skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I don't think reading/learning are productive use cases. Productivity, IMHO, means you create/produce something that is tangentially different (regardless of how small it is) than what existed before an activity. In the minds of most people, creating new knowledge or acquiring new information does not conform to the above definition.

You could argue though that iPads and other tablets _help_ you stay productive on a broader basis. At least that's how I justify my use of my iPad. They simplify certain aspects of my workflow (like easier/intuitive annotation of PDFs). But I know that simplification is not at a level where I'd like it to be.
As an Xbox customer I always wonder why MSFT doesn't sim-ship their games on their Games on Demand service (and, why their GoD prices are never competitive). I guess it's the retailers.
Well, you didn't use the same regular expression. If you use the same one the matching is the same. Here is the link of tubular with the same expression than debuggex: http://rubular.com/r/rMu0nAnJai
I'd love to see good numbers for people who own a tablet and only a tablet (I suppose I'd technically count as one cause my laptop is work provided). I suspect the vivid anecdotes of "my grandmum loves hers and is video chatting for the first time ever!" is overpowering the reality where most of those are sold to people who already have desktops and laptops and smartphones. Could be wrong.
Reports of gunman inside MIT unfounded
It's also interesting in this context that the allied forces disarmed people in Germany with the Treaty of Versailles. Hitler then armed the people in Germany again. You didn't even need a license for shotguns, rifles or ammunition.

Gun control doesn't necessarily have anything to do with dictatorship. Preventing a Coup d'état with a militia is just a pipe dream.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gun_politics_in_Germany#History...
I often hear that argument and it's interesting but then how to do you square it with Us history? Slavery and legal apartheid were legal for a long time, how come guns didn't stop that tyranny? During WW2, thousands of an ethnic minority (Japanese) were moved into camps against their will will the war was on. How come guns didn't stop that tyranny? I question whether a well armed people are capable of stopping a tyrannical government...
There appears to be a bug!

http://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=172281
Ah, so here's the point where it gets all "us vs them", eh?

I have fired guns, enjoy shooting, and several (but not all) of my family members own guns.

It's not that I don't believe safe gun ownership is impossible, it's that I don't trust other people, and I would like their failures with potentially lethal tools to have consequences.

If you own firearms, you should know where they are, and you should secure them against theft. If they're stolen, you should have to report them. And if you're losing a lot of guns, that should raise red flags, and someone should have a talk with you about responsible gun ownership.
Productivity and Calmness
Students build computers out of cardboard
Just saying, Tent is great. Good community, great third party developer support, and though for now it's just a Rails app you can run on your server, it's going to be something more abstract like IRC. The co-founders also really know their stuff.
Author likes dual monitors therefore tablets are a fad.

This is nonsense. There will always be powernerds who want expensive keyboards and 15 million pixels of desktop. Tablets are not currently productive... for us

Now watch ordinary people using them and then look at tablet sales. Now tell me they are a fad again :)
I agree, this sleep schedule is not very sustainable due to can't-miss evening functions. But it is working out very well for me for now because it is late in my school quarter. I spend a lot of time studying and working, and I haven't had any things come up during the evening. Since I'm in school, my rhythm gets messed up easily regardless.

Another productivity hack, I use LeechBlock during the day so I limit my Internet breaks. I find myself compulsively visiting distracting websites. There's self-control, but why not delegate it to the browser.

I have only been doing it for a week and continue to keep it up for at least the next week. I think I plan on tweaking it towards something slightly more normal, like 8pm-4am.
Not to mention NBN includes the launch of two satellites into orbit to provide coverage for the most remote (think outback) parts of Australia.
Thank you for the best contribution to the Campaign for Plain English on HN.

I hope to soon see 6 lane stuck-in-traffic-ways, online adultery sites, and one joyous day I will be called a passenger on a train again instead of a customer :-)
Terminal.

Sounds crazy but I do a lot of work in the terminal and the ipad makes a great terminal when paired with a keyboard.

It's akin to the distraction free solutions such as write room or the blocking the Internet hacks out there... With the ipad you can just have a terminal and nothing else fighting for my attention. Especially as the otherwise great Promt app logs you out so quickly so I put off checking my email as long as possible.

In short, I get more work done.

I think two tablets would make a great development environment, one running the terminal and one a browser checking the results... I do mostly web work so this is easy in the current state of affairs.

