skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Congrats on invoking Godwins law on a topic not related to the thread.
Why all my iOS Apps are on hold - or iCloud sucks Part II
Does it matter? We do a pretty continuous 400k ops/s worth of Mongo, but I don't think that's necessarily going to fix anyone's issues with it.
Show HN: I built a music app for iOS to learn how to build iOS apps
Some history: I was hired to work as a probational employee for an upcoming iPad app that was starting out. Since I hadn't written a single line of native iOS production code at that time, I had to scramble. I read Big Nerd Ranch's iOS Programming book front to back over a two week period on the bus and realized I could probably learn a lot better by building an app that I wanted to use.

I started tinkering last October, on and off the bus, never expecting to get very far and ended up polishing it and getting it fully ready last month. The rest of the time was spent building the website and ironing out other visual bugs.

Take a look if you'd like. There's a video showing off how it works on the website so you don't need to buy it :)
This site crashed my browser (Chrome Version 24.0.1312.57 m). The video card had to reset.
to quote kerry packer:

I am not evading tax in any way, shape or form. Now of course I am minimizing my tax and if anybody in this country doesn't minimize their tax they want their heads read because as a government I can tell you you're not spending it that well that we should be donating extra.
Some history: I was hired to work as a probational employee for an upcoming iPad app that was starting out. Since I hadn't written a single line of native iOS production code at that time, I had to scramble. I read Big Nerd Ranch's iOS Programming book front to back over a two week period on the bus and realized I could probably learn a lot better by building an app that I wanted to use.

I started tinkering last October, on and off the bus, never expecting to get very far and ended up polishing it and getting it fully ready last month. The rest of the time was spent building the website and ironing out other visual bugs.

Take a look if you'd like. There's a video showing off how it works on the website so you don't need to buy it :)
I don't want to make the statement that women are smarter as it may be more related to what each gender accomplishes with their education. Men are physically more capable at labor-intensive roles that don't necessarily need the type of education currently provided in K-12 outside of vocational schools and shop classes. That doesn't mean they're not smart, it just means they may know what they want out of life and know what it takes to do it (i.e. taking over his father's business).

I'd love to see our education system provide both academic- and career-oriented pathways that bring back apprenticeships. While I think women would still take more academic courses than their male counterparts, I believe it would really help alleviate gender-based assumptions about intelligence and capabilities.
Very close, but choosing an i5 pushes the price closer to $1300 and doesn't come anywhere to "handily beating" the Surface Pro claim in the OP.
BTW, I am really chicken so I used this to decide whether or not to post: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4053427
You, but whatabout a laymen user who doesnt care ehat your justifications are? They want people to build snappy mobile web apps. This creates competition and legitimacy for them
Gnome wants to sandbox applications
Most of the successful mobile app launches I have seen used extensive pre-promotion. I have seen email lists, blogs, as well as teaser trailers used to good effect.

Pre-promotion also helps you validate your idea. If no one is excited for your app to come out when you can promise anything and everything, you might need to tweak it. My 2¢
Same, and running ghostery, I am getting consistent experience on both Safari and Chrome.
I can't even get the text to load in Chrome, all I get is the spinner.
I think part of this comes from the abstractions used for tablets vs. "traditional" computers. (With the surface being viewed as a tablet by most consumers, vs. the air being seen as a traditional laptop).

In tablets, the trend seems to be to abstract away/hide the OS as much as possible – it isn't something that runs on the machine, it is the machine – if that makes sense. Compare this to the laptop world where we're all engrained to conceive of the OS as something that is installed on the machine and in most/all cases is able to be swapped out (insert plug for your favorite Linux distro here, etc.)

So, given that, most consumers willingly accept the space the OS takes up as a given on the laptop yet the same people see the listing the tablet storage including the space required for the OS as disingenuous.

When you want to abstract away something, if your abstraction leaks, it usually hampers the user experience or user perception of the offering – as this case illustrates (IMHO).
The author wrongly dismisses the impact of the SSD's spare area on usable storage:

> "The parts about wear-leveling blacks and bad blocks are just part of how SSDs work. On a new SSD these numbers should be very small."

This is absolutely wrong. Modern SSDs reserve a significant part of their NAND even when new. For example, the Micron C400 used in the Surface Pro has 128GiB of NAND and reserves 6.8% as spare area, and thus presents to the OS as a 119.2GiB block device. An Intel SSD 525 with the same 128GiB of NAND reserves 12.6% spare area, so it presents 111.8GiB to the OS. The author's MacBook Air seems to have about 11.7% spare area. They're still fundamentally the same amount of storage, but drives with smaller spare area will generally perform worse when they are nearly full, and having less spare area can also reduce the longevity of the drive.
"Really, that the current CEO could not think of anything better than to give money back to the stock holders tells me that Apple is now doomed."

