skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"Working hard doesn't entitle you to anything." -- well said. I am a software engineer, I always worked hard and I have a good income; but I'm by no means rich and most likely will never be, mostly because I've got no entrepreneurial genes. But that's alright, I think people who (besides the hard work) take high risks by creating new companies or even working their asses off in a startup that may or may not succeed, deserve an extra reward.

OTOH, the poor schmucks who work in the car wash a few blocks of my house, so I can have my car cleaned for $9 even in the winter with temperature below freezing? I would say they work much harder than me. And very likely they always did, they were already sweating over some soul-crushing job when they were teenagers (or even earlier), while at that age I had the privilege of being fully dedicated to my education. Not to mention always having a good and stable life -- food, healthcare, parents who had the means to care for me, etc.

Simple truth is that inequality of opportunities is huge. Another poster mentioned Bill Gates, well I don't take his merit away but Gates was the son of a wealthy attorney and a wealthier banker. Even Bill's entrepreneurship is something that can be attributed at least in part to the fact that he had a very good safety net to fall -- if he failed, he wouldn't exactly be screwed for a decade with debt.
Perhaps you didn't experience the PR storm around the time OS X was initially released: it was heavily geared towards nerds and the literal phrase "open source" was extensively employed in their marketing material.

This aside, you're basically trying to write off nirvana's (IMHO excellent) rant using a minor technicality, one of the common features of the discussions here that tends to make my skin crawl.
Astrid for daily tasks (paperwork and links or technologies to check later) and Trello for projects-related tasks.
No, this kind of printer isn't controlled by a computer, it's much more analog. http://visual.merriam-webster.com/arts-architecture/graphic-...
What is "callback hell"?
Lua vs Node vs LuaNginx
You should read his book "Intelligent Image Processing" for a bit more information on what he's been doing in the area.
They're both using the Square Space platform, so I imagine it's one of the themes available there http://www.squarespace.com/templates/
Service sales 101 - if a business model contains manually/individually quoting every potential customer, then your prices cannot possibly be reasonably low, as your sales model requires enterprise-level prices to pay for your salesmen.

It's not that I can't spend 20 minutes on call - but if your customer acquisition costs involve at least 20 minutes of salesman-time per a possible lead (thus, at least 200 minutes of salesman-time for even the smallest sign-up), then I'm very sure that whatever number they will quote - that number will not be something that I can or want to afford. Let them pester some 'enterprises' with that.
>Ok, this is a real low for HN. Are you actually saying that the only thing computing has done for the world is better porn delivery and better commerce? Wow. Do you have any idea how we managed to decode our genome so fast? Any idea that every science labs including maths have computers to test their hypothesis and solve their equations at such a huge scale and speed no human being could possibly dream to match? How about communication? How about almost anything you use today to make your life easier has a computer chip in it?

Making my life slightly easier is not that important -- and hardly what I'd call a world changing event in the scale of agricultural revolution or even the industrial revolution.

I understand that as CS people we like to sing our own praises, but just like once you have electric ovens, getting a microwave is not that big of progress (if it's not a throwback to a worse method of heating), similarly, once you have global trade routes, ships, trains, cars, snail mail, telegraphs and telephones, having computerised version of communication is not that much of a step forward.

The world is not that different, including everyday life, from 40 years ago, when computers were mostly unknown outside of large companies. We just play more videogames, watch more cat videos, and exchange more (than zero) BS instant messages and mails. Quantitative is not qualitative difference.

As for the use of computers in science: again, quantitative is not qualitative difference. The most involved and mind-boggling discoveries were done before computers, from evolution, to relativity, to quantum mechanics, to the DNA. We are now better at number crunching (such as decoding the genome), that doesn't mean we produce science of equal impact.
Citizens Energy-CITGO, Hugo Chavez Continue Helping Needy Americans Keep Warm
For eight years Venezuela has given needy Americans heating oil. They and federally funded LIHEAP are two important means of keeping low-income people warm. There should not be criticism nor reduced funding when no one else steps forward to help
The interesting point to me is that a device can be future proof through iOS updates - i.e. for as long as apple is prepared to create software drivers/updates to support the peripheral. Obsolescence is now almost entirely a software rather than hardware problem. Features can be added or removed via updates.

Firmware loaded at runtime is not new (see many of the wifi/bluetooth dongles that don't work in linux).
However, would apple let 3rd party peripherals download driver code? I wouldn't have thought they want to keep baking it into iOS itself as the number of peripherals increase. Perhaps drivers embedded in a controller app via the app store?

