skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Nicely done, but I would seriously consider updating your daily limit. I did not have nearly enough time to play around to consider converting as a registered user (I was clicking around). I ended up just deleted the site cookies, went into inspect elements and deleted the modal but I am not your average user and most people wouldn't do that to continue testing out your site, let alone know it could be done.

After all that, I am pretty certain I will continue to use your app. Nice job!
> It runs Windows 8 and only Windows 8, so unlike a MacBook or even a small Dell notebook, Linux isn't an option. It's locked down in the worst possible way, more like an iPad than an Air.

Is that speculation or do you have a reference for that?
The question isn't "Is it good?". The question is "Is it selling?". What are the sales figures for windows on mobile?

I wouldn't mind giving it a shot next time I buy a phone, but most people I talked to seem to consider it a minus. Yeah, I know, anecdotes are not data, but from everything I read so far, sales are sluggish.

It's a pity. I want to see more than just Android and iOS.
Consumer goods are, however, much cheaper now as compared to 50 years ago (at least in urban Asia where I live). It makes a huge difference between spending 10% of my income on daily necessities, as opposed to 50% like my ancestors did.

Arguably, this matters mostly to those below a certain threshold income (difference of 2% and 10% not as big as 10% and 50%), i.e. matters more to the poor than to the rich. I think American citizens tend to be richer than the rest of the world.
MSFT has been a whole other kind of ridiculous: As close to completely flat as you can manage given the turbulent financial markets for going on twelve years.

Adobe, Apple, Oracle, IBM, they've all completely eclipsed Microsoft in terms of stock performance. I'm not one to suggest stock price is everything, but it is an indicator as to how much faith people have, collectively, in the company.

When Apple was bottoming out they were in rough shape. Yes, they had billions in the bank and could've muddled along for another decade, and they never posted losses anywhere near what other companies at the time did, but they were a hurting unit.

Slumping market share, collapsing interest in their operating system, expensive research efforts coming up with nothing tangible to bring to market...

Sounds a lot like Microsoft, doesn't it?
Why does Microsoft have to be involved in the signing process? After all, you're not buying the computer from them.

Can't there be some sort of independent signing authority? In fact, why couldn't the user just sign and install his own code without involving any third party at all?

This whole "secure boot" system seems really poorly conceived, unless its purpose is to take power away from the user who owns the computer and give it to a central authority.
I think Apple is making sure people voice their displeasure with win8 as it is genuinely ahead of OSX in both functionality and design.

It seems implausible that Apple would be behind the raft of bad reviews that Windows 8 has gotten, including the review from a professional UI testing company. I don't think Apple even wants to get Microsoft's market. After, Apple is premium vendor.
Even if they had launched at the same time who is really going to buy a 2 pound tablet when you can get a $199 (soon $99) 7" tablet that weighs so much less? A regular laptop + cheap tablet killed the Surface Pro long before it had a chance to even go on sale. Microsoft was competing with the iPad 1 / MacBook Air -2 generations.
agreed. while this task is not hard, the rest may not go as planned. recently i just moved back to ubuntu instead of debian out of lazyness. tried to copy a bunch of images via dd, unetbootin, whatever method... but the debian installer (be it the disk, netboot, etc) always died trying to look for a cd rom instead. after some dozen tries (20min+ each) i just gave up and got the ubuntu iso and installed. sucks no to have to disable a bunch of proprietary and binary blob stuff, but at least that i can manage --differently from fixing the installer.
Item not as not as described
It's still speculation until someone confirms it, but as far as I can tell, UEFI is a requirement for Windows 8, and it's not good: http://www.pcadvisor.co.uk/news/software/3374039/installing-...

It's possible that a Linux certification for UEFI will come about, but that will mean you're restricted to certain flavors of Linux and not able to freely install whatever.
> What the heck is anyone going to do with a tablet that is (over)priced like an ultrabook and has only 4 hours of battery life?

