skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Analyses that repeat the “post PC” mantra in its various forms may be correct in doing so, but the mantra is getting threadbare. Since I’ve read this sort of thinking so many times (desktops are dead, Intel is doomed, ARM is the new hotness, etc.), I don’t find it terribly interesting to hear the same restated. Don’t get me wrong, I appreciate the detailed analysis provided by the author, but the thesis is unsurprising.

Here’s what I would like to read if a technology journalist could dig it up: What kind of strategic planning is going on within the halls of Intel, Dell, HP, Lenovo, et al with respect to keeping the desktop PC relevant? Put another way: I find it astonishing that several years have been allowed to pass since desktop performance became “good enough.” The key is disrupting what people think is good enough.

The average consumer desktop and business desktop user does consider their desktop’s performance to be good enough. But this is an artifact of the manufacturers failing to give consumers anything to lust for.

Opinions may vary, but I strongly believe that the major failure for desktop PCs in the past five years has been the display. I use three monitors--two 30” and one 24”--and I want more. I want a 60” desktop display with 200dpi resolution. I would pay dearly for such a display. I want Avatar/Minority Report style UIs (well, a realistic and practical gesture-based UI, but these science-fiction films provided a vision that most people will relate to).

I can’t even conceive of how frustrating it is to use a desktop PC with a single monitor, especially something small and low-resolution like a 24 inch 1920x1080 monitor. And yet, most users would consider 24” 1920x1080 to be large and “high definition,” or in other words, “good enough.”

That’s the problem, though. As long as users continue to conceive of the desktop in such constrained ways, it seems like a dead-end. You only need so much CPU and GPU horsepower to display 2D Office documents at such a low resolution.
There was a great picture CNet had in one of their reports (and I grabbed a copy at my blog [1]) showing a user holding and using a tablet while sitting at a desktop PC.

In the photo, the PC has two small monitors and is probably considered good enough to get work done. But the user finds the tablet more productive. This user should be excused for the seemingly inefficient use of resources because it’s probably not actually inefficient at all. The tablet is probably easier to read (crisper, brighter display) and faster, or at least feels faster than the PC simply because it’s newer.

Had desktop displays innovated for the past decade, the PC would need to be upgraded. Its CPU, GPU, memory, and most likely disk capacity and network would need to be beefier to drive a large, high-resolution display.
So again, what are the PC manufacturers doing to disrupt users’ notions of “good enough,” to make users WANT to upgrade their desktops? I say the display is the key.

[1] http://tiamat.tsotech.com/i-see-the-problem
Sleep's Surprising Effects on Hunger
I really like this analysis - it (seems to me) to say
that most of the 1000x that is available is not because
this guy can manipulate the AST really well and I cannot but that a huge variety of dimensions are involved - so ial skills to project choice to Lin term investment in deliberate practise all on top of actual keeping track of ten variables in your head

I often think of football (soccer) players who are rewarded 1000x - the top flight players are clearly not 1000x better at penalties or free kicks than say 4th division players but
Their total skill set is 1000x more valuable
Google and Motorola draw up plans for “X phone”
Nah, the game just used up all its Druid loot luck in Molten Core.

Those frickin' salad shoulders.
If you ask those users to change their browsing habits, they're more likely to change browsers. Sad but true :)
Remove the santa claus costume from the equation and you'll have just some drunk guy being arrested for writing in chalk. So why can't they arrest him? Does the santa costume justify anything?
The thing is, though, even though it's in Amazon's interests to create dependence on AWS, it's also in their customer's interests to use those services.

When you double down on a rich platform you can get enormous advantages. Avoiding the inner platform is a biggie; not paying portability tax is another.

