skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You've hit the nail in the head regarding Android spilling over beyond just phones. Take a look at the ARM development boards, there is a new one coming out almost every week, and guess what almost all of them have in common? They all run some flavor of Android.

Let's say you are developing some expensive piece of industrial technology and would like to provide some sort of interface through a tablet. Sure there is the iPad and many opt to use that, but in the end is a closed garden, you can't change it significantly. Where are you going to go? Android of course, since it already has almost everything you need and it is customizable to your heart's desire. In the long run, iOS will keep on being one of the champions of the mobile market (and that is exactly where Apple wants it to be) but Android will evolve beyond that reaching many other sectors.
I don't think it is necessary. I believe there is some kind of intelligence behind the workings of the universe (aka "god") but I am not religious. My oldest son is a nihilist. He often doesn't mention that to people because it causes people to jump to all kinds of negative conclusions that don't fit him. He believes there is no point. He doesn't find that depressing. He is much happier than I am. I am sometimes jealous. I wish I had his life. I see his happiness and my less happy disposition as reflective of our experiences in life rather than our beliefs about "the meaning of life" or whatever.

tldr: different strokes for different folks.
Cash. Lots of cash.
Yup, by Ballmer's estimate (as of early 2011), 90% of the copies of Windows in China are pirated.

http://www.neowin.net/news/ballmer-9-out-of-10-copies-of-win...
I agree. My N9 is a pleasure to use and it feels like MeeGo could've been an actual competitor had it not been mired in the internal battle with Symbian.
What the hell is course 11??
Seriously? Being pro-choice is your litmus test for sanity?
Relatedly, the default Ubuntu install of Firefox (including in the *ubuntus, like Xubuntu) ensure that everything you type into the location bar (even if you know exact URLs and don't plan to search!) is sent to Google, Wikipedia, and various other websites. The only way to turn it off, afaict, is to uninstall the Ubuntu extensions from Firefox---which is not at all obvious.
Perhaps, the respondents are just being humble. Most MIT students must know that they are clearly above-average students. However, being humble and always striving to improve is a good trait.

There does seem to be a trend of self-confidence improving year-over-year for undergraduates.
I agree. Posterous needs some love, or they should just shut it down. There are a number of bugs cropping up.
I find the UCS position interesting and have no argument with the data on yield increases or the ineffectiveness of Glyphosphate-resistant GM Crops in increasing yields (Although I find this questionable from personal experience).

My experience relates to Cotton, not Maize (corn in the rest of the world) and so is more relevant to the discussion of fibre rather than food cropping

I grew up on a cotton farm in Australia and witnessed first-hand the introduction of both Bt- (branded Bollgard by Monsanto) and Roundup-Ready Cotton varieties.

I think an often overlooked aspect of the introduction of genetic modification is the Environmental and economic improvements.

For Example.

When we first started growing cotton (around 1993), in a bad (insect) season we would occasionally spray our crops 7-8 times. Stories abound of farmers getting planes in perhaps 15 times.

Enter Bt-modified Cotton - 0 Sprays.
These chemicals weren't good, and I think not spraying them was a big win for the environment. This, combined with intelligent management of resistance (Crops are required to have a 10% 'reserve' area of either unmodified Cotton or another crop the insect is attracted to, so that selective pressures don't evolve resistance), is surely a benefit that is hard to calculate and to the best of my knowledge no study of this kind has been made.

Roundup ready cotton, when introduced, meant that we saved around $100,000 per field of cotton on Cotton Chipper costs (That is exactly what it sounds like - around 80-100 people walking through the rows of cotton with hoes to chip out weeds, which will otherwise grow and contaminate the crop). This had an economic effect for us, the grower (save money) - which I must admit was not all savings as of course the cost of the technology through seed must be taken into account).
It also had an economic effect on the labourers - seasonal employees. It may be good or bad individually but economics suggests that those labourers are now driven further up the supply chain & re-allocated through the economy.

Interestingly there would have been further environmental gains if Terminator seed technology had of been introduced. I dont want to get into the ethics of terminator technology for food crops as I am also concerned about the impact any use in that area would have on continual seed usage, particuarly in developing nations as most developed nation farms use hybrid seed which must be purchased each year anyway: But i digress

Terminator technology, by rendering second generation seed sterile, would stop harsh chemicals being used to kill regrowth after the crop is harvested; and also mean that the soil may not have to be plowed which also has environmental effects in terms of fuel use, soil compaction, increased erosion and moisture loss.
I miss the working volume slider. The working volume slider was nice. I wish it would come back. I understand how important it is that everything look prettier and different all the time, but I miss stuff that works -- like the way the volume slider used to work.

