skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Are there any digitizer users here?

I use a Wacom digitizer daily for notes and sketches instead of using pen&paper. My wet dream is a pressure&tilt sensitive/e-ink based device, but it looks like the Surface Pro is the closest you can get currently - and this is a good review.

If you want a portable device (laptop/ultrabook/tablet) with a good digitizer that you can actually use (that is, wacom based), your options are actually very few.

There is the Lifebook T902, or the ThinkPad X230T. Did I miss anything else? Both are convertible laptops, both are quite heavy, have medium to poor battery life if you extend them with the additional battery, and a lower-dpi screen. I would have expected higher-range graphics on those laptops, but the integrated HD 4000 is ridicolous when you think you basically get the same on an ultrabook.

Not to mention that the price range is simply off. The Surface Pro is way cheaper.

I used an earlier version of the Lifebook T902. It's actually better than having a separate digitizer which takes useless space on the desk, but it's still cumbersome. You cannot draw unless you flip the screen (odd position otherwise). It's really heavy. A clipboard with paper is an all-around better.

There are two segments of markets that are filled by this usage pattern: on-the-go artists, and cheap cintiq replacements. Drawing on a cintiq is just awesome, but wacom has basically a monopole and the prices are just unjustified. Even the Intuos line is, IMHO, overpriced at least by a 2x factor. The sad reality is that they have absolutely no real competition. I tried several NTrig-based digitizers (lately the Vaio Duo 11), and they just suck. The tracking is just worse, many jumps just over a few hours of testing, not to mention that the pressure sensitivity is lower too (when you're drawing strokes it's quite visible unless the software is not interpolating it for you).

Just look at the missed opportunities there are! The Taichi 21 and VAIO Duo 11 are cool, but they use N-Trig. The keyboard on the Lenovo Yoga is awesome, but no digitizer. The Dell XPS 12 looks stunning, but again missed opportunity. It was rumored to ship with a wacom layer, but it didn't finally.

The only downside of the Surface is the keyboard. I tried the flip keyboard of the Surface Rt and I only hope that the keyboard from the Pro is different, because it sucks. Missed keys, zero feedback. Admittedly, it's better than typing on an on-screen keyboard, but the Taichi 21 of the Dell XPS 12 approaches are way better.

As a sad note, the replaceable battery concept is gone on all these modes. You know, I would settle for lower battery life if I could just have 2, or 3. I was actually shocked that at least HP offers the EliteBook Folio 9470m which has a replaciable battery in a thin format (the ultrabook is awesome), so there are really no excuses for it.
Where's your control group, though? :)

This is non trivial evidence which should not be ignored, although it is by no means "scientific". Furthermore, wheat today and wheat from 100 years ago are not comparable - even the non GMO wheat these days has been thoroughly optimized ("slow GMOd") for shelf life, is exposed to insecticides it wasn't exposed to 100 years ago, and has recently started to be irradiated as well.

It's going to take 50-70 years until we can evaluate this experiment with respect to modern wheat (and by then, we'll have postmodern wheat ....)
38 Maps You Never Knew You Needed
Impressive new Adobe campus in Utah
While I am not an expert on FPGA design, I believe Figures 1 and 2 are slightly exaggerated. The C program is very ad-hoc (returning a double from main is actually illegal and will lead to interesting results) and avoids all I/O, whereas the Verilog program seems to be quite complicated (in particular with the use of ready flags and clocks). Please correct me if I am wrong, but couldn't the authors just have used a continuous assignment (or maybe a simple clock) for their conversion? Also, don't newer verilogs support specifying IEEE floating point numbers in their natural form, as opposed to having to manually convert them to hex? This seems a little like catching attention and potentially trying to make the alternative products (SystemVerilog, etc.) look nicer.
Personally I think shifting creation from centralised gatekeepers to smaller organisations and individuals is a social improvement, and a lot of what is driving the need for upstream is things like video chatting which again is a social need.
> Beyond any educational benefit, what do you see as the
> advantages of programming in this way?

