skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> That's like excluding the US when talking about Democracy.

Speaking of which, western countries, with very few exceptions, aren't democracies. They are representative governments. Well, that's if what I call "democracy" is what the Athenians had in mind a few millennia back. Remember, the custom there was for citizens to vote for their rules, not their rulers. Some people did take charge sometimes, but they had to be picked by random trial, not elections.

Come to think of it, Alan Kay did not have Java in mind when he coined the term "OO". And Karl Marx certainly did not have USSR nor North Korea in mind. And so on.

You're all agreeing on the facts here, which are: every government that have thus far claimed to be "communist" where mostly dictatorships where only the establishment had any wealth to speak of. And this outcome is undoubtedly very different from the ideals of those who used the term before that.

The only contentious point here is the definition of the word "communism". Does it apply to the ideal, or to the outcome? Well, who cares?

Unless…

…someone is trying to push arguments behind our back by using a definition over the other. The actually important question is not a matter of definition, but a matter of prediction: what chance do we have to properly implement communism-the-ideal, while avoiding communism-the-outcome?

Choosing a definition for "communism" does not help us on this one. It only shows our respective opinions.
> Has anyone tried running Ubuntu (dual boot or otherwise) on a Macbook Air

There's a very good resource here: https://help.ubuntu.com/community/MacBook

I've recently installed freebsd (as the only OS, no dual boot) without any hickups what so ever. Full disclosure: It was an older macbook, about 4-5 years old, and I can't tell if it works for or against its chances of running Ubuntu.

I was surprised that it went about so easily, I must admit.

If wanted, I could write a blog post on my exact instructions, but all in all, you may need a tiny bit of OSX at hand to get the install going (seeing as a MacBook Air does not have a bootable device, such as a CD/DVD drive).

So in conclusion, Ubuntu on a MacBook Air should be very possible: https://help.ubuntu.com/community/MacBookAir4-2 with the only exception of Thunderbolt
Merrill Lynch hardly failed in a free market manner. It was bought out based on guarantees from the taxpayers IIRC. GS also got help from the SEC in the form of a temporary ban on shorting. I'm not saying you're wrong, just that you've over-simplified the situation... there really aren't any free markets when it comes to finance.
"I'm fully on board with trying to fix the problem for all."

Perhaps, then, you should reconsider the people (like me) who are saying that the application of copyright to academic publications must be ended. The reason, as far as I am concerned, is simple: expanding access to knowledge and to education is crucial for maintaining a just legal system in any democratic society. The better educated the general public is, the better able they are to keep politicians in check, to fix problems like overreaching prosecutors, to reform laws that make no sense, and to ensure that minor crimes do not bring overly harsh punishments.

We cannot claim that everyone has equal access to education if academic publications are prohibitively expensive. At one time, that was a situation that simply could not be changed, because the publishing industry was the best way to disseminate knowledge and we were better off monetizing that system. In the 1970s, that changed when global computer networks that could connect low-cost personal computers became a reality; today, we can rapidly disseminate textbooks, scientific journals, course notes, and recordings of lectures and discussions at low cost. Even the poorest schools and libraries in America have computers with Internet access, and could theoretically gain access to what would be the largest library in human history if we took the time to build it. It is just one piece of the puzzle, of course, but it is an important piece.

The only thing holding us back now is, ironically, copyright law -- the very legal system that was originally meant to ensure that knowledge could be spread far and wide has transformed into a system that cripples our ability to spread our knowledge. Instead of the Internet becoming home to the world's most expansive library, it has become a system for further restricting access to information. Instead of being able to read whatever published research we want, we are forced to navigate a maze of paywalls. Textbook publishers are now using their copyrights and the Internet to kill the used book market, and are experimenting with ways to create books that students can only read for a limited time before they must pay again.

