skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think in 5 years you'll see a resurgence of plain-old-computers. People will still be in the market for tablets, those that never needed a full blown desk/laptop to begin with. However, as more people begin to realize that they're just consumers of these new, handheld "TVs" of the Internet generation my hope is that the demand for boundary-less computing platforms will realize a resurgence. It's sad to see the overall industry being reduced to the world of locked out hardware because of... Software companies. Hypocritical? For sure. But if protecting the business model of a platform by ousting competition is the only way to lock in dominance I feel that's a cheap way to earn your keep. I think some would argue it's just the way things are today. I don't buy that.

I tried to buy a Lenovo sans Windows and they informed me it was not possible. Not possible to not write a bloatware image to a hard drive, of which takes time and energy for Lenovo in the manufacturing process. Really? Don't tell me as a savvy consumer that it's not possible since that is an aggregious lie. Instead tell me that it is not something that within your catalog of product options. At least then it's not a lie.
Right. The only technology that has over-delivered in the last 25 years is computer hardware (MIPS, networking, and storage). Of course, this has had incredible nth order effects on society, but the rest of tech (cancer research, energy, transportation) is not ridiculously beyond 25 years ago.
The bigger issue isn't whether they influence the masses, it's whether they influence the decision makers who do matter to Google's revenue streams – and that's an open question, IMHO.

The idea that you can't rely on Google to keep services around is a bit of a chilling one for many and too much of that vibe may well mean that established companies and smart startups are more careful about what services they depend on (and who they get them from).

But we're not at that point yet... and Google is hardly alone in the general rug-pulling-out-from-under-you trend these days.
A few minutes with PubMed turns up no causal relationship. One study did find a sudden cardiac death odds ratio of ~2, but the dose response curve was flat suggesting lack of causality.
Weekend HN: gamebook.js, an IF-style gamebook engine
I have created "gamebook.js", an experimental crossbreed between interactive fiction and gamebooks: instead of navigating an explicit set of choices, you are free to type any command after each section. The engine then tries to match what you typed with the best available choice, using a parser. The parser is quite simple (as it wouldn't really make sense for it to be otherwise) but nevertheless using some techniques like stemming and synonym matching, to try improving flexibility a bit. The engine currently implements the full version of Fire on the Water, the second book in the Lone Wolf series, as distributed by Project Aon.

To try it:

http://projectaon.org/staff/christian/gamebook.js

To read more about it:

http://cjauvin.blogspot.ca/2013/03/suspension-of-parser-disbelief.html
> Why not assemble desktops from components?

The actual labor of unboxing consumer parts and putting them together would double the cost of the machine after you run sufficient testing on the system akin to what a factory will put it through.

Even if you got someone to sit around and just screw together PC parts, you are looking at an hour a machine (if you want to verify it posts, then stick it in a corner running prime95 and memtest to make sure the parts check out) and that is prohibitively more expensive than a Windows license.
Fake game earns funding on Kickstarter
I think branding can definitely be a factor in the success of a company, but it's certainly not a huge one. And you can always rebrand later.

Here's a thread about Wesabe vs. Mint: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1746832

Here's the list of YC startups, from which you can infer whatever you want (I feel like success is unrelated to name quality): http://yclist.com/
This is silly. This article is about a comic that people paid money, and because it contained DRM and the company went out of business, those customers are no longer able to view it.

You say: the problem is the DRM. Get rid of the DRM and we won't have the problem.

And that is a perfectly valid point.

But there is another solution you are completely missing: Why are you paying for DRM'd media?

No one is forcing you to purchase it. Someone created something, and they decided they wanted DRM in it. You (or more accurately, those customers) looked at it, saw the DRM, and said: here's my credit card number.

If you don't like the terms they are providing the service on, DON'T GIVE THEM YOUR MONEY!

So then you bring up Hulu. Hulu uses DRM. What are the solution here. 1) Go argue with Hulu about their DRM; or 2) Stop using it.

If you don't like the terms of a free service, stop using it. It really is that simple.

I don't give Hulu money. It's free. I think in exchange for free videos, they can put DRM in it. I didn't buy the videos, I know they aren't mine. I don't expect access to them in the future. If they go overboard with the DRM, then I'll stop visiting their site.
I wonder what the alternative is for companies. For users or companies with a few computers, Linux is absolutely no problem once you get used to it. For power users I'd argue it's the only sensible choice. But what if you are running a 2000-employee company, how can you manage all workstations without a Windows domain? Does Mac have any alternatives, or are there open-source alternatives?
Thanks and will do!

I just added a 1 second timeout that puts a default font on if the webfont hasn't loaded. Just tested with ghostery and it should be good to go.
ARM-based Windows RT systems are also lead balloons in terms of sales.