I might be getting too old to understand this but when I was an undergraduate student 14 years ago, I had an 1-hour-battery laptop and was 'really' useful. I can't see how a portable computer (even if I have to plug it to use it) would be 'especially useless' for students.

Coming from a latin-american country, the whole battery life issue sounds a lot like a "1st world problem" to me.
linux guy here, microsoft is not disappearing anytime soon(sometimes i think sadly not), nor is windows8.

Windows 8 is quite successful believe it or not. Microsoft still owns the government. They can sell them whatever the hell they want.

Hybrid tablet/laptops(not talking about surface)? Windows 8 is the best OS to use in that case(it's really just two OS in one nothing more)

What about secureboot? Basically EFF has to beg Microsoft to give them permission to install linux on all those new windows ultrabooks.

I mean WTF, Microsoft going away? Hell, I wish that was the case!
Public folders don't work consistently in countries that Dropbox has deemed a piracy risk. Doesn't work in India, for example.
I've responded to one of your 4 other comments on ex.fm with a bunch of reasons why it's different, despite the trolling.
For those who don't follow why this is. In the first case, data is dup'ed to stdin and so remains seekable. This is important since head buffers reads (typically 8k at a time) for efficiency, then uses lseek to reposition to just after the requested number of lines. If reading from a pipe as in the second case, lseek() fails and by the time tail runs, head has consumed all of the file.

If you use "seq 10000 | (head -5; tail -5)" you'll get the first and last lines as expected since head hasn't consumed too much of the file.

I don't think this invalidates his example, but it could mention this subtle caveat. :-)
This.

I installed the beta preview and I've since upgrade win 7 to win 8 pro. My reaction, which I share to others, is that it's the first time I've used a computer and it felt like 2012.

There's plenty of room for improvement but they are getting a lot of things right, IMO. I would kill for the GUI formerly known as Metro on top of FreeBSD or Debian.

(I'm also a Mac user 90% of the time).
Unless they all agree, either through collusion or informal cooperation, to anti-consumer practices and to shut out smaller competitors.

I'd much rather take my chances with democracy.
Until it gets so locked down it can't run Emacs, anyway.
Because I feel that people on HN try to micromanage their neurons to an extent that they evaluate themselves as if they were computer hardware....

"Well I only have so much RAM to do this task, but if increase my computer processing power through deliberate practice..."

I was a bit offhand, I admit. I was in a bad mood when I made that comment. But I stand by the fact people on HN take themselves and their capabilities way too seriously, without any thought to the fact, say, that the internet and programming are only a minuscule fraction of our history as intelligent lifeforms. While I love the internet/programming/topics discussed on HN, I just think that people here are too hard on themselves. You're not a computer with specs, you are the results of hundreds of thousands of years of evolution.
Really depends on your metric of "rate of advancement". If it's going to be about what common people think, then consumer-product and lifestyle innovations would be over-weighted. Viewed by a specialist in any field, that field's progress would be overweighted. From the perspective of productivity increase (or GDP per capita increase), qualitative changes in lifestyle would be underweighted. etc.

Furthermore, even after deciding on a vague sort of metric, it's hard to quantize (choose a measure, in math jargon), advancement to be able to have rates.
Very interesting idea! This is really smart and handy for small business or blogs. I wonder what Dropbox thinks of this idea.. maybe they should incorporate it into their own service?
I'm facing the same dilemma. I'm technical enough to get the product to MVP (though I suspect it will all need to be reworked to take it to scale), have enough marketing sense to get it distributed and have enough BD hustle to have found beta partners (we're an Enterprise B2B company) to test it with.

The one thing that irks me is being alone in the trenches. This $hit is tough and its like whack a mole. You nail one thing and another thing pops up. Wouldn't it be great to have four hands instead of just two?