The new Google Image search result page (after you click on an image result) is pretty great though. A huge improvement.
Trying guilt your customer base into doing something is a bad plan, especially on Linux. If people really do start to dislike this option the same day someone will post a script to remove it. Now you will have people using your product and Canonical is left holding the bag.

I think it's time to research other ways of keeping the lights on.
Oh boy, if you had said something like: "maybe the reason they didn't care about using the right picture is because there's this intrinsically wrong belief that poor people look the same".

Since you did not, let me tell you that it's very insulting and I hope it gets deleted soon.
Ctrl+p to move in and out of preview mode. Or click the empty margin to the right side of the text.
Golang has Revel. http://robfig.github.com/revel
> Can you recommend me a setup for using Arch as a desktop? Eg: which UI should I install?

xmonad is probably the best option.

> Do things like sound, video, usb, etc work fine?

USB works by default. I'm not sure why people even ask this anymore.

You will have to configure sound (easy, usually works by default) and video (not too bad these days) yourself.

Keep in mind that the Arch Installation Framework (an ncurses-based installer) has been deprecated, as of earlier this year. That means you will have to follow the Installation Guide[0] to manually set up the system from a live command line, Gentoo-style.

0: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Installation_Guide
You're kind of all over the map spewing half-truths and full-hate there... but I have to point out the worst of your arguments.

You mentioned the thousands of Rebel soldiers who died fighting for slavery. Really, most were just fighting against being told what to do by the central government and didn't even own slaves. You conveniently didn't mention the thousands of WHITE Northern soldiers who died to end slavery and whose side prevailed, thus showing the core character of the nation. Why is it that folks like yourself generalize the American battle over slavery by mentioning only the losers rather than the winners who sacrificed so much for another race? It's kind of hard to have a meaningful discussion on interesting topics when your post is so intellectually dishonest.
This is a marketing problem. If your designer is posting on Dribbble, your app is definitely being seen; my iOS concepts get more views than anything because that's what people are searching for these days. People may like the design, but may not have a reason to actually download it.

In the same vein, all of these "pretty app UI" sites rely heavily on submissions. If you think you have an app worth looking at that could possibly convert eyes to sales, submit them to these sites.

Additionally, "Doing what users expect" doesn't always have a straight-forward answer.
Windows will not have lost until Microsoft goes bankrupt.

Mobile platforms are really just a fad. The future will be essentially a distributed OS, where devices throughout the home interact with a larger system to provide a much more immersive and practical experience. Few will give a fuck about iOS and Android in 10 years

Apple is going to be focusing on novel user input with their new T.V. They've already provided Airplay, etc. but other than music, streaming video, and other information provided by screens and tablets, what are they providing?

Microsoft has a head start with kinect, so if they invested in related research, touch screens, and other novel input devices like the LEAP, they might be able to compete in the future. By placing kinect-like devices around the home with some mics and speakers, you could talk to your computer like in the original Star Trek ("Computer, how hot will it be today?") or make a gesture in the air to turn on and off lights or lock doors. That would be something people would buy.
Add to that: it should be possible to link to the results of a specific question. Also, there is no mention of the sample size of each group.
All your points are correct, but when the original version required 16 MB of RAM it wasn't expected to be able to dedicate all of that to itself either.
The comparison is to other MIT students, not to students in general; these results didn't surprise me in that light.
I suppose mixed results are typical of beta software. Did you try it on a tablet or a mobile? Perhaps the dropped sentences happen more often on a smaller screen? (since the target areas are shrunk?)
I don't think that you need `Control`.
This article was actually the tutorial I used to get into node.js. I learnt a lot, but I still don't feel like I could write anything really good using just this info. Usually after articles like this (no matter how good) you just need to dive into the docs to expand your knowledge. It seems like there's just so much to it.
Some more of these "contronyms"

http://www.rinkworks.com/words/contronyms.shtml

Words that are their own antonyms.

My favorite is off:
"off - off, on (e.g., the alarm went off)"
Hyperbole delivered calmly is still hyperbole.
I suppose there was a period of time that this fact was accepted. Take a look at [1], and then [2]. There is a difference of two years between the articles. There might be some out of date articles still on the web promoting that this is a true statement.

Given that the main idea behind the product is to produce light without any standard energy sources, and not "a new bug repelling lamp!", I would give them the benefit of doubt. Also, the people behind the lamp are regular designers, not a big company which had all the time and energy to verify everything in the article.

