skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I just went to the Dell website, and you can't even look at their laptops until you identify as a member of an organization. They don't sell to consumers anymore. You have to go to Best Buy.

Ridiculous claim. Visit http://www.dell.com, click on "For Home" on the menu at the top, then in the menu click "laptops & ultrabooks".

That puts you on a page showing consumer laptops you can buy, right there, two clicks from the homepage. Or you can search/filter on ten different fields (including 17" screen size which finds a choice of 34 laptops).
I still use my ThinkPad T400 running Ubuntu when I don't want to be at the desk and need more power than the iPad. I love it!
But the true future proof approach is to not add the code, but write the code you do write in a way that makes it easy to support the expected changes anyway.

E.g. for the pet example: Avoid hard-coding the class name all over the place, so that if you do end up having to add a Pet superclass and add Cat's in the future, you don't need to make changes more than one or two places.

Writing loosely coupled and reusable code is good practice anyway, and also makes testing easier, but if you practice YAGNI it becomes extra essential: You know your code almost certainly will need to change in the future, so you should structure your code accordingly to make extension and refactoring easy.
Keep Your Unsolicited Redesign to Yourself
> So I guess governments/universities/organizations who fund research for scientists and physicists around the world have much to learn from you since you know what is and what cannot be ...

No, not just me -- anyone with the most superficial familiarity with quantum theory knows that virtual particles cannot upset nature's energy bookkeeping.

Also, the author of the PDF is trying to make this sound like a serious research project with governmental support, when it is nothing of the kind -- there are no "governments/universities/organizations" involved in this activity. Here's the dead-giveaway line:

"However, the amount of U.S. research dollars spent in this endeavor is abysmal such that even the simplest experiment cannot be performed."

If that's true, then it is not science. The PDF is filled with this sort of handwaving claim, but without any substantiation, without any specifics.

Here's a classic crackpot alert (not by the author of the PDF, but a quotation from elsewhere):

"This is not pseudo-science but a very serious discipline where very serious research is underway worldwide that range from investigating the Casimir effect, finding new alternative sources of energy, and developing a means of future long-range space travel."

All this without being able to do any experiments, a sure sign of pseudoscience.

And notice the attribution for the above quotation -- "an analyst at Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA)" -- but the article doesn't identify the person, a no-no in any technical or scientific publication.

The PDF contains obvious and glaring falsehoods, example: "While grand plans of harvesting large amounts of energy from the vacuum to propel vehicles through deep space is better suited for science fiction, it may eventually be possible to use small amounts of energy (picowatts) from the vacuum for long-term space travel." This is not how the Casimir Effect works, and the author of this article has no idea what she is talking about.

The Casimir Effect is a force, not a source of energy, and the force is symmetrical -- it can't propel anything in a particular direction, i.e. the net force outside the region of the plates is zero. It is to space travel what blowing on your own sail is to sailing.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero-point_energy

Quote: "Over the years, there have been numerous claims of devices capable of extracting usable zero-point energy. None of the claims have ever been confirmed by the scientific community at large, and most of these claims are dismissed either by default, after third party inspection of such a device or based on disbelief in the viability of a technical design and theoretical corroboration. Current claims to zero-point-energy-based power generation systems are considered pseudoscience by the scientific community at large."

Q.E.D.
I'm having so much fun right now. I'm better if I click rather than use the keys, but that's a cool feature.
not to mention that physics can

1 - (mostly easily and cheaply) run experiments

2 - is described by a stationary distribution, unlike most of economics
The CME had nothing to do with the object.
It's Mercury being lit up by the Sun.
I ran Linux on the desktop for almost 20 years, till recently taking a Rails job where EVERYONE used Macs, and finally bought a MBP. This refrain, "OSX is Unix," seems to be very common, but I'm not feeling it. As I just tweeted today: "How much 'Unix' is in OS X when I can't use CTRL-s to freeze the terminal? Pfft." For something that's supposedly got all the power of Unix, it sure doesn't seem to expose much of it to me.

