skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Minor nit-pick: The PC came out in 1981 but the XT came out in 1983. But they both have 8088 chips running at 4.77 MHz. The main difference was that you could get it with a 10 MB hard drive, but my PC (not XT) had upgraded ROM BIOS chips (you had to change the actual chips because they were not flashable) from around 1984 and so it has a 20 MB Seagate hard drive. (Which still works.) The XT also drops the cassette port.

I recently got ahold of my PC from storage again and when I opened it up I was surprised that the floppy drive uses up one of the five 8-bit ISA slots, even though it has very few simple chips. (The XT has 8 slots.)

(Pic of the floppy controller. http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a6/IBM_PC_Or... )
I wonder why this is blowing up today? It's not a brand new policy: it's been largely the same since at least April 29 of this year, i.e., before Yahoo bought Tumblr: http://web.archive.org/web/20130426023137/http://www.tumblr....

What seems to be new is a) the addition of the "Adult" category, which is blocked from safe search tag pages even for people who follow a particular blog and b) a slight relaxation to the third-party indexing policy, where NSFW (but not Adult) blogs are now indexed by external search engines.
No. I had to add a few new iPads, so I opened the organizer, clicked the 'use for development' button and it was good. It took a little bit for the actual provisioning profile to update but I was able to run the dev app on the device right away.

This was yesterday morning. I haven't tried today, though.
Why Stocks Continue To Levitate...
Would love to hear what folks who know more about this think of this post, and the idea that Rehypothecation is a central part of the risk involved in our banking system. I didn't realize that this was allowed, so this whole thing is fascinating as an idea.
With many of their new products, Microsoft seems to finally have viable offerings. The dangerous thing for Microsoft's competition is that previous iterations of Microsoft products stunk so you had to go to the competition by default. That is not the case anymore so expect to see much thinner margins for Apple, Google and others in the future.

Azure including their Virtual Machines are a great competitor to Amazon AWS and EC2. I've used both.

Office 365 and Hosted Exchange are a great competitor to Google Apps. I've used both.

Windows Phone 8 is a great competitor to iPhone. I had iPhone 3G, iPhone 4, iPhone 4s and now a Nokia Lumia 928.

Windows Surface Pro (i.e. not RT) is a great competitor to iPad. It really is a desktop/laptop replacement unlike the iPad and again, I've owned both.

Windows 8 had several issues out of the gate. I use it every day and spent the 10 minutes necessary to learn the new interface to get used to it. Many people aren't willing to do that. Vista had even more problems, and Microsoft still came roaring back with a very successful Windows 7. Microsoft is hoping Windows 8.1 does the same thing for Windows 8.

In all of this, the customers win. Expect cheaper prices with increased competition - example being how Amazon just lowered their EC2 pricing by as much as 80%.
Netflix Dropped Your Favorite Movie? Get Used to It
Microsoft attacks iPad to unload Surface RT inventory
I'm not saying this is a good thing, but what if the drone gave out more warnings than tickets (ignoring the issue of delayed feedback) and based infractions on average speeds. If the tickets were reserved for seriously reckless offenders, I'm guessing the public backlash would be reduced.
Is Runbox still storing account passwords in plain text?

They looked like a great option but when I set up an account recently they emailed me my username and password in plain text. I cancelled immediately but if they get the security basics right I may look at it again.
That is the problem with exponentials, they are really s-curves in real life.

If you are upset with the state of your desktop computer, you need look no further than the accountant next door. You see "we" (and I use that term to encompass people who are interested in computers and changing the computer to create new things) are a small market, and "they" (the set of people who use computers as a tool to get their job done) are a huge market. And they don't care about 4K screens. In fact 1920 x 1200 was more than they needed and so they would buy the cheaper "TV" glass (aka 1920 x 1080) and save a few bucks (or a lot of bucks) and be just as happy. Meanwhile I pay $400 - $450 for a display because I want ever pixel I can get.