I guess I'm old school in my thinking that a screen can be totally detached from its server but then again I once admined a few hundred sun rays. The tablet to me is just the end display, if I need a unix environment I login to a unix server and do my work. When I'm at a real computer 95% of my time is spent on the terminal anyways so what is the difference if I run vi locally or if it is running in the cloud?
the title of the article claims there are no game console app stores. you are talking about a barrier to entry. two different things entirely.
I would say that it is notable that the author has apparently never used iOS. Setting all subjective judgments of whether iOS or Android is better to the side, what that means is that the author hasn't even tried out what is by far the largest app/developer base available on a tablet. So I don't really think the author's opinion bears much weight, when we have facts staring us in the face such as the near-universal adoption of iPads in Fortune 500 companies, sales figures clearly showing that many users are buying tablets instead of laptops now and apparently are doing just fine, etc.
My best use case for iPad has been the ease of showing some paper or draft to my advisor instead of printing it out or sending it over email and hoping he reads it. In general, I find iPad great for sporadic use cases that complement my laptop-based use cases quite well. But often I will lament the fact that I am using a $600 device (32GB) just for sporadic use cases.
25 Years to Mac - How Ubuntu Pushed Me Away from the PC
I'd be interested to know how Americans who live in countries with strict gun controls feel about not being able to carry a weapon? Do they feel any less safe?
But hundreds of thousands of innocents killed in the "Shock and Awe" of Iraqi cities somehow doesn't count?

More tyrannical U.S Government = More "Shock and Awe" abroad.
The tone of this article does absolutely nothing to help a new learner. While mostly factually correct, constantly complaining, whining, and saying what a stupid design decision this or that was helps in no way.

Every language has quirks. In the case if js, the things your complaining about like var and function declaration are features of the language.
So a silly question: does the constitution protect the right to own ammunition as well as weapons?
Are we being a bit condescending by insinuating that points earned or facebook walls commented on, is not productive?
I'm sure you cure cancer with every 5th keystroke of your best selling novels and crush awesome ruby code for breakfast.

You're espousing a pretty narrow view of what a computing device can be used for in a way that produces some value for its user.
They see it reduces bounce rate...... but not away from that actual article.

Such a silly trick.
blah blah blablah, i can stop reading your comment right at " it is the person using the weapon", that's the stupid stuff people keep repeating over and over and over again, like it would make sooo much sense, it's hilarious. Do you honestly believe that less people will die if you distribute more weapons among people!? Honestly?! Like think-really-hard-about-it-and-be-honest-to-yourself honestly? If yes, you are successfully lying to yourself, congratulations.

I think that americans just feel that this weapon owning is some sort of common property, a value of the americam people that needs to be protected because everyone grew up with this value and noone can imagine to not have those rights.
In that sense it is the same as the no-speed-limit driving in germany. We grew up with that and it is virtually unthinkable that the state will introduce a speed limit on motorways, partly because of the car industry but more importantly because every german grows up with it. It's crystal clear to me that there are more car accidents when cars drive faster (overall, driving faster equals less time to react to dangerous situations). Yet i can't imagine to drive max. 130 km/h although every surrounding country does that. In the same way i can say "It's not fast driving that kills, it's bad drivers!!!!", but we both know it's a stupid excuse.
I can tell you without a doubt that I do not live in fear. Carrying a gun simply lets me go about my day knowing that I am equipped to handle an unpleasant or potentially deadly situation should I have to.

Where do you live that you believe you will never fall victim to a crime? Are there no bad people where you live?

There are a lot of great people where I live in a very affluent and safe environment but I'm not naive enough to think that there is 0% chance of someone attempting to take my life. I simply prefer to be prepared.
Fair point. I wanted a Barretta Nano, and I know the gun store, didn't want to fool around with waiting for a gun show, or finding a private buyer, so I went with the store.
Doesn't Playstation Mobile count? It's an SDK and accompanying store for publishing to the Vita and Playstation branded Android devices. I can absolutely see them extending this to the PS4.
HN uses ridiculously small fonts.

I need to press ⌘-+ three times to get to something reasonable that I can read without straining my eyes. Chrome remembers the setting, though, so it's not a big problem in practice.
For the very productive, I think there's a tendency to think oneself exempt from the rules of sleep. But only for "a small group of people—perhaps just 1% to 3% of the population" is sleep a waste of time according to researchers.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142405274870371250457624...
You are correct. It drives me nuts when I walk around Second and Madison in Seattle; I would assume the workers were trolling when they did it, but I have pointed it out to plenty of co-workers that didn't see a problem.
I'm not sure why people are recommending make. Apart from the fact that it makes perfect sense for a library written in JS to use a JS toolchain, tools like Rake and npm are far more portable than any of the Autotools toolchain ever was. OSX uses BSD make by default for god's sake, and installing autotools on windows is not nearly as easy as installing node and npm. After that, you've got hundreds (thousands?) of CommonJS libraries that you can leverage where you control the version, versus having files sprinkled with comments like "// curl version <7 didn't support the -p flag, needed for WinXP cygwin v.24" (not actual example, but I've worked on many C/C++ projects where this is the case).
(I'll answer in the most crude general terms without aiming for nuance just to give you an idea of the culture here. Of course the reality is much more detailed than I can describe in a few paragraphs and what I say is only true to the coarsest approximation.)