If JSTOR does indeed provide a necessary service, if they are not just leeches taking advantageous of our anachronistic approach to academic publishing, let them prove it: end the copyrights on academic publications, and let JSTOR show us how important their search service truly is by charging for access to it. I have my doubts that a peer-to-peer search service would not be equally useful and much cheaper, but right now there is no way to test that theory. If you can name something important that academic publishers and companies like JSTOR do with the money they bring in that could not be done equally well or better using today's technology, please do so (note that, at least in the case of scientific articles, the writing, formatting, reviewing, and often even editing are not paid for by the publisher, and so you should not bother naming any of the above).

So if you want to fix a problem that affects everyone, perhaps you should be thinking about that problem.
The X220 IPS panel is highly prone to developing pressure marks, even when babied. Also, it's low resolution (same as the TN panel).

I would not recommend it.
Because its a corrupt and incompetent regime that relies on censorship?

Maybe all their filtering toys currently only work with the sat uplinks. Who knows. Non-free countries have crazy networking to remain non-free.

wikipedia: Cuba has an Internet penetration of 1 to 3 percent; making it the lowest rate in Latin America and one of the lowest in the world

/this is a feature not a bug.
Is it ready yet? it never worked for me :(
MINECRAFT XBOX 360: HIDDEN SECRET VILLAGE
I have been several times and I have a lot of family there. Notice how I started my comment with "young people." I'm not familiar with the eastern part of the island, but in Havana, mobile phones are quite common amongst young people. Furthermore, you're wrong, the young people in Cuba DO miss facebook. This is because university students are allowed to use the (slow) internet more or less freely. The censorship is not as comprehensive as that of the chinese firewall. And after spending several years with access to gmail and facebook, they're thrown into the regular society, where access to internet more difficult to come by.
Facebook Calls for the Creation of Cheap Flash Memory for Mass Photo Storage
Why limit yourself to a $1,000 budget? If you're writing code, that's a small percentage of your yearly income. If a more expensive laptop makes you 5% more productive, it's worth buying purely for economic reasons.
If you're going to run ubuntu as a primary OS, the Bonobo Extreme is worth investigating from system76.

I have a high-end Latitude E65* without any issues, and a Thinkpad W530 that is also working well - both are running CrunchBang. I didn't encounter any software/Linux-specific issues on the Dell that weren't on the Thinkpad. The Thinkpad feels nicer, but it cost a lot more.

The system76 machine costs less than both (spec for spec), but I haven't used one. That said, they only build ubuntu machines - which might be right up your alley. If you want to save a little money, they have cheaper models in the 15.6" size too.
I think by definition, self-awareness means something on a more personal level. You have to understand not only the market you're in, the business you're trying to start, your product and your customers, but also must be keenly attuned to your own methods, your "chemistry" with your partners, and the _way_ you approach the business, not just the approach itself.

At least that's been my experience as a self-proclaimed "self-aware entrepreneur" ;)
Fun with John Conway's FRACTRAN
It's not self-examination, it's taking action based on that self-examination, which is much more difficult to do...

Most people don't want to face their shortcomings, but of those who do, even fewer actually take the action necessary for success...
Haven't played yet, but from the screenshots: Great Graphics! Keep up the good work!
I would highly recommend the ThinkPad X1 Carbon. I'm typing on it right now and the keyboard is a joy. See my first impressions of it here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4848375
The way this happens underneath is that every type that has a Num instance has a fromInteger function. If a literal like 3435 is encountered, the fromInteger function gets called on it to convert it to the appropriate type.
Yelp: Favourite San Francisco crackhead moments
I've got a couple recent ThinkPads - (T400 + W520) - running Linux, and love them.

My favorite thing is the removable CD/DVD bay, where you can stick in a hard drive caddy and put different 2.5" drives in there.

Nice for super-fast (internal SATA) backups to multiple drives. 500G of databases, video, etc. Or for installing an alternate O.S. - so if you want to try a BSD or Linux on its own root drive instead of a virtual machine, it's an easy way to swap out drives.

Also because they're so popular, parts are easily replaced. I typed-through the keyboard on my 2-year-old T400S, wearing the matte finish & letters off the keys, and it was only $40 to go to some random shop in Singapore and get them to put a brand new T400S keyboard on it.
I've got a W520. It's a great machine. Love the keyboard!