And this, ladies and gentlemen, is why the stock market is a zero-sum game.
Agreed, it's a bit of a straw man. It's certainly an issue that hard drive capacity is advertised as being higher than it actually is (and that BS apple is pulling is inexcusable), but the actual issue people were taking with the Surface is the fact that when you buy it it's packed so full of bloat and crapware that half the useable disk space is already depleted on a 64gb model.
I haven't heard of Librivox before, and I'm too lazy to actually check the site, but my thoughts:

Upvote-only, no displayed view/play count. This protects the producers by letting them assume neutral reasons for low approval ratings–maybe everyone who does listen to their reading is just too lazy to upvote–while providing a mechanism to say, "This one was good."

I could also see making the upvotes invisible and using some magical algorithm to convert raw numbers into a range from "no one has given an opinion" to "lots of people liked this".
The corporations are just acting on their incentives. The opportunity exists, therefore they're going to take advantage of it.

Returning maximum value to shareholders is something that most (all?) corporations are trying to do. To not take advantage of government loopholes would be neglecting fiduciary duty.

It's not the corporation's job to police morality. That responsibility theoretically belongs to the state. If they're inept and/or corrupt, so be it.
The Mobile Train Has Left The Windows 8 Platform Behind
+1. That grated on me a bit, too. While the author does treat the topic extensively, it felt slanted. There's no grand conspiracy: storage manufacturers have traditionally reported capacity in base 10 GB, software in base 2 GiB. So long as the article is internally consistent, so as to compare like units, what does it matter?
Why? It was accurate, and it does you no favors to brag about not reading an argument.
> ... no lying or half-truths.

So who gets to decide what's a half-truth, a lie by omission, or just well-intentioned but insufficiently detailed?
Agreed, that headline is totally rapey.
An Epic in the Comments
I'm not a fan of the lack of exceptions in Go, but it's not a dealbreaker for me. I feel like Go code is very cluttered and fussy. I don't love the language as a language. But as a tool for getting systems programming problems solved, it is pretty amazing, and I love working with it.
That's why we mail tshirts to customers who find bugs :)
the company can also buy back shares. the point is that essentially that as long as the company is profitable and continuing to generate cash flow, some shareholder down the road will get his or her due, so the stock is worth some value of these projected cash flows.
Since my point obviously flew straight over your head: the problem is not whether we understand monoids, or even that "Harry" used monoids to solve the problem, but that he's using completely inappropriate terminology to try to explain his solution to non-technical people.
Mr. Byrne's article starts with and promotes as true the prosecutor's claim that Mr. Swartz is a thief who "stole" a database, despite the fact that Mr. Swartz, both as a Harvard fellow, as a visiting family member of an MIT employee, and as a random member of the public visiting the MIT campus, had the legal right to access the JSTOR archive, and MIT was paying JSTOR hefty licensing fees for this access. The only stealing going on was JSTOR stealing the access that MIT legally paid for.

It is infuriating that Mr. Byrne makes his argument based on questionable claims, but even more so that his blog has no comments permitted or contact info rather than to contact any of four sets of high paid lawyers that represent him.
You think Boeing lets any schmuck work on their aircraft? The airlines have Boeing certified and trained mechanics that work closely with Boeing to conduct maintenance and repairs. Apple, similarly, allows you to become an authorized maintenance service provider for their products.

In any case, the airlines are often not the owners either. A lot of new aircraft are actually leased from Boeing or Airbus. That's kind of how I view my cell phone really. A leased appliance that I'm happy to let the maintenance of which be someone else's problem.
Where did brennenHN invoke Hitler or Nazis?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Godwins_law
If I knew enough about the codebase to know where to find the UI code, I'd do this happily!
I don't know what this person is talking about. Did you mean to submit http://asherwolf.net/dear-hacker-community-we-need-to-talk/1... instead of a one-paragraph gateway page?
What is stopping the government from saying: "No, too bad. Pay X amount of taxes instead of the proposed X-Y taxes."
Show HN: Crowdsourced Tech News
The result of pinging all the Internet IP addresses
Using the same compiler with the same instruction set/ordering running on each processor? That sounds astoundingly broken; can you find a reference?
> One of my examples was that I got a text from somebody and wanted to call them. I can't do that in iOS.

You can. Scroll to the top (or top the top bar to scroll up instantly) and click "Call"
How is it Apple's fault that Australia has accounting and tax laws that you consider ludicrous?
Erm... I think you are just not a designer yourself and don't understand the difference custom fonts can make to the 'readability' and overall feel of a website.

Using custom fonts for headlines and then a 'helvetica' variant to mix in on copy only gets you so far.

