skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I keep using Linux because it has a real file system, fails less often, and feels faster (maybe because of a better scheduler), but the blog writer has a point.

Documentation on Linux is sparse and incomplete. You talk about man pages: more often than not, I am looking for some feature and cannot find it in the man page. At the end, though, I see the following:

> The GNU folks, in general, abhor man pages, and create info documents instead.

Guess what? The feature was in the info page. And that's when things are good, because sometimes the info page doesn't exist.

Since each component has its own conceptual model (and config file format), configuring one system gives you little information about how you would go about configuring another system. You often end up with contradicting config instructions in different files, and knowing which takes precedence is impossible, unless you are the developer (and even then…)
As a result, you can't just sit down and learn everything, even if the documentation was there. You can't drink the ocean: it never ends.

All of that would not be an issue at all if we had a way to automate the annoying parts:

- A way to search through all configuration files, a way to search through all documentation on all systems.
(I can't believe that Googling it is usually better than searching through installed documentation!)

- A better package management than dpkg / apt. This system gets old fast.
Conflict resolution is awkward, big updates can break things.
Projects such as Nix and its spiritual successor Guix make me hopeful,
but will it ever displace the elephant in the room?
It's particularly painful to watch from my node.js background. Never had a single issue with npm.

Apple's OS is lacking on both front (and the author will soon realize that, at least once he installs Homebrew and fiddles with BSD's lesser set of tools).
The only praise I can make is its standardized plist configuration system,
which is awkward to use and which most cross-platform programs ignore anyway.
However, Apple feels better because its defaults are amazing.
For instance, I tried to install NVIDIA's proprietary drivers today, because Nouveau only goes so far.
Installing it was easy; debugging it was so hard that switching back to a lower standard (Nouveau) was the best option.
Apple has the better option in by default.
I wonder how well they are selling? In Europe they cost 45€ a game, and are locked to that console (not to your account). I guess this is so as not to annoy their retail partners - cartridges are a much better deal, can usually be found cheaper online, and can be swapped amongst consoles.

Having said that, I have bought a couple of the cheaper "A" games that cost in the 6-10€ range (V, Fallblox/Pushmo and another I've forgotten the name of). Mostly due to the lack of good 3DS games so far.
> Try it! Honestly - you will not look back.

I know lots of developers who run linux on their macs. Many developers I know also switched to using linux virtual machines for serious development because dealing with the flustercuck of osx package management is too much.

I really want to switch back too, after 10 years of using osx primarily.
No, because the author mentioned that it's some kind of Mac problem. You'd have the exact same problems switching from "free" software running on Linux.

Really, I think the article should have been titled: I am Now Dependent on Modern Technology and Don't Like the Alternative
That's one person. Everyone cheering the guy on was probably saying that they're glad he did it, not that they would do it. I'm from Utah, where the vast majority of gun owners are more than reasonable.
I've never managed to get the advertised battery life out of an MBA, even when straight out of the box. What kind of battery life are you getting? What is your battery cycle count?
I've tried this, but find waking up in the darkness hard to get used to. I mean, I can set an alarm and get up, drink some coffee, and pretend I'm now up, but it still feels like weird zombie-time until the sun starts rising to mark it "really" being morning. Whereas when I stay up late the nighttime doesn't feel like that. Could just be familiarity, but seems like the sleep->wake transition happening during darkness could be an issue. Maybe it could be artificially assisted if my apartment interior had more/brighter lights.
Oddly enough, that was my first thought. My takeway from the article was that the real annoyance in her life (therefore the itch that a programmer has to scratch, and thus help the rest of us) was iPhone related.

Rachel-by-the-bay is a dyed-in-the-wool linux-sysadmin so I gather from her Web pages, and has recent experience with software defined radio. Ubuntu phone is 'proper' linux but at a very early stage of development, see

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/02/23/ubuntu_tablets_first...

Sounds like rachel-by-the-bay's skillset fits Canonical's development plan.

Say what you like about Shuttleworth and Canonical, but you won't have to sell your soul to them and the development will be handled in public through the bug tracker and mail lists. They do respond to feedback. Shuttleworth needs to transition Canonical to profit/self sufficiency hence all the Amazon integration, but I think they learned their lesson over the Unity search integration. There will be an off switch in any future experiments of this nature I'm sure.

PS: my new year's resolution is a Web page per week which I owe to rachel-by-the-bay's Web site.
I came up with the same idea a while ago, except I would fit dinner in either after work/before bed or after waking up/before the day job. I never got to try it out though, because when you live with others who are on a regular sleep schedule, there will be plenty of conflicts.