I often think of it in terms of resources. Right now, the resources are my time, the money investors have put in and advisors' time to a lesser extent. To hit the milestones on the way to success you have to carefully allocate those resources. The kicker is the time portion. It is very easy as a lone founder to get deep into a rabbit hole (product feature, marketing approach or customer acquisition channel even) without having anyone to check you. Other eyes on projects help you to better allocate your resources in addition to giving you double the time-based resources to allocate. Advisors are cool but they aren't in the jungle with you and they won't wake up in the middle of the night to scribble ideas and email you about something that could be a game changer for your startup.

That said, with co-founders come issues of motivation, passion for the project, etc. Partnering with a great co-founder is like a marriage but it is not easy to find the right fit.

To sum it up, I have no clue. I'm weeble wobbling between the two myself.
P. Halpern on Bloomberg's (BSL) C++ polymorphic allocators
Good question - it is something I regularly wrestle with myself as I evaluate the various hardware and software options out there. In the end though, it always is a matter of tradeoffs based on your personal value system.

For the past few years, the most valuable property that I have tried to maximize when pitting multiple hardware offerings against each other is time. For other people it may be money, gaming performance, or other intrinsic values such as freedom.

For me, buying the latest Apple hardware as default has become the easiest way to maximize time: I do not need to perform exhaustive research across the market, the shopping experience is smooth, support is same day and local, the resale value is high and selling is easy, the hardware supports the tools I have built my current workflow around (a UNIX command line, emacs shortcuts system-wide, Xcode for iOS development, Photoshop, etc.), and configuration and backup is simple (iTunes, Migration Assistant, Time Machine, and iCloud for a limited scope of data).

Now obviously a lot of this is a result of vendor lock-in, which I try to remain vigilant about. How did I get fooled into being locked in?

It is simply a result of a string of great experiences early on in my dealings with the company. All companies provide varying levels of experience across their lineup of products and services. In my opinion, Apple manages to have more peaks in more fields that matter to me. The early positive experiences in areas that resonate deeply with me, built a great deal of respect and trust in the people who create things at Apple, earning them the spot as my default hardware

Regarding the Retina MacBook Pro product specifically: it is still "one of the best [computers] I have ever used" because it hits peaks in many right spots. The performance, portability, keyboard and trackpad, how it fits in my backpack and on my desk, design, ecosystem, and OS X are all positives for me. What I believe to be low points (Wi-Fi issues, video card performance in certain situations, Mission Control, the annoying MagSafe 2 adapter, iPhoto woes, etc.), are tradeoffs I am willing to make.

The "ghosting" is the one point I cannot concede. I work with pixels and color too much to let it slide. Thus far, Apple has offered me one replacement, with a free SSD update thrown in. I consider that great support, but poor quality control.

This is an interesting tradeoff because of how the two fields are closely related. Poor quality control necessitates good support. Whether that support is good enough (or the quality control poor enough) for me to continue leaving Apple's hardware as my default depends on whether they offer me another replacement, and whether that one is satisfactory.

Times change though. Open hardware and software is more important to me than ever. We must all be able to tune the properties of our hardware and software to our liking, without sacrificing the state of the art.
Ark bought Carsabi
A single person can't do all 3 of those things, that makes perfect sense.
A single person could, however, hire people to take care of some of those issues. Is that correct or just my being naive?
Basically EFF has to beg Microsoft to give them permission to install linux on all those new windows ultrabooks.

This is actually very interesting- for those not following along already check out http://www.zdnet.com/linux-foundation-uefi-secure-boot-key-f...
Web Platform Doc Sprints off to a Good Start
Mobile & Tablets = 24% Of Online Shopping On Black Friday, Up 18% From 2012
Super basic Pelican site I made as a test a few weeks back: http://mlapida.site44.com/
How can this differentiate between users though? Can the frequency be replicated?
A large number of Americans want just want easy to use. But another large number have serious work they need a real PC to accomplish. But most of the who want PCs already have them whereas iPads are pretty new. Moreover, Microsoft seems to want to step on the useful part of PCs to bully their way into the tablet market.