Most things are pretty locked down. That's not Unix-y. Yes, most defaults are pretty descent, but if you want more flexibility in your environment, there MIGHT be a 3rd-party tool for it, and it may even work, but if it does, it'll cost $20. It's like the world of Windows about a dozen years ago. Maybe in a few more years, this situation will improve.

I miss Linux. And, yeah, I know I can supposedly run it on a MBP, but I know that there will be nothing like the (nearly) flawless power management and screen switching capabilities of just running OS X, so I make do.
"Full-service agencies’ value proposition has been that they can execute a client’s message through every conceivable medium."

This is not very accurate. "Full-service" usually means that an agency both makes the ads and buys media to place them. There are many agencies that do only one or the other, and then there are subsets of each: digital-only shops, ideation-only shops, search-only shops and so on. "Full-service" is not a bad thing, at least in theory, because the fewer agencies you have working on different pieces of the same project, the smaller the chances that the result will be a watered-down compromise between competing organizations. The real reason why big agencies are big -- which is what I think OP is really arguing against -- and will stay big is scale. A national retail chain will produce thousands of banners a year, dozens of TV commercials with dozens of regional variations, hundreds of radio spots, thousands of catalog images and pieces of copy. A single unit of ad output may require input from dozens of people. The OP has an idealized model of the business that ad agencies are in, but creative ideation is only one line item in an advertising budget.
"What port does ping work over?"
I think that you may be vastly overestimating the number of web and mobile app developers. They're still a relatively small proportion of all software developers.

While web developers may be more vocal and have more content on the web (this isn't unexpected, since they are web developers, after all), you shouldn't forget about the numerous other developers out there. They're working on systems software, embedded software, industrial control software, accounting and billing software, various other kinds of business software, scientific software, and so forth.

These days, these kinds of developers generally use Windows or Linux systems, running on non-Mac PC hardware of some sort. And there are a whole lot of these developers.
Games perhaps?
I hate Microsoft, but... there are crappy frameworks in Java-land, too. I don't know that Oracle is going to do any better with future Java frameworks.
what did you feel while reading this?
The germans are the economic titans of the EU, and from the coverage I've seen the population (both young and old) have seemed pretty outraged by the NSA stuff. I don't think this'll translate into EU policy, or even German policy very quickly, but I do think it'll turn into a lot more support for more liberal parties, and more anti-American parties, which could swing Germany, and possibly the EU.
NUS and Berkeley have both the similar number of students ~30,000. Berkeley might be good for getting close to the users, but NUS would be better if one wants to remain stealthy or study adoption a la Google Fiber not being in California. Still you are probably right since there doesn't seem to be any asians on the team. If it's Berkeley, Marty Nemko should be involved, but can't find clues to that yet, although the original post contains two smoking guns, methinks.
Neither is paying $1000 (from the article) a prerequisite for it.

If you like the experience of OS X then buying MacBook is completely justified choice. Buying one just to install another OS on it is pure stupidity - you could have the same hardware for much cheaper from other vendors.
Javascript is in a similar situation with node.js ported to a Cortex-M3 ARM microcontroller (similar to the Due) http://technical.io/

I've been working off and on porting the go runtime to a microcontroller, but still finicking with segmented stack support.
You shouldn't be looking for bargains for your developer hardware. You should pay for what you want, not just for what you need. You spend a lot of time using this for your daily tasks, and it's worth it.
▶ URGENT Your GOVERMENT INTEND TO START NUCLEAR WAR THEN HIDE HERE,
The Thinkpad 701 series needs to be brought back somehow. It was ahead of it's time, including the butterfly keyboard. The T42 was my next step and probably most productive during it's time. The only thing we need to do is apply today's battery technology to those older laptops and call it a day ...
They do take a bunch of water trucks out there and spray down the dust to "harden" the runway before the event, so it should be marginally better than landing on bare desert.