UK residents are simply not afraid of being shot, because there are so few firearms. Armed robberies (with guns and with other weapons) do happen and as I understand it the generally accepted procedure is that you give the robber the material goods that he wants and then he goes away.

Violent physical attacks do take place too, of course, though (without looking at the statistics) I would estimate they happen far less frequently than the US. Even when such crimes cause outrage, civilian gun ownership is never suggested as a means of reducing the crime rate.

Public policy in the UK is far more focused on reducing the number of attempts at violent crime than it is focused on giving individual citizens the ability to defend themselves from such crimes at the moment they take place.
I think you'll find a lot libertarians who disagree with putting restrictions on either.
Do you have the same control over JS library versions in NIX and you do in npm? I find it very unlikely...
I almost wonder if you should be liable for having a gun stolen, unless you can prove it was adequately secured.
I find it very hard to understand what you're saying.
The author mentions it at the end but this schedule is really only good for the asocial. I submit that unless you truly have a aversion to social interaction, it will get lonely.

I know this because I used to work night shifts and pretty much had this schedule. You end up losing the period of socialization which is typically 4-10PM, where people go to dance classes, have dinners with friends, go get drinks etc... and things feel lonely.
And is the average response time of a police officer to your home, less than a minute, everywhere in the UK, any time of day or night, regardless of any other circumstance?

If not, maybe you lot should reconsider your irrational fear of guns.

FWIW, the USA is much larger than England, and some of our rural areas are very rural, so it's hardly an apples to apples comparison... but just to illustrate a bit: I was a 911 dispatcher for a while some years ago. The county I dispatched for was one of the larger ones (by square mileage) in NC, and mostly rural. Law enforcement was provided by the county sheriff's department, as well as town police forces from the 9 or 10 incorporated towns which were large enough to have their own police force.

On an average night shift, there would be 4 sheriff's deputies plus a sargeant on patrol. That's 5 people, plus the one or two town cops from each town. Now this is to cover a county where driving all the way from one end to the other, north/south down Highway 17, would take about an hour, and crossing the county east/west along Highway 211 could take a good 45 minutes.

So what do you think the response time for a cop was, if you dialed 911 at 3:00am and happened to live out near the Brunswick/Columbus county line? Well, if the "area 3" deputy happened to have been on an earlier call that took him down towards Southport, you were looking at probably 45 minutes. What if he was actively tied up on another call? Now you have to ask somebody from another district to respond, or get one of the town officers to respond. And they're even further away.

Interestingly enough, even in big cities with much greater population density and more police officers, you still can't (except by blind chance) expect a particularly fast response time for a cop. Certainly not fast enough if someone with ill intentions is creeping around outside your home.

The simple truth is, the idea of police responding to a life threatening emergency, and arriving in time to stop it before anyone is harmed, is a myth. Police exist to A. act as a deterrent, and B. respond after the fact and attempt to locate the perpetrators.
If it doesn't already have an source/destination check than it doesn't seem correct to call it a build tool. Or at least not a mature one.
That's not clear. AFAICT Nintendo isn't losing money on each unit sold
> The rest of the internet is "asleep", there's not much content being generated and so you are less distracted.

Thanks to the zones, that never happens.
The French Resistance and Warsaw Uprising were not entirely irrelevant, even if they were defeated.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gun_politics_in_Germany#The_193...
In the UK and most other developed countries, that scenario is simply not something people worry about. It just doesn't happen much. You don't feel the need to be prepared for getting hit by lightning either.
Easy for you to say. You're not being called apocryphal.

I thought readers could connect the dots but maybe a bit more explanation is due.

Having worked at the "new Microsoft" in recent history I feel like the part I quoted is highly indicative of someone who has their head in the sand. Across multiple divisions among people I've voiced opinions with openly I haven't talked to anyone at MS who shares his view. Even in his own DevDiv, I've heard people say that DevDiv is a bit better than the Microsoft average but yeah, it still has these problems.

At least, this is how I felt last month when replying to his previous comment. So I left a reply, even though it's taboo to talk this way about a former employer, even though I risked potential embarrassment attaching my name to this. And I said, hey, what they say about MS, what they said in that Vanity Fair article, it has a lot of truth in my experience, and I don't really know anyone who says otherwise without being a blind shill or a sociopath. (I'm saying it a bit more bluntly here but that was the idea.) I was reluctant to make that comment, but I did.

Then he goes around repeating still that all such comments are apocryphal and anonymous, despite the comment of a real person who is not writing anonymously. (Aside: He is probably not aware that current employees won't say this for fear of losing their job, and former employees probably feel the general taboo against speaking ill of a former employer.)
The peculiar nouns "-osity" thing was not originally a hacker thing. Discounting other unnecessary word endings being introduced to the public at large by the Fonz in Happy Days when he continually added the "-omundo" to the end of things, the "-osity" type of adjective -> noun mutilation may have been picked up from surfer/Cali talk, introduced into the mainstream by movies such as Fast Times at Ridgemont High (Spicoli) and later by Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure and Pauli Shore (on MTV and then in really bad movies).

