skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Linux just doesn't seem to do laptops very well.

Linux doesn't do 'random, low-priced consumer laptops' very well. It does regular business laptops very well. I've been installing Linux on Thinkpads from the T20 days all the way to the current T430 and I've been incredibly impressed with how well everything runs.

Even cheap laptops run pretty well these days, at most you'll wrestle with the wifi drivers. The problem is the low-end market for laptops is so varied you don't get a lot of developers who get hands-on time to get the drivers working well.

Popular laptops will usually have great support unless they've got some hardware where the vendor doesn't want to play ball. But any cheap machine that's sold a lot of units will have a forum where users explain everything they've figured out.

In the old days you could buy two network cards, keep one and send one to a developer as a gift, and you'd end up getting a working driver out of the deal. Some people did that with entire laptops.
Prelude Data.Int> minBound + minBound :: Int16

0
Show HN: Open-sourced my Java chess AI high school project
I don't think you logic works. Your table says that if a 0 is in-putted then there is a .1 chance of getting a 0 and a .8 chance of getting a 1. That leaves a probability of .1 or something else happening, but it you add a third state it is no longer a not gate.

In other words, a not gate, regardless of the implementation must have it's columns sum to 1. This is a fundamental principle of probability and the definition of a not gate.
How do you do a laptop review without discussing battery life?
How many people in the SF Bay Area are working at startups?
How many of them are millionaires?

Here's your answer.
> The screen can never be truly black

Is it blue or brown or just gray?
I love darktable, too, but I don't think it's really the tool for mash-ups like these.
No, only the Latitude line has that.
Never had issues with their power supplies.

I still use the power supply from my previous line on my current laptop.

Use the old one at home, and the new one while on the road.

When i get home, i just have to plug it in.

No complains there, every issue i had with their laptops (one per each model i had) were solved on next business day, no questions asked.

This is mainly why I chose Dell, next business day support is flawless.
Sorry, but in France and in China, the two countries I have lived in, it is easy to buy relatively cheap food that is not produced "efficiently" from food industries.

Example:

- bread, cheese and wine in France. I mean the cheese, not the plastic yellow industrial thing that hijacked the name. You could visit a cheese-making farm, I bet you won't say it is "efficient".

- in Beijing, I buy my breakfast mantous (steamed buns) in a mantou place 30 meters away. I have seen the bags of wheat coming in the truck in the morning. They serve a block with very good mantous, but they are probably not as "efficient" as a couple of factories doing it for a 10M city.

But obviously, these way to produce food is in long term much more efficient than factories. Why? Because good food is good for health, and food cannot be good and at the same time produced "efficiently" by robots in factories.
Linux has come a long way in the context of driver support. It has not come very far at all in terms of ease of use.

When something goes wrong on Ubuntu for example, the advice is 99% of the time to open a terminal window and start running commands. This is impractical/unworkable for the majority of users.

Ubuntu might be the most forward thinking Linux distribution in terms of ease of use, but for every step forward they take two steps back.

With Unity for example doing relatively "simple" things like configuring the firewall have seemingly disappeared (as well as much other settings). They seem to have just deleted the majority of the UI and said "we'll just use search for everything!" Without thinking through discoverability.

I think Linux is great as a server operating system. But the people behind it just aren't capable of thinking like "normal" users and thus are completely unable to produce something for those users to use.

Right now the most likely contender for a Linux desktop is some kind of Android fork that extends what Google has managed to accomplish to a larger hardware set (or just take Chromium and expand that).
The relationship between Plasma and KWin in KDE Workspaces 2
In my company, profit sharing is 1/3 employees, 1/3 owners, 1/3 goes directly back into the company for investment. However, sometimes the company needs money to repair some equipment or whatever, and that comes out of the revenue (before profits). So the business needs come first obviously, but when times are good the employees are treated very well. This works best in companies where the employees can have a direct affect on short-term profits.
> "He did not access customer content," Pelanne told Ars. "We caught it well before he had any chance to do any of that."

> Given the rapid discovery, the malware was on Hostgator systems for less than a month.