For me (and I'm just getting started here, I've only been playing around with this in earnest in the context of the little blog engine, and there are certainly many different ways of going about it), it makes the process of exploratory coding feel very different. Instead of thinking up a series of classes or functions that might solve the problem, and starting to write them -- I instead start by outlining (literally) what I want the program to do, and then describe the functionality in paragraphs, and then implement those paragraphs.

When the paragraphs have code below them that does what they say they do, the thing works. When I end up coding myself into a corner, I rewrite the paragraph and change the code. It's really a very different process than usual. It's also definitely more work than just doing code and omitting comments -- it takes a bit of elbow grease to prevent the comments from becoming lies ... but it's the same type of work as preventing bits of your codebase from becoming dead code.

For me, it seems to make me organize code into smaller functions grouped together into sections, use less classes, and care more about putting things in the place where you're talking about them, and less about putting similar things together in one block of code. For example, I started to require things close to the paragraph where I first mention them, instead of putting all requires at the top of the file. At least, that's how it feels so far.
Regarding the inefficiency of the engine. There is something seriously FUBAR with the design when you must choose the size of simulation (the rendered rows and columns of ASCII representing the playable zone in the window not the physical dimensions) at the beginning of a game before embarking. The performance of the game is directly proportional to the number of blocks in this zone + the number of dwarfs and NOT the actual stuff happening to them.

The bad part is that you have to completely start over and embark with new dwarfs if you decide that your system can/can't do a bit more and you wish to adjust the size of the zone.
BTW, I think using `and` just make things more human readable, closer to what Martin Fowler says about "Good programmers".
Yeah I should probably add, I've only used it intermittently. For whatever reason I don't find it comfortable enough to replace regular reading. It works best for articles and the like where I want to actively extract information or quickly ascertain quality.
Whaddaya mean if ?
The worst ending (darkest timeline?) would be WebOS not getting used for anything at all.

I'm curious to see if it will stay open-source. At this point, though, Firefox OS has much more mindshare as a full-stack mobile web OS anyway.
The good thing about the price increasing is that the early adopters are more willing to spend BTC and also convert BTC into fiat.

This increases the overall value of BTC because as more people who own BTC bought in at a higher price, it will be harder and harder for the price to crash down to levels lower than the average price of BTC purchased. (I argue this based on the psychology of buying BTC at a certain price)

Back when the large 2011 crash happened and even now to a slightly lesser degree the average BTC acquired/bought is still low, (i'd wager around $5 for the entire network of BTC still accessible, as a example)

As more earlies sell and purchase items, this average will increase, and as it does the possibility for BTC to fall below this average becomes harder and harder.
> Drawing with a capacitive stylus is like cutting off the tips of your fingers and trying to type.

Never tried but I can totally imagine :) From my experiences with iPads, I'd compare it to fingerpainting, but I guess your description is more .. vivid :)

But I get from the article, and how the author seems pretty satisfied with it, that the Surface uses a different, better technology for t6hat?
> I switched into a diet optimising gut bacteria and hormonal balance. To my surprise, it seems I am no longer gluten intolerant. I still don't eat it much, just to be on the safe side. But when I do, I get no adverse effects.

Very interesting! Can you tell us more?
Ok, so I just read that Turnbul is talking about fiber to the node rather than fiber to the premises.
Upvote for you sir! Exactly, you don't need a stylus to run the Win8 UI. A touch interface should be designed with a finger as the primary interface in ind, which was what Jobs was talking about.

A Pen is just an additional tool to make the tablet experience better in various use cases, just like a bluetooh keyboard.
In so far as I have had "success" with speed reading it has been to force myself to run over the words more quickly and so interpret the commonly seen structures as single units. This means that if a piece is written in a very formulaic style then I can get through it fast because most of the stock sentences read like single words with only the unique modifiers jumping out of the page.