I think that the market will self-correct here, as no one wants ReTarded Windows, or a machine that can only run the same.
It may very well be that in this case Uber is right. I just don't like the sentiment, expressed in several comments, that the workers may do as they please -- leave or stay and shut up -- as long as they don't unionize. Just as the company has the power to control wages in order to maximize profit, so too the employees are well within their right to organize and try to use whatever power they have. This does not automatically make them crybabies.
How do these double submissions creep in?
The OP leaves it unclear whether any new information has come out about this recently, but I don't think it has. Weren't the 1968 tapes released years ago?

Robert Parry has been writing about Nixon's election campaign sabotage of the Vietnam peace talks for years. He made the rather witty remark that it went from "conspiracy theory" to "old news" without ever having been widely reported.

http://consortiumnews.com/2012/03/03/lbjs-x-file-on-nixons-t...

Johnson asked Walt Rostow to personally abscond with the files on Nixon so as to thwart Nixon's attempts to find them. Rostow eventually sent them to the LBJ library with a request to keep them sealed for another 50 years. Instead, the library began declassifying them in the 90s. It might be hard to believe this stuff, but there it is, all documented.
The stupidest thing I have ever read. What do you say about all those inventors and thinkers, who did not get a Ph.D., but contributed to human knowledge in major ways....
> "But still. It boils down to a mobile app that could be cloned, bit-for-bit, for way under $5 million."

I had an argument about this yesterday with someone. I do not think this statement is true.

Mailbox is an app that, usability, design, and technology-wise is two standard deviations away from the mean iPhone app. It is anything but commodity.

If you assembled a team of pretty-decent devs and designers, you probably couldn't clone Mailbox. To be blunt, the quality of Mailbox's app is beyond the capabilities of almost every mobile engineering team I've ever come across, and I write mobile apps for a living.

You could try cloning Mailbox, but it's contingent on first building a truly world-class design and mobile development team - and I mean world-class literally, you need to build a mobile team two standard deviations away from what every startup has. Assembling a team at this level is really friggin' hard. Mailbox has somehow done it - there's no guarantee that Dropbox could do it independently.

It might seem a bit hyperbolic, but apps like Mailbox are sort of like the mobile equivalent of Google - there's a magic sauce and team there that makes it non-trivial to clone. We're not talking about an app that bolts together standard UI components and pours some fresh paint on top, this is something that's at the very extreme end of UX quality.

> "Dropbox has a pretty strong brand of its own already."

I highly doubt Dropbox gives a shit about the Mailbox brand as it stands. The idea is to have the absolute best email client money can buy - and that competitors will have a hell of a time trying to clone. The whole idea is to be able to go "Sign up for Dropbox, make email way easier than blech! iPhone email. And way easier than even GMail!"

> "I can't imagine mailbox.app would fare all that well against a (near identical) dropboxmail.app"

This rests on the assumption that Dropbox can clone Mailbox. Having used the Dropbox app extensively, this is a really unsafe assumption. Dropbox's mobile app quality right now is pretty middling - not bad, but not great. For them to even start approaching the ability to clone Mailbox they'd first have to build a brand new team at a level few companies have been able to achieve.

And even if they did, an app like Mailbox is not something a few people can bang out in a couple of months. IMO Dropbox would be easily at least a year behind Mailbox. All the while other cloud competitors are looking for the leg up and willing to acquire Mailbox also.

> "By that logic their next move will be to pull another Color.app?"

If people ever gave a shit about Color.app. Color was a flop right out of the gate. Mailbox has received rave reviews from just about everyone who's touched it, and the demand continues to be furious.

If Dropbox will acquire a photo sharing app, it will have to hit that bar - i.e., absolute best in class experience, existing buzz, and not a pointless app no one knows what to do with.
What makes you think that the Iraq & Afghanistan wars will be over in 45 years ?
The Civil War was fought by state/national governments. But you do have a point that many rural populations have shown higher social solidarity than even urban Americans show today.
But doesn't this lead to a culture of quick fixes? Meaning no long term perspective, but just squeezing out any short term quantifiable result while completely ignoring the long term impact of that?

Just imagine what would happen if this were about customer segmentation or something like that. A super short term focus would suggest a client to drop all contracts that are relatively unprofitable, even so on the long run these are there for relationship building. That would be disastrous for gaining larger contracts as these are mostly gained through building up a reputation by fulfilling smaller, less profitable contracts. But for the consultant there would be no motivation to bother about anything that does not result in an immediate benefit.
I can't speak to the other one, but I will go on to say that Taurus is moving very fast. I was an early adopter, and while I don't use them anymore, I saw them go from a barebones product, to a barebones product with an on-site tutorial builder, to a fairly rich product with customizable themes, etc., in just a few weeks.