If you're interested flying out there contact some pilots who go yearly and they'll give you the run-down :)
Are those your own apps?

If so how did you guys get the audio to play in sync across devices?

We've been trying to figure that out.
The author mentioned using "Chromium with Vimium". For someone wanting easy keyboard shortcuts (like Vim) for a browser, I'd recommend luakit.

It's a webkit based browser, scriptable (or written with?) lua, along with vim style navigation (eg, ":open www.google.com" to go to google).

afaik, it's also available in the arch core (or extra possibly) repositorys, which means no fiddling about with the aur! (good news)
I skimmed over the Google+ page for "Google Ideas"[0] and it was interesting to see how many of the projects they are working on relate to current world events, actions in the Middle East, "terrorism", and such... all under the premise of analyzing "big data".

I wonder who else, besides Google, has "big data" that they'd like to analyze...
Mythical man month outlines why 14 hour days are often better than the alternatives.
Honest question here: Why would anyone ever think OS X has "world-class interface design"?

It's missing basic interface features that have been bog standard in Ubuntu/Windows for years, like any sort of proper window management. Hell, the maximize button actually doesn't work- it has such inconsistent use that you have almost no hope of actually getting what you want out of it. To get even decent window management, you have to buy software off of the app store.

Then, you have the fact taht you still functionally have a folder-based OS, which feels a greater need to present me with buttons to alter the view of a given folder, how icons are arranged, etc- all useful things no doubt, but things you don't change on a per-folder basis that often- while literally not having an "up one level" button. At all. You either have to know the keyboard shortcut, or you have to go to the Go menu. The back button isn't always dependable for this interaction(especially if the finder was just opened), so of course this just screws the whole pooch.

Seriously, the most I can get anyone to offer as to what makes OS X such a great operating system, is that it's Unix with no driver problems. If that's the most we can claim, can we stop acting like the interface design is halfway decent? Windows Vista had better interface design than this. That's just sad.
Mattress Facts: Memory Foam Mattress Reviews
Except YouTube hasn't solved the content problem. Monetization is a complete afterthought here. Tarantino doesn't sit down and write a movie with the goal of maximizing revenue. If you have great content, the money will follow.

The problem with YouTube's content is almost all of it is either completely forgettable, not brand safe, or just plain crappy. Ask yourself if you would pay $5/mo for access to YouTube's content. The big brands hardly want to be seen next to "cute cat videos" which is exactly why YouTube is heavily moving to have more premium content. Which connects back to the OP, its not solely about the technology - its about creating great narratives using this new medium.

Hollywood isn't about raw attention. Facebook, Google Search, News, Banner Ads, and Billboards are all about selling ads through raw attention. At the end of the day however, you wouldn't pay to use Facebook, you wouldn't pay to look at Billboards, and as we have found recently, people don't want to pay for news. Hollywood and Premium Content are about engagement. Its about creating an itch, and generating hype. You "need" to watch the next episode, you "need" to watch that next Spielberg film, you "need" to see Scarlett Johansson. That is the biggest difference Hollywood and YouTube. No one is tripping over themselves, or camping out to watch a YouTube video.

Lastly, you can now see how this problem cannot be solved solely with technology. How do you quantify the difference between a Spielberg film and a cat video?
Great story, but not really tech related
ARM support, sweet! This is one of the advantages of just using llvm for code-gen -- architectures just work right out of the box, and the library handles all of the specifics.

I think this is a good example of what the llvm code generation libraries enable (as opposed to gcc).

(In addition to being a pretty cool project on it's own!)
Revenue and Market Cap aren't comparable. I don't know where the figure of $65 billion is from, but Disney alone has a turnover of $45 billion, so I suspect it is an order of magnitude off the total hollywood economic value - which is worth vastly more than the box office total.