The urge to be independent of any vendor, any platform etc is attractive to us as engineers. But it comes at a high price too.
The graph shows a dip on the rightmost side below the leftmost side before going right up to indistinguishable from reality, that's the basic premise of the old uncanny valley hypothesis, that things which are just short of indistinguishable from the real thing are less desirable than fairly good approximations which could not otherwise be confused, due to the feeling that something implacable about them is a little off.
The segment is short on details, but it's incredible given how long ago this was. Writing something like this today would be challenging. People here often talk about how powerful LISP is, and I thought this was an interesting example of that.
To keep it that way?

Once they've verified that they can actually produce it a low price and at scale, and after having been paid by a significant chunk of the population that had paid the higher price, they made a move that made their product viable to a much larger population, and made it harder for others to compete. That's completely in line with the GPs claims.
Coach japan
Am I the only one that gets slightly annoyed when people redesign a Web site without being solicited? I understand redesigns like this are part of practice for a designer, but sometimes I feel like these designs are "I don't like yours, mine is better," when design can be such a subjective thing.

I don't really see a benefit, for example, in his redesign of EXEC:

Before: https://iamexec.com/

After: http://kyrobeshay.com/post/20746111679/yc-facelift-exec

I actually think the redesign looks worse. Is there a tangible benefit here design-wise that I'm just simply not smart enough to grasp? I find it ironic, by the way, that I'm so vehemently against rhetoric that decries skinning Bootstrap without design sense (as in that prior thread), but finding myself defending an obvious Bootstrap here as looking better.

I can't connect with the feeling because I'm not a designer, but in code, if I wrote something one way and someone else rewrote it just because they like their way better, then showed it around to get buy-in, I'd be a little annoyed. If there was a tangible benefit like faster runtime, or better maintainability, that's one thing, but just because of preference? That annoys me. Maybe it's different between our lines of work.
>Drive around and check how ease of turning out into traffic is. Some places royally suck and makes it insanely more time consuming.

Alternatively, make sure the place is near transit so you don't need a car at all.
How do you figure this qualifies as an anti-spam measure when it is giving spammers a tool to reach me that they didn't have before?
20 Entrepreneurs Share the Best Business Advice They Ever Received
I assume last one was a joke?
If this is your tactic, I'd think the binary log would be the winning way to rollback a bad delete.
When is that site which is a collection of Poke mesaage screenshots going to show up? Can't be that long. I can also see this user reaction: "what! I thought there was no way to save a poke message. facebook you lied to me."

Typically these complaints wouldn't matter as much but because of the sensitive nature of communication this app is designed to facilitate, it could matter much more.
WalkScore.com isn't just about scores. There's actually a great (and unsung) apartment finder available. Give it a go: http://www.walkscore.com/apartments/CA/San_Francisco?openmen...
> This is blocking the sort of extensions that get installed with other desktop software. So, like, for whatever god damn reason Microsoft thinks it needs to install Office addons into Firefox when I install Office. That wouldn't fly in Chrome now.

As someone else commented below, Firefox has blocked this for a while now. So this will no longer fly in any major desktop browser (except perhaps IE, but in your example it's made by the same company installing the addon ;)
The merchants would still need to use credit cards, so money laundering would not be an issue.
I'd suggest actually having a working product, this book doesn’t cover product development...

Excellent! Having researched what it'd be like to build a product before having done so, I found so much emphasis on the development side ... building, launching, iterating, etc. I didn't find a whole lot that covered marketing, sales, and conversion. W/my product launched and getting good reviews from those that use it, I have every intention of using 2013 to focus on it's growth and conversion.

So this turns out to be such a timely offering. Thank you for offering this up at a great price, and for recommending Hyperink (I have a deep interest in writing an ebook in 2013, I'll check them out).
In this case "up" is defined by potential profit/chip. There are structural and easy to miss business reasons why it is very hard for any company to successfully move into markets where the profit margins are below what they are structured to expect, and it is very easy for a company to move into markets where the profit margins are above what they are structured to expect.