I can't speak for what they've done since I stopped using them, but looking at their homepage, the velocity still seems pretty high.
They're not mutually exclusive. Nowhere is he saying that this is the only way to advance the boundaries of knowledge.
Interestingly, it turns out you can buy your way onto a best-seller list: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142412788732386430457831...

(not saying that was the case here)
I had a little trouble finding a non-Windows laptop last time I bought one (summer 2012), but it wasn't impossible. If these guys are making most of their money from customization or support, why not resell System 76 laptops? Otherwise, buy big orders from Clevo or some other manufacturer. I sincerely hope this shop wasn't buying computers at Best Buy for resale.
Hah yeah, Sweden does not have oil (but minerals) but what they do have is fucked up taxes. Robbing people of their money to cover up for stupid ideas.
Look at the language list at the bottom : http://img4.imageshack.us/img4/5827/f82f99e84bdc45a6b2b11ed....
The vast majority of "black cars" are Lincoln Town Cars made for livery services. They are very comfortable and roomy for a passenger to get into. And not all of them are black, that is just shorthand to say it is a full-sized sedan.
Every once in a while you read something and shake your head thinking, "I always felt this but was never able to verbalize it like this." This is one such post: one of the best things I've discovered in 6 years of Hacker News.

As someone who has always built and shipped, I've been troubled by a subtle shift in thinking in our industry the last few years. Why so much hostility and failure to learn from others? Why so much attitude?

This brilliant post finally explains it: because so many of us who at one time would have been building products, services, and value are now building anything but: resumes, reputations, portfolios, and (Heaven forbid) "personal brands".

Thank you, Glenn Kelman, for one of the best arguments I've seen in a long time for builders to just shut up, find a customer, and satisfy them.

Just a few gems that really resonated with me:

But one crucial difference between this boom and the last is that the folks in the last boom had to ship or starve.

Amazing what you can do when you have to.

But how many engineers hired from Stanford or Berkeley in the past year will ever feel the savage need to make something happen, to bust out of the matrix, to push the limits of their abilities?

Is "bust out of the matrix" the new "think outside the box"?

The problem is that the young engineers earning that much become well-fed farm animals at the very moment in their lives when they should be running like wild horses.

What a great metaphor!

The result for many engineers and product managers is often a case of arrested development, as they drift from one startup to the next, dabbling in several side-projects, without the ballast of having solved some really hard problems or contributed to a lasting business.

Sometimes, not having an alternative is the best motivator to finish something.

After all, the only way to get much better at your craft is to be challenged in ways that make you uncomfortable. Yet not many people in high technology are uncomfortable these days.

I had no idea.

Startups, like professional football, are best done by the most desperate people on the planet.

Great observation!
I am sorry,but to me this entire article and comments below it are just a massive pile of whine.

Large companies like Dell get Windows at such discounted prices that the difference between a machine with or without OS would be 10-15 dollars. It's not like having windows installed on a laptop is increasing its cost by $100.
And why does a company mentioned in this article have a problem with Windows already pre-installed? Installation of Linux on such a machine is exactly the same as if there was no OS on it in the first place. Heck, they could even leave Windows and install Linux as a second OS,but make it boot by default - and then have it as an extra selling point - Linux computers,but with Windows as an option.
Windows 8 is not sealing anything yet. And EFI problems are easy to overcome if you want to - and if your business depends on it, I believe that it would be in your best interest to want to??
To sum it all up - I believe that this entire story is made up and no shop even existed in the first place. If they could sell linux computers 3 or 5 years ago they could still do it today, and it seems like the entire article is constructed to just blame MS for problems that don't exist.
It is a description of what a PhD is, not what not a PhD isn't.
Fuduntu Gaming: A Textured Compression
Will eBay remove this paid search page?
Since eBay says "Paid Search Ads Doesn't Work" - Will eBay remove this page that says "Many of eBay's most successful affiliates use paid search to generate over $100,000 each month in eBay commissions!"
They are livery drivers. Aren't they required by the state to carry liability insurance?
Are You A Google Refugee?
I would say the most useful part of studying algorithms is knowing how to analyze them and understanding the meaning of asymptotic analysis. Understanding that asymptotically fast algorithms might be slow for the problem sizes you are dealing with is the most important thing an algorithms course can teach.
Phasing out fairware
Have you seen Square Enix's pricing in the app store? They charge 20-30 dollars a game. I think Nintendo could get away with a 30 dollar Mario game in the app store.
Ask HN: Should everyone have their own domain for email and IM?
In light of recent changes at Google such as the upcoming shutdown of Google Reader, the restriction of access to CalDAV, and the blocking of external XMPP contact requests, it's likely that some people are thinking of leaving Gmail. Some of these people, wanting to never be locked into an email provider again, will probably get their own domains.

