skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The fragmented community doesn't matter. At all, really. It just requires that one group (Canonical, Redhat, whoever) put their guns behind what they provide and try getting that into the market.

While having more developers would help the individual efforts, having other people rebuilding the same thing doesn't hurt the individual projects. It hurts the ecosystem to have excessive duplication (and I don't know why I can list 3 dozen window managers or file browsers but can't name one good non-linear video editor) but the success of any single distribution doesn't depend on everyone else getting behind it.

I think the comment is actually pretty accurate in relation to the non-geek - the problem has nothing to do with developer fragmentation. Consumers don't care about that. The reason desktop Linux doesn't take off is because Grandma doesn't walk into Best Buy and see an Ubuntu laptop, they see Windows. And every computer 99% of consumers will buy will be from a store, carrying Windows of some flavor.

They won't go out of their way looking for a competing OS, or how to install it. As soon as the thing boots into Windows, you have lost them, because they won't change anything. And you can't try teaching them, because Windows has won for them - the device works, hence nothing has to change. Internet Explorer shows emails, even if it is slow, I don't know what "security vulnerabilities" are, or why developers hate it (and why do I care? they already rewrite the site to work in 10 year old non-standards compliant web browsers anyway).

Linux will get widespread adoption the day it is the default. Because it honestly does work, when you take the time to tailor the hardware to it. System76 or a Dell Ubuntu laptop are as far as you need to go to see that in effect - they work out of the box because the engineers tailored the device to the OS. Like they all do with Windows already.

The problem with Ubuntu, though, is that it is too different. It doesn't look like Windows 7 (or, for a lot of people, XP still). Instantly, nobody likes it. They want the same thing, better. Not something different. They don't want change, or to have to learn or read. They want to read their kids facebook posts. And you can't blame them for that.
And this my friends is why a hammer costs the government $5000 http://www.followsteph.com/2011/11/22/why-does-a-hammer-cost... Add to that that people will complain when they're not selected and you have to prove why. Good luck getting any kind of affordable solution!!
docking station, monitor, keyboard + mouse?

that's no longer a smartphone
I keep hearing this. Could you explain why pure web technologies with no other options is better than giving developers the best of both worlds (deeply integrated web apps as well as native apps, if the performance is needed)? HTML5 browser technology isn't even able to render current iOS games in full blown desktop browsers, how is it going to be adequate for embedded devices in the coming few years?

In the long run you may be right, but it's going to take quite a bit longer and until then the mobile market is going to be even more entrenched than now.
I think it's true that *nix will not replace Windows on the desktop. The question to me is whether something will disrupt desktops entirely.
I'm a little surprised the author doesn't comment extensively on the availability and use of google docs as a useful and FREE (or fairly cheap) replacement for the office suite. Having been a hardcore enterprise user of MS Office (excel, ppt, access, to a lesser extent word) for the first 5 years of my career, I'm very familiar with the value these software suites play in large organizations. Shared tools make collaboration easier and shared formats make operations across the globe even possible.

Google spreadsheets still a little work to do but excel for Mac is is the same position. So you replace everything MS office can do with a free suite of tools that are a near enough equivalent and what do you get? Just like we saw the personalization of tech in enterprise organizations with hardware (buying and using our own iPhones/iPads and saying screw centralized IT), you will see the same thing happen with software. Add in the collaborative aspects of google drive vs emailing docx files back and forth and you see clear advantages to choosing something other than MS Office.

What happens when that next 3com or IBM sprouts up using google docs and becomes a multinational 100k+ employee organization? Do they switch to MS Office? Maybe, but I doubt it would be the best choice for companies in the future.
The US uses an adversary law system, where a side 'wins'. It's basically a competition rather than an organized attempt at finding a 'truth'. As twisted as it is to frame a legal system as a form of combat, it usually ends up being pretty fair.

