractive. Where in the real world, personality and confidence can have a much larger effect. The unspoken assumption is not that people want girlsthatlaughatmyjokes.com and guysthatmakemelaugh.com, It's hotgirlsthatlaughtatmyjokes.com and hotguysthatmakemelaugh.com.
The first thing to understand is that this isn't a problem with contemporary computing per se, it's a problem with Microsoft Windows and its software ecosystem.
Yeah, as a Linux user this article was just a list of reasons not to go back to Windows.

It does seem ironic that the product you pay for is far more anti-consumer than the free (in both senses) alternative. But I don't think that fact can be denied.
The email list is the easiest part - just copy Groupon's. By the very nature of the business they publish a list of everyone they deal with. Scrape it.
OK sure, but change the statement to "...any major Linux distro on any major hardware system" and it seems on the money to me. The only place I think Linux is lagging is graphics cards.
> whereas a function with a signature will need its arguments changed whenever the database schema changes.

True there is some work in keeping the two synchronized, but there are benefits.

First, unexpected arguments are immediately caught since they throw a TypeError.

Without this, you either have to manually check for unexpected keys (probably doing a set difference with `allowed_keys` or something) or you just silently pass through unrecognized attributes, probably causing strange behavior later on.

Second, you are forced to say explicitly which attributes are modifiable. To draw from the 'person' example, `name` and `age` might be modifiable, but `admin` might be protected. That would be made abundantly clear by `update(person, name=NotSet, age=NotSet)`, but less so, by `update(person, attrs)` or `update(person, kwargs)`.

A clear docstring would help, but I'd prefer to have the code just fail-fast on this unexpected input.
Those with information about salaries have power. Those who do not have them do not. Do not tell yourself stories to make you think it's good you don't know everyone's salary. You're disadvantaged by not knowing it.

Just like you're disadvantaged when you fill out the "past salary" boxes on job apps.
Retro Boxing: Evander Holyfield Vs. James Toney in Lights-Out Heavyweight Debut
I had a good laugh at people recommending Ubuntu. I recently installed the very latest Ubuntu on a VM, started the launcher, typed "terminal" ... and looked in utter disbelief as it started showing me random movies and crap from Amazon.

If that is your idea of a better operating system, try again.
You can dig through the tests to get a sense of what has been implemented. TLS, HTTP server/client, filesystem bindings, dns, etc are all working.

I have been trying to figure out what to use for docs and it seems that some markdown files and jekyll are what most recent projects have settled on: redis, yeoman.io and node.js.
So perhaps the real surprise is, is that despite the rather vocal apple/linux crowd, there is still a very large user group for which the crapware-OEM bundles are not big enough an issue to switch or to act up on. Be it for technical or for economical reasons.
That's a big reason that I don't use it anymore! That and the interface changing constantly and security issues!

Admittedly, I do have a fake account for my website that's updated automatically if anyone actually cares.
Oh come on. This is just unnecessary pedantry. We live in the real world here where people are people and not die-hard ideologues. It makes perfect sense that they do this. If youre a Facebook member you get access to the "openness" they're talking about. Plus it'd be really dumb for "to make the world more open and connected by providing an online service that lets you comminicate and share messages and assorted media with people with which you already have or will build connected relationships with if you are a member of our open connected service" to be their mission statement. Obviously the bulk of it is implied. If you follow your argument all the way through then you eventually get to ampointnwhere you're basically arguing that they explain the entire service right in the mission statement leaving out no detail. Just, c'mon. We all know what it means.
Report on Sensors and Future of (mobile) Healthcare
In my opinion it's not "installing" apps in Mac that can be "unintuitive", it's grasping the fact that a lot of applications are self contained; setting up an application on your OS is as simple as dragging it to a folder on your hard drive (generally) and it can be unintuitive to users that are accustomed to Microsoft installers and package managers.

OSX by default (at least for DMG's) opens a window with the extracted content and most include "setup" instructions ("drag FOO into the Applications folder"), so it's not hard to miss.
Curious why you would claim links for search engine ranking algorithms are a myth. Links from high profile sites (like TechCrunch) are demonstrably good, though I would guess it is definitely a smaller percent now than it was in the early days (ALA PageRank http://ilpubs.stanford.edu:8090/422/1/1999-66.pdf).
The title of this article should really be changed to "The amount of crap WINDOWS users have to put up with is incredible". I remember back 5-6 years ago when I had to go through all of the above. But if the writer is tired of these things, he should just pony up the dough and get a mac.
I haven't quite seen your hypothetical with hotels yet, but the low-cost airline market in Europe is pretty much converging on selling you a dirt-cheap ticket and then trying to market you to a bunch of other revenue sources.
It's not advantageous for a parasite to immediately kill it's host. By 'wiped out' I don't mean the literal death of windows installs, I mean in the sense that a pristine windows install will, on average, slowly accumulate cruft until it's on the verge of being unusable. It's not a 1:1 analogy. In a strictly practical sense, an individual windows install may not be nonoperational due to mal/spy/crapware, but the quality of the user experience goes way down as a result of it.
The real answer is stop buying those machines loaded with crap-ware. The Microsoft Store sells various computers free from all the crap-ware. Also some manufacturers are good about keeping the extra software to a minimum and even offering a clean restore disk.
This is why I switched from staying in hotels to AirBnB houses. The best place turned out to be Startup House where I am currently staying longer than anywhere else in a month. As my current startup stabilizes, I intend to live in more cities not just in US but all over the world.
I'm on my phone so typing is a little bothersome, but if this is the same as the printed manuals they've had for years I would highly recommend it. Most of my study on electronics outside of hands on work was with this series. If you're thinking of taking 6.002x on edX these might help out a lot as a primer for those who might otherwise be jumping in blind.
Is your target professionals or consumers?