Then yes, he did. If the malware was on there for more than a few days, I find it extremely unlikely that at least some data wasn't compromised.
Direct link https://gist.github.com/Nurdok/4096182

'oct' should also be added:

>>> oct(45)
'055'

One caveat: Python doesn't assume the leading '0' indicates that the number is octal, so you must specify radix 8:

>>> int('055', 8)
45
Functional combinators for JavaScript
of all the languages, python probably needs this the least. it's been my main language for 8 years, and once I initially learned the functions, I never needed to be reminded.
That's not how it works. If StackExchange wants safe harbor from being sued itself, it must put the content back online if it receives a counternotice. YouTube doesn't have this problem because it's not receiving DMCA notices in the first place. One can't send a counternotice when there was never a notice to begin with. Since Google gives all the major media companies direct access to their system, they don't have to use the DMCA process to remove content from the site.
text handling and CMYK support are not essential? Personally, I find lack of non-destructive color adjustments ie adjustment layers a deal breaker
>>>I'd like to imagine that most artists are relatively well-adjusted.

Keep imagining. But great ones aren't. Go read:

Touched with Fire: Manic-Depressive Illness and the Artistic Temperament by Kay Redfield Jamison
http://www.amazon.com/Touched-With-Fire-ebook/dp/B001D1YCM2

The Outsider by Colin Wilson
http://www.amazon.com/The-Outsider-Colin-Wilson/dp/087477206...

The Price of Greatness: Resolving the Creativity and Madness Controversy by Arnold M. Ludwig
http://www.amazon.com/The-Price-Greatness-Creativity-Controv...

EDIT to add: Why Jobs stood out is because the closest equivalent to what he was is a film director. But business is not set up to hand out accolades like Hollywood does. So instead of everyone learning who did what in Apple -- as with film we find out about sound editors, foley artists, etc, etc. -- we just get the face of Jobs.
Thank you for perfectly summarizing the structure of the Steve Jobs situation.
A few questions:

Ruby 1.8 - I thought we were dinosaurs for still using it

How is the hi-res display handled on the 13" screen? Does Ubuntu have display scaling or something built-in? I have it on a machine at home but never noticed any settings related to that.

Glossy display - is it as glossy as the classic MacBook Pro, or more like the Retina, which is still pretty glossy and will make you hate being stuck by the window at Starbucks.

I want one of these, but Dell isn't doing the one thing that makes people buy their hardware - offer it a BIG discount compared to other in the market (Air, Carbon X1, etc)
This is a fascinating article but the formatting is atrocious, mostly with the closing >-like character in the |0> notation, which seems to be rendered as an image and then repositioned in an inappropriate way so that it leaves its context.

People with Chrome developer tools or Firebug will find it marginally improved by disabling the stylesheet rules for the .imageRight class (and maybe setting the p.font-size to 16 or so to boot, so the > isn't grossly oversized relative to the text)
On Cellular Automation
To give you another perspective:
I bought a Dell Latitude including 3 year extended warranty for less that a similar powerful Macbook that has 1 year warranty.
I had a problem with the motherboard after a couple of months and a Dell technican came to my house and fixed it the next day for free. I dont have to drag it into their shop and give it away for days/weeks like in Apples case.
Lenovo has similar offerings for business customers.

On Dells (and Lenovos of course) i can actually replace the battery if its broken (on their business laptops atleast, the Ultrabook Designtrend which Apple invoked doesnt allow this), on any modern Macbook i cant.

My Latitude from 2009 is now still used by my mother and she didnt have any problems with it since i gave to her, power brick is fine, while my current Macbook Air of 1 1/2 years needed a new one recently because the old one had died.

That being said the built quality of Dells Business grinders isnt really that great, but i heared the more "Apple-like" machines are better in that regard.
I hope that soon it will sink with the masses that DMCA takedowns are mostly censorship.

Currently the system allows taking down everything you don't like.

Just amend the law to have a fine of 0.01% of yearly corporate revenue for each bogus notice sent and enjoy the show.
Assuming all the data can be gathered in some way with Google Maps, they have NSWE coords. You get an Address and there will be mostly the face direction of any house.
> The screen is glossy, which I like, a choice that will no doubt illicit [sic] an immediate "I HATE THIS AND WANT TO THROW IT OUT THE WINDOW" response for a lot of people.

This just exasperates me! The article is not bad but I reflexively lose confidence in the author when I notice spelling mistakes like that. Maybe because they're not typos but actual mistakes. I know it's arrogant and overly dismissive but I can't get over myself on this point. Sorry, you lost me at "illicit"…
Your cell phone can kill your career
I just searched for How to make cupcakes and the first three results were instructions of how to make a cupcake, including a video on youtube.

