skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It may surprise younger technologists to learn that an entire generation of personal computers used ordinary audio equipment for storage. A cassette recorder would be used to read and write digital data, and one's archive of mass storage consisted of a pile of cassette tapes.

Among the downsides (there were many) was the fact that a huge amount of time was required to read and write a few tens of kilobytes of data.

I can remember begging Steve Jobs to relent and give me one of the new, rather expensive disk drives under development at Apple, so my work on Apple Writer would be sped up by perhaps ten times compared to the older storage methods.

In this image of my system from about 1979 --

http://i.imgur.com/CjoRH.jpg

-- one can see two of the new storage devices -- floppy disk drives sitting on my Apple II -- and their immediate predecessor located at left center, a cassette recorder/player as a backup. Each floppy disk was able to contain 140 kilobytes of data. The new drives constituted a breakthrough in storage density and read/write time -- about five minutes to read or write a full disk of data.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disk_II

One of these drives and its controller card cost US$595.00 in 1978, equivalent to $2130.00 in today's dollars.
Is there any way to protect backups from being deleted?
ServerA shouldn't be allowed to destroy ServerB's backups.
And preferably it shouldn't be allowed to destroy it's own backups (bad backup script or evil attacker trying to delete eevrything).
Is it just me, or has the entire Open Source/Free Software movement(s) been replaced by simple proprietary tools "in beta" pushed by profiteering young coders looking to start a micro-business oriented towards their peers? The great majority of these tools could be [and often are] written in a weekend, which is why it confuses me they'd be trying to sell it to someone.

As soon as I see a shiny, polished web page with lots of highlights and no details, I now assume it's a shill for money without any meaningful content. I'm right more often than not. Oh, startup culture!
Sounds like you're a terrible person on Facebook. I'll assume you're not a terrible person and maybe you can adopt some of my practices if you think they're useful to you:

- Don't connect with professional contacts on Facebook. If you do, use Security groups to not let them see anything. Same for easily-offended family members...

- If you're sick of someone's posts you can hide them from your timeline without de-friending them from the context menu. A well curated timeline is essential to having a good signal-noise ratio.

- Do you really want to get laid by girls who check out your Facebook profile for the proper ratio of girls:guys in your photos? Sounds like you'd rather get laid by women who don't care, figure out where they are and hang out there. Then again I'm a gay man in an open/poly relationship so YMMV.

- You can control who sees your posts as well, this can be as fine-grained as you want with Security groups. Personally, I just have one group that can see everything, and everyone else (cow-orkers, distant relatives, Mom) gets nothing.

- I Like stuff even from people I don't really like because hey cool post! If someone is neurotic enough to look through who Like'd what I probably don't reall ycare what they have to say.

- Yeah, ads suck.
I think you missed the point - there should be no frequency. Data should just "be".
Yes "adverse" consequences always occur in countries we don't understand and don't particularly care about, no matter what awful things we do to them. (Next door in Iran, how did that Mosaddegh coup turn out?) The only real argument is over how much wealth will be transferred to our military-industrial complex, and how many Senators will get to go on another junket as a result? On those questions, I vote "less" and "fewer".
I've heard a lot of complaints against flat mentioning novice users specifically and I have 2 things to say to that in regards to iOS7:

1) It's a tool people use daily that they'll get used to quickly, I don't mind if new users have a slightly higher learning curve (in theory, I don't concede that it's actually the case here).

2) Anecdotally it seems to not be difficult to figure out. My 3y/o has had no additional trouble navigating my iphone/ipad since I upgraded to iOS7. Neither has my wife or my 4y/o.
The NeXT deal made perfect sense. Copland, Apple's internal effort at making a next-generation OS, had failed, and they needed to acquire a pre-baked operating system. Speculation at the time had them acquiring BeOS, but they went with NeXT instead, and the rest is history.
One suggestion would be to use timeouts to add a delay to the input event handler, so it would wait until the typing has stopped for a while rather than recompiling on every key press. That's just a line or two of extra js and should make the auto updating vastly more usable.
wow, that's quite hard :)
This is retarded. They are holding up their kids development to make a point; especially the older one. So while his classmates are whizzing around the internet, this kid has to work that much harder...

If they want to do this correctly, they should be providing dial-up and a 133MHZ computer for their 5 year old (they probably have an AOL cd kicking around too; lord knows they still sell their dial-up).