Intel has to improve their power because a major market for them - server chips - is full of people who want to spend less on electricity for the same computation. Despite this push, they have made absolutely no inroads into the unprofitable mobile market. By contrast ARM, which already has the required power ratios, has every economic incentive in the world to move into the server market. Unless Intel can offer a good enough power ratio to offset the higher costs of their chips, ARM will eventually succeed.
I've spoken to almost all of the founders of those companies and they've all been totally fine with it. If anything, they got some traffic, I got design practice and exposure, a few of the companies actually went on to change their site design, and now potentially dozens of people (probably more with 600+ downloads) have a template to play around with for their own purposes. Seems like a win-win-win-win.
Real randomness is very frustrating for players! Games should be designed to not be random.

This reminds me of Magic: the Gathering and the misery of mana screw.

I disagree with the uniform "should be", because there are so many different design objectives. Slot machines aren't "good games" by Euro standards, but people spend a lot of money on them. (One can argue about whether that's enjoyment or addiction. I'll skip that for now.) Random payoffs can foster enjoyment, as seen in Skinner Boxes and on slot machines. Random denial makes people unhappy. What you want in most games is some degree of random windfall but no one getting "killed by the dice".

Have you played Ambition, by chance? It's a trick-taking card game designed to remove card luck.
1) Where are the stores? You'll need to eat, do laundry, probably buy some hardware (to hang stuff or whatever), get dry cleaning (if needed), and vet care.

2) Is the apartment under Rent Control or Rent Stabilization (a NYC thing, mainly)?

3) Why did the prior tenant leave (because they were living next to a bastard blasting music all night?)?

4) Where is mass transit located?

5) When is garbage and recycling pickup?

6) What time is the usual mail (USPS) delivery?

7) Does the lease say the landlord can enter the apartment "at will" (if so, get some goddammed hidden cameras)?

8) Where's the closest hospital, police precinct, firehouse?

9) Is the area served by taxis or car services?

10) How far are you from social services (assistance as well as an unemployment office you might have to visit)?

11) Are there any probation offices, drug treatment centers, or criminal courts nearby?

12) How close is the nearest bar and do they play live music (not what you want nearby during the summer)?

All I can think of at the spur of the moment.
Displacing Intel's base != disrupting.

Innovators dilemma raises the question "will market demand shift to products where ARM has already displaced x86? (i.e. mobile and tablets)"
ADD is a noun, not an adjective.
Windows in 2012
I think something handling a TCP stream has better things to worry about than an extra buffer smaller than a single packet.
Is there any use-case besides sexting that necessitates:

1. Sending photos that automatically disappear in seconds;
2. Requires user input to view;
3. Prevent screenshots, strong efforts to prevent saving photos?
Are you on crack? Steve Jobs is a great example of relentless pursuit of a goal, never giving up. From the days of the original Mac he had a vision of how computers should be designed so that humans could use them, and so they could be beautiful as well as functional. When he left Apple and started NeXT the dream didn't die. NeXTStep was the next iteration of his dream. When he returned to Apple he made a series of bold decisions to essentially wipe out large portions of the product line and focus focus focus. NeXTStep formed the basis of OS X. OS X enabled the iPhone and iPad. Steve delayed both until things were ready instead of jumping in too early with a half-baked product. Time and time again he (1) never let go of his goals and ambitions for computers+humans and (2) was not afraid to make big bold decisions that went against the grain. Steve had a long term vision that he held on to and pursued relentlessly for decades. People who say his success was (even in small part) due to "luck" are just trying to make themselves feel better about their own shortcomings.
There's one on iOS that uses a gpu shader to render and it's plenty smooth.
I think they use capacitors. At any rate, almost anything would be better than "gravity power". Even a flywheel.
> "what IV is almost certainly worried about is that, if the extent of its activities were known, there would be more fodder for real and necessary reform against trolling"

I think they're more worried about the situation where, if they were to sue directly and lose, they would have actual assets for a wronged party to pursue.
> It still sounds like their focus really is not on 64-bit

It's a matter of priorities. 64-bit is important, but for almost all users, it isn't an immediate concern to use 32-bit on windows, nor would they get a big benefit to move to 64-bit bit there.