By the same token terms like "barf" and "bogus" were just popular terms in the very early 80s because of all of the California influence.

Of all of these, the ones that look most familiar for the time that really have little to do with popular culture of the time were: BITBLT (just because I remember seeing it and thought "what the hell"), crash (mid to later 80s when used the first Macs), and down (which wasn't really used much until the 90s, because when you couldn't connect to a BBS or Compuserve, etc. - which almost was never the case to my memory - you just couldn't connect, and prior to modems there was no connection- just cassette tapes and eventually floppies - and no I did not have a card machine :) and I didn't see a minicomputer with a huge-ass 8 inch floppy until my first network admin job in the 90s).

Basically, the majority of this is "bogus". ;)
I'm always really interested in the straw man 'home invasion' fantasy that the pro-gun lobby brings out. Why would someone invade your home with a weapon? For financial gain? Just for jollies[1]?

The thing about giving everyone a gun is that it makes every crime that much more likely to be fatal. In Canada, for example, if I break into your house for your TV and you catch me, we're sort of at an impasse. Maybe I have a knife or a hard-to-get, illegal gun, but more than likely I hadn't thought it out. I'll run away, you'll call the cops.

Compare to the US, where I'd get a gun before I break into your house, because why not, they're everywhere. Now I want some crack, break into your house, get startled and shoot you. Or you shoot me. By introducing guns into what would have been a non-violent crime, you've significantly increased the risk of injury or death for all parties.

This is not to say that it's impossible to get an illegal gun if you think it might be beneficial; as in your 'holding up a convenience store' example. But why would I cap a bunch of random bystanders, and turn my potential armed robbery charge into first-degree murder? If I do have an illegal gun, and I know everyone else is unlikely to be armed, I hold all the power. The gun is merely a tool to keep people in line, I don't have to shoot anyone to achieve my goal. If I think everyone has a concealed carry, suddenly the situation is fraught with peril for everyone.

Gun control in the US is some terrible, bad-faith arms race where everyone 'needs' to defend themselves against these random, nun-toting boogey men.

1. One would argue that mass shootings are this sort of irrational behaviour. However, they tend to involve legally purchased guns, and they represent a very small proportion of gun-related deaths.
I was also thinking it might be difficult to keep up a 5pm sleep time during the summer months when the sun sets later. But if you had a sound-proof bedroom that was pitch dark (some crazy shades that blocked all light), then I would imagine that would help a lot.

An 8pm-4am sleep time sounds more manageable... although the 5pm-midnight sleep schedule is such a talking point. :)
Sony do day1 downloadable releases for most major titles. Probably the biggest reason I've played more games on my PS3 than on my 360 in the last year.
Discussion on HN about bad choices in a language? Check

Someone bringing up PHP when it's fairly unrelated? Check

Maybe focusing on the issue at hand would be something to keep in mind?
Bill to make legislation more transparent, easier to understand
Good solution.
I'm afraid it's glitchy, and there's something horrible happening on the square panel above the door - looks like two flats superimposed, or transparency moire, or some such.

Sorry, but I'm not especially impressed - this is on a high end desktop machine custom built for gaming at 1920 x 1200(core i7, 12GB RAM, GTX670s etc.) - there's no hardware reason for it not to be perfect. Running Chrome 24.0.1312.57 on Windows 7 64 bit.

It didn't run on my Nexus 7 (no WebGL found) but then I'm not running a beta version of Chrome. Perhaps that would be the impressive bit.

EDIT: updated Chrome to 25.0.1364.97 m (the latest) and got the "Aw, Snap!" dead tab on reloading. State of web development as expected. Perhaps THAT'S why there aren't any AAA titles on WebGL...
There are not 200 million gun owners, but there are ~270,000,000 privately owned guns in the US (http://www.gunpolicy.org/firearms/region/united-states). That's a gun for 8.5 out of 10 Americans. Or 3.4 guns for every legal gun owner.

I think this is a fact gun rights folks miss. We can clear people when they purchase guns, but a gun is a lethal weapon for years. You can't guarantee it won't fall into other hands in 30 years.

Some people argue we should give up, and embrace the number privately owned weapons in the US: http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2012/12/the-case...

Others argue that registration of weapons is a better solution: http://swampland.time.com/2013/01/24/fact-check-the-gun-regi...

But the sheer number of these things is amazing. FWIW, the country with the second highest number of guns per capital is YEMEN. With a gun for only 5.4 out of 10 citizens. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Number_of_guns_per_capita_by_co...

(IMHO, gun registration and improving our mental health system would go a long way toward addressing gun violence)