skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm not talking about advertisers who lie. That's pretty well the default -- everyone has already lost credibility there and no one should (or, as a general rule, does) believe anything subjective that anyone puts in a paid advertisement.

But astroturf is lying about the lie. Review sites are operating under the flag of representing the consumer rather than the vendor. So now we can't even trust the reviewers when they review anything for which the vendor has demonstrated a willingness to pay for reviews. Now how am I supposed to know whether one of their devices is any good or is just being reviewed by someone who is being paid to say nice things about it?

>Steam should probably stop selling games for OSX and Linux, as they don't represent anywhere near 20% of the market.

You're assuming that a heuristic has to be an inviolable law of nature in order to be useful. If it's right most of the time, that makes it right most of the time. You take the exceptions on a case by case basis when you have reason to suspect that the situation is an atypical one and the cost of further investigation is less than the likely benefit of obtaining more information.

>Or we could just judge technology on its merits, and take everything technology sites say about all of this stuff with a grain of salt.

So then what are we supposed to use to judge the technology on its merits if we can't rely on what technology sites say about it? If I'm trying to decide whether to buy something, I can't very well go out and buy it in order to determine for myself whether I should go out and buy it. These things cost hundreds of dollars or require long-term contracts, and then I would have significant opportunity costs in configuring it with all my information and then having to export it all back out again if I don't like it. Which is exacerbated significantly by Microsoft's prolific NIH syndrome. So if I can't rely on reviewers then I have to rely on something else to tell me whether it's any good, like the market.

Even if the market is wrong and the OS is not as mediocre as its share would indicate, the market is still right. App developers want to write for devices with users. Users want devices with apps. The device has to be a large enough improvement over the status quo to overcome that chicken and egg problem, and until it does, it's objectively worse for both developers and users than devices that already have. Microsoft has benefited from this dynamic for decades, it doesn't change just because now they're on the other side of it.
I think a lot of fear people have of guns is because they are unfamiliar with what they can and cannot do, how to use one properly, how to tell if someone else is using their gun properly, etc. Concealed carry permits already require classes and background checks. Maybe gun safety should be taught to everybody.

As further evidence that the fear of guns may be overblown, consider just how widespread gun ownership is, and then consider how rare gun violence is outside of gang-ridden urban centers.

I would disagree with any sort of strict liability for one's gun being lost or stolen, but if the gun owner was clearly negligent, then they should bear responsibility.
Many people don't want to carry a concealed gun, but as this story shows -- the mere sight of a gun causes people to panic so in order to placate the overreacting uninformed one must conceal their gun.
Making this the 11th time that story has been posted here. http://www.hnsearch.com/search#request/submissions&q=the...
Likewise with management. I worked at a place managed by a confederacy of dunces that promoted people I'd never have promoted, but who I realized were people who did not threaten the leaders' authority by being too smart.
Foreflight - for the pilots out there this one app makes the whole thing worth it.
Perhaps because the 2nd amendment is their last defense against the erosion of those other rights completely. See: American Revolutionary War
Why do projects take so long?
> At their scale, there's no way Google could provide support for all the countless billions of people using their services.

Google does not deserve such charity - plenty of companies with far more customers have figured out how to support them, Google explicitly chooses not to.

Fedex, UPS, DHL, Apple, Facebook, Twitter, Microsoft, Amazon, eBay, Wal-Mart, Pizza Hut, Dominos Pizza, MacDonalds, KFC, Burger King, Subway etc, just off the top of my head.

You can literally talk to United Airlines, one of the most incompetent companies in the world, and get a response and resolution.
True, there was no national dialogue on guns until the Democratic Party-controlled press fabricated one. The Newton shooting was going to be another crime story to be largely forgotten in a month except that the Democratic press made it the top headline of every party-run newspaper for over a week. (Meanwhile, where the hell are the news articles about Benghazi and the second September 11 attacks? Our "nearly defeated" wartime enemy launches simultaneous attacks on dozens of US facilities around the world, with tens of thousands of fresh recruits, and there is NO news coverage? WTF?) It is a classic "pseudo-event" as Boorstin called them, or in common parlance, a fake news story. It is obvious that the Democrats are using their near-monopoly power over the media to create the image of a public frenzy where there was none, for the purpose of raising enough public support through the bandwagon effect to shoot another hole in the Constitution. They are doing this partly by slandering the Constitution's supporters as "gun nuts" and potential murderers. Imagine if the political cartoons in your newspaper regularly portrayed EFF and online free-speech activists as child rapists, kidnappers in bondage gear dragging screaming little girls away, because a few people use Tor and Linux for trading kiddy porn. That is how the Democratic Party is depicting anyone who believes in the Constitution and the orderly process of law whether they are gun owners or not.