This begs the question: Should every savvy Internet user get his or her own domain in order to have a stable email address and Jabber ID without being locked into a single provider? That seems a bit extreme to me, if only because domain names were originally intended for companies and institutions, not individuals.
It's probably too late to ask now (the story was posted 19+ hours ago, as I write this), but -- do you know what happened to Google Groups digest emails? They just stopped working for me a long time ago, with no communication about what happened.
Leading up to my current job, virtually none. However, at my current job (Firebase), it now makes up a significant percentage of what I do. The way I've described it to friends is: "You know how most companies ask you tree traversal/sorting/search questions in an interview, then when you show up for work the first day, your job turns out to be 'add this button to this web form'? We actually work on those algorithm problems." It helps that we are an infrastructure company and that our user interface is an API.

If this is something you're looking for, my recommendation is to look at either large companies that have large infrastructure needs (Google, Facebook, Twitter, Amazon, LinkedIn, etc.) or small infrastructure-related startups, depending on your preferred working environment. If the hard parts of your job are offloaded to the database/language runtime/middleware, look for companies that work on databases, language runtimes or middleware. And in the interview, ask them for examples of hard problems that they have solved.

Also, I have absolutely nothing against the companies that don't do this kind of work. In fact, Firebase exists so others don't have to do this kind of work. This is just an observation that occasionally, the skillset tested in these interviews is not in line with the responsibilities a successful candidate will end up having, so make sure you ask.
You are assuming that you know both the algorithmic and the business rules when you start the project. That's rarely if ever true.

People in charge of setting those business rules also rarely know what they actually want in details. This is what is meant by the joke that writing an accounting software is order of magnitude harder than building a kernel, even if the latter is much more challenging technically speaking.
I see your point and it makes sense. However, calling this FUD simply by stating the lack of data is not less of a FUD in itself.

And on a grander scale, how many times you have seen a small shop taking a big corp out of business? I don't think immense forces like Microsoft require our zealous defense. They're more than able to defend themselves, unlike these guys.

Even at an off chance this Dutch shop is a fraud, give them a benefit of a doubt, before you learn more about the case.
Your Business Is What You Eat
I wish this were coupled with a Huygens wavelet effect to say that knowledge is advanced over time by many small contributions at the frontiers of various disciplines.
Just so its clear, the Wii was a resounding success. Nearly 100 million sold vs 75 mil each for the ps3 and xbox 360
No one could have predicted this level of success, in fact many were complaining that the Wii had low graphics capabilities and thiz would signify its doom

Yet it was succesful since it launched early, was cheaper (and profitable from day one) and had something innovative(wii remote)
And they tried to use that same formula this time with the wii u(the new thing is te tablet like controllers) and their sales have been abysmal, but I wouldnt count them oit just yet, i wouldnt be suprised they go into a heavy marketing campaign when the launch of the ps4 is nearer
Don't forget tuple() and ().

I don't think any are more pythonic. They are all valid python.
"Cardinal Says Paedophilia not a Criminal Offense"
Friends Don't Let Friends Curate
No, the idea that Google making this specific action is "DESTROYING" a distributed Internet is grandiose.
The authors point is that this is how poorly you'll do monetarily even if you reach bestseller status. Even if we assume a whopping 25% of all books becomes bestsellers, that means 75% of all books don't and are likely to net their authors even less money.
USC Launches Open Source DIY Virtual Rreality Website -- 3D Print VR Hardware
I've mainly done web development and typical university style assignments for the bulk of my programming experience- barely encountering algorithmic problems that weren't well defined.

Recently, I started creating a throwaway physics/game engine for fun and it is an awesome way to learn some really cool algorithms. Also, I did a small image manipulation app that exposed me to some cool stuff as well.

As a new grad it definitely pushed me more towards game development- would you mind sharing your reasons for leaving?
But whether or not it is a game changer depends on the value of your users time and mental real estate. When you tell the rss crowd that they should remember to regularly come to your site, what you are actually telling them is that you consider your output to be so valuable that other people should regularly reserve time and effort just to see it. You are basically saying that you consider yourself at least as interesting as sites such as reddit.

I'm of course not sure, but it might well be a really bad move to not offer a rss feed, although feed subscriber numbers are not that high. People using rss are people that consciously manage the way they interact with inforation and the internet. It is possible that these people are also more valuable as multipliers.
I had used the word "typefaces" earlier but nobody noticed it and hence I changed it to "fonts". The current heading isn't written by me.
No, I don't use the digest email feature. Sorry. The other day I had to clean out some old Groups subscriptions, because apparently you can only subscribe to 200 groups at a time. What a fucking joke. :(