Think about when you look at code and automatically chunk the bits you have seen a million times before but are somehow magically able pick out the needle in the haystack which tells you what is special in this instance. The layout of code helps enormously for us, but I find the effect is the same with reading if I go quickly and with specific purpose to reformulate the information as it is scanned. And the more you do it the better you get because you have more data to draw from when identifying structures. It gets to the point where often I want an author to be formulaic rather than stylish and idiosyncratic because it makes it much quicker to reorganise and internalise.
Looks interesting, certainly want to try! Got myself into invite queue :)
Interesting to see actual use of sets on Python. For those like me not familiar with the syntax there, the OR-ing (|=) is just Union minus Intersection (because all elements of a Set are unique).

>>> {1,2,3} | {2,4,6}
set([1, 2, 3, 4, 6])

By the way, AND-ing would be a straight intersection

>>> {1,2,3} & {2,4,6}
set([2])
Debian 6.0: 6.0.7 released
East Germany showing off its computers in a state parade, 1987
I don't understand why I would use this over SQLite.
Show HN: Listen to Growth Hacking & Hacker News on your mobile
If you could translate that to English, that would be great.
Actually you could already start to see that with multi-paradigm languages.
A very common use case for Module#prepend is for mixins that want to decorate methods.

For example, say I have a class that can process stuff, and a mixin that attempts to log calls to the #process method:

class Processor
def process
puts "Very important stuff here"
end
end

module Logger
def process
puts "Entering process."
super
puts "Leaving process."
end
end

If you just ``include Logger`` in Processor it won't work: Processor#process is looked up before Logger#process. However, if you use Module#prepend, the ancestry chain will change and calls to Process#process will be decorated as expected.
This.

I thought it meant super user too, but then I put in that command and said "ah". Then I moved on with my life....
Why they did not test for IE 10?
i like the idea very much, it's not that it is the newest shit in the web, everything was there before most of the time. but i like the design and the web IDE idea.

why? now i can think about leaving my macbook at home for a holiday trip, and when someone reports me an urgent bug, i still could fix it with my ipad. (most of the time urgent bugs are often one liners, so who cares to do this on an ipad)

but it will success or not with the prices...if it's cheaper then my current dedicated server, i might thinking about changing over, i wanted to cancel my dedicated server contract anyway.

so when can we expect prices?
Hi HN,

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If you visit http://soundgecko.com/hackernews you can get Hacker News & Growth Hacking artucles on your iPhone.

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- Andrew
He said accepting Bitcoin was more reliable and safer than dealing with charge-backs, credit card fraud, and "scam sales from certain Asian countries like Malaysia or Indonesia."

This is worrying because it means consumers have no protection.
I spent a lot of time in China, but it was sadly before the tablet craze. I'd take a punt and say their cultural and business norms don't require so much writing and people would own it for the status - much like a designer handbag - and possibly QQ.

Ironically it's the tablets that's much more compatible with their traditional written language. Sure you have pinyin/wubi based IMEs, and touch devices have had hand writing recognition for a long time but it's never really caught on. It's depressing when you're struggling to learn the language and you see native Chinese pull out their phone when they don't remember how to write a character.
The thing I liked most about WebOS?

Gestures and its card system.

I cannot imagine how that translates to a TV.
Off-topic, but it's weird when they leave internal notes on the final article. As in the image footnote: "JAPAN OUT, MANDATORY CREDIT, NO LICENSING IN CHINA, HONG KONG, JAPAN, SOUTH KOREA AND FRANCE".
Samsung Galaxy Note N8000 tablet uses wacom digitizer.
What's impossible? Reading without subvocalization? I do it all the time.
That's what I loved about Minecraft for the first few months too. People keep whining about putting the "recipes" in game and making it easier, but the whole process of researching, looking up YouTube videos, reading the wiki, etc, was what made it fun because it felt like you were learning something useful, despite just being a game.
Great point! Perhaps we should also hobble the Africans who manually track poachers so we create twice as many jobs!
I have difficult to see what advantage webOS has on a TV. With no touch (?) they need to completely redesign the interface anyway.
> For one, I think it's really hard to convey succinctly how well a product works.