This is not intended to be a partisan statement. I am a Democrat. I am also able to see what my party is doing, and I don't like it. This also has nothing to do with Obama; the pressure is coming from the party machine, not the White House. Obama is doing nothing significant, proposing minor regulatory changes that stay within the bounds of the Constitution, while giving the appearance of doing something to appease the party's desire for action.
The author talked about "productive use" - you listed gaming and browsing. In many circles those don't rank as productivity. There's a fine difference between "great"/"cool" and "being productive".
I think the author has an excellent point until he gets to "I feel like tablets are a short-lived fad."

Every single comment here is how much people are using their tablet: for reading, surfing the web, watching videos, etc. I personally use my Nexus 7 every day both directions on my commute to do all those things.

However, the like the OP I'd really like to do something productive with my commute (coding, writing, whatever) and I have not found any good way to do that on my tablet. Even my 1st gen netbook is more useful for productive work.
yep, sounds a bit harsh. Oh well, that just means prolly we should get back to pushing the code to git, instead of reading HN ;)
Immigration Reform and the American Worker
They usually do cause more rivers simply because on many lines the spaces are significantly larger. Since you only would letterspace as an absolute last resort (and probably not even then), it tends to create more dangerous whitespace per line.
"I'll start by saying we do not have a gun problem in this country. We have a people problem"

You have a culture problem, not a people problem. A culture whereby you are so fearful of violence that you have to carry a gun on your person every day is a broken one.
I am with you on every point you make except that guns are not comparable to a screwdriver, car or a knife when it comes to life and death. Of course there are similarities between the 'tools', but a gun is a much easier and definitive way to take a life. The differences are what stand out to me. Again, I agree its a cultural problem more than a gun problem, but I do think it all intersects.
First of all, correlation is often not causation: you can't draw a causal link between the decline in violence and gun ownership. If you compare with other developed countries, it will be very clear that the U.S. has a lot more violence in general and violence using guns specifically.

Secondly, violence using guns requires the presence of guns, so it may be possible to establish a causal link between gun ownership and gun violence. Then, looking at statistics from developed countries, it becomes clear that the U.S. greater gun violence is directly related to greater gun ownership.
Cyberlaundering: Anonymous Digital Cash and Money Laundering
Doug Drug Dealer is the CEO of an ongoing narcotics corporation. Doug has rooms filled with hard currency which is the profits from his illegal enterprise. This currency needs to enter into the legitimate, mainstream economy so that Doug can either purchase needed supplies and employees, purchase real or personal property or even draw interest on these ill-gotten gains.
Add anchors to your section titles
People generally want to use what the community wants them to use. With C and C++, that is certainly make and shell scripts. With Java, that is Maven (or was when I was last there :). With Ruby, that is rake. With Python, that is distutils. With JavaScript, that is npm.

There are benefits when the entire community standardizes on something. I know I will frequently pass looking at a Python module that won't easily fit into my build system, which, conveniently, is the build system mostPython scripts use.

The fact that Cappuccino pre-dated the de facto standard should not be held against them.
Exactly what are the core problems with Javascript in your mind?
I will vouch for this strongly. Being in Delhi myself, even asking someone out can easily come to this. Even if you walk away, from a no, no policeman, nor a civilized person, has the guts to stand by, and let it be cool. Everyone is so ready to jump horses. Geez!
If you want to work more on the law side, pretty much any sufficiently big software company is going to need someone like you. If you want to stick more to the developer stuff, try something in a more heavily regulated industry like healthcare or finance.
Agree. Going to toilet without my kindle dx, I consider as wasting of time.
It used to be common law in the UK that the police and soldiers were only trained experts in performing a part of the civic duty of all of the people. This changed around the Cold War.
This is not the best argument for gun control, because it's very easy to insert any other words in that sentence. Some examples:

"Your freedom to work out like mad and become significantly stronger than I am infringes on my right to feel safe in public."

"Your freedom to wear tattoos infringes on my right to feel safe in public."

"Your freedom to have that skin color infringes on my right to feel safe in public."

"Your freedom to choose to whom you are attracted infringes on my right to feel safe in public."

You need to define an actual danger that goes beyond feeling unsafe.
What evidence do you have that Microsoft are Astroturfing reviews more than their competitors (or that they are astroturfing at all)?
Soldiers used to struggle with this issue, but someone (probably a Soldier) invented a new type of sling that eliminates it. With the old slings, basically every time you needed to use your hands, you had to sling your weapon on your back, but the newer version keeps your weapon suspended in front of you, a little lower than chest level. All you have to do is let go, and your weapon stays exactly where you need it.

If a shooter is using a handgun, well with just a little bit of practice, you can learn to draw a handgun in a fraction of a second.