Note: I respect your catch. I'm not promoting such misstatements in promotion videos, but the word "lie" is farfetched. Too harsh. Especially with all the other bashing going on here.

[1] http://www.energycircle.com/blog/2009/06/16/newsflash-leds-d...

[2] http://www.energycircle.com/blog/2011/08/17/correction-led-l...
Wouldn't believing nothing is out there, be believing in "something"?

I for one don't believe that this creation came to be as a matter of random chance. I have friends who absolutely believe that and they seem to be just as happy and fulfilled as I am.
"Urban Studies and Planning". I went to MIT and honestly have no idea what it actually is (beyond the web descriptions of it), and never interacted with anyone from the program -- it's a very tiny program which seems inherently fuzzy.

It's a tiny program, so I suspect a few people who responded really skewed the numbers.
If you like gists, markdown, and quick-and-nasty publishing: http://gist.io/

I'd still prefer something like this for the actual drafting, of course.
In rural areas of certain developing countries is common to have cell phones access and/or Internet while not having electricity in their house. I've seen towns that have a central building that has some electricity (wind or solar) and small satellite dishes for Internet. In other places I've seen cell phone towers and the telecom company provides charging stations for individuals that do not have electricity within their homes.
I can appreciate that. Thanks for keeping me on my toes there ;)
Awww, Larry's in the corner, sobbing. It's OK, Larry, we still like you.
http://content.usatoday.com/communities/technologylive/post/...

MS itself says here (from 2010) that about 1/3rd of all installs are pirated.
Homer Simpson isn't a role model. He's apathetic, stupid, and constantly convinced that he's more important of a man than he is. In fact, he's more a critique of that kind of man than an endorsement.

It's telling that Homer's redemptive characteristics are that he's capable of loving his wife and his children, and through his love, he's willing to realize that his opinions on things, his actions, are not perfect just because they're his. He can admit to being wrong; he can start caring; he can grow, ever-so-slowly, as a man.
> People are not used to a search area that looks up local AND internet resources.

This is the crux of the matter. I would argue that they are used to this. Ordinary users aren't aware where they are conducting a search at all. They just expect the computer to figure out and do what they mean. The distinction between the Internet and local storage is already being lost on them (examples: Dropbox, Google Drive). The fact that so many users put URLs in a Google search box is a perfect example of this phenomenon.

The set of users who do understand the difference are capable of directing their computer more specifically. The default does not matter for them.

Ubuntu is supposed to be usable by everyone. This is (I assume) why the default is the way round that it is.

> the lack of obvious warnings

Have you looked? There is a warning on the same screen as the box, complete with a link to a privacy policy. Or are you saying that this isn't enough?
"In case of tragedy, what would you do?" is the response I hear most often. Do you feel better equipped to handle those moments than your agnostic counterparts?
The other half of the School of Architecture and Planning. Though among people I know, it seems everbody studies at the architecture half (course 4).
The In-game Economics of Ultima Online (1999)
Notation is what it is because it serves our ( ie. mathematicians') interest so well. If every one of us started writing
Integral Of Quadratic Polynomial = Cubic Polynomial plus constant
maybe we would increase the size of the audience a tad bit....but the downside would be, we'd move at a glacial pace & never make progress.

Things like direct product and cyclic groups are basic....almost trivial even.

If a non-programmer asks you "Why do you guys say
int x = 10;
float y = 0.2
Why not
x is an whole number who value is 10
y is a fraction whose value is one fifth.

you can sit down & reason with him for a while....but if he insists that everything be spelled down in such great verbose detail, you will at some point, pick up your starbucks coffee and say "Dude, this programming thing, its not for you. The average program is like 10s of 1000s of LOC and if I start writing everything out in plain English, I'm going to get writers cramp & file for disability insurance."

Trust me, math gets immensely complicated very, very fast. The only way to have even a fighting chance of keeping up is terse notation ( and frequent breaks ).