It took a guy who had a penchant for making "insane" requests to demand that his company put a high pixel density display on a phone. While at the time it was "crazy talk" the reality is that it really is nicer looking at a high ppi screen than it is a low ppi screen. And in markets where that translates into sales, they have come to dominate the "high margin" bracket.

We don't have a "high margin" bracket. We don't have anyone making "workstations" any more (not in the sense that Sun used to make them), we hardly have anyone making general purpose non-server type computers any more (all you need is a thing to host a browser to display what the real computer wants to show you). The Pixel is perhaps the most interesting example of this at the moment.

Once the network becomes sufficiently fast and reliable, the low marginal cost of delivering a new program on a server trumps the high cost of upgrading the thing you sit at. And the network has gotten a whole lot better with gigabit links being the 'norm' these days.

I've watched computers go from things that filled rooms and talked to dumb terminals over a serial line, to amazing local computation engines with multiple displays, back to computers that fill rooms and talk to a browser over the network. Why do you even want a desktop "computer" any more, don't you want your computer to be able to talk to all of your peripherals, keyboard, mouse, display, phone, and television ? That puts your computer in a box and attached to a fast network that your peripherals are attached to. All you need where you sit is enough juice to light up the peripherals. And we've pretty solidly reached that point.
You can get a ton of value out of usability tests without going all-in on a usability lab. Buy screenflow and a USB microphone to record sessions, and then recruit people for $50 a pop to come in and go through your product.

Steve Krug calls it "Lost Our Lease Usability Testing" and explains how to do it in Don't Make Me Think. You can download the relevant chapters here: http://www.sensible.com/downloads-dmmt.html

We did this at a company I worked at a few years ago and it made us completely change how we were building the product because our target users got nothing out of it (I talked a bit about this a RubyFringe: http://www.infoq.com/presentations/francl-testing-overrated)
"Linux is not a technically impressive project."

Jesus are you dumb. I feel to counter that argumentatively douchey statement is so rhetorical I'm not even going bother.
Some time ago, I was trying to buy a few hundred dollars worth of furniture, only to be informed that the cashier could not process my order because her computer was down. Everything I was buying had a price tag and I was paying cash, so I suggested that she find a pencil and some paper, and just write everything down, so she could enter it when the computer came back online. The concept apparently fried a circuit or two in her brain, because there was 6% sales tax on everything, and how was she supposed to know how much that would be? Plus, how was she supposed to know how much change to give me?

Nowadays, we don't have price tags on anything anymore. Prices are fetched from a database using the UPC as a key, so if the computer's down, the buyer is out of luck. At a previous employer, we sold specialty goods to contractors, so we had strong relationships with our customers. I drafted a plan to print up pads of paper sale forms that looked more or less like our (80x24 greenscreen) order screens, so if we lost connection to the mainframe, we could still move product from the warehouse to the customers; we'd just give them the product and bill 'em later. It was a risky move, but not really any riskier than sending our customers across the street to our competitors. To my knowledge, they've never had to use the manual system, thankfully.

We may not be "completely dependent on computers" just yet, but we seem to be getting there.
A site:tumblr.com now returns 943 million URLs in Google. It would be interesting to see this number in a few weeks time.
Yes - all via the dashboard/search functionality.
Malicious bots don't care if there is an API. They can screen scrape easily.
Might's PL PhD student reading list might scare away many prospectives away from PL research. But no, not all of us do theory and lambda calculus.
The developer had lots of Windows desktop experience but little Linux desktop experience. We run a mix of Windows, Mac and Linux here, so using Windows shouldn't have been a problem.
A sign that's... fake? As in, not real?

In this case, it means that the signs were not posted by the authorities.
And yet, and yet... the new Gmail.
John, I agree. It's a hack for sure.
I think you can just delete the old version from App Store. People who brought your App could still find the old App in their Purchased List.
As bad as the US is in those statistics, you'd expect this island to be 5 - 20 times worse looking at the range of third world countries on the list.
"great many things that occur in one's life are not in fact a product of one's own actions"

Well, this also implies that none of our actions have any foreseeable outcome. And since we're defined by our own actions, that means we have no means to define ourselves. And that's a scary proposition.
This is kinda going to a different direction than the article.

http://www.maxmasnick.com/2013/07/19/fastmail/#fn:1 "This may be a deal breaker if you’re concerned about government spying.
"

I believe that Fastmail is a valid option if your main problem is with Ads and the fact that Google might be reading all your mails and companies are buying this big data to sell you better services / more targeted Ads around the web.