Basically, I don't think it's a good idea to assume what will or will not be reasonable in the eyes of a mass-murdering lunatic.
Well we in Australia are so very disadvantaged in that not only are guns hard to buy, but our banks are strongly regulated too. Oh, and don't forget about Medicare, all those doctors being paid by the government. It's depressing.
We're python guys, and we use Komodo Edit.
On the Constitutional rights front it's funny how many of the same groups fight for there to be as little restrictions as possible for one right (owning a gun) but often fight for putting as many restrictions as possible for another right (getting an abortion).

Why not make getting a gun as hard as getting an abortion? Mandatory waiting period, show photos of gun violence, require that a professional explain the horrors of gun violence etc?

:-P
Fully agree, it is nothing more than an expensive toy to browse the Internet and play games.

A proper computer wins hands down for any type of productive work.
I would like to suggest that gun control and healthcare are linked to the same cultural problem. To have a system where millions of people know that any disease they catch they simply will never afford to cure, and the rest of the country stands by and allows it to happen, comes from the same place as standing by while those self same people are shot by guns they can afford.

Ask not for whom the bell tolls.
I have also Asus transformer prime. I use it for reading PDFs; I also have a Kindle app; then there's streaming music, watching movies, and playing games. Also useful for occasional web browsing (e.g., to look up something while reading).

I also had a keyboard, but quickly figured out that it was useless. It transformed the tablet into a laptop that only barely could do things I usually use the laptop for.
Only if SO_LINGER is set.
Melissa Mayer Kills Yahoo’s Innovation with Termination Threat
+1 to this as well -- I've been telecommuting for ten years now, and it's always been my view that I have to find the communication mechanism that suits the situation, not the other way around. I think because of this viewpoint, I don't get "left out" nearly as much because I don't give people the chance to forget about me.

That's not to say that I don't miss out on "watercooler chat" topics as they happen, but I still make a point of chatting with coworkers to make up for it. A simple "hey, you feeling better now" IM goes a long way.
See my other post in this thread on precisely that point. The Assad regime in Syria is likely to fall, and that's despite having and using tanks, jets, artillery, and chemical weapons. Gun rights are no guarantee of victory against tyranny, but they can provide a powerful leg up.
The headline on that article is terrible, the generation capacity of the planned installation is ~1/6 that of Niagara Falls (the 5x comes from the greater height difference of the planned facility). And that doesn't address the storage capacity.

The point of the HN-linked article isn't to slam storage technology, it is to establish some scale. The author even suggests dividing his results by 14 if you don't like his assumptions. You still need something like several thousand plants similar to the 15 we have to provide 1/2 day of backup capacity.

I'm sure the author would happily agree that pumped storage plants are immediately useful (this is basically obvious, the existing ones were all built because they were economical to connect to the grid).
I'm interested in hearing your thought on this in more detail. Can you explain how the police in the UK are able to get to your house fast enough in the middle of the night when someone breaks in? It takes hardly even 30 seconds to kick in a door or break a window and enter a home. Are you really capable of calling the police, having them respond, enter and clear your own home before that person does harm to you and your family?

What about someone who enters a business, gas station, whatever, one day and starts executing people on the spot? Is a cell phone really your best tool?

Maybe you are not capable of protecting yourself or not ready to deal with that yet but if I put myself in that situation and was also not capable or ready to protect myself then I would hope that an upstanding citizen next to me or in the same situation as me was prepared to stop the threat.

In a lot of situation where you can be seriously injured or killed in seconds by an evil person I really can't think of any possible way that the police can help me. Keep in mind that most criminals are surprisingly smart enough to not commit a crime with a uniformed police offer standing next to them and unfortunately you will not always have the police standing next to you.
My in-laws are generational Hanford-ites: the grandparents built it, the grandkids are cleaning it up. If anyone ever goes up there, there is a FASCINATING jet-boat tour you can take up the Hanford river where they show you about 6 or 7 of the reactors. The tour driver knows all about the history of these fission plants, and he tells it during the 2 hour tour.

Highly recommended, fascinating, and a great merging of bird watching and nuclear history.
And does anyone really believe that criminals follow laws?

Criminals do not follow the law, that much is true, however a large amount of crime is due to opportunity and removing opportunity does help reduce crime.

If guns didn't exist and everything else were the same and these evil people
still had intent to do harm do you really believe that they would just give
up because they had no other way to harm people?

If this is true, then you're arguing that opportunity has absolutely nothing to do with crime. Adam Lanza for example, if everything had been the same in his life (mental illness, family problems) but he was born in England where he had no access to guns and wasn't brought up around guns would he have been able to do what he did in Sandy Hook somewhere in England?