>Most legal experts agree that, in the long run, the adversary system results in societal benefits that outweigh its inherent shortcomings. By allowing all sides of a controversy to be heard, the system protects against abuse of power, and forces those with the most at stake to focus on the issues in dispute.

(from http://legal-dictionary.thefreedictionary.com/Adversary+Syst...)
But with other more established networks such as researchgate or mendeley, is this really good for science overall? more segregation. It does not seem to offer anything more than the two afore mentioned options. Really do not know what to do on it, while mendeley offers a great way to organize papers and researchgate is a great place to get advice as well as share your work.
Poll on nature of reality
7 ways to email heavy files
As cool as this is, the original humans probably did most of this route by boat along the coast. They had to have done the hop to Australia by boat circa 45,000 years ago; they probably crossed the Red Sea by boat; and why else would the diaspora have been so fast along thousands of miles of coast relative to expansion inland?
Academics should already be doing this as a matter of course. If they'd like to actually show tribute to Aaron, they should:

1. Find seminal and survey papers from their fields that are unavailable on Google/Citeseer/etc, whose authors are dead/moved on/unfazed by the Internet/etc.

2. Download digital versions of these papers through their institutional access, or scan in paper copies if necessary.

3. Post them on their personal website with appropriate titling (especially important for papers that have been through scanning) such that they will show up in search engines.
Season 2 of The Wire has to deal with the Docks. 3 and 5 deal with Politics
yep, my mistake.
RIP Aaron Swartz, A legendary Internet Activist - Hacking News
ResearchGate is very nice, but you have to request and wait for the full-text of a publication from the author. In Academia.edu, you just get a direct link to a full-text source or a straight up PDF download. At least that is how my experience has been so far.

Another thing I noticed is that most of my professors and colleagues seem to have active ResearchGate profiles. Academia.edu is still pretty new, so I only found a few friends that had Academia.edu accounts.

It will be interesting to see where this all goes. I will personally be using both sites, but I better get back to finishing my first publication :)
Is there some reason you can't both publish your research on your own site as well as in whatever publication you send it to? We could run that sort of "dual stack" until self-publishing becomes the standard.

I think a lot of the concepts from traditional publishing can be translated to this sort of online publishing. Once again, I think if it was easier for a researcher to self-publish and get peer reviews then to go through an old school publisher, then they would do it.
2013: What should we be worried about?
That's not how civil disobedience usually works- there's generally some kind of punishment, and the person taking part in the disobedience takes on some risk. Here, though, the punishment was so utterly, utterly disgustingly disproportionate, that it boggles the mind. It wasn't "6 months in jail"- a bad, bad sentence, but not the end of one's life. It was years and years.

In a just system, the system will go out of its way to bend, and all the individuals in the chain, from the prosecutor to the judge to the jury, will do the legal minimum- and then push for change. In the best system, the citizens will take part in jury nullification, and save the defendant.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jury_nullification_in_the_Unite...
The problem is that Android and iOS, while popular, are largely money losers for most game shops. Console games are still where the big money is for top tier game shops, and MS still does quite well there.

Now Steambox may provide some competition, but I think it will be more like Sony and Nintendo in that it'll just be another platform. No major studios are going to neglect DirectX and the XBox720 (or whatever it will be called).

The fact that the Microsoft ecosystem and community was hostile to open source and code sharing basically meant that FOSS (and even OSX) could build up a backlog of shared base to constantly take advantage of, while Visual Studio and that entire ecosystem was always shackled to what Microsoft provided.

I'm not sure that's true. I've used a lot of shared code developing on Windows. One big difference though is that I pay for the code, rather than it being open source. Control and component vendors are very common on Windows.

The problem with the Windows dev ecosystem is that it's more pragmatic. The Android dev ecosystem and (to a lesser extent) iOS dev ecosystem are more fanatical. This allows them to bootstrap new form factors before a user base shows up.
Why would they try to force an entire application stack that has nothing to do with windowing or full opengl and try to put it on x86?