I'm currently switching to Fastmail because I don't believe in free lunch and I won't stand for it anymore.

If I want to make sure no one is reading my mails, then I have a problem. Most governments are doing this and we can't do much about. If I need privacy, then I use GPG.
It is cute that you think there's any chance in hell that such a service would be granted permission to fly drone-spotting drones by the FAA.

In any case, a single 1.8 gigapixel ARGUS-IS can cover a huge amount of surveillance area and within a few years that technology could be commonplace, so the answer could easily always be "yes, of course there is a drone watching your car right now", making that information basically useless.
remember the nbc olympics - http://www.inventinginteractive.com/2010/05/26/remembering-q...
Unless you have a really big upload pipe, better use ssh -C.
> You mean the current scientific consensus doesn't believe that is correct any longer.

No, I think that what the grandparent meant is that, for all the problems "ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny" has, it is quite falsifiable in its claims, and they have been falsified. Therefore, its false.

> Scientific consensus believed bleeding patients was a proper treatment for two thousand years.

"Proper" isn't part of a scientific conclusion, and for most of the time bloodletting was an accepted treatment, the scientific method didn't exist (it certainly hasn't for two thousand years), so it couldn't be the subject of a scientific consensus.

Scientific consensus does change, though, but the important thing is why. A theory which loses status as a consensus not because it has been falsified but because a more broadly applicable or parsimonious (two sides of the same coin, really) theory with equivalent predictions (at least, of those that have been tested) insofar as their domains overlap replaces it might still be correct, even though it is no longer the consensus theory. One that is rejected because its testable predictions have been shown to be false is not in the same position.

> From a common sense point-of-view it still seems like a legitimate theory to me.

A theory that comports with "common sense" (i.e., someone's intuition) but whose claims don't stand up to empirical scrutiny does not remain valid merely because it is (for someone) intuitive.
How The Stick of Truth got too big for its own good
Animography — An animated typeface
> " their first break may have been a fluke, (albeit one attained by hard work and persistence), but their continued success was due to talent rather than to some winner takes all effect."

As regularly and repeatedly demonstrated by the phenomenon of "one-hit-wonders".
I dont get why universities require closed book tests. Are professors so lazy/overworked that they can't come up with questions that can't be easily googled or referred from a text book?
Well, I started coding on an 8 bit machine, 3.5 ~~GHz~~ MHz, up to total 64 kB of memory (static and dynamic together) - but keyword here is "up to", initially it was less than that. I had all the "OS" pretty clearly mapped out in my head, by address no less. My programs did contain sometimes jumps to physical addresses.

So I think I've some idea how the AGC operated.
One issue: how to move data from old app to new - and separate - app? On a Mac it's easy, because everything has access to the full file system. On iOS, apps are blocked from anything outside their "sandbox". I gave up on one desirable iOS app because I'd entered a pile of data in the free version, and couldn't move any of it to the new/paid version.
According to “Zuckerberg’s Law," the amount of information we share online doubles each year.

I stopped reading here and had to talk myself down from burning my computer, burying the ashes and salting the earth around it.
So they survived 65'000 years just fine, but now suddenly we need to "help" them?

I don' think they need our medicine, housing or plumbing.
The 2005 screenwriting book that’s made every movie feel the same
My first thought also.
Shouldn't all people punished under criminalization of homosexuality be retrospectively pardoned?
I think people are mad because it seems inevitable that, like all other new Gmail features/UI changes/etc., it will become mandatory within less than a year.
I'm still feeling pretty good about jumping on.
i'd love to see some additional apps (err blueprints, perhaps) like a job posting app
Nitrous.io - Dev environments in 60 seconds
You're right. I wasn't really aware of the NSFW vs. adult distinction when I posted.