...I'm so pissed off I can't even put together a proper response to this.

The fact of the matter is that if your kids aren't looking up from their iphones, that's a parenting issue, not a technology one.
How to make people believe the claims in your resume
RIP R.H. Coase and RIP the firm
Think Distributed Podcast - Episode 2: Causality
Read and learn young grasshopper: https://www.facebook.com/note.php?note_id=389414033919
Bullying, the Corporate Veil, and the Smell of Raw Power
Wow this is hard. Wish there was a level option (beginner, intermediate, advanced or something). I have never heard of Pike or Whenever, plus never seen Algol 8 or APL. I spent ten minutes trying to find one that I recognized.
"It is known." Yea im aware of that... The comment I was replying to gave the impression that it was the USG specifically doing the funding.
Such an argument would be rich coming from someone building a solution on Ruby. Indeed, such arguments essentially limit your technology choices to Oracle, SQL Server, or DB2, with an app layer built on .NET or J2EE.
I have found SQL to be cumbersome for expressing temporal relationships, eg find all the event As that happen within one week of event B. There's not necessarily a data schema link between the table for event A and the table for event B.

how does htsql do with this?
Yes.

For example, Microsoft is permanently enjoined from restricting OEM crapware preloads. OEMs are allowed to preload whatever they wish on top of Windows.

However, it's perfectly fine for Microsoft to bundle an app store -- so long as an OEM is also allowed to load its own app store. (As Lenovo is doing.)

As for Windows RT and Windows Phone, Microsoft can do anything it wants. When the news came out that Windows RT would only allow Internet Explorer and would only allow programs to be loaded through the app store, the EU competition commissioner said in an interview that he saw nothing wrong with it.

That's because the antitrust case defined Microsoft's monopoly to be over x86 operating systems. Windows RT and Windows Phone run on ARM. What's more, Windows RT and Windows Phone do not have anywhere close to a monopoly of the tablet or smartphone markets.

There may be some tying issues, but branding is not a form of tying.
This is one of the most beautiful theme I've come across, and the one I am currently using:

https://github.com/jasonm23/emacs-purple-haze-theme
-1. As an Indian, I feel offended by your (implicit) expectation that others should censor themselves because of your arbitrary ideas about what's insensitive and/or offensive.
The score thing seems to be broken though. Clicking on forfeit doesn't seem to affect it
Is there a configure script or cmake or something? It looks like you might have to do something before `make all`
Glad to see that semantic HTML is being promoted here. There are a lot of programmers who think doing everything in <div>'s and <table>'s is "just fine".
Microsoft also used offshore money to buy Skype.
It isn't clear to me why the author is angry here but it comes across that way :-)

His thesis though, that something forced this move, is pretty credible. And the choices being (in order of likelyhood)

1) Nokia filing for bankruptcy - this one clocks up as being most likely for me

2) Someone else was going to buy them - I wondered about this with Apple's Maps fiasco, they had much better maps than Apple did, although I don't think Nokia would go for a breakup with partial acquisition.

3) Nokia switching to Android - this one I hear from people who wish it were true, but haven't seen much from Nokia on it.

Nokia has clearly been hurting for a while. Small flashes of excellence in an otherwise confused consumer experience. They also showed that you could build a competitive experience with Microsoft's phone product but it hasn't been helped by Microsoft's inability to get the developer traction it wanted.

Time will tell if it was able to change the path of Nokia and Microsoft for the better.
The starter packages like prelude and emacs-starter-kit are more like a learning to walk with a crutch when you have perfectly working legs. They offer an easy way to start but once you start using them you'll find it hard to do it the normal way (like when you need to modify your emacs config or add some new elisp that isn't included).

It is better just to start emacs do C-h t and start learning, then add and configure when needed. You'll need to start out rough but after a while you'll learn how emacs works and be a better emacs user because of it.

Though if you don't invest in emacs and just need it to finish your thesis or because a professor won't let you use anything else then the starter kits could be fine as they are pre-configured.
Well, the whole city was the same. It wasn't just his parents. And any other adult of the same age I've asked has described similar experiences.

Now I see daycare children on leashes in Montreal. Quite often. That didn't happen in the 1950s.

This isn't something' easy to quantify, unfortunately.
You have to guess right for it to go on, otherwise forfeit.

