skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I use a Macbook Pro for work and while the hardware may be pleasant to look at, it's a pain to use. The keyboard is set entirely too close to the screen, meaning I can't use it comfortably for very long without an external screen and/or keyboard, the nice 90 degree angles along the edges mean that if I can using it I quickly get marks in my wrists from it (and occasionally have hands start to go to sleep, a really bad sign), the touchpad is placed to where it's difficult to keep straight wrists/proper keyboard usage without touching the touchpad. But is sure does look pretty.

I had a Lenovo T60 for quite a while and, while it looked like a cheap piece of plastic, it was wonderfully durable, keyboard was placed in a good spot, the positioning of the buttons/touchpad were all just right. Just because it looks nice does not make something well-designed, and I have yet to use an Apple device that I would consider anywhere close to ergonomic friendly (the iPod nano being the closest as you only really used 2 "buttons" on the circle, pause/play and next).
Well Microsoft do install dodgy stuff. The poorly thought out MS11-100 patch broke everything for us.
https://github.com/gravityonmars/wp-svbtle
grab it while it's hot :)
I wonder why the new course is not part of Coursera...
When I say "workers" I only mean people who are in the direct making of the product. Most people on the payroll share the property of not being properly accounted of when the production costs are calculated with CEO. And that's the group we want to optimize today.
472 different VC are backing companies with a valuation over $100 million
Said person may have only been the catalyst. The reality is that company culture changes as it scales up, whether you bring in outsiders or not.

It's easy to blame a specific person, but in fact it is perfectly normal for some of "the best" people to leave because they no longer feel comfortable in the changing company.
New study on companies worth $100M+ shows how much of a lie the Web 2.0 fad was
Those who find Stallman's view of automatic updates against common sense should note that they are just the logical consequence of GNU's demand for "freedom to study and change the program in source code form". There's nothing more to it.

From that point of view automatic updates which could be reviewed at the source code level are different from binary updates, although both serve the same practical purpose for the "non technical end user".
> But it is much easier to create a frictionless user experience if you do not have to redirect people to somewhere outside your side.

Under this model, how do you train ordinary users to avoid phishing?
He's not just a clown, he's a clever clown. He knows how to bring in pageviews by creating controversies amongst his readers, which is why he is still 'respected' by the people who hire him to write - Because pageviews are everything for them.
What is so wrong with iCloud? It does exactly what I want it to do - back up my phone and sync my data between devices.

Maybe people try to use it for more than this?
I rotate through antique/classic cars about every 5 years. I buy one in alright condition, slowly fix it up/restore it on weekends until it's in good enough condition to be a daily driver (normal commute is less than 2 miles), drive it for a while, then sell it and use some of the money to buy the next one. They're really not ready for specialized insurance until the last year or two I own them. That being said...because of the distance I drive, and the fact that it's only used for commuting/events/whatever (no out of town trips, not trips to the store, etc.) I typically have it on the super-cheap "I barely drive it" insurance and the company I'm with now (GEICO) has really good rates for antique/show cars.
Same here. And sometimes after being introduced to a concept or function, I will wonder, "hmm, what if i do this.." but the embedded REPL doesn't allow you to tinker.
Uhm... asking serious questions about the price of something is supply and demand.
That is true, but they all represent somehow the older version of connected software, as a pure extension of the device rather than a service on it's own. iCloud works great for a device as an invisible backup, but you can't use it to share files, co-operate, publish, share data between applications, etc. And I'd say the popular web services of today are so because they integrate across services and socialize the usage. Apple are still stuck 5-10 years behind.
Is software or hardware cloning ever OK?
Spend your career in a Big Four accounting firm mostly. Get a MAcc and CPA.
Apple relies on its developers to power the App Store. They (hopefully) won't forget that.

Well, I'm sure they won't forget the 25 [1]. They may forget about everyone else though.

[1] http://techcrunch.com/2012/12/04/analyst-just-25-developers-...
TI-83+ was my only hand-held programming system. In high school, I wrote Blackjack, Trapshoot, and a Whac-a-mole clone on it, along with a few originals. I hope that touchdevelop takes off-- it might be the only reason I'd get a tablet.
Undoubtedly, Apple will continue to grow & be profitable. The question is whether they'll be able to maintain those fat 40%+ gross margins on their flagship products.

I'm a huge fan of Apple but even I would start to question the wisdom of the iPhone 5 costing 649 $ (unlocked) vs a very capable & well-specced 349 $ Nexus 4. The same could be said about the iPad Mini & the Nexus 7. It's not the Apple products have lost any of their shine, it's that Nexus Devices have gotten a lot better.