I like the idea that with a thunderbolt<->lightning adapter (and a huge amount of hacking) iOS peripherals are a blank canvas and could be used with other non apple devices or for purposes never originally intended (that VGA card as a software radio transmitter springs to mind...)
Org-mode for emacs is excellent. I've been using it for years.

http://orgmode.org/
I am happy with MS OneNote.
It seems to be the most versatile tool.
Integrated to outlook calendars, easy to find open tasks, ...
I'm no expert, but this is my impression based on seeing and using lots of nibs :):

Most drawing / calligraphy nibs only work well when you're pulling the pen (e.g. try pushing with a pointed nib, and you'll quickly tear up the paper or break the nib). Because of this, they can be of fairly simple construction, made of flat uniformly thin metal (generally just steel AFAICT). As they're relatively cheap and easily replaceable, it's not a huge deal if a nib breaks, you just put in a new one, and you're not out too much money.

Fountain pens, on the other hand, have to work reasonably well when pushing the pen too, so you can't really make them entirely out of thin flexible metal. Together with a more complex ink delivery mechanism, the nibs seem inherently more expensive, and so tend to be part of the pen rather than a disposable part (I imagine the average person who just wants to write his stuff wouldn't be very happy if they had to constantly replace the nib either). By making them out of relatively stiff metal, you can sort of avoid some of the problems while still using cheapish construction. I don't know why gold is better offhand, but I imagine it may be better able to put up with the forces involved when the nib is thinner and more fleixble, without breaking.
When you get to a certain size, there's a limit to how much you can pre-stage and test. Sometimes you just have to roll it into production and hope you didn't miss anything in the planning.

That doesn't seem to be the case here, but it's possible.
This is baffling. I really don't understand what you don't get about this.

To watch a DVD you need to decode the CSS.

You either have authorisation to do this, or you don't.

On Linux there is no authorised method to do this, and thus it is illegal.

Whether anyone is interested in prosecuting that illegal use is irrelevant to this discussion; and it's not been what you've claimed.

> What's illegal is leaving it decoded and redistributing it to others.

Let's examine this sentence.

i) circumventing the rights protection without authorisation is illegal.

ii) distributing copy right material without permissions is illegal

Thus, your sentence "What's illegal is leaving it decoded and redistributing it to others" covers 2 illegalities, the circumvention and the distribution.

> Two, of course there is. Have you ever even tried to look?

Yes, I have tried to look. I can't show you what I have not found. Have you tried to look? Feel free to provide a link to any rights holder anywhere giving authorisation.
Most of them would be on the free tier
I didn't find anything about what it does?
It makes pretty colours. http://alexcoplan.github.com/amazingjs/
Clear http://www.realmacsoftware.com/clear/
They just listened to their advisors. When it comes to creating laws the media industry is the advisors.

No, they don't understand IT.
I guess here Evernote figured any instructions they sent would have resulted in a link being sent anyway, so why not just send the link and ensure a higher shot off compliance.

They seemed to have forgotten about phishing.

Some sites have taken to including in such emails account information that presumably only the company would know (such as part of the account number) along with the name. I know of at least one bank that does this. The idea, of course, is that the user can then verify that it must be coming from the company.

This can be reassuring when the email is legit, but the problem is that it requires the user to remember for subsequent emails that such information should be present. So, if a phishing attack comes, will the user stop and think, "hey, where is the personal account info?" Some will, but many won't. I mean, if a user can't be trusted to follow a simple set of instructions (thus needing links), then how can he be expected to remember the security policies of every company for which he is a customer?
As much as I enjoyed watching Black Mirror bringing a piece of fiction into this kind of discussion early on is potentially highly problematic [1].

Consider what mentioning The Matrix or Terminator does to a discussion about AI. What Black Mirror's "The Entire History of You" [2] does to lifelogging resembles what those films do artificial intelligence for dramatic purposes. I highly recommend reading Less Wrong's article on this issue [1] for an in-depth discussion of this issue.

[1] http://lesswrong.com/lw/k9/the_logical_fallacy_of_generaliza...

[2] Trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3bFCqK81s7Y, plot summary (spoilers): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Mirror_%28TV_series%29#S....
>That is a problem entirely of our own making.

Aren't all problems in computing this way?

>The stereo beside me has components that span 30 years and uses the same cabling for all components.

Yes. And it does just one thing. Output analog electrically encoded sound signals.

Now, call me again when that stereo cabling has to also support: audio out, digital audio out, video out, different resolutions, MIDI out, connecting to medical and scientific devices for control, charging, data backup and sync, ethernet, etc etc...

>I realise someone will come back with "Oh, but DRM, encryption, needing more information about the source and destination"... but I'd counter by pointing out that telecoms cabling works perfectly well for transporting all kinds of things across it.

Only because there is a computer in the other (either an actual PC or a TV, etc) that knows what to expect and how to decode it and show it.

In this case, the computer is inside the cable, so the connected devices don't have to know everything.
just to complete on HDR: http://worldwide.espacenet.com/publicationDetails/biblio?CC=...