Now for problems. Hopefuly some of these things were fixed in W530?

* Bezel is huge!

* Larger 170W power supply is very heavy, doesn't work in airplane power outlets. Smallish power cord often pops off.

* Installing Crucial M4 SSD for me has resulted in BSODs (on windows). Dual booted to linux mint 12 and that also corrupted. Google for SSD W520 BSOD. Eventually gave up and went back to stock HDD.
Just found this interesting looking tablet:
http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/281048847748?ssPageName=STRK:MEWAX...

It's 1024*600, with 8GB disk, 512MB RAM.
Arial's A has a wider base (seems more "fat") than Helvetica's
Good powerful and light developer laptops include:

The Lenovo X230. Downside: Only a 1366x768 screen.

The 13" Vaio S. Upside: Pretty much the lightest full-power 13.3" laptop, 1600x900 screen, a comfortable keyboard, $880. Downside: None? The screen is only pretty good, instead of being a high end, high color gamut screen? It lacks a Thinkpad keyboard. It has HDMI instead of DisplayPort. This is a good general purpose laptop.

The Lenovo T430s: The downsides relative to the 13" Vaio S is that it has a worse quality screen, it's slightly bigger at the same resolution, and has worse GPU, as if that even works on Ubuntu. The upside is that it has a Thinkpad keyboard and the DVD player can be replaced with a hard drive bay or battery, and it has a mini-DisplayPort port.

The 15" Vaio S: The lightest 15" laptop option in your price range, at 4.45 lbs. You can get a quad core processor (without VT-d support, though, and I'm not sure about staying under $1000), and it has a 1920x1080 IPS screen (with orange tint problems).

I'm told the Vaio S's work fine with Ubuntu. However, you should carefully check forums online to make sure of their hardware support.

If you want to consider ultrabooks, the X1 Carbon is worth checking out, but a version with 8 GB of RAM is expensive with marginal benefit compared to, say, the 13" Vaio S, or the ASUS UX31A for that matter.

I'm a fan of Thinkpad keyboards but if I had to own only one computer, it would be the 13" Vaio S, because of the GPU and better screen, and (to my subjective opinion) better size. If you don't care about GPU at all, and if you don't care about screen color or viewing angles that much, a T430s is a good bet. Both are below the threshold for me where descreasing the weight further doesn't matter.
I just experienced substantial delays on a new Lenovo machine, too. Great machine (W530) after the wait, but the delays were unexpected and not welcome.
Not sure how to explain this, but on a personal level, "when my mom was laid off" references a specific point in time, while 11-ish references a period of potentially years.

"11-ish" is likely more useful to everyone else, but "when my mom was laid off" is far more accurate, researchable time measurement.
I'm sorry, but "Google apparently accepted to pay the fees (even worst since the government is also forcing a decision favorable to the ISPs)" is pure nonsense. You misread your source. The French government doesn't give a damn about peering negociations.

The French government supported _media companies_ (which is a nice way to say "old-school newspapers"), or at least tried to pressure Google into reaching an agreement with them. That's a whole different issue, which just happens to be mentioned in the same article.
The main downside, besides the weight, is the 170W monstrosity of a power brick. The performance is amazing and Ubuntu support is decent: NVIDIA Optimus doesn't seem to work and suspend is flaky, but those are the only problems I've encountered.
Whatever you do, do NOT get anything with Windows 8 on it. I got a beautiful Acer Aspire M which has a great screen, backlit keys, decent CPU, less than 5 pounds, 15" screen, ultra-thin, you name it. The pain of getting Linux to run on it, I can't even begin to tell you.

Worst part is, I like it so much that I would buy one again (if I could get Windows 7) without hesitation.
This library looks great! I really like the functionality and the html requirement definitions.