There are other things that the devs are focused on, that have more tangible immediate benefits. That's all it comes down to. At some point though I would imagine 64-bit would become higher priority.

edit: Regarding multiprocess, it is already used in FirefoxOS, for example. Enabling it on desktop would be hard because of all the existing addons, on mobile though it has been used for a while (the Android browser was multiprocess, now it is multithreaded, and the FirefoxOS browser is as I said multiprocess). Since most of the growth in the browser market today is in mobile (sales of desktop PCs actually declined this year), that is a forward-looking approach I would say.
I don't know about Verizon but I was unable to verify myself to craigslist using my Google Voice number earlier this year.

A lot of Google Voice numbers appear in a number pool marked for prepaid cellphone plans and a number of services will blacklist such numbers for use for identity verification. Sad but true.
As someone who often has more then a few tabs open, I use it primarily as a way of saving pages to read later (especially with HN links). I find I would never actually read bookmarks, but having tabs means I will get around to reading them. Mozilla did a presentation on this kind of use-case recently it recently, https://speakerdeck.com/bcg/saving-for-later.
As an owner of a Samsung Galaxy Nexus, I just have three words for Google: more battery life. Seriously, I love the phone but it sucks down the juice like there's no tomorrow. And that's with an extended capacity battery pack and App Killer set on Aggressive.
One under-stated but awesome thing about Poisson distributions: fishing has a Poisson distribution. (Poisson is French for "fish".)
> Last thought, if there was a truely random number generator then why do fruitmachines have control systems to monitor the distribution and with that what is paid out to maintain that x% payout to comply with laws that say x% of money taken has to be payed out.

That's easy to answer -- to comply with rules that require a certain outcome some x percentage of the time, one need only take a truly random generator's output and filter it by x:

outcome = (rn * 100 <= x);

If rn is a float, lies between 0 and 1 and is truly random, then the above trivial filter will produce the required distribution in the long term.
Its not technically mail (is an internal message system) and you don't hold that strict standard for anything else do you?, e.g. all tv commercials are spam because they show unsolicited commercial information, all billboard are spam...
The rule requires that Verizon not block phones or apps. It doesn't say anything about Apple blocking apps for its own reasons, or Google blocking apps because Verizon is leaning on it on the sly.
From what I have read, it is lack of a maintainer since the current developers are concentrating on other features. The 64-bit support problem is also only on Windows, and one of the dis-incentives is lack a of 64-bit plugins.
Show HN: my iOS app to remember special occasions and send custom cards/gifts
True, but my question is if a clock winding mechanism can keep going for days without need of winding could a clock winding style mechanism be more efficient than a gravity weight powered one.
"Gravity's Rainbow", by Thomas Pynchon, has an extended section about the Poisson distribution as applied to falling bombs, maternity wards, etc.:

http://books.google.com/books?id=GGPm4I3BbxAC&pg=PT194&#...

(possibly NSFW)
"Rockstar" developers are simply jack of all trade developers with the most experience by far in the company - they created the entire system from scratch. About it being a political thing, I believe so.

I failed to get everyone else on board (even new hires as per my last discussion) because they seems to have already pledged allegiance to the "rockstars" AND/OR don't give a fuck about good engineering/project management practices. Eg: Some have already told things like "I don't mind having a commit fixing two issues at once while the bug report clearly specifies to fix only one of them. I don't mind not raising an issue in the bug tracker about the second bug I silently fixed".

Some managers are former developers who did implement those practices while they were devs but they don't see the urge now. Maybe they know they will not have to fix the issues directly and that might be the reason why they don't push those changes as much. What do you think ?
I mean this in the least insulting way possible -- I think you just lack design sense. His redesigns are very clearly significantly better (which is why they have been so popular here on HN), and default bootstrap ALWAYS looks bad on a professional company's production site. It screams "I don't give a shit about real design so i just used bootstrap".