One reason for this schism is the lack of rigor.
eg. When a programmer says "function", he is order of magnitude less rigorous than what a mathematician means by that word. You ask a programmer what probability is, and he will say "you know, whether something will happen or not, how likely it is to happen, so if it doesn't happen we say 0, if it is sure to happen we say 1, otherwise its some number between 0 & 1. Then you have Bayes rule, random variable, distribution, blah blah...I can google it :))"

You ask a mathematician what probability is...even the most basic definition would be something like "a function from the sample space to the closed interval [0,1] ". Note how incredibly precise that is. By the word "function", the mathematician has told you that if you take the cross product of the domain ie. a Set of unique outcomes of your experiment, with the range, which is the closed interval [0,1], you'll get a shit-ton of tuples, and if you then filter out those tuples so that that every outcome from the domain has exactly one image in the range, then that is what we call "probability". And this is just the beginning...the more advanced the mathematician is, the more precise he'll get. I've seen hardcore hackers who've designed major systems that use numerical libraries walk out of a measure theory class on day 1, simply because they overestimate how little they know. Calling APIs is very, very different from doing math. The professor is like the compiler - he isn't going to care if you know or not what measure is or what a topological space is...its a given that you've done the work that's laid out in the pre-reqs, and if you haven't, go write an API or something, don't bother the mathematician....atleast that's the general attitude in most American universities I've seen. If you tell him "describe its purpose and give a full description" he will look at you as if you are from Mars, and then tell you to enroll in the undergraduate section of Real Analysis 101 :)
There's no need to be like that. I own multiple Android devices myself.

Just the fact that so many Android devices have been sold isn't very convincing. Lots of MySpace accounts were opened and lots of RIM devices were sold in years past too.

Android is free. If it doesn't drive revenue to Google through over avenues, it's not sustainable, and the only revenue stream Google excels at is advertising. Sure, there's Play, but a) Apple has stated that their 30% is just barely above break even; so even taking a cut of paid apps is probably not enough to sustain an entire platform and b) Android users overall are well known not to be very spendy when it comes to apps. If Android isn't a successful advertising vector for Google in the long run, I think you have to seriously question how secure its future will be.
It should be obvious to anyone running Ubuntu

I'm not quite so presumptuous, especially knowing how many times Ubuntu has been mentioned in the past 5 years or so as a great option for peoples' parents and other less-technical people.
I admit to a serious case of greener-grass syndrome, but it seems to me that the environment at MIT would do quite a bit to lower stress. In my experience, the primary source of stress when doing what interests you is dealing with people who are either disinterested or otherwise generating friction within the group (not comprehending, communicating, etc). The less of those types, the more stress you get just from doing hard work– something MIT and at least a few others should be perfectly capable of handling ;)
That depends entirely on the carrier.
I came here to point that out as well. But I was thinking it was a good thing, rather than a bunch of fools playing out the Dunning–Kruger effect.

One of the more valuable things you can learn as a smart kid in college is that you're not the smartest kid around. It also means that they're being challenged at the school. There's plenty of schools that are hard to get in, but there's no challenge after you're in.

Besides, I don't know about you, but I can't stand people that think (or pretend) they're heads and shoulders above in ability when they're not.

http://tech.mit.edu/V132/N59/pressure/breakdown/year/index.h...
Great question. Not sure if you've heard of what Mozilla's been trying to do Persona (http://www.mozilla.org/en-US/persona/). Also, I can't recall the name but I remember a popular (Kickstarter?) project that wants to use your phone to verify your information.
The self-confidence question: http://cl.ly/LQvB.

Compared to the other students: http://cl.ly/LR7c.
Agreed, I would really love to fork this on GitHub and play around with the implementation and features!
I think it must be the shock that comes from being at the top of one's high school, then arriving at MIT and no longer being head-and-shoulders above most of one's peers.

It's been a while since I was at MIT, but this was my experience and that of a lot of the people I knew there. I have to admit, though, that if I had taken a survey like this while I was there, I would have rated myself above average. :-)

maybe the administration should see if there's something they can do to give students a more realistic view of where they stand.

Many of the courses I took, at least for the first couple of years, were graded on a curve, so you could tell where you stood, at least roughly, by your grade. Perhaps that's less prevalent now.
Paul, I just looked you up and realised of course you would have met Feynman.
Although he died when I was 3, Reading books by and about him when I was going through my final years of undergrad changed the course of my life - I am now a final year medical student due to the influence of him and, subsequently, Carl Sagan.

so, I guess this is just a hand wave across the internet at someone who has achieved much and met one or more of my intellectual idols.
ps. I find your aperger's by proxy article very interesting.
I've seen this article five or so times now, but what's always missing is what they did that counts as "hacking" the tablet. Was it changing a (hidden) setting in the camera preferences file? Disabling some sort of monitoring software (and if so, how)? Reverse engineering a preexisting binary on the device?
Yelp Reviewer Gets SLAPPed With 750K Lawsuit And Order To Alter Comments