I'm not a designer, nor a narcissist, but I've seen body copy fonts used well.
Great feedback. That's one of my main points of concern, is understanding what it is/does. It's an implementation of stripe that allows you to quickly and easily create a payment form for your stripe account. :)
Irony alert. Games Workshop railing against strict copyright enforcement in 1978: http://sphotos-e.ak.fbcdn.net/hphotos-ak-prn1/67991_55608864...
Copyright licenses apply to third parties, not owners.

The GPLv3 compels entities other than the copyright holder to make available source code to those who receive non-source code versions of software, if they are actually distributing the software or "offer access" to the work (e.g.: as a Web app). The copyright holder him or herself, whether by authorship or assignment, has no such obligations. Third parties would, as would the project maintainer if that maintainer accepted third-party contributions without assignment.

If the Knight Foundation grant required continual availability in open source form, that would be a different contractual obligation under the grant.
Can somebody explain to me what is stopping someone from hitting the power + home button simultaneously and creating a photo of whatever is in the screen effectively working around the "self destruct" nature of Snapchat?
Typing keyboard + python = Musical instrument
You replied with the incredibly intellectually lazy "take it up with your politicians", which is exactly what the article describes is happening, but were too lazy to bother reading even the first sentence of. The politicians are questioning the tax issue, and are implying that there is something fishy in the way Apple does their tax - the MP in question thinks that they are not paying their proper tax bill as a result.
*facepalm
an eyewitness is usually worse than useless, they can be entirely misleading.
This font renders odd in IceWeasel 10.0.12 , all occurrences of the letter 'e' have their left side 'cut off' so they stand out and are very difficult to read.

Chromium Version 22.0.1229.94 Debian 7.0 (161065) works fine.
This is neat. I did something similar using a set of files with tight permissions deployed only on production servers. Like your solution it depended on configs being written in a scripting language. I think it was ten lines of code.

The whole reason for doing it at all was simply that MySQL doesn't support Kerberos. There's a very old ticket for that in their bug tracker.

"For everything else, there's Kerberos."
I am the 5% :) Which is a shame, because I really don't like their service, and my spot would be better reserved for someone else.
Goldbely (YC 2012) brings gourmet cuisine all over The country
No it doesn't. The 11" MBA is available in 64Gb or 128GB.
http://store.apple.com/us/browse/home/shop_mac/family/macboo...
The same thing happenend in Argentina a few years ago. Not enough coins were coined, and since the bus used a machine that only took coins, thye were in high demand (there was even a point where you could sell coins for up to 120% of their nominal worth). It was obnoxiously common at teh time for drugstores to give you candy instead of change in coins, simply because they didn't have enough of them.
113 is ambiguous. Its an error
This is ridiculous. The complaint was always about the 64GB model. 75% is fine. 35% is not. Very simple.
Interesting. I've actually been building/modifying a javascript wizard all week for a rails app. I'll give this a test drive.
7.8 GB recoverable recovery
3.3 GM hibernation file
4.0 GB pagefile
2.3 GB Office
10.4 GB Windows + other default apps
---------
27.8 GB

Which seems to indicate that you can recover 27.8 - 10.4 GB, or 17.4 GB. I'd like to see a chart like that for the Air.

The comparison in the article is with the Macbook Air, which is a laptop, not a laptop/tablet hybrid. I think this is instructive, however. My understanding is that there is no hibernation file and pagefile on an iPad. It's not trying to be a laptop. Likewise, there is no recovery partition on the iPad. (And I see very little need of one.)

The Surface Pro is a laptop in a tablet format. It's basically an old stylus tablet PC from the early 2000's done with 2012 technology, capacitative touch, and some design ideas from iPad style tablets layered on top.

Like my old tc1100 stylus tablet PC, you can use it for the same use cases as an iPad. However, there are important differences:

Holding it in bed would be a bit of a stunt. I can do it with my tc1100 if I rest my elbow on the bed and balance the thing along its diagonal through the center of gravity, with the corner resting firmly in my palm, whereas holding the iPad is like holding a book: something I don't have to think too much about. (That said, the iPad is already at the upper limit of what's tenable for me to not notice weight wise.)

Like the old tc1100, I have to be mindful of vents. A total non-issue with the iPad. I don't know what term there would be for this quality, but it's like a magic slab of touchable light. Having to think about vents ruins that.

Like the old tc1100, I would have to be mindful of battery per work session. To give credit where credit is due, the battery on the Surface Pro lasts 2X as long. However, I can put the tc1100 to sleep and hot-swap battery, so one extra battery gives me as much work endurance.

Basically, they're missing three of the essential qualities that make the iPad great as a tablet. I think they would've done better to go whole hog on the tablet/laptop hybrid idea like the IdeaPad Yoga and the Inspiron Duo. By pretending to be a tablet, they're setting up a bunch of expectations that aren't gong to be met. The tablet/hybrid is good enough for occasionally folding up as a tablet and passing around at a meeting, and doesn't seem to carry expectations beyond that.