I'm still itching to try this if/when I ever get my own place. It's basically a normal day with the sleep and personal time portions swapped. It's easy to come up with the idea since it's the only flexibility possible when your work time is non-adjustable.
So if there's not any good software for exporting iTunes and iPhoto data, sounds like a great opportunity to write something you can sell for $10 a pop.

I'm pretty sure there are already some decent options, though, especially for a programmer.

Regarding the commentary on the phone, it doesn't sound like the complaint is specific to Apple. The author categorically lists every major type of phone and dismisses them all.

There comes a point where it's useless to talk about what you don't like, and figure out what you do like. I take all of these "I'm going to start carrying around a regular phone, a regular camera, a Fodor's guide to the city I live in, a compass, a map, a notebook, a pen, and a gameboy" posts with a grain of salt.
> - For multi monitor support I had to install nvidia's drivers from the repo and set up the dual monitor config from their utility. (This is a PITA utility and I blame nvidia)

The proprietary driver has support for xrandr 1.2/1.3 since version 302.07 which has been released in last may, so you're no longer confined to using nvidia-settings (in case of Lubuntu probably lxrandr). This also solves many issues with let's-go-fullscreen-over-all-your-monitors applications.
Probably not, but as mooism2 mentions, what happens when it's a legitimate customer who gets wrongly banned?
So, basically, CoffeeScript can't target ES6 while maintaining backwards compatibility, but it doesn't matter, because they have time to manage the transition. Ok, that may well be.

Personally, I agree that ES6 isn't that big an issue, but for a different reason: when they decide they want to take advantage of ES6, they can always make the switch to Javascript then; there's no reason it has to happen now.
When I could not bear the KDE4 anymore, I tried KDE3 again for a while and then switched to Xfce. If they deviate from their goal I'll figure out what to do. But for now, KDE4 and Gnome3 are out of the question.
From hieroglyphics to the actual power on hands. Wow! Just wow.
Lycra in the streets of the Netherlands
Debian is a good choice (I use it as my main OS), but I think the key is to choose one Linux distribution - preferably one run by an open-source community and not by a company - and spend some time using it as your only OS and learn how to fix the most common issues.

It helps if you know other people that use that distribution: that way you can ask each-other for advice when something doesn't work as you'd like it. Alternatively one can join a user's mailing list / IRC chat room, most distributions have one.

But even if your choice turns out to be wrong (i.e. Ubuntu) the solution is not to abandon Linux completely.

In fact I couldn't imagine being able to work on anything else than Linux these days, I just depend too much on it: from a working valgrind tool, to having the source code for the entire OS.
So you extend the offer. The user accepts the offer. The user believes they have shown consideration by paying for the item, and they expect you to fulfill the agreement that they believe has been created. Your messaging may even support this.

If you have anything less than 100% specificity with your fraud detection algorithm, don't you risk running into trouble because of violation of a contract (or something similar, IANAL)?
My iPad 1 paid for itself in a month: I was able to squeeze in "anytime anywhere" time to take on teaching an extra class.

Now I edit iPad app code on it in "anywhere anytime" opportunities. Our app's users save hundreds of thousands of dollars (actual savings for mileage & enterprise data access "anywhere anytime").

If you can't find a productive use you're not trying very hard.
when do you eat dinner?
But, I'm stuck. All of my music is in iTunes, having been re-imported from the original CDs over a period of time. I can just re-rip all of it on my Linux box, but that's going to suck. Or, I can try to grovel around in their grungy database and try to make sense of it and "export" things, but I'm sure that will be even worse.

I'm confused about this line. I ripped all of my CDs to AAC using iTunes over the years and recently upped all of it to Google Music without any issue.

Oddly enough, the only format that has ever given me any problem with interoperability has been OGG.
Coffee-Powered Car Sets Guinness Land Speed Record for Caffeinated Combustion
This happens because there are time zones that are significantly more active than others on the parts of the internet one tends to use. Sure, there's content being uploaded when it's 10:00 in Japan or China, but except for what's coming from Australia (not really much), I'm unlikely to be browsing any of that.
>> "Then there's my phone. How do you use one of these things without a computer upon which to sync your data and backups?"
>> Windows VM?

That only works when you disable USB on the host (which makes USB keyboards and mice temporarily unusable) while the Windows VM is running. And even then it sometimes just stops working after a while.