So the PC is not going away but Microsoft could suffer a lot in the next few years. It's hard to weep for them, though.
I tried to back up the Windows 8 install on my X1 Carbon before wiping it, but it was too difficult without an optical disc drive, so I just gave up. Perhaps it depends on the OEM, but I don't believe Lenovo cares what software is on the device.
I think Apple is making sure people voice their displeasure with win8

That is one hell of a conspiracy theory. Got any evidence?
That sounds like Makey Makey (http://www.makeymakey.com/), though that's based off a simple electrical circuit which is different to this I think.
WiFi Signals Caught on Camera
There could be an independent signing authority providing that (a) they could provide some incentive to all hardware vendors to ship their keys and (b) there was someone actually competent and willing to be that independent signing authority. For Microsoft, this is just an extension of the Windows driver signing program - they already had most of the infrastructure in place, so there was little additional expense involved in handling Secure Boot as well. And Microsoft certainly have the means to "encourage" vendors to ship with their keys, since they can withhold the Windows logo program funding from vendors otherwise.
Performs well. Cheers.
My advice is to use what the government has set out for people to use: the courts. Sue them in small claims court.

Apple has sold something that is not suitable for its intended purpose, and has breached warranties required by law such as warranty of merchantability.

Even a place like Texas has the Deceptive Trade Practices Act. Under this act a consumer can sue for breach of these warranties and receive damages, AND get court costs and attorneys fees!

Take them to small claims, you will probably win, if they show up at all.
How do compute the risk-adjusted part? What would 50k risk-adjusted mean in your example?
I can dump their services and go with a competitor

Says who? Or, more to the point, whose army? When the corporations that hold your email and bank statements refuse to be dumped, you'll need someone to break into their server rooms, wipe their hard drives, and arrest or shoot anyone who resists. I want those people to obey the law, and be under democratic control.
12 Gems of Christmas #10 – konacha
a.k.a ECommerce site, am I right?
I find it odd that you demand evidence for his number, yet provide none about your claim that people will have a PC cause they hate typing on a tablet.

I don't have any hard numbers either, but people that can't touch type can often type faster using a tab with swiftkey than on a keyboard.
I was wondering if someone was going to ask that :)

We got a bunch of new accounts created, several times more than we would get in a normal day (though not a huge amount).

The percentage of these twitter visitors to our site that created accounts was really low. Like you said, the average curious twitter person is not in the market for analytics infrastructure.

Something like a technical blog post has a much higher conversion rate, since it attracts more technical folks interested in that specific thing. But it is also much more costly (in terms of time) to produce.

We're learning as we go with this marketing stuff, but seems like more hits on the site is always a good thing. There's always some unquantifiable amount of "value" you get from building brand awareness.
Your event seems like a product looking for a solution, but beer and girls will get you some developers.
Quickly deploy an easily editable site at no cost.
Off the top of my head; for me this would be useful for showing HTML work in progress to clients.

EDIT: Didn't realise the free option only allows 100MB/month. Turns out this is kind of useless for me :(
I don't think that comparison is valid. It's like saying that MS would be worry 12 years ago because people was buying blackberry devices and wouldn't upgrade old PCs because they had a new way to send and receive emails.

Granted, you can do a lot more with an Ipad than with the 1st generation of blackberry devices but being an owner of an iPad I can't think in somebody that would prefer to write an email or a blog entry in an iPad rather than in a computer.
The graphical elements may look similar but Apple is smart enough to know that touch screens call for certain UIs/metaphors and that desktops call for others.

The UI metaphors that work for PCs don't necessarily make sense on touch screens and the ease of use tablets afford due to their "touchability" is what Steve Jobs promised when he heralded this as the Post-PC era.

Microsoft is simply not in a position to say "We agree with Apple". Doing so would betray Microsoft's current PC using customers.

So its hand was forced to merge tablets (which have been killing PC sales for 2 straight years quarter after quarter, something even MS can't afford to deny) and the PCs that have brought MS this far.