So NSFW content is available, but only from blogs that feature it occasionally? Adult blogs are not searchable, and not indexed in Google? Only days after Karp appeared on TV and said Tumblr won't police adult content?

Well, it's Yahoo/Tumblr's prerogative to handle NSFW content however they see fit. I'm not enraged, but... I don't get it, and it seems like a lame move.
As I study biology and microbiology in college, the more I realize that taxonomy and phylogeny classification schemes are essentially bullshit. Bioinformatics and evolution research have shown "life" to be much more ambiguous and mysterious than we could have ever imaged. Modern classification schemes are so arbitrary and error-prone as to be essentially just a painful way to satisfy scientists' compulsion to shove things into neat little cubbies and has the negative side-effect of scaring students away from an otherwise fascinating subject. The professors I've spoken with tend to agree.

Edit: added "classification schemes" after taxonomy and phylogency to clear up confusion
New rival? I'm not so sure. From the Indiegogo page[1], for $299 you can get the "Pre-release Buggy Version." With that type of wording and the recent track record of crowdfunded hardware projects, yes please take my money!!!

[1] http://www.indiegogo.com/projects/glassup-augmented-reality-...
Upgrades are confusing for novice users. Version numbers aren't. While upgrade pricing has been nice in the past, I fully understand wanting to get more revenue from existing users, it just means that the price per version should drop. If customers are truly "loyal" they should have no problems paying full price for an app.
Or download the command line tools! The downside of all this nice Xcode integration.
A computer that came with XP (let's say prior to 2006? 2005?) will probably still run faster with XP (though XP is literally 12 years old now..). However, from what I understand a computer that came with Vista will run faster with Windows 7, and faster still with Windows 8.

Vista upped system requirements from XP, but since then, MS has lowered system requirements and OS footprint on each release.

Remember though that there are PCs that were genuinely quite good (back then) which came with XP and then could also easily run Vista. This is sort of what I was trying to get at with the 2005/2006 limit. Meaning that some PCs that came with XP might still be able to run faster with Win7/8. Just don't count on it if you got it in 2001 :)
I'm not sure what I said contradicts what you're saying. I've been involved with hiring over 100 people in Boston, San Francisco and NYC. Everyone does not really know everyone but that's a different story. Contract to hire is very popular in the part of the Midwest where I'm originally from because of no particular reason other than the hiring firm can and the person being hired doesn't have many options. At one place I worked in Boston everyone was theoretically "contract to hire" but it was atypical as the rate paid was so high that nobody ever took the full time job.
http://www.tumblr.com/docs/en/nsfw says "Blog indexed by Tumblr search: No" for adult blogs, which implies even switching off safe mode won't show adult content.
When I searched Github it seemed like most of the supposedly leaked passwords were actually examples or placeholders and not a problem.

It would be one thing if Github ran (or at least sanctioned) a feature that warned you of possible security problems, but I don't think I'd like potentially multiple, poorly-coded bots going around messaging repo owners.
It's a solid point. I wonder though if it being a british author (even before it was known as Rowling) and forwarded to british critics by the british arm of the publishing company may have had something to do with it. Less crime novels published in UK than larger markets perhaps?
Few reasons for a large truck:

1) The space needed to drive safely behind the car/truck in front of you would be wasted. Cargo, in a container (semi-van, etc.) does not need to travel a safe distance behind the cargo in-front of it; it is tightly packed, and there is a lot of 'cargo'. If all cargo was transported via. cargo vans, the wasted space in-between vehicles (distance for the same volume of cargo traveling with a semi-truck) traveling down the highway would add up to a HUGE distance. Btw. Lets see it in practice:

- The average distance a Truck Load semi-truck travels down the highway is ~856-miles

- DOT Guidelines suggest a three-second rule for driving behind a vehicle. So... at an average speed of 55 m.p.h. A car is traveling at 81ft/second. At three seconds this is 243 ft behind the car in front of you.

- A normal truck container is 48' (we'll go with 48' but there are 53'), and holds 24 pallets. 12 and 12 (side-by side), from front to back.