I don't want to hijack, but I just want to link to the form library I wrote a couple years ago. It has a little less functionality, but it is a little lighter and has no dependencies. It is here: https://github.com/rickharrison/validate.js
Hey man, nice job! As someone (a 25yr old) who picked up programming within the last year or so, I'm pretty jealous that you got such an early start! How long did this take you to build?

Also, it seems like you're going to be building lots of things, so here's a tip: don't pay attention to most of the negative things people say here; they can't stand to see someone as young as you being more productive than them.

Looking forward to see what you do next!
> Design is not a single input discipline. Many factors go into making a design for a product... including trends and fads.

The problem is that sometimes (usually?) it's 99% fashion, 1% usability studies....
I concur with this guy.

Had mine for a while now and it's the best laptop I've ever owned.

Amazing Linux support, light, and I seem to be able to keep dropping it with no ill effects.
It's more subtle than that. You need to know _why_ you're doing things wrong - what's motivating you, what's preventing you from improving, what conceptions (or misconceptions) you have.

As pg said, having self-awareness isn't necessarily a recipe for success, but a lot of failures come from a refusal to see the reality of the path you're on.
I run Ubuntu on my 11" 2012 Air and have pretty much given up on it. Sleep is a major issue - closing the lid will _most_ of the time have the machine sleep, but it will also inexplicably come out of sleep without the lid having opened. It's not much fun to find your machine has halted in your bag due to a drained battery. There are other issues too - the trackpad sensitivity is wonky (can be fixed but like all things linux will require some digging), and Ubuntu can't detect the resolution of my external Dell display (potentially a monitor issue rather than the laptop, I don't know. It works flawlessly in OSX). The Air seems to run hotter in Ubuntu and the battery life is also shorter, although not significantly.

The only thing I miss from Ubuntu in OSX is apt, but homebrew is functional if not as elegant.
I too have an X220 with the "HD" screen. It looks great. The only issue is the awful resolution, but it's the same with the regular panel.

I should probably mention that it runs Arch Linux without issue.
I'am on a Asus Zenbook Prime ux31a with ElementaryOS Luna(Cool Ubuntu Distro).
It's a 13,3 Ultrabook with a 1920x1200 Resolution.
I'am a webdeveloper and always on the go.
Somepeople say it is a Macbook Air Clone but it is not ;)

i payed about 1050 euro for my version
It's pretty great, but the clickpad is a love it of hate it affair
The Four Economic Classes and Their Respective Plights
I really had no idea how horrible the humanitarian crisis in North Korea really was until I began reading about it yesterday after checking out the blog post that was on the front page here. I feel ashamed I have been ignorant for so long.

In summary of what I've learned, it's generally accepted that there are around 200,000 people kept in active concentration camps [1]. There are two types of camps: those for political prisoners (and those related to suspected defectors, because you're guilty by association with the convicted individual) held until they die, and re-education camps for "minor" offenses. Regardless of the prisoner classification, both are subject to a similarly deplorable fate.

Conditions are eerily reminiscent of concentration camps operated by Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan.

This includes:
1) Constant threat of public execution at the whims of guards. 2) Deplorable conditions including: lack of suitable sleeping areas, lack of general access to toilets except on a twice daily basis.
3) Malnutrition. Amnesty reports 40% of inmates die due to malnutrition. Highly rationed diet consisting of 100 grams of corn (if you're not being punished) and salt soup. Finding and eating rats raw is generally considered a blessing, but at the risk of punishment by guards.
4) Torturing prisoners is commonplace. Without going into the gory details, suffice it to say, it is horrible.
5) Human experimentation performed on prisoners a la Dr. Mengele.
6) Infanticide of babies born in captivity.

I remember when I first learned about the Holocaust in school and wondered how in the hell did the world stand by for so long while these atrocities were being committed? Now I understand.

When you are, by pure randomness, lucky enough to be living in a part of the world where these horrible acts are distant enough to barely register on the press radar, reading about these things do seem unfathomable, almost fake.

Most of what I've heard about North Korea in the past has focused on their bizarre cult of personality and generally bizarre culture. As comical as North Korea is made out to be in much of the internet, there is a serious humanitarian crisis ongoing. Given that the Korean War ended in 1953, the situation has perpetuated for sixty years now.