To compare directly, Facebook received $2.5bn in funding, last year turned over $5bn and made loss of $0.5bn. Disney received no funding, turned over almost $45bn and a profit of $9bn (Making it roughly as profitable as Google).

Not to mention if you couldn't liquidate Facebook if you tried, but say you defied economics and did - you couldn't buy even a single one of the top Hollywood studios with the proceeds - their market caps are all much larger than Facebook. It wouldn't even make a scratch in the industry, let alone buy it out and shut it down.

Saying there isn't enough money in Hollywood for VC's to bother with is a bit like saying there isn't enough money in oil. This is an industry that will happily dump half a billion into a single film and take cash write-downs that would make VCs shudder. Hell, lots of the hollywood companies OWN VC funds.
> Even if you can't swap out the entire windowing system, you can certainly go ahead and install Arch or any other distro.

What's that got to do with

> Are we still talking about how OS X doesn't give you "full control over the system?"

?
Not completely. Incognito mode is still useful so that when your boss sits next to you, and you start typing words in the browser/search bar, it doesn't offer "interesting" autocompletion based on browsing history.
> The T42’s touchpad is hardly usable for productivity. Disappointingly, so is the iconic red nub.

I agree the touchpad leaves much to be desired, but I've found the nub to be fantastic. With one index finger on the nub, and two thumbs on the mouse buttons, my hands never leave the keyboard.
I agree with the price concern around Macs. That's why I let my employer buy one for me and take it home for night/weekend hacking. A $3000 investment by my employer pays for itself in terms of my productivity increase in what, two months? Win-win. One feature I'll never go without again? SSD.
> Or maybe I put quotes around it because I don't agree with that assertion and it's a quote from the article...

Well, that's unfortunate, because you are wrong. You don't have full control over the system. It's not a matter of debate. You don't. You simply don't. There are elements that you cannot control in OS X. That are closed source.

I mean, maybe you are a developer for Apple. I don't know. And maybe you do have access to the source code. But the average? No.

> Can you give me an example? I'm genuinely curious...

Proper full screen support on multiple monitors. It should finally be fixed in Mavericks. That being said, the window management is still fairly weak compared to what I implemented years ago.

(I forget the WM I was using at the time, but it wasn't properly handling full screen support in a multi-head environment. I patched it, as well as added some handling for allowing easy movement of FS windows to other screens via key-board shortcuts.)

> Yet the author certainly could get a MBA,

The author is not the only web developer out there. So I don't see how that matters.
That's exactly how I do it for my Node programs. Any service that I want to have 100% is using the cluster module, resulting in multiple processes listening to the same port. When I want to update, I replace the files and kill the processes one by one.
I still don't understand what stealth companies are all about (I mean the premise of "stealth").

If they say, we're working on X field with some Y tech, but can't discuss details, that's whole 'nother story. With some of these I have no idea what the company is, what it does, why it exists and even why anyone would use them.

If they want to avoid tipping competitors, there better ways of doing that.

I don't know. The whole thing seems silly.
Turns out it's in arch community.

Note:
AUR isn't really that bad, as long as you install a package manager that handles it (like yaourt).
Here's a clarification from the official Burning Man blog:

[Note: It was erroneously reported on Boing Boing that BRC won a lawsuit against BLM this year and that BLM may be retaliating by writing more citations in Black Rock City. For the record, BRC was not in a lawsuit with BLM this year. There is an ongoing lawsuit with Pershing County. More information about that can be found at www.brcvpc.com. The information about retaliation is unfounded.]

http://blog.burningman.com/2013/08/building-brc/law-enforcem...
Yup in 1983. Thanks to both of them. Petrov is still alive, so you can send him a Hallmark card if you're over 30 and glad to be alive.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanislav_Petrov
HFT and the Nasdaq outage
> Even if you can't swap out the entire windowing system

And yet you believe that you have full control over the [OS X] system?