It's not that hard, you just need to use it and review that.

Problem is, that takes a good couple of hours of seriously trying out the machine for seriously doing some work. The author of this article even took a couple of days, and did some serious Googling and tweaking to smooth out any wrinkles he encountered (which is the use case for anyone who buys the device because they are expensive: if they "just work" that's great, but if there's a work-around or fix, that's still better than if it "just doesn't work").

But for many review sites, it's much faster to just run some benchmarks (or just copy the numbers from somewhere), compare that to some previous models, some current/similar models, and review that. It doesn't take a lot of effort, time or creative thinking.
Long-lost continent found under the Indian Ocean
>Andy ‘Wise Owl’ Brown decided to write a tongue-in-cheek rant whilst he could still remember the pain-points

It's at the top of the freaking article.
Cross-platform Games
>There is the Lifebook T902, or the ThinkPad X230T.
I have a X230T (typing on it now) Overall the whole thing is great. I would highly recommend it.
Isn't "command" [at least conversationally] a supergroup of syscalls, functions and instructions?
what is the stack. I checked for FAQ to see what what Linux distro it runs on. Is it on Ubuntu. Also can install any extra packages that I might need and will I always be constrained to the version of gems you think are compatible or I can always install new gems and upgrade them without fear. Finally do you also have Mongodb installed or I can install it. Kindly add an FAQ on your site that answers this sought of general questions.
I can read pretty quickly (I've never really measured, but it takes me about a minute to read a page, which I guess is around 500 words). Depending on the text, though, there's a lot of slowing down or re-reading. I read Harry Potter pretty quickly, but "Thinking: Fast and Slow" is nowhere near at the same pace.
Hacking incidents and the rise of the new Chinese bogeyman
It was called Kumari Continent[1]

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kumari_Kandam
I really, really like your comment! Even though the tone is probably a bit sarcastic. You are right about the title, I was going to change it, but forgot. Sorry to everyone.

And I do like your summary, awesome writing skills, give me time to get there ;)
Steve Pavlina reported that he stopped subvocalizing thoughts when he did his polyphasic sleep experiments.
Read carefully: "sudo -i" to replace "sudo su - root". You should check the "su" manpage and look for the -/-l/--login option.
Shouldn't they be working on the goddamn Source Map support instead of literate gimmicks?
It's nice if consumers have a choice. So long as people know the risks it's okay to let them pick.
Seriously agreed; I would think it at least has CSS fallbacks that black things out.
Drawing on an iPad is dreadful....
You know, its rude to say something is obsolete in this field, so we just say...there are other choices and hope the hint is taken. Nothing ever dies quickly, it just fades away off into the sunset.

There is a lot of legacy code running with MPI for sure, but the big data and almost big data trends are clear, and CUDA has been absolutely disruptive in the scientific computing field (though some people are beginning to use MapReduce here also).
I didn't see any mention of anti-biotics and the resulting alteration of the intestinal flora in this article.

I am of the opinion that the causes of these increasing gastrointestinal problems are multi-faceted, and a variety of factors (our diet, environment and lifestyle in general all in effect) are coming together to affect people's lives dramatically and negatively.

The bacteria that lives in our gut is sensitive. We throw all kinds of nasty toxic things at it and expect it to survive.

While anti-biotics are still a necessary evil, I cannot help but feel that we do not truly understand the real affects long term of its usage. Living with a gastro problem is tiring, depressing and challenging.
How often is the Hacker News "station" updated? It changes a lot so I hope its very frequently.

Cool none the less
There seems to be so much capital floating around that a policy similar to YC but broader might be the best be for a well funded VC company - call it Pre-Angel.

Put in 30,000 dollars for 1 % of a company and option of ten. Startups must be incorporated, and have a one page business plan. Aim to get 50/50 balance of college grads and middle aged contractors. 30,000 is a year of ramen or a quarter or half year for a middle aged contractor. Long enough to get off the ground.