If the statistic of six million Jews murdered during the Holocaust shocks and disgusts you, I shudder to think about what we shall uncover after the North Korean dictatorship falls (if it ever does at this point if the situation continues) and their dark history finally becomes public knowledge. It really makes me feel nauseous to think that we always have to wait until after the atrocities end to learn from them.

Is there anything we can do? I'm sure there is, I just don't know what. Ugh.

[1] Amnesty International Media Briefing on North Korean Prison Camps http://www.amnesty.org/en/library/asset/ASA24/001/2011/en/26...
BlkReplay - Block IO Testing / Measurement / Benchmarking
IMHO, for non-compute bound developers the single most important thing on a development machine is high resolution.

Both the Dell Latitude e6500 and the Lenovo Thinkpad T500/W500 are 15", high-end Core 2 Duo machines with WUXGA (1920x1200) screens. You can probably snag one on Ebay for $300-$400. Add in an SSD and max out the ram for another couple hundred dollars would be my suggestion.

That's the best developer machine short of a Retina MBP.

edit: updated Thinkpad models, added header.
C and C++ Aren't Future Proof
Really? So it was the credit unions that were decimated by the crisis? Or did you just mean the "smaller of the giants"?
I really like my Sager laptop with a OWC Mercury Pro SSD in it. I've had really good Linux support with it. [Baring NVidia Optima].
It's annoying, well at least to me, because I would click on one of the various tabs in JIRA and be presented with an ad instead of the information I was seeking.

We have Jenkins set up to input data into Jira, unfortunately that integration isn't entirely fantastic and doesn't always work as well as one would hope. Mainly because Jira's SOAP API is an absolute mess.
> Dustin Curtis's flat approach to buttons and links is to use rounded borders: http://svbtle.com

Of course, they're so dim that I can barely see them at all... ><
JSTOR is actually relatively benign, the likes of Elsevier are the real problem.
Here's a handy reference that shows the distinguishing differences between the two typefaces: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helvetica#Similar_typefaces
The banks will never let this happen. The banks have become too powerful.
He says he might spend more, but does it really make that much difference?
Sometimes there are cashflow issues and opportunity costs.
Perhaps saving $200 on a laptop and investing it in advertising would give an even better return? Or perhaps the OP already has a desktop computer to use for the majority of coding work?

Besides, unless you are doing something especially intensive; once you get past a certain threshold (decent screen,disk and RAM) the returns start to diminish.
Is having a laptop that is half an lb lighter, has an i7 instead of an i5 or an nvidia GPU vs an intel GPU really going to help you ship rails applications faster?
It's 1920x1080 (Full HD).
Giving this a go - I do have solutions for most of these things (Evernote for notes, Maps' built-in syncing, etc) but this sounds like it might be convenient, especially for files.

One small thing... when I started the app, it fired up my Twitter client O.o What's up with that?
No worries at all. Any feedback is good - and I added a clarification to make it's clearer now.
MegaUpload, with a new skin? Seems like the same general business.
I had some issue just reading the text on the page after clicking the video. Once the video had opened for me the scrollbar on the site disappeared. It reappeared on reloading the page but incredibly annoying and confusing behavior.

Nothing to really say about the video etc.

Relevant C&H comic:
http://www.explosm.net/comics/2398/
The original Helvetica
It's likely that the good outcomes in Finland are primarily the result of the student body, not the education system. Non-Finnish students attending school in Finland tend to perform about 50 pts worse on PISA than Finnish students.

http://super-economy.blogspot.com/2010/12/amazing-truth-abou...
You mean it improved dramatically since the beginning of communism? What's your point?
I will not bail out private money making banks via the FDIC via my tax dollar.

Never in American history has the FDIC had to take a "tax dollar" during a bank failure. The government does back it, yes--but the amount of private money in the FDIC makes it extremely unlikely that bank failures even at the scope we were looking at in 2008 will tap them out.