Also, what benefit is there to be had from a tablet/laptop hybrid that I couldn't get from an "ultrabook" laptop with an 8.9" tablet? Instead of one device that's mediocre as a tablet and a laptop, I could have two devices that are great in each situation, for little additional weight. (For one thing, I could use the hybrid with a Wacom digitizer to do double duty as a poor-man's Cintiq, but that's kind of niche.)
I wrote about the challenges I had to work with for Hashtagaholic.com
Likely, I have a fair amount of contact with random internet people (running game servers), seeing quite a few spam emails from y7mail.com; notably from people I have previously had direct contact with (so I am in the accounts address book).
There's still a problem where Apple appears to be advertising a 120 GB SSD as 128 GB.
I think your definition of "parse visually" is very different than mine. The java version of the below would be much harder to parse visually for me.

https://gist.github.com/jaydonnell/4735159
IBM's tumblr of patents
Hair-trigger, there.
I remember staroffice 5 (its ancient predecessor) in the late 90s. The interface was amazing to my eyes, for the time: http://linuxbook.orbdesigns.com/ch11/images/btlb1114.jpg and http://www.os2ezine.com/v4n3/sointr-1.gif

The star office applications all played well with each other in this shell of an application that looked like windows 95.

This is back when KDE was a new thing and many people were using FVWM ... it just looked so wonderfully sophisticated up against the desktop applications available for linux at the time.

PS: http://www.os2ezine.com/v4n3/soui-1.gif
and http://www.os2ezine.com/v4n3/soint-4.gif and http://www.os2ezine.com/v4n3/soss-6.gif and http://www.os2ezine.com/v4n3/soss-5.gif ... I don't know how it's taken them 15 years to start to be awesome again.
You may well be correct. However, since this is Windows, there is some chance that Lenovo, Acer, Asus, MSI, Samsung, Sony, Toshiba, Fujitsu, HP, Dell or one of several hundred other companies will hit your sweet spot. It's not like you were limited to a single manufacturer.

In fact, if you think your sweet spot PC would be attractive to a lot of people, you could set up a company and market it yourself. There are hundreds of factories in the Pearl River Delta capable of producing that sort of thing at a reasonable price. Kickstarter here you come?
I think a lot of people get choice-locked and over value choice in general.

I'm not a rails dev but I have experienced the pain of choice with Node. When you know you need 5 libs that each do something but each of those 5 "things" have literally 30 choices then it's easy to get deadlocked by choice.

I'm not sure if it's just me but I always have this feeling of "did I pick the right one?" in the back of my head. It hurts my productivity because I feel like I'm wasting my time if I picked the wrong one.
True, at the base. Still goes up to 512.
Electronic Harassment, Targeted Individual
I've been harassed for a while and it has left me completely incapacitated. It's almost impossible for me to begin working on anything without the harassment picking up and completely wiping my short term memory or interrupting me, or just plain shutting my brain down preventing me from thinking. Even when I'm not working, hell, even when I'm dreaming, I'm constantly being harassed with intrusive, depressive, accusatory, repetitive, annoying thoughts. And they are usually about the same few idiots that in all likelihood did this to me.

I've already been put in the Psych Ward twice (against my will), I've been force-fed the anti-psychotics, and I've tried tons of supplements, all to no avail.

When I say harassed, I mean harassed in a manner similar to what has happened to targeted individuals, and, in addition to the mental/physical torture I've been through, everywhere I go it's like everyone is "in on it" trying to keep it going.

Whenever I attempt to start doing something, it's as though someone gets nervous, then starts pumping an overbearing ramble into my head while (usually linking back to people I don't like, while saying they are better than me, and that I don't know what I'm doing, and they were right, and that what they did to me was my fault or just my imagination, etc) shorting out my creativity, ability to think, ability to hold anything in short term memory, and my ability to pay attention.

I'm constantly going through experiences where it's like someone possesses me, then starts pushing me to yell for no reason, ramble, or break valuable things around me while consuming me with a panicky out of control anger.

I've spent the last few years, everyday, being able to do nothing other than read about health and supplements (but I don't have that much interest in those topics), and write, repeatedly, about the things that are happening to me.

My career is already ruined, and my life, independence, ability to work on my own thing, and even to learn is being toyed with everyday.

I know this is a long shot, but does anyone have any ideas how to get rid of this?
> To not take advantage of government loopholes would be neglecting fiduciary duty.

Not true. Taking advantage of loopholes is sometimes illegal, and sometimes a grey area.

> If they're inept and/or corrupt, so be it.

So why don't we all just give up then? Companies have a duty to earn as much money as possible regardless of morality, lobbying to get whatever laws changed they feel like in the process, and politicians can do whatever they want once they are elected.

In my view letting corporations determine law, law determine morality, and accepting it without complaining is an exceptionally bad idea.