It's one of the reasons I ditched my iPhone and got an Android device.
To be honest my generalization has less to do with schedules/who your partner is and more to do with the supply of partners. I think that (in the US at least) in college sex is less dependent on one partner compared to later in life.

I read your profile and appreciate the sentiment re: votes. I am not trying to be crude. Within this context this is my best effort at a thoughtful response.
Ubuntu is full fat and runs a lot of processes by default.

Once Canonical have the device drivers sorted for native linux on a range of hardware, there is nothing stopping anyone putting arch or slackware on the same platforms. Perhaps some extra gunk in the kernel.
I've been a developer now for a year and a half, and right now, I don't think I would have any anxiety about writing code on a whiteboard (even if the final outcome would be no code - I can't know everything!) or even over the phone. However, when I interviewed for the present job, I was straight out of college, and even with 10+ years experience being a hobby programmer, I was very very nervous. So, I would say coding questions are OK, except maybe for junior, inexperienced applicants.
I moved my music from iTunes to Linux and back many times. It's really just a matter of finding the files (trivial) and copy-pasting (trivial).

I also don't understand the author's preferences. Macs weren't good enough for programming, so (s?)he switched to Linux. This was the whole cause of the iTunes trouble. Why does it, then, matter whether Macs are going downhill or not?
IMO she did a good job of capturing the Linux vs. proprietary system tensions a technically sophisticated user might experience. I've had (and have) similar problems myself.
Being able to work in JavaScript code is valuable to our users (and to the project itself). Learning make would be a significant barrier for many of them.
Yeah, this is a really weak set of complaints to sail to the number one HN spot on a Saturday.

None of the problems seem like real problems.

Even the concern that Apple is post-Steve is insubstantial. I'm watching for signs of that eventual decline as much as the next Apple user, but there isn't any product degradation evidence... yet.
It's an interesting idea, but what if it's an error on your part and not the user?

There's no real channel for reverting the hellban once issued since you've pretty much permanently assumed the user is malicious and can't be trusted.

A few cases I could think:

- User loses card and cancels it, but finds it again and uses it without realising.

- A single piece of information the user has provided is wrong, but the user repeatedly resubmits without realising. Eventually you hellban them, but they're actually a legitimate customer who made a mistake, but now you can never have them as a customer and might be feeding false positives to them and ignoring their calls for support after they fail to receive the product.

In the end, it doesn't seem like you're saving yourself (you mention Walmart as the one that usually suffers) and from my point of view you're shooting yourselves in the foot, as you could accidentally hellban a legitimate customer which could result in a bad reputation.
Exactly. Your original statement was about laws and training programs that the government should require that will prevent these things from happening. In your two stories, you have a person with a concealed carry permit, and a state trooper. How much more training can you have than as a state trooper. I don't know what policy or training that we can mandate as policy that will prevent this.

Gun deaths are from suicide, gang/drug related shooting, and homicide primarily. Accidental gun deaths are mostly hunting related, and still are much smaller than the above three. I don't see what your government training for "safe gun ownership" really accomplishes except feel good hopefulness and annoying people into not wanting to own guns.
JDateTime - Iranian (Shamsi) Date for PHP
jDateTime is a PHP wrapper for DateTime class enabling developers to use Iranian date/time in their projects.
Yeah I agree with that but you pretty much ignored the question. A bad comment isn't the same as being a troll account, and you didn't mention anything about fraudsters.

Also most [dead] comments I see aren't from hellbanning.
What does "Free" mean in the context of licenses? Looking at a few of those it appears that some don't actually specify, which is dangerous:

"Because I did not explicitly indicate a license, I declared an implicit copyright without explaining how others could use my code. Since the code is unlicensed, I could theoretically assert copyright at any time and demand that people stop using my code."

http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2007/04/pick-a-license-any-...
Take The Side Of The Loser
Most know cultures through history have allowed the carrying of arms, especially for self-defense. So I suppose most cultures are broken?
We certainly wish node had come out about a year earlier. It would have saved us a lot of headaches. But at the time there was no serious alternative to narwhal.
I'm late, but I'll go for page 12.
Interesting perspective and an engaging read. Thanks for sharing. Spotted some typos you may want to fix though:

> chartered plains vs first class

> there “limited success."
And yet another Jefferson quote: "Happy for us, that when we find our constitutions defective and insufficient to secure the happiness of our people, we can assemble with all the coolness of philosophers and set it to rights, while every other nation on earth must have recourse to arms to amend or to restore their constitutions."
So she never actually used the MacBook for development yet says it "wasn't cutting it"? What specifically was missing that you can only get on Linux?