The people who don't need desktops or laptops are already using ipads and Android tablets as computing replacements. They get their web apps and that is all they want. To write emails, they might get a bluetooth keyboard. To write a document, they might use google docs. They have no use case for a full sized x86 desktop or laptop anymore.

Meanwhile, productivity software like Photoshop or Sony Vegas is completely off the table for Android. Both depend on directX, and unless Google outright bought Adobe or Sony they wouldn't persuade them to rewrite the whole thing to port it. That stuff won't show up on Windows RT either, even though porting with DirectX intact would still be easier than porting to openGL. Same thing with old games.

If Android x86 or just desktop ARM were put in stores tomorrow, no one would buy it. Gamers would get Windows for games, artists would get Windows for photoshop, grandparents would still buy tablets because they don't need a desktop, and businesses would still get Windows because all their shoddy business applications were written on Windows.
I am able to view the screen that you are mentioning, and I can continue and reset my account. What I am trying to say is after resetting my account successfully, I have 0 tokens left to purchase anything. My tokens don't get reset is it?
Online grieving
"I'm not sure we should glorify Jonathan James or even compare him to Aaron Swartz."

I just posted the Wiki article in no way did I glorify him. However, to suggest I am in error to even compare his story to Aaron's is well....an error.

"His "hacking" of the DoD was undeniably illegal, and his sentencing seemed appropriate for his actions."

Illegal is an absolute term, an act is either illegal or not, there are not degrees such as "undeniably illegal." As to your observation that the sentence was appropriate, keep in mind that James was 15 at the time of his alleged hacking and he was the first minor tried by the US federal government. Further, the federal prosecutors (Janet Reno, in particular) used James story as a political gain by threatening James with adult charges carrying more than 10 years, all so they could "prove the Justice Department is willing to get tough on juveniles offenders accused of cyber crime." So James took a plea deal and at 16 was on 6 month house arrest and probation to 18 and he had to stop using computers for recreational use, shit even drunk drivers can drive again.

"It's tragic that he killed himself, but, at least to me, his actions seemed on the whole more malicious than Swartz's ever was."

I only want to address this as devil's advocate, but in terms of James' act being malicious, James acquired $1.7 million in NASA software, he did publish it or sell it, rather he did it to learn more coding. Further, he said he only pursued his exploits because he wanted to explore, which seems to be the very opposite of malicious, after all anyone who was malicious and in control of the Space Stations life sustaining systems could surely have caused more damage than copying the code if they were truly malicious. Whereas Aaron breached a system and copied information with the intent to redistribute it in mass to the detriment of the system itself, which fits the very definition of malice. I am in no way justifying anyone's actions and condemning another's actions, simply highlighting that your word choice of malicious really does not seem fitting for James as much as curious, whereas Aaron intended to destroy a system albeit one that many feel unethically controlled the flow of knowledge which should otherwise be open and free. Besides assuming Aaron did have intent and malice toward the system, is he any more legally culpable than say someone who takes bread to feed the hungry where they are otherwise being starved?
Why entrepreneurs innovate better than managers
How many magazines about Ruby on Rails or MySQL do you read? You know that highavailabilty.com is more credible than some guy named FunkySysAdmin on a random forum. Yes, there is (much) less rigor in software development publishing than in scientific, but I think the basic model might work. Social networks such as HN help you find the right blogs. Also, researchers already have social connections. During my short stint in research as an undergrad, I was amazed at how many social connections my lab had around the world. I also found it interesting that when we published papers we made a point of emailing the PDF's to other researchers that might be interested. Through this mechanism we also often got early access to papers that were about to be published.
While this is really cool, how is this HN material?
Google and Apple have both found great success in phones while Microsoft has floundered and so the article logically asks, "what's to stop Google and Apple from carving up the desktop (including laptop) space as they have with phones?" The key is inertia. While Microsoft may have had a mobile OS before Apple or Google, it never really caught on. There was no inertia in the smartphone space. When Apple came along with iOS, almost no one had a smartphone. Apple didn't have to convince users to switch from a mobile platform they already felt was ok. Similarly, even when Android entered, the majority of people didn't have to be convinced to switch. Most people didn't have a smartphone.