- I am not sure how many pallets a cargo van could take, but let's go with 2 (it is probably less than this).

At 2 pallets for each cargo van, we would need 12 cargo vans for the equivalent of shipping 1 semi-truck.

At an average of 55 m.p.h. on the highway, 12 cargo vans would total 2,916 ft of wasted space in-between. That's more than a 1/2 mile

* we, keychainlogistics.com have over 40,000 shipments on our system, right now, that would go on a single semi-truck. Most for today. In calculating needing cargo vans for these loads (sure they very in size, but lets go with a total size of 24 pallets per shipment) it would equal 12 * 40,000 = 480,000 vehicles.

With an average of 2,916 ft of wasted space in-between each truckload worth of shipment (calculation referenced above), we are talking a total of 40,000 (combined 12 cargo vans here) * 2,916 ft = 116,640,000 ft of wasted space which = 22,090.91 miles wasted

1.b) Think about the congestion on highways!

2) Large items needing to be shipped: Equipment, Logs, containers, etc.

3) Freight containers from ports. They are a standard size, and the maritime shipping industry, until 1950's or so did not use containers. The book - The Box: How the Shipping Container Made the World Smaller and the World Economy Bigger - gives an amazing/detailed understanding to the efficiency of containers. Which ultimately you need a semi-truck to transport a container.

4) The time to load palletized goods (something that would likely not fit in a cargo van) is much shorter than loading individual boxes
"Along with not having drones we definitely do not have any drones that would fire any type of weaponry."

Doth protest too much?
maybe, but that might not be any better. I can imagine the consequences for being known for hosting "adult content" where nobody is checking the actor's ID at the door could be way worse than the consequences for hosting stuff the copyright holder doesn't want you to host.
At Saturn's enormous distance, the crescent Earth, with most of North America illuminated by the sun, will span a single pixel and will appear as a pinpoint of light in the depths of space [1, 2]. FYI - The Cassini cameras are 1-megapixel cameras, modes include 1024x1024, 512x512, and 256x256 pixels [3].

I work at an observatory and there was some internal discussion this morning about heading outside to wave. Cool idea, but I don't think you are going to be able to see yourself in the image ;)

Times for anyone in the US to head outside:

U.S. - Hawaii-Aleutian Stand. Time Fri 11:27 AM	11:27	HAST
United States - Alaska Daylight Fri 1:27 PM	13:27 (24/h)	AKDT
U.S. - Pacific Daylight Time	Fri 2:27 PM	14:27	PDT
U.S. - Mountain Daylight Time Fri 3:27 PM	15:27	MDT
U.S. - Central Daylight Time	Fri 4:27 PM	16:27	CDT
U.S. - Eastern Daylight Time	Fri 5:27 PM	17:27	EDT

[1] http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-205_162-57594419/cassini-spacecr...

[2] http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/life-unbounded/2013/06/1...

[3] http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov/faq/FAQRawImages/#q5
prestigious critics Who said anything about the prestige of the critics involved? Just some critics somewhere said they liked it.
I am curious, what methods are anthropologists using to try to date how long they have live on the island?
While I agree that the article too easily discounts the weight of one's talent in achieving success I think the main point to take away is that the need for social conformance heavily skews our own perceptions. Imagine if a Youtube video was to start with 10k fake upvotes, I bet that video would be upvoted by the vast majority of users regardless of whether they liked it or not.
Leap Motion miscalculates shipping, won't let people use it until 22nd
It arrived in the mail this morning, and I was very excited to try it after having waited for about a year since ordering it. There was no driver CD inside, but there was a card that directed me to the setup page on their web site. But... it's just a launch page until the 22nd. Now, three days is not a long time to wait, but it seems wrong that having bought a product from a company, they should dictate to me that I'm not allowed to use it until the date they want to make a big, splashy entrance on. I called them, and they said they had miscalculated the shipping, and the devices had arrived sooner than they expected. They still wouldn't make the driver software available yet, though.
Especially if the House of Lords is deciding the issue!