Google's OS is getting polished by the day (Google Now's today update) & is slowly but surely eroding the advantage Apple once had in mobile OSes.
WallStreet is expecting those margins to compress & that's affecting their valuation.
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With simply installing Zoolz you will instantly make your life easier, especially if you take a look at its many enticing features such as the introduction of Cold Storage TM ; which is the future of all backup solutions. Not to mention the user management that is tailored for the ease of every client.

All in all, Zoolz is the perfect business solution for both corporate and home users, and with its compelling prices, you can even save some extra money on the side for that expensive Christmas list you are bound to buy.

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One drawback with R is that in computations like this, several intermediate data structures with one dimension equal in length to nrow(dfrm) are allocated. Traversing an iterable of tuples is a simple way to think about it, is efficient, and ties in with other technologies e.g. relational databases. R is often people's first language (e.g. science graduates) and those people would be better off learning how to iterate over tuples than learning the obscure bestiary of data structure manipulators you point out.
Ah ok, now I understand your point and you're right.

I was actually under the impression that any value type could be used in fixed buffers.

You can however workaround that by using fixed byte buffers with serialization, but it is not so programmer friendly.
T-Mobile Discontinues Public Wi-Fi Hotspot Service
What always surprises me with these posts is the amount that developers make in San Francisco. Or possibly in the US as a whole.

I work in London for £31k ($50k), doing computer vision computer graphics (GLSL) and the occasional ML development. Mostly in C++ or Python. My rent for a 1 bedroom apartment is £1000/month ($1.6k/month) (the cost of which I thankfully share with my girlfriend).

Honestly, it's a constant struggle just getting by. Looking at the salaries offered on the job market, I don't think I'm the only one. Yet the demand appears to be high. I've seen job posts up for months on end on Linkedin. Every Hacker News meetup I've been to, almost everyone presenting is desperate for new hires.

How have we ended up with such a huge difference with respect to SF? I'm sure other jobs would be much more closely matched across the pond.
Users can disable the check.
The article isn't saying Apple should go back to making servers, he is just saying they are no longer serving him in particular anymore, which is fair.

I will however contend that MY main issue with Apple now a-days is that its actually becoming worse on the "normal person front" (at least when it comes to OS X). Messages for example is a complete disaster. I regularly have to help family members with their Macs (many of which originally moved to the Mac on my insistence ages ago), and I can tell you that they are still quite confused (increasingly so) about how to use these machines. Here is an article that touches on this: http://blog.davidchartier.com/post/36634783567/im-getting-si...

However, I am still pretty happy with iOS/iDevices. I have not been as happy with an Apple product as with the iPad mini in a LONG time. I do agree with others though that if they don't get their act together with "services" (Maps, Sync, basically anything that isn't judged on a purely client side "niceness" scale), it may be an issue for them. However my opinion is that they just shouldn't be bothering with this at all, but that's a whole other story.
"The sell-off, fueled by a forecast ... that the iPad maker is continuing to cede ground to rival Google Inc Android gadgets"

That's an unfair comparison. Google doesn't directly make money off of Android. A better comparison would be Apple to any other single Android manufacturer.
Computer as appliance means not a general-purpose computer. If you cannot use it to execute your own code and access the hardware, then it is not general-purpose. That means the new wave of locked down computers are instead multi-purpose computers - those purposes being defined by what it cannot do.

Apple makes damn good multi-purpose machines for the most common purposes of most people - which they have consistently explained is their company's goal forever. Just look at their general-purpose tools (XServe, Mac Pro, Developer Tools) being neglected, and single-purpose machines being cannibalized (iPod) or taken lightly (Apple TV).

All of Apple's lineup is of respectable quality, but it is obvious where the focus is converging. Now there is an opening for others to explore new general-purpose and single-purpose machines.
We're not just talking about mephedrone, we're talking about a wide range of odd drugs.

I agree that main stream reporting on drugs is generally awful.

> its rarely the drug that makes someone crazy, it just amplifies existing mental health issues.

Since we're talking about novel compounds and there's no ethical way to design an experiment I'm surprised at the firmness with which you make your statement.

There are a range of options.

People with existing MH problems could be worse if they didn't take drugs.

People with existing MH problems could make those problems more severe by taking drugs.

People with underlying MH problems could make those problems more likely to surface by taking drugs.

People without risk of MH problems could cause MH problems by taking drugs.

[Obligatory drugs disclaimer: I'm firmly pro-legalisation of most drugs. Things like mephedrone wouldn't be used if other drugs were legal.]
Is "Internet governance" a synonym for DNS?
This makes a lot of sense. It will be interesting to see if this has even more value during emergencies and severe weather when normal citizens have to pull their resources.

- Dave Hadden
I took this one a year ago. I had zero idea how to do anything with databases. I won't say I am DBA material, but I'm confident in my abilities to design and deploy a database.