The problem America has is not one gun control will solve, the problem America has is that guns are a part of American culture and the country is so saturated with guns that making them illegal will not make any difference to availability to anyone. Arguing that gun control is wrong for America seems fair but arguing that gun control is always wrong and that people will kill regardless of gun availability doesn't match reality.
There are a few things that make it confusing for non-Americans and even some Americans unfamiliar with guns.

First, the laws around buying and selling guns are set by each of the 50 States. In some States it is easy to buy a gun and in other States it is very difficult. Movies and television tend to exaggerate the availability and legality of weapons. A lot of television shows are set in places like New York City or California where buying firearms is difficult, restricted, and can take weeks.

Second, while some places (like urban cities) have police close by, the low density sprawl of most American cities means it will commonly take 10+ minutes for police to arrive, at which point they are mostly just filling out a report. While it might be possible in theory to hire enough police to reduce response times, it would not be cost effective since crime rates are quite low in much of the US. Consequently, there is an understanding in many areas that even if you call the police you will be on your own for a while. If most American cities were more densely packed, like European cities, police would be more effective at responding immediately.

Lastly, the US is a big and populous country with many different regions and cultures. In some parts of the US, guns are just a tool and ubiquitous enough that they are treated like any other dangerous tool. In some places like San Francisco, guns are treated as some kind of magical evil amulet because few people have seen or handled one and get most of their pre-conceptions from the media. In many other parts of the country, say Idaho, owning a gun is sort of like owning a chainsaw -- dangerous but with few social or personal implications.
I expect the people you're referring to are anything but average pro-gun advocates. I (a staunch pro-gun advocate) interact with a lot of gun owners and "pro gun people". And I can say that the vast majority are calm, reasonable, level-headed and logical. Certainly as much so, if not more so, than the rabid anti-gunners. They also tend to be better informed in my experience.

Are there some really kooky people out there on the pro-gun side? Yeah, and a lot of them are very vocal about their weird conspiracy theories, their racist tendencies, etc. But those people are hardly representative of gun owners in general.
I echo the sentiments here that tablets are media consumption devices, because that really is what they're best at. The most productive use I have for my tablet is using it to view a crochet or knitting pattern while I'm working on it or for following a recipe when cooking. My tablet's primary use is for reading, though.
There are stats that suggest this: http://www.justfacts.com/guncontrol.asp#crime
The line height recommended by classic typography books is 130-150% of line height, depending on the typeface and personal preference. I've also read web typography tutorials giving the same recommendation.

IMHO, the default line height in browsers is just too narrow.

Agreed, though, that it's a matter of what you're used to. But when you're used to high quality typography designed to make the text easy to read, you tend to notice the mistakes.

Here are some rules I go by:

- Use an appropriate font designed for screen display

- Avoid small font sizes: 16px is a good default, less than 14px is usually too small

- Use dark text on light background

- Typeset on a vertical grid with 130-150% of line height

- Use a reasonable line length (no more than 80 characters)

All these rules aim to make the text easy to read and easy on the eyes.
Hardly reliable, not everyone puts everything on the web/Facespace.

I deleted that paragraph before posting for a reason; you may or may not want to consider that next time.
I would have to agree. Most of my social activities are with my classmates and coworkers, all between 10am-5pm. I code better after a good nights rest. Totally going to give this a shot.
Accessibility - footer - Danone
So basically you think that if the French populace had a lot of guns it would help them fight off Wehrmacht? It might help the resistance a little bit but otherwise it's useless. And even more so against modern armies.
how would you differentiate types of loss? The main issue with TCP over large BDP at the moment is not the limited buffer size IMHO. You can increase is dramatically on modern Linux. You can maybe attempt to work around congestion mechanisms and slow start by using very aggressive algorithms. But I wonder how researchers work with packet loss?
I'd probably agree, if we're being strict about "productive." I still wouldn't give mine up.

I had a smartphone, and I was paying way too much each month to never make a phone call, to check email, navigate the city, and check wikipedia/google for conversational trivia.

I now have a Nexus 7 instead. Chucked the phone completely. I pay about $25 for metered data. GrooveIP would let me make phone calls on it, but I haven't had the need.

I even stopped hunting for apps, I've just settled on this as a great email/wiki/nav device. The bigger screen makes the experience better for all the things I use it for. Larger size means larger battery, it feels like it lasts forever. It's still pocket sized. A 6-inch mini-tablet would probably be my sweet spot, but 7 isn't too shabby.

None of my uses are "productive," but I'm also not usually "producing" anything outside of a fixed workspace. Kudos to those who prefer to write in parks or coffee houses, I prefer my full chair and desk.

Wouldn't give it up; don't see it as a fad.