As a consumer I'm always incredibly wary of things that seem too good to be true. I don't understand how you can scale the economics of $8/month with unlimited storage. When I see that it induces scepticism that you'll be around for the long term, and one thing I really do not want is my lifetime archive of photos suddenly disappearing on me one day.

A second point - for me these days, getting photos uploaded to storage is as key as the storage itself. If you have a story about that (smart phone apps, background uploaders, APIs, dropbox, picasa, flickr or other integration) then I would like to see it. The drag and drop is neat, but it doesn't work at scale. I want something that's going to upload the photos automatically.
It's even worse than that, as Woz effectively left Apple after his plane crash in 1981. He continued to officially be an employee, but didn't contribute a whole lot after that point. Quitting in 1987 was more of a formality than anything.

The last Apple computer Woz had a direct hand in designing was either the Apple II or the II+ (I can't quite figure out which), over three decades ago. Woz was a genius when it came to minimal and effective designs and it's certain that he played a key role in getting Apple off the ground, but he has had no real impact on the company or anything the company does for nearly as long as I've been alive.

Woz helped build Apple into a successful company, but the scale isn't even remotely the same. The Apple that Jobs subsequently built decades later now sells more hardware in a month (or so) than Woz's Apple sold during his entire tenure.
This is one of the features of Scala I like; explicit types for Option/Some/None in the core language and standard API. It's generally used for return types (ex: a hashmap 'get' will have a return type of Option[ValueType] and return either Some[ValueType] or None) but you can use it for function parameters as well.

scala> def foo(name:Option[String] = None, age:Option[Int] = None) = {
| println("==========")
| if( name.isDefined )
| println("Name: " + name.get)
| if( age.isDefined )
| println("Age: " + age.get)
| println("==========")
| }
foo: (name: Option[String], age: Option[Int])Unit

scala> foo()
==========
==========

scala> foo(Some("Alice"))
==========
Name: Alice
==========

scala> foo(age = Some(10))
==========
Age: 10
==========

Plus with some implicit syntactic sugar...

scala> implicit def strToSome(s:String) = Some(s)
strToSome: (s: String)Some[String]

scala> implicit def intToSome(i:Int) = Some(i)
intToSome: (i: Int)Some[Int]

scala> foo("Alice")
==========
Name: Alice
==========

scala> foo(name = "Alice")
==========
Name: Alice
==========

scala> foo(age = 10)
==========
Age: 10
==========

scala> foo(name = "Alice", age = 10)
==========
Name: Alice
Age: 10
==========
There will always be new bad ads- so that's not a valid argument
Looked up their web site: https://www.system76.com/home/ pretty nice stuff. They are in the right space for this business model. However they've gone only half-way there. They assemble a system out of off the shelf parts and provide Ubuntu for it.

If they were doing a 'Sun' type model, they would spec the hardware, get the Ubuntu distro and integrate it with some key features. Create an ABI and a DDI [1] that third party vendors could rely on to work for the next few years and when it changed to evolve in a compatible way, and then sell that to end users.

The point of having a managed ABI/DDI is that someone like an AutoCAD would be assured that if they ported AutoCAD to the system it would always work on all systems and if it didn't then System76 would figure out why and fix it. System76 would have to sign up to create a stable set of interfaces that provided all of the required features so that you wouldn't need "autoconf" or "configure" you could just add "#ifdef SYSTEM76" in your code where needed and know it would just work. Now System76 can build that out of existing pieces, they can say for example that "OpenGL will be available, link library is -lgl and include path is <opengl/*.h>" and those kinds of "restrictions" enable someone to maintain a version of their product for a 'small user base' (which rounded to the nearest million users is 0) Those same restrictions are anathema to many in the community ("Why force me to use Unity? I love Gnome/KDE/XFCE...") but they require a federating API if someone wants to code to them and support that code.

The counter argument is "community support has created stuff that runs on everything without restrictions, look at MySQL, or VIM" and that is a good argument, but for 'boring' things it works poorly, and 'boring' usually means tools of interest to a user who isn't interested in quarrying the rock so they smelt the iron to make into a lathe kind of users.

The third argument is that its all going into the cloud and people running computers that they compile on and stuff will be like people who spin fiber into yarn so they can knit their own sweaters, a niche and a small one at that. I can see the merits of that argument as well but hope it doesn't win the day.

[1] ABI - Application Binary Interface, DDI - Device Driver interface
I think that's wrong philosphy to have. If I've built something (especially a 3 day project when I haven't invested too much time yet), I want all the criticism I can get. Comments like "that seems cool" are just noise. On the ohter hand, someone pointing out a legitimate showstopper can save you 6 months of time working on a dead end idea that could be spent working on something else.
Apple is still a polished, shiny version of the consumer-focused computer, and not, I think, the developer-focused computer that ChuckMcM is describing. The locked bootloader of the iDevices and the Mac app store are but two pieces of evidence of this.
very interesting. My understanding was that most handsets didn't implement compression but I think it's worth a try.
Thats why a I mentioned statutory if for example the FBI had suspicions that the KGB/SVR or another state had agents within a company they would take action and they have caught a number of spies doing this.

The KGB back in the day had an entire department Line X that was dedicated to industrial espionage - Putin apparently was in this Department