As far as I'm concerned, this is one of the best OCW courses available. Very challenging at the beginning. Though I think there are areas that could be improved upon, it will take you from zero to proficient. Although I've never used views in real life, I have used triggers; I know how to normalize okay (I guess?), and can figure out the logic to run fairly complex queries over raw data.

What you won't learn about is creating optimized and fast queries, though this is something you'll get with experience, trial and error, and research. The NoSQL section is wanting, but the goal of the course is to teach you relational theory and general SQL concepts, which it does a very good job at.

Of course, if you want to be a PostgreSQL or Oracle master, you'll probably have to buy the requisite books or comb the online docs. If you want to learn how to integrate the DBs into your programming language or platform, that is a self-study item as well.
Telling you some stories in life of Pi after 1942
People keep saying this, but I'm not sure why.

Maybe my experience is warped, but if I had to stereotype I'd say it's younger people walking around with Android phones and older well-off businesspeople walking around with iPhones. I'm not sure "targeting teenagers" really holds.

The people I know who still use Blackberries? Both of them are hardcore fans. Back in the 90s, every Mac user I knew was a hardcore fan… all five or so of them.

Apple is what it is today because it started selling to everyone else. RIM is what it is today because it hasn't yet figured out how to do that.
Apple's price-to-earnings ratio is in the low teens, below the market average. Usually a growing tech company is much higher.

Those earnings largely depend on the ability to sell iPhones for $700-750 each, including carrier subsidy. Google just proved they could sell the Nexus 4 for $299 unlocked without subsidy. How much longer can Apple expect the carriers to play that game? At $500 each or even $400 Apple would be enormously profitable but maybe not biggest-market-cap-in-the-world profitable.
> The online SQL quizzes are pretty cool little puzzles but the only truly exciting part of the class was creating a website using a large database as the final project, which I can't imagine will be offered in the online version.

The year I took it, they couldn't get the Oracle licenses sorted out in time so they forewent the entire final project. They ended up just talking about XPath and Data Warehousing instead (both of which seemed way too enterprise-y to me at the time to commit either to long-term memory). The schema design stuff I found helpful, if only to drill into my mind the importance of data normalization.
Well, there is some sharing (PhotoStream), but you are right in general. And even if Google is 5 years ahead (I don't think they are), and I do use google services for sharing, the thing is I don't enjoy it. Functionality is there, but experience is lacking, alas I cannot pinpoint why. Just every time I use Google docs or Google drive I want to get out as soon as possible.
For this reason I don't see Apples lack of these services as a big problem and I don't see Googles offer as a big advantage.
It is possible, however, that with right implementation it may become a necessity.
It's easy to setup correctly. It lets you set a rule like "buy me X credits when I get below Y credits"

I think ours is something like buy me 20 credits when we get below 5.

Also you can install their iphone app and use push notifications for free instead of or in addition to SMS.
Curry - Currency Conversion Drop In
You can't do less with an iPad than with an Apple II, you can do a great deal more. And you can also do a great deal more with an iPad if your previous experience with computers was mostly confusing.

It depends on how you define "you". Broadly, the term "you" means "people". It doesn't mean "every person under the sun, especially programmers".

If we correct for misinterpretations, I would say people in general can do more with simpler computing platforms that are more appliance-like than with their mostly confusing computer that more often acts in confusing manners, and that more often seems to be ridden with viruses and malware (whether it is or not), and also sports a number of features and buttons which if clicked the wrong way, can cause the computer to be broken (whether true or not).

When people talk about what "you" can do, they are not talking about you, specifically.
At work recently we reinvented something that already existed - but I think we had a good reason to.

There's a node package called "request" [1] that's a very, very popular third-party library to simplify HTTP requests. If you look at the code, though, it's really, really nasty - the whole thing is filled with global state. After I spent 6 hours in one day debugging issues in the library and filing bugs (some of which included things such as "if you try to set a querystring parameter, request can no longer follow redirects"), we decided that enough was enough and we rewrote it from scratch [2].

I think that rewriting it took us about as much time as we spent debugging it, but we were left with a project that's a drop-in replacement (as long as you're not using any of the advanced features) and has a codebase that's 1/10th (!!!) as many lines of code while implementing near 80% of its features.

[1] https://github.com/mikeal/request

[2] https://github.com/clever/quest
I think that the stars vs followers update was far from useless. That improvement was absolutely fantastic.

I (and I assume lots of other people) were following repositories because they liked them, the same way someone might bookmark a page because they liked it. But this meant they got every commit and issue update for lots of projects, which was unnecessary clutter.

Github realized this and made a distinction between liking a repository and actively following its every change.