P.S.: I mistakenly typed HOT to make cupcakes
This is my biggest issue with the DMCA. Issuing a take-down notice for content you do not own should result in large fines. Maybe you get a couple of false positives, but at some point you have to be accountable for this stuff. If you want to rigorously enforce your copyright, good on ya... but be prepared to pay out the nose when you hurt someone else in the process.
They don't use git. They have a custom ruby based git implementation.
It's great that it works and all, but it still seems like a shameless attempt to sell what ought to be a $900 laptop for $600 more because it's for 'developers.' Maybe give them the benefit of the doubt for needlessly using an i7, but even then the mark up is still $500ish...
Torrent freak sensationalising as usual. Fox was sending takedown notices to Google of links to the Homeland TV show. Included in these notices were some links to a novel with the same name that was available on torrent sites. Seems like a simple mistake. As much as I dislike Fox the title here is completely misleading.

Edit: I agree with the other commenters there should be some sort of financial penalty for this. It's a simple mistake but as it will impact the author of the novel negatively Fox should have to reimburse him in someway. I'm not exactly sure how that would work but it's something that needs to be looked at with the DMCA.
I had an EEE pc 407.

I installed a bunch of different distributions and most of them worked well.

To say that "Linux doesn't work on laptops very well" because you had a terrible experience with a single distribution is odd. Especially when many of those distros have pretty good user communities and wikis that tell you what does or doesn't work, and how to fix stuff that's not working.

But the wider point - there are a gazzillion different distributions and sometimes there's no way of knowing if they'll work on your hardware apart from just installing it. Which does suck.
I wonder if it's the amount of ineptitude or not being on the same page that they may experience on a daily basis - even if it's 1 of 100s of people they interact with? I can see that being very trying when you literally have hundreads of things you need to make sure get done daily.
Second page:

"Because the XPS 13 is mature hardware, I didn't do any complex benchmarking. Battery life for a constant simulated load average of about 1.3 was almost exactly three hours, which isn't awful, but it isn't particularly great. The Ultrabook fared better under a real-life workload of light Web browsing, e-mailing, and writing, yielding about five-and-a-half hours of time spread across a day of work. This included a few transitions from home office to Panera Bread (or as we Ars editors like to call it, "the other office")."
I created an account to reply.

A YEAR! MF! That's meant to be long! FTS! A friend is someone you have validate of ten or twenty years of shared adventure. Treat everyone else as a possible friend (and likely tosser).
Security theater martial law and a tale that trumps every cop-n-donut joke ever
Me too. I've owned several and without exception the cords turn brownish, get soft, and then ultimately fray. I've tried all sorts of ways to gently wind/pack them, all sorts of preventative tapes/heatshrink tubing, but eventually (2 years, tops) they all fail. I like the (relatively) light weight and decent design, but they simply don't last.
Lean Media in the music world: From Led Zeppelin to the Deftones
Wouldn't it be better to comment on the direct link, where the author is more likely to see it?
Would be nice to have a messaging system or at least a way to prompt the other person. Never know when they've stepped away.
Generation gap: communicating with different ages.
"State What License You Use"

I would go further and say "state what licenses apply to code you didn't write". It's dangerous to see people cull code from the internets without properly understanding who holds the copyrights.

As explained in coding horror: "Experienced developers won't touch unlicensed code because they have no legal right to use it."

http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2007/04/pick-a-license-any-...
GIMP is terrible for text input, but then it's a raster graphics app and so I don't really think it's a major use case. I tend to use GIMP for photo editing mainly and then use those raster elements in Inkscape for composition and anything vector-y.

Inkscape is pretty good for text but there are still some things that trip me up on it. It could use some of the multi-page elements from Scribus IMO.
Physicist Proposes New Theory of Gravity—Gravity Does Not Exist
Actually I mis-spoke. It compiles but I'm getting an error when it tries to load the background texture. I definitely have OpenGL but I am getting some saort of OpenGL error. I will test that Ubuntu installation in a bit. Thanks.
Thanks! Where can I pick up my Nobel?
Three super-Earth-size planets found in 'habitable zone'
I've had a similar experience, and I'm currently on the 3rd system. Here's an example: http://i.imgur.com/oovbnwI.jpg

I was hoping I was just unlucky and keep getting units from a bad batch of hardware, but it sounds like I'm not alone.
I'm very amused. About 80% of my career has been in the "real world", so I have actually have some authority in calling this. No power in the world can subvert incompetence.
I have a gut-level reaction to this reasoning, which is that I believe that when you provide less value to your users you will likely get fewer users no matter how well you've justified the opposite case to yourself.