From Wikipedia: Steve Mann developed and patented the global-HDR method for producing digital images having extended dynamic range at the MIT Media Laboratory.
Well, Yeah I visited that page. So, making pretty color for what?
An HTML5 Exploit Can Fill Your Entire Hard Drive Quick
What part of "the DMCA was passed in 1998" is a personal attack?

It's not like he said:

"Please actually read the links you give when arguing. It's especially important because the links you're giving should be your first hints that you're wrong. However, you're so certain that you're right that you aren't even checking."

OR

"I think I'm going to stop responding now, because you're pretty obviously on auto-pilot."

Are you in a manic phase or something?
Subsistence farmers in developing countries often have quite happy lives. I've lived in PNG, and the biggest thing they lack is health care, but that's getting better all the time.

Farmers in developed western countries probably have it worse. Supermarkets have driven prices down to ridiculous levels, so the profit of, for example, dairy farmers is very low. There are reasons the suicide rates in rural areas is high.
How on earth does programming teach you biases?
You left out making knowledge available to all.

> that doesn't mean we produce science of equal impact

Of course we do, we make amazing science at such a huge rate most people can't even keep up with it anymore. If you believe computing has only little and only "quantitative" impact on science and communication than there is little I can do for you, computing has completely revolutionized every single science field. But sure, keep thinking it's just cat videos and porn. Maybe we should just go farming instead...
Couldn't a wiretap order compel a VPN company (even one with a reputation for anonymity) to transparently begin logging any data having to do with the target of the wiretap? The VPN company does have the capability to log, after all. Could they just refuse?
The technicality being that Darwin seizes to be an open source operating system once it is shipped with closed source components. Why would this be true?
I'm also not aware of what the "European equivalent" of a DMCA the article talks about it.

Seems like a lot of "didn't do the homework" in this article
I'm talking about what are commonly called the skilled trades [0]. Some of the most analytical thinkers I know were trained in a trade. Masons and cabinet makers that have an intuitive understanding of geometry and trigonometry that most people just don't grasp. I learned most of my problem solving skills from my father who was trained as an industrial electrician. Spend a day on a job site and you'll hear the same things you hear programmers bitching about. Most people complain about the engineers and architects not understanding how the real world works just like programmers always bitch about software architects.

It's a real shame that most people seem to look down on the trades as somehow being inferior to white collar work. This is what Mike Rowe has been preaching about for the past 4 or 5 years. Just listen to his TED talk [1].

[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tradesmen

[1] http://www.ted.com/talks/mike_rowe_celebrates_dirty_jobs.htm...
Steve is the kind of person that makes you question your assumptions about just about anything.

Doing a 'why does't he just' on him means you're going to have to do the equivalent of 6 months continuous reading first if you want to avoid making a fool out of yourself, so I wouldn't worry about not knowing about his connection to HDR.

Steve and I had some interesting exchanges back in '95 or so when video on the web was still a novelty. Steve went on to make history with his series of inventions.

What's extremely impressive to me is Steve's incredible faith in his own inventions, no clinical trials on others but dog-fooding in the extreme. Bolting things onto (and into) his body for attachment and augmenting his world. He's a real pioneer in every sense of the word.
A Brain-to-Brain Interface for Real-Time Sharing of Sensorimotor Information
Go also hangs at the end with a lot of concurrent requests. I think it has something to do with how it time outs http connections.

Maybe the same thing is happening with Lua?

Also what were the specs of the computer you ran your tests on?
Sure, so just don't get a .com.
The key is the limited community. Comments are great when the community is oriented towards something. Generic type comments, just like generic type social media are useless. In extreme cases, like youtube, the comments severely degrade the quality of the site (try using a youtube comment blocker).
This document dates from 1998. A more suitable title would be "CodeWarrior 4 shipped for Playstation" (14 years ago).

Modern Sony development tools come from these people: http://www.snsys.com/.
I built GetCloak.com. I draw a hard distinction between privacy and anonymity and feel that it's disingenuous for VPN services to claim that they offer anonymity. Here's our take on it: https://www.getcloak.com/blog/2011/11/30/word-anonymity/
As well as bandwidth, power consumption. Chucking 3Gbps down a long wire is going to reduce battery life for a mobile product. Perhaps the controller can support it, but heat dissipation in the phone is significant?
It's easy to create that model: just take a time machine (or history books) and copy the same wealth distribution of America a few decades ago, say in the 1940's-1960's. Also known as, the Golden Age of the American Middle Classes. I would settle for that.

But that was a time when the very rich had to pay up to 91% of income tax, and unions were everywhere preventing exploitation of middle-class jobs! OMG, the US was a Socialist country, thanks god we don't have this problem anymore!!