I would urge you to study design a little more before you start critiquing designs. Design and code are vastly different disciplines -- I started as a designer then learned code later (now full time developer) and I can tell you this from experience. I regularly see you discussing design on hacker news, and everything you post about it is misguided. Educate first, then discuss.
I'd be happy if installing Chrome didn't install a Google Update plugin in Firefox without asking me.
> Even $150 notebooks come with 1 gig of ram.

The issue is with the processor's cache memory, which is small, typically 64 kiB or so. (The TLB cache is also important.) Even a few hundred bytes savings can give an important improvement in speed amd power consumption.
Are you a single dev or do you work in a team ?
Somewhat agree with the author, but I make the big tasks calendar events or put them on their own context list (ie "edit paper" is not on my office list, but my "research" next action list). The idea with GTD is to choose the best next task, not just hammer them out mindlessly, so I think the author misunderstands GTD.
They're incredibly efficient. There's one on my wireless router that happily spins away all day.
Once the monitor is so large that you need to move your head to view it all, you have gone too large. Almost no one wants to stare at a wall sized monitor from 2-3 feet away.
And Iowa workers can quite if they have an 'irresistible' boss. Or a boss with a weird shirt that it a bit too green.

Freedom is funny that way.
Good start http://jcp.org/en/jsr/overview
> to an addled, irrelevant argument about privilege.

No, I did not. You're the one who brought up privilege.

> all cooking around the world across every economic class everywhere

Traditional cooking, maybe, but that is less and less relevant to what the underclasses actually eat in the First World these days, and food deserts explain why.
with
(er, result) ->
you may find yourself polling both er and result.status

in practice I find I this means relatively ugly or unhelpful error messages through the first parameter are successively refined by conditionally setting helpful status and message attributes on the second

this style is kinda consistent with ajax calls on the client that may either fail, or return data containing an error.
> I'm pretty sure that for anything you can cook with a rice maker, I can cook something else, to an equivalent quality/pleasantness/enjoyment-when-consumed, in a microwave.

Except this isn't what was asserted. The assertion was that neither rice cookers nor microwaves can make good food except for rice.
Foxconn Buys Stake In Camera Maker GoPro, Turning Founder Into A Billionaire
But 'the reamainder' amounts to 'every non-gibberish sentence of the appropriate length in the target language' with no way to distinguish between them. So

"Attack at dawn."

and

"Attack at dusk."

are equally valid and equally probable decodings of the ciphertext:

739B912B0B067A9B803C46FBDB1E03

Brute force amounts to making a large number of guesses. But you can't brute-force something if you have no information about whether not a specific guess was correct.
It's not a problem - it lets you do some really neat things that you just can't do in other languages easily. But it is a very very true thing about Tcl.

I was generating functions procedurally, and I was having a scoping problem with one of the inner variables. Naturally, the suggested solution was to do a string replace on your newly created function. Seems obvious in retrospect. :)
> I'm staying out of the "why" question

Which is the only one worth talking about.
With one time pads, you can decrypt it to anything, it all depends on the key. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One-time_pad#Attempt_at_cryptan...

What am I missing here?
100 Best Books of All Time
Did your original Project (and the pop charger people pay for) contemplate the use of a lightning port? It didn't. Then why cancel the project when you cannot add it?

Even if you are not allowed to use the 30 pin... Why don't you just use an USB port on the device?

Or just avoid the "Made for iPhone" sticker. I have plenty if iPhone accessories that aren't certified but work nonetheless.
Show HN: Quack for Ducksboard
Brute-force all possible ciphers? We don't know the input, only the output. But brute-forcing in this context would mean trying out every cipher with every input, and that's not possible since there is an infinite amount of inputs.
There's lots of disaster reports that start with "shouldn't" and "normally we wouldn't" :)

http://www.taobackup.com/
UBB, the granddaddy of modern message boards, is back