But I also have some specific reasoning that leads me to believe it's not a poor choice to provide another way to sign in. Signing in with facebook is extremely easy compared to normal signup paths. What this means is that most people who trust you with facebook will still sign in via facebook. And I don't think there's much of an argument that people who don't trust you with facebook will be signing in with facebook if it's the only option.

You can always allow them to link with facebook later, after they know what the game is, and after you've explained to them why linking will be valuable to them.
I don't know about 12.04, but display scaling was part of the Ubuntu Touch announcement. Their plan is to stop defining everything in terms of pixels and start working in "grid units", which they will rescale in response to pixel density and the type of device you're on.
Here's the one with lots of basic math around the subject:

* http://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/basicdesign.php...

These next two are in regards to dealing with heat in space warfare:

* http://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/spacewarship.ph...

* http://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/spacewardefense...
If you enjoyed this article, you may enjoy my series of short videos on "Quantum Computing for the Determined", which go deeper into the subject than this article, while remaining accessible to anyone with some basic background in linear algebra. The videos provide an intro to quantum mechanics, and cover the basic quantum computing model, as well as quantum teleportation and superdense coding:

http://michaelnielsen.org/blog/quantum-computing-for-the-det...

(Apologies for the self-plug, but this particular article seems like a good prelude to my course.)
I'm sorry to hear about your loss. It always sucks to have something you worked so hard on (your baby) canned or messed around with for non-technical reasons.

Your elucidation of Upcoming's differences helps explain why I probably quit using it, though. While I can see the value in having your social network plugged into a facet of (if not your entire) calendar, I personally choose not to participate in third party social networks. If Upcoming required a Facebook (or just about any other social network) login, I would have stopped using it. And yes, I realize I'm in the minority :)
Cool marketing stunt.
Imagine that the guy knows his Miranda rights, refuses to talk and demands a lawyer. The unsaid implication of the supposed public-safety exception is that the police will do anything to get the guy to talk, constitution be damned.
Why isn't this the case in practice?
You can reframe most laws in the same terms.
Valid point, comment submitted. I assumed the author submitted this to HN in the first place
I first read the sentence "it's not science as usual," as "it's not science, as usual."
I have a rather old Acer Aspire One and Linux has always worked perfectly with it. RE those who say Linux isn't good with cheap hardware.

Oddly enough it's not thin, but has been quite durable and weighs very little (~2 lbs?) and still gets somewhat meaningful battery life even all these years later.

That said, the most recent laptop I tried Ubuntu on was perfect except for the track pad, which needed touch regions to differentiate between right and left click, but instead treated everything as left click. Needless to say I decided not to install Ubuntu on it.
@ Document Your Project

here's a good talk about it http://pyvideo.org/video/1795/write-the-docs

> bitbucket is a good service, no doubt. But people who choose it for public code are just being difficult (according to me)

this argument is a pile of horseshit (according to me).
Unfortunately, the vast majority of Groupon customers do not return for additional purchases and the people who capitalize on these types of deals are 100% price-conscious vultures[1] (also, I used to be one of these people). At the end of the day, this was a very poor business decision and just a PR gamble.

People are primarily driven by price when they buy goods, so after 6 months or so people will forget this extremely generous act. Razer fans will remain razer fans, but unless Razer has a product leaps and bounds ahead of the competition (some are, but most are only marginally superior) very few will become loyal customers due to this act of kindness.

[1] http://businessmodelinstitute.com/is-customer-retention-the-...
just pointing out that the thread image you submitted as evidence to the contrary had 4 karma points, which on reddit is akin to a whistle in the dark. If it had 1800 karma points I could see the sentiment having broader reddit apeal.
An open request to LÖVE library authors
Mistercow's focus on tactics is a mistake; as the saying goes, "... professionals focus on logistics". And while not one of those (poor eyesight kept me out), I can't help but notice that the logistics tail for those drones is all in the US, and of course the pilots flying them. Who have to go home at the end of the day.

As for the US Military, a lot if not most of the scenarios posited have much or most of them on the side of the "revolution", but much more likely a counter-revolution.
> Issuing a take-down notice for content you do not own should result in large fines

It effectively does. The DMCA makes damages, costs and attorneys fees mandatory for material misrepresentations. Doctorow can sue at no cost to himself, while Fox would be out a significant amount of money in two sets of attorneys fees plus whatever damages Doctorow can show this caused to his sales.