To make things worse MS made Metro which makes apps all look so similar that there is no way for developers to stand out driving some of them to other platforms.

http://www.riagenic.com/archives/889
Torvalds: SecureBoot doesn't hurt Linux
I don't think it's remotely sensible to compare the types of exercise professional atheletes endure to walking.
The old /u/ trick doesn't seem to work anymore.
No but Apple is expert to sway the media to do what it wants. I mean, lately it's been releasing barely upgrades and it was covered with anticipation that no other groundbreaking technology got.

New windows is really good, I don't like that MS is copying Apple and making whole thing closed, kind was hoping things would go the way of the linux, not the way of the apple, but... So, it is not perfect, but it is very futuristic interface that works.

What I specially like is that they designed interface in such a way that it doesn't require insane graphics card just to get it to work well.

I think we all need a lot of options and dissapearance of any would hurt us big time.
True! I also tweeted @saulcolt about the post and he really liked it! Then he retweeted it. He has over 9k followers; not bad :)
Well said. If the customer is unhappy with the product, there is a problem.
I don't know anyone who has an iPad but not a PC, but I know several people who have smartphones but no PCs. They're good enough for people who aren't heavy internet users and don't want to spend money on a PC or a separate internet connection.
Congrats! I want to drink that koolaid too where I should send my resume? :P
It'd be very useful for laypeople. No FTP, no SSH, no SCP... You just drag and drop - I can definitely see it taking off.

Actually, I think I'll be using it too for shenglong.ca where I keep a bunch of static content. Lots of people have domains, but don't really pay for any servers during project down times (blasphemy, I know!)
Some of that may depend on precision - how precise is the sensor? Can it pull a fingerprint, so it will basically do a fingerprint scan to authorize door unlocking?

I'm reminded of #66 on the Evil Overlord list - My security keypad will actually be a fingerprint scanner. Anyone who watches someone press a sequence of buttons or dusts the pad for fingerprints then subsequently tries to enter by repeating that sequence will trigger the alarm system.

http://www.eviloverlord.com/lists/overlord.html
One more thing why I think Win8 is good and works. My kids love it and didn't need a second to figure it out. They don't care about companies, they love ipad, so, this is very good sign in my view.

Which kind of makes me wonder about those people who can't figure it out :)
Do you have some sort of basis for claiming it's less distracting? I mean, I get that it has a certain visual appeal, and I readily accept your font claim, knowing little about font rendering.

But I'm not at all convinced that an Apple laptop is less distracting than a Lenovo laptop. After all, we're discussing it in the comments, aren't we?
While OS X certainly needs some love and attention, and even iOS could use more than a fresh coat of paint, it's still practical and usable.

Windows 8 seems garish and over-complicated while, impossibly, being dumbed down to uselessness. Seeing video after video of people flail about with what should be routine tasks is amusing enough to watch, but probably no fun for an amateur.

I have no idea what IT departments will make of their business computers suddenly looking like an XBox, either.
That's an interesting theory. But the fact is that the data doesn't lie. People have bought iPads and other tablets in huge numbers and their purchasing of PCs has slacked off by an enormous amount. The timing and severeness of the change is too much to be accounted for reasonably by any other phenomenon.

The conclusion is clear: people are forgoing purchases of PCs because they are buying tablets.

You may think it's ridiculous, but the market is speaking loudly with the voice of billions of dollars, and any company which ignores that is doomed.

As I pointed out, this may not be because people are not using PCs, it just means that they aren't buying new PCs. Perhaps they find that an old, clunky computer is just fine for writing emails and so-forth and their tablets and smartphones are preferable for doing everything else. Or maybe they aren't satisfied with their technology choices at all but because they spent so much money on a tablet they have to delay any updates to their laptop/desktop machine for financial reasons.
In addition, I'd suggest explaining simply what each product does in each section (flip to reveal text when mouse-over of product images?).

I was also confused as to why I couldn't find the app download link. Took me a while to realise it's a website, not an app.
Am I the only one who read this as:

"Poll: Do you text while driving?"
And this was a huge factor in Steve Jobs' success - he understood the typical American better than almost any engineer.