Then you have funded 10,000 startups for a 300 million fund.
Rinse after six months and drop 3/4 of them. Then repeat for the remaining 3000. After that you have a stable of maybe 1000 startups now actually talk to them.

Is this just a dumb idea? I mean picking winners and crazy ideas is so hard why not ignore it ?
Samung Galaxy Note 8.0 to be a competitor for the iPad Mini
"Your program isn't about what it does, but about what things are"

"In the Haskell code, the data flows from right to left, instead of from top to bottom"

I find this article vague, imprecise, forced. It's like those "lets do OOP for the sake of doing OOP" articles, just swap OOP to functional programming.
That was exactly my line of thinking, too: Imaging you have written you literate program using all those literate-macros and TANGLE and WEAVE. If you're using a sufficiently powerful language, you can replace all your literate-macros with native language constructs.

That's why I never really felt the urge for those lterate-macros.

Moreover, I'm usually going into the opposite direction, writing LP programs that depend on as few tools as possible. For example, I wrote a LaTeX file that is also a valid shell script, executing the build instructions section when called from shell.

I named this experiment "Self-contained Literate Programming":
http://www.profv.de/literate-programming/
I believe that the ASCII isn't true ASCII, though, as I believe gnabarian said - which is part of the problem.

This post has more: http://gaming.stackexchange.com/questions/24693/pseudo-ascii...
I used VB for many years and didn't understand why the C# people mocked it... then, about 3-4 years ago I switched and have not looked back.

In my honest opinion, whilst VB is obviously fully supported, C# just "feels" more professional... When you get your head around the syntax, you can seamlessly move between C#/Javascript and many other languages that all follow similar syntax without even thinking.

In addition, there are so many more articles/examples/open source projects and just help out there for it.
Self-contained Literate Programming (2009)
Most Chinese kids these days prefer phonetic keyboard input (pinyin) to writing characters, so they don't mind an iPad over something with a stylus. iPads are ubiquitous where I live (Beijing), so I wouldn't call it much of a handbag thing anymore. Maybe in a tier 2/3 city.

If you are learning Chinese, I wouldn't bother on memorizing how to write the characters but rather focus on how to input the pinyin and recognize the right character to select (erm, reading). I know this sounds like giving up, but its the new way.
> It gets to the point where often I want an author to be formulaic rather than stylish and idiosyncratic because it makes it much quicker to reorganise and internalise.

Hence legalese, and bureaucratese, and any number of other things that get laughed at and railed against in equal measure.
After you see your fourth dwarf carry on fighting with a "torn brain", you give up on conventional ideas of biology and medicine.

Then again, dwarves are not the brightest. Possibly as long as the CNS is intact they're fully capable of continuing about their various tasks.
"Taking shortcuts" is a pretty common theme behind successful startups. Sometimes even illegal shortcuts (look at Uber), or ethically questionable ones (look at Oracle)...
How to send email using Java (back to basics)
At around 7 or 8 years old, my reading level was several grades ahead of schedule. I was consuming large (for my age) novels with no sweat.

My parents noticed this and gave me a speed reading book. I incorporated each an every item on that book including the removal of subvocalization. It certainly gave returns right away, allowing me to consume books at a faster rate, but a huge cost.

Years later, I entered college as an engineering student. I noticed that when reading highly technical textbooks, and classes that required deep comprehension of text, I was much much slower that my classmates, or my comprehension level was much lower. Turns out, it was taking almost double the time for me to get through a section.

Really wished I didnt read the speed reading book now. I dont blame my parents at all, it was unfortunate that at nearly 40, i'm still trying to unlearn what that speed reading book taught me. I'm trying to re-learn subvocalication but its very very hard to 'slow' myself down. I've actually installed screen readers to replace subvocalization with some positive effect.
I wonder which current conspiracy theories will turn out to be true.
Oh tell me about it! These good for nothing, lazy open source developers! How dare they spend their free time relaxing, or maybe working on something they're interested in, when they should be working on MY pet feature! They're just so INCONSIDERATE!
How do deaf (since birth) people subvocalize?