(Sarcasm aside, yes the world has changed and the exact same formula that worked in the fifties wouldn't work perfectly in the modern and globalized economy; still, in this case the present is so screwed up that even an imperfectly-fit clone of the past would work better)
Apples Reminders.app is actually better than most people say or think. You can even keep it in sync with your own server using CalDAV.
I am the developer behind http://weekplan.net, please have a look if you have 2 min.
Retina iPads already need to re-scale the image since they're higher resolution than an HDTV. Why force the little adapter to do (some pretty massive) scaling and encoding when the iPad has a very nice GPU?

It seems to me they had a system for outputting video via h.264, and they decided to use it again here. Seems like a reasonable decision at that point.
TIL about "rubber ducking"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rubber_duck_debugging
Comments on the same site as the article are a terrible idea. It basically allows every green-ink shouty idiot to undermine what's being said, in a way that gives them huge undeserved prominence. Just because you said something to the NY Times, does not mean you deserve to be published in the NY Times.

The internet permits you to reply to anything - get a tumblr. If your opinions are valued, you will attract a following.
I also recommend Things, because it's an app that makes you feel good if you're into OS X and iOS style user interfaces. I bought it years ago, but truly started using it when they got the Things Cloud sync working.

So now I always keep it open on all my Macs (I switch between 3). It's always up-to-date, shows the number of tasks pending for today in the Dock icon, and it's comfortable to very quickly switch to the app, and create new tasks or mark old ones done. And when you're procrastinating, you can organize the tasks into projects and drag'n'drop them around, enter tags and descriptions, etc.

I think you can achieve the same with any todo list app or even text files, but Things makes it look and feel nice.
I truly appreciate your time and effort but I think it's better to name it "crap.js".
> I'm not sure where you get the idea that decoding a DVD is a form of circumventing access controls, since as an owner, access is controlled not for you, but for others.

> This means you can't redistribute it, not that you can't watch it. Access control means keeping unauthorized people out, not keeping legitimate purchasers out.

DVDs are sometimes region encoded. Bob visits EU (from US) and buys a region-encoded DVD. He goes home, and tries to view this DVD, but it doesn't work on his machine. He looks online, and finds a hack to turn his machine from a region X machine into a region 0 ("all regions") machine.

Do you agree that Bob is breaking the law here? Specifically, the DMCA anti-circumvention bits of the law?

>"What's the source for your understanding of the DMCA?"

> Already cited.

I've tried to find it in the thread but I'm having trouble. Please, would you mind citing it again? Thanks.
> Why such a desperate trend to make everyone grow their own food again?

Because people forgot in a hanfdul of years (that's what it is, compared to the span of human history) what was slowly learned over the course of centuries and millennia. And the result? That kids nowadays almost think that foods magically pops out from the shelf at the supermarket.

Specialization (in the sense that nobody does everything, everyone does his small part) is definitely good, unless you forget what everything is about and depend on others too much.

Nobody expect people to go back to farming, but at least to know how is done. You never know.
Concise explanation of why programming is fun
This is sort of like saying that a one time pad is not secure because if you have the one time pad, you can decrypt the message.
Asana is my favorite. It can be used for basic to-do lists or more complex project plans. The interface feels fast and nicely designed, with key bindings for everything so you can move through it very quickly. Free for up to 30 people in a team, so you can assign tasks to others if you want to.

http://asana.com
I was an undergrad research assistant for him for a while in the mid-1990s.

He's both self-promotional and has legitimately done all of the stuff he's promoting.
So you're saying that computers and computer science didn't revolutionize the world? They just made people's lives "slightly easier"?

What about free instant communication with people who live halfway around the world?
What about massive knowledge bases like Wikipedia that never existed on this scale in the past?
What about search engines that make every piece of knowledge available to humanity instantly available to you?
What about having access to all of that in a small device in your pocket?

I really don't know if you're trolling or you're just being obtuse. If the only benefit you've been able to get from all this wonderful technology is watching porn and cat videos, then that says more about you than it does about the technology.
Task Warrior! All in terminal but very practical.
If you are constantly lost in "If only …" thoughts, this book will help
I didn't give the Amazon.com URL before. So i had to repost.
I'm guessing that oil rigs are i) profitable and ii) places where lots of people watch a lot of DVDs.
One thousand times yes. VPNs have many uses, but true anonymity ain't one. I wrote a bit about it on our blog, here: https://www.getcloak.com/blog/2011/11/30/word-anonymity/
I've been involved in farming for most of my life and now, as an adult, have my own operation. I also program professionally. With considerable experience in both, I still think farming is the more challenging of the two and believe that farming does require more problem solving over a wide range of disciplines.

When the whole learn to code push came to my attention, I also wondered if farming would be a better option for achieving the claimed goals.
For people who are willing to pay a premium for quality, I'd say you are representative. It's not like "high quality bulk ink" is a middle-market product.
I am biased but mine is http://halis.io