Most people do have a desktop. They've invested years of time learning Windows and have applications specifically written for it. Desktop Linux has been around for years and hasn't made a dent in Windows. Why would a new desktop Linux distribution change that?

In many ways Android Desktop would be inferior to most desktop Linux distributions because it would be launching with few, if any, apps. Android has many mobile apps, but just like iOS and OS X, we would really need separate apps for both. Google could provide a Linux with Android APIs just as Apple shares much of Cocoa between iOS and OS X. However, traditional linux distributions are quite usable (my complaints about Gnome 3 and Unity aside) and they haven't made much of a dent in Windows. If people don't want those, why would they want Desktop Android?

Branding might help. People might hear Android and think, "oh, I've heard of that or used that before". Still, the "Windows" brand hasn't been helping Microsoft counter Google and Apple in the mobile space. In fact, looking at the mobile space, we can see how important inertia is. Despite coming out with a quite good mobile OS and getting Nokia to commit to exclusivity, that combined force just can't make a dent in consumer inertia toward iOS and Android. Even if Google came out with a premium desktop OS with the Android brand that people know and love, would users change their inertia?

It just seems less likely to me. In mobile, Google and Apple weren't fighting inertia. They were creating a new space.
In fact, a federal prosecutor would be behaving in an impeachable way to fail to pursue a violation of federal law.

Citation needed.

Particularly considering the fact that prosecutors do not have the resources to pursue all violations of federal law. Doubly so given that multiple states currently have extremely uneven enforcement of federal law around the sale of marijuana.

Selective enforcement is a reality.
I agree, not sure the author knows what he is talking about ! not a single number or research study result or even a trivia to support his claim, Mobile OSes simply aren't designed for using the PC hardware ! A claim I can make by simply looking at the Android SDK/ iOS SDK / windows phone SDK, none of them truly can match up to what windows sdk has to offer !
> Now Steambox may provide some competition, but I think it will be more like Sony and Nintendo in that it'll just be another platform. No major studios are going to neglect DirectX and the XBox720 (or whatever it will be called).

Valve will be debuting this thing at a loss to try to detract classic PC gamers off Windows so Microsoft can't do a hostile takeover with the Windows Store. Game engines are more and more being developed to support mobile and traditional profiles, so they write to opengl, not directX. Once you start using openGL, nothing is tying you to Windows anymore, and you start releasing your games everywhere. I fully expect initiatives like Shield, Ouya, and Steambox to take away huge chunks of the market from Sony, Microsoft, and Nintendo.

> I'm not sure that's true. I've used a lot of shared code developing on Windows. One big difference though is that I pay for the code, rather than it being open source. Control and component vendors are very common on Windows.

And small games don't have the funds to try to buy their way into code bases. They look at their options and see webapps or mobile as a much lower barrier to entry and jump on that. The Windows dev community that emerged in the 90s is still the same group, and all new entries are moving elsewhere.
Please don't call it theft.
Taxi laws are different in different places. Many places you have the option of calling a taxi company, and they are legally required to send you a cab. Obviously not NY.

Your "zone" idea is logical. So logical that it is the law in some places, like the Bay Area which is the subject of the comment you replied to.

(2) Out-of-Town Trips. Drivers are authorized to collect 150 percent of the metered rate for out-of-town trips exceeding 15 miles beyond City limits.
http://www.amlegal.com/nxt/gateway.dll/California/transporta...

>>>Rigidly fixed prices are NOT a good thing for customers if you want there to be service at any time to/from any region.

This holds true for NY, where you can't call a cab with a phone. Other places you can call, and the cab is legally required to come and pick you up.