Maybe you definition of "full" differs from mine?
> Also, the author of the PDF is trying to make this sound like a serious research project with governmental support, when it is nothing of the kind -- there are no "governments/universities/organizations"…

What about on page 4?:

"(U) Brazil, perhaps the most surprising entry on the publications chart, conducts research into
measurements of Casimir force between different types of conducting plates that have varying
designs. It is noteworthy that many of the researchers working in and with Brazil are Russian or
originally from Russia. The Brazilian research also mirrors Russian research (i.e., studying the
Casimir force using different setups of conducting plates). Both Brazil and Russia appear to be
focused, at a basic-science level, on maximizing the energy obtainable from the Casimir force. A.N.
Petrosyan, of the Moscow Engineering Physics Institute, and Yu.E. Lozovik, of the Institute of
Spectroscopy of Russian Academy of Science, are conducting research into ZPE to create massless
particles in a cavity, but the value of this research is questionable.
(U) Research in France and a collaborative effort between the United Kingdom (UK) and Iran
comprise two of the most promising recent ventures in ZPE, as it pertains to MEMS and NEMS. The
French are researching the possibilities of using the Casimir force to drive nanoscale ratchets in the
hope of creating novel contactless translational actuation for NEMS or to move tiny objects in a liquid.
The UK-Iran effort has similar goals and focuses on a rack-and-pinion powered by Casimir forces to
enable contactless translation to avoid wear of the components. This work has demonstrated devices
that hold up to high velocities and is a good example of valuable work in ZPE for use in practical
applications.
(U) Germany has solid research programs in theoretical calculations, modeling, and experimental
measurements of Casimir forces in various conducting-plate and cavity configurations. Germany's
research appears aimed more at basic science than in engineering for applications.
(U) India is studying the use of the Casimir effect for MEMS devices, such as calculations of effects
for different hypothetical designs, but the work is more theoretical than experimental or for practical"

>And notice the attribution for the above quotation -- "an analyst at Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA)" -- but the article doesn't identify the person, a no-no in any technical or scientific publication.

To me it doesn't seem like a technical or scientific publication at all, just reporting on what is going on in the field and who's doing research, where the contact information for the people that composed/involved is listed at the end of the PDF (page 7-8). The report is even cited in the wikipedia article you quote.
Definitely! This is really just a demo, so I can see how people are complaining that it "doesn't really do anything." But that shows such a startling lack of vision and imagination. We are supposed to see the potential in new tech and then push it further. Or at least, that's how I see myself. Cranks and nay-sayers have no business in this industry, in my not-so-humble opinion.

HTML was originally a document, but today we've stretched it to do so much. And that's great! There's no need to draw a line around fancy webgl stuff. Your whole page can twist and flow and sparkle and whatever. You can make styling prettier sure but also make you content deeper. It will take time work out the kinks but hey, it's an adventure! That's pretty cool! Boring is never good. And there will be those with poor taste no matter the medium. This isn't a fad and it isn't superficial. This can totally change our experience on the web. Why wouldn't you want to take advantage of such cool stuff?
Yes switching workspaces is such a pain on OSX... come on, you just swipe with your fingers. Sure you can do pretty much the same on any linux distro, but that doesn't mean it is not 'seamless' in OSX.

We can all agree that windows is just not suited for Rails development, but whatever floats your boat is fine of course. I like crunchbang linux a lot, it is very fast and makes you feel smart. But when it comes to something I have to make my living on, I'd rather go with something that is 1. stable 2. has a solid support in terms of applications (photoshop, sketch, etc) actually begin built for it. And, for now, that means I'd rather work in OSX and on a Mac.

Then again, nobody cares.
I have one of these thinkpads and another t61p which I am using to serve my Exchange 2010 instance.

You can't kill these things, they will probably out live me.
Hey, that is my University :), great surprise.
He means games written in Rust, not in html5. If someone would work on windows support for Rust, then both Servo and other rust projects, like games potentially could run on Windows.