The stars/followers update says a lot about how good Github is at stepping back and looking at the user experience as a whole.
Without a graph, I'm not entirely convinced of the conclusion. 2000 was a crazy boom year for tech. I wouldn't be surprised if it took 12 years for wages to return to dotcom era levels.
Aren't there simply enough people in the field to make most IT workers (I include both programmers and "system administrators" in this category) completely interchangeable? As long as the majority of the workforce, the bottom of the pyramid, is readily replaceable by a steady stream of college grads, there won't be much need for salary increase.

Becoming irreplaceable, my guess is, is where the cash is.
> you can do less and less with your computing devices, or that they become, in
> the end, more convoluted to use because of the design choices made.

Can you be specific about "less and less"? You can no take a movie, edit it, compose music for it and publish it online with your phone only.

> Like, turning a desktop computer operating OS to a tablet-like OS is just
> plain stupid and is a loss of efficiency.

Are you talking about Windows 8 or iOS, or Linux? The problem with Windows 8 was not turning desktop OS into tablet OS, it's stopping in between.
I disagree. I own a Lenovo Thinkpad x220. It's perfect (for me).

Its keyboard is reason alone that it beats the MacBook Pro.

On top of that, I bought it back in 2011 for around 960 USD (converted). The configuration included an i5-2520M, 8GB of RAM, 320GB HDD, an 80GB m-SATA SSD and an upgrade to a 3-year on-site warranty.
That's really cool. Would be even nicer if you can upload any file and attach it to a github issue. That's the only thing keeping us from moving our issue tracker to github (private repository). Unless I missed some sneaky way of doing this?
Average employees in a Fortune 500 company: 28,000

($13,000,000-$700,000) / 28,000 = $439
Oh, thanks! You definitely didn't have to do that, but we appreciate the mention. (:
So, for you, are the words "internet governance" not necessary in the subject?
Anyone up for posting a list of recommended tracks for Brubeck newbs to listen to?
It doesn't matter whether Google is making money or even loosing it. What matters for the Apple shareholders is whether Apple can make money.

If more people are going to buy Android phones, then less people are going to buy Apple. It means less people getting locked into their eco system. That is not good for their future.

So you sell off your shares and take whatever you can get from them.
TLSSLed - a tool to evaluate the security of ssl/tls in webservers
He's evading a US lawsuit. He doesn't want to go back to the US.
Zero upgradeability (in the sense of zero need to upgrade: does not break, is powerful enough) is a good sign of well designed.
Just Saying: Facebook not Instagram kills its pictures on Twitter.
How to manage email more efficiently
The issue is that many Apple fanboys never experienced the original Apple, the one with proprietary connectors and Mac OS specific APIs for video, 2D, 3D, networking ....

When Apple tried to cater to the open source community using the UNIX underpinnings of Mac OS X, young generations thought Apple was always more open than Microsoft, when actually they were the opposite.

Now that they are back on top with more profits than ever, they are as they always were.
I can tell you what is wrong with iCloud. It's supposed to be a sort of magical data sharing, but apparently it's only partially magical when it comes to OSX.

Go ahead, make a keynote deck, or numbers spreadsheet. Save it to "the cloud," now go look at your ipad or iphone. Where the hell is it? So much for magic.

Sharing is a royal pain in the ass with iOS. The gyrations I have to go through to move data from an ios app to the desktop is ridiculous and often impossible.

I'm hopeful they will get iCloud up to spec eventually, but for now it just sucks.
I think this might be more useful the other way around.

Put ddg inside a linux shell and let me interoperate with linux commands.

eg. ddg reviews samsung note | grep "note 2"
It looks nice, but perhaps not as comprehensive as Rickshaw http://code.shutterstock.com/rickshaw/ - also based on d3. Of course there are so many different charting libraries, it's really hard to choose, but I guess it depends on your needs.
I'm not sure the carriers have a say in what Apple charges. It's probably the market. People go nuts for the iphone. Lines still happen for the iPhone. That's what sets the price. I don't know how many lines were made for the Nexus. As awesome as Nexus or any other phone may be, they're definitely not on the same market level as the iPhone, in terms of popularity not in terms of percentages.
I don't get why the parent is being downvoted and I dislike silent knee-jerk-downvoting at HN very much.

I'm absolutely orthogonal to Apple's services and devices - just never used them, and article does not seem to shed almost any lights on whether I should or shouldn't try to. Actually, it confuses me even more: author dislikes Apple's services (or does he? he's been so enthusiastic in the past!), makes some unclear points about Apple being a 'consumer electronics company now', and then suddenly wraps up with him being perfectly happy with his MacBook Pro today. Now throw in a pathetic iTitle and prepare your WordPress to be hit by the frontpages of the Internet. Am I missing something?

What the article does show clearly though is that we're in urgent need of some nagging/whining detector, if not for the whole Internet then at least for HN's frontpage.
What problem would you say you're solving then?