>>>The regulations on cabs are not at all utilitarian - they are pure rent-seeking

I agree that some are, but I think that I have listed some laws do service the public good. Am I wrong? NY tip: you can implement the zone system yourself on an ad-hoc basis - give them enough money and they will take you to Brooklyn. I hope you have a lot of money though :) .
From my experience, it's because of this. These publications want pageviews, they'll write anything they want to get it.

But here's a more logical reason based on my experience traveling to these countries - In every home, they buy a PC once in every ~3-5 years. Now, the iPads have started to become really common, so everyone wants one too. So, you see a rise in the sales of the iPads. The decline is because the PC you bought 5 years ago (For. ex Core 2 Duo) is still as good and supports a lot of applications. So these users don't have this need to upgrade to a newer system - Because they can already multi-task pretty well.

One thing you must understand is that PC's are not mobile phones or tablets where they get outdated very fast - like less than a year or so. Whereas, the PC's utility and already excellent overshoots anything else and hence doesn't need an upgrade every year, atleast not for the average consumer. Also, the rise in the sales of the iPads and the decline in the sales of the PC does NOT necessarily mean that the usage of the PC is declining too. What I mean is that, in this era, almost every house has a PC. But tablets are on the rise. But that doesn't mean people are ditching their PC's to buy the tablets, it simply means they just buy the tablets in addition to their existing PC's. Can you show me one citation that says users are selling their PC's to buy a new tablet? And there lies your answer.
It's actually more complicated than that. You value saving the lives of people on the other boat (albeit much less than you value your own), there are "third options" with risks but interesting payoffs that are worth considering (disabling the bomb, stealthily jumping into the water...), and the longer you delay, the more likely it is that a deus ex machina (Batman, a stealth bomb disposal specialist...) will show up and offer you maximum payoff on a silver platter. Indeed that's what ends up happening in the movie.

(Of course this isn't a practical approach, since the problem is likely to solve itself long before I'm done formalizing it.)
We already pay billions to switch DST. We pay billions annually in wasted time converting time zones.

We also waste money on the Imperial Units, but that (like the UTC proposition) is short term pains for long term benefits, and nobody likes to think long term.
Series A Crunch: Customers vs. Investors
Hopefully they bring up the petition to dismiss the prosecutor in this case.

https://petitions.whitehouse.gov/petition/remove-united-stat...

Already about a fifth of the way there.
What is the 'terrible unity experience'?
Im freelancer in the NL and i'm using MoneyBird, for dutch / english freelancers. What do you offer more than MoneyBird? Open API || a link with dutch banks?
Windows 8 phone will probably have the market share in due time. Nokia has already reported increasing profits and personally I cant wait to switch out my Droid 2 for one. Windows 8 on the desktop is also amazing once you step back from the blogger cloud of BS and actually use it. Having the same OS on both desktop and phone is a powerful idea which even Ubuntu developers are now beginning to realize.

http://www.ubuntu.com/devices/phone
you must be joking ? your saying the avg chinese love paying 4000 yuan for an ipad than to pirate a windows copy (which is quite prevalent there) for free ?
Further, you have a class of individuals whose job is to make new laws (Congress and its machinations, as well as the state and municipal equivalents). If they don't make laws, the perception is that they are not doing their job. It was the same frustration with the parlements and the resulting legal culture that helped ferment the French Revolution.
> So, why isn't there an Office or any other Suite on your iPad? Think about it: I can type between 70 and 80 wpm on my computer. I can't thumb-type in a partial keyboard very fast at all. Could you imagine trying to read a spreadsheet on a tablet? I know you can, but I'd prefer to not bother discovering how much of a nightmare this would become.

Not a nightmare at all, with the Logitech Ultrathin keyboard cover for iPad 2, 3, 4.

http://www.amazon.com/Logitech-Ultrathin-Keyboard-generation...

The single best accessory for a working person's iPad.