She also paints the consumption-only device picture, yet it has nothing to do with the machine, only herself; that and the post-steve thing makes it look like she's just regurgitating the stereotypical anti-Apple ideas.
No, what? You end up confirming what I said: it's an application issue - be it free or proprietary. But in her case, phone syncing in a proprietary world is more of a problem.

I think she meant it like "I'm dependent on MAC Technology and I can't get out".
Only if they actually charge to the credit card.

If you never process the card and simply give them their 'digital content' or (in this case) mail a card to an address then you aren't violating anything. It'd be the equivalent of making a magnetic card reader out of cardboard and pretending to swipe it before handing someone a cup of lemonade.

Even if you never mail the card I don't see where you would have anything legally binding as you never processed the card in the first place. (IAANAL)

For one system I worked on we did this for legitimate purposes. It's a long story but it was around devices people would walk up to and use their card to buy stuff... if the machine was unable to process we would simply give them their stuff. The internet connection was crap and it failed about 20% of the transactions and we ---really--- did not want this thing to come back with an error 20% of the time, so it was just better to give them away for free. Eventually we fixed the internet issue but kept the code in there just in the off chance it happened again.
The author seems to desire a needlessly complicated way to make these things happen.
Why massive national security leaks are good for us
An evolution from not JS to JS for a JS library is not really language agnostic. I'm not sure you have an appropriate grasp of what the JS landscape looked like when we started Cappuccino.
Does everything that you need on a daily basis work properly on the Mac?

I mean it might seem to be like that at the beginning, only to find out later that some software just worked better on Linux.
>> yet those are the areas where it can be extremely difficult, or expensive, to get specialized Linux-friendly hardware

? what specialized hardware? Buy a PC or laptop and install Ubuntu. Unity is not configurable as old Gnome but it runs fine and actually is attractive .. I still miss right clicking on a panel and adding my own stuff but in general it works fine.

Specialized hardware? I call BS. I just bought a new PC with the release of Steam on Linux. Guess what? Everything I connected works but the fancy new Gig Ethernet for which the driver has already been checked in and will be available in the kernel soon. My headphones for Google Voice, my USB drives, printer, the fancy new high speed video card from nVidia, it all works great. You decided to try Mac. Cool, enjoy, for me I enjoy computing on Ubuntu even with Unity.

The builtin wireless works great too BTW, and web cam.
I hate to be that guy, but when I'm viewing the font on this site at default size, the cross of every "t" is twice as thick as everything else and it's extremely distracting. It looks fine if I increase the font size and slightly better in IE for some reason.
Isn't app.net a Twitter clone, i.e not a federalised service, like tent.io seems to be?

Twitter could charge me a subscription fee for tokens that I could use on whatever application I wanted. That would remove some of the issues. Twitter makes money, I can use it however I want. But I still think something like tent.io is where we should go.
> IOKit is strange coming from a Linux world, sure, but it works as well as you would expect. It's a pain but it's possible to write kexts and other low level osx stuff.

Indeed, I've found working with IOKit and kernel-mode bits in OSX a nicer experience than in Linux. Some of the things were very well thought out and quite elegant, and their documentation is surprisingly good.
What the world wants is never what it needs. It needs authentic people who are vulnerable and willing to speak to the full emotional spectrum that most of humanity goes through. It needs a sense of community, and an ability to listen as much as it talks. These are things worth working on.

Fame is not real. It is little more than a flash in the pan of mainstream consciousness. As soon as they've discovered you they're looking to move on.
The comparison with linux makes it look like there is a tried and true way to export your data, and iTunes or iPhoto devs are just too complacent to so it, as linux devs are as well.

That's not the case IMO.
There's just no perfect procedure for moving your data from iPhoto or iTunes to anything else. Most of the things the author lists (preferences, usage data, starring etc) can't be storred in any universally compatible format under any OS. You can export all your photo at once, but it will be the bare files and anything that can't be storred as exif or id3 data will be gone, except if you are willing to deal with the nitty gritty stuffs, and make a script to move these data by yourself.

Actually she's ranting about the lack of a universal data format keeping as much information as iPhoto or iTunes keeps in database. That's a gvalid rant I think, but it's a problem of a higher level than iPhoto or iTunes export functions, or using OS X or linux.
Samsung Galaxy S4: Release Date Pushed Back?