A lot of similar looking languages easily tripped me up, I found I had to pay much closer attention to some of the definition sections to differentiate
You can enter accented characters into emacs by hitting M-x 8:

M-x 8 ` e -> è
M-x 8 / a -> å
M-x 8 E -> €

The number of these binds does not cover all of unicode, but it's surprisingly high nonetheless. If your desired character does not have a direct bind like that, or you just can't find one (C-h b lists them), you can insert a character by hitting M-x 8 RET and then typing its name:

M-x 8 RET "Em dash" -> —
M-x 8 RET "Hebrew letter double vav" -> װ

Tab completion works for these, of course.

[edit] I just saw the comment where you're more specific about what you're looking for. This isn't it, but having gotten a reply already, I don't want to delete this comment. It won't help you, but maybe it will others :P
You know Emacs has faithfully implemented Vim right? Check out emacs evil-mode.
GDR3 brings Screen Rotation lock and Windows Phone is a different beast than RT. They get quarterly updates.
Ask HN: Does anybody know what happened to memrise.com
For those of you that are familiar with the excellent vocabulary enhancing service Memrise, featured quite a few times here on HN, does anybody know why it is no longer available. Upon accessing their website (memrise.com) one gets redirected to a "Domain name expired on Sep 2" page.
Here Come The New iPhones: Apple Announces September 10 Event
A New Kind of Mafia in Montreal? How Startup CEOs are Playing the Angel Game
(I deleted my comment because clicking the big obvious question mark answered my questions. Doesn't mean I didn't find it difficult to use though.)
Save Locky's Dad
Half of them look like C with one additional keyword!
Yep, I like the idea, but as the article points out it can potentially cause an employer to look at you differently because you paid to be placed there. At the same time it's not different from paying for advertising so I guess it's all about how you look at it.
Hardly. Your backend needs to support both your templating language and whatever you're using to populate those templates. Which means either adding support for JavaScript to your backend or creating and maintaining redundant code.

Meanwhile your backend could be Python, Ruby, whatever and can easily inline the initial chunk of JSON without needing support for any of the frontend technologies doing the actual template rendering (such as Handlebars+Backbone for example).

So far as still needing to wait for JavaScript to download it becomes a matter of how the ROI works out for one's particular use case. Let's say simply inlining the JSON for the initial content narrows that 'time to initial content' gap to a few hundred milliseconds. Is removing that gap still a worthy return on your investment?
If you don't like that report you can check out two others that are provided by sources that most would describe as "rabidly pro-Apple". The trend is pretty clear and has been for a while so I'm not sure why everyone seems so suprised by this. Though given Apple's yearly cycle which has a slump in Q3 and a big spike in Q4 they may briefly reclaim the crown in Q4 if their next launch does well.

Strategy Analytics: http://bgr.com/2013/07/26/samsung-smartphone-profits-q2-2013...

Canaccord Genuity: http://appleinsider.com/articles/13/07/31/apple-takes-53-of-...

Asymco: http://www.asymco.com/2013/08/21/amp-index-update/

They're all for the quarter that ended two months ago and say (Samsung-Apple) 53%-47%, 50-53% and 43%-57% respectively and they were all at more like 15-80% two years ago.
I just replied to kordless' post.

Thank you for the apology - it does mean a lot, given the circumstances. I saw the issue on GitHub and I am following it. As I mentioned in the other post, I sincerely hope (and would like to believe) that this wasn't intentional.

Please understand that, as a consumer and a newbie developer, I will (kinda) hold you guys to high standards. A large part of my learning process involves 'watching' you guys make stuff, which I eventually try to emulate.

Therefore, when something like this happens, it is quite unnerving. I hope you understand that, I am not holding a grudge; but merely being cautious.
The big list of Devops Resources (updated often)
> Windows software in general is designed on the assumption that screen geometry will not change constantly every time you tap.

Maybe that's an indication that stock Windows as a tablet OS is a mismatch. When you have to compromise the user experience to support legacy software (or any non-tablet software), then maybe that's a bad sign. Or at least a sign for where Microsoft's priorities lie. When you're competing against slick iPads and Android tablets, that you don't want to compromise the user experience for backwards compatibility.

Now, if you aren't competing against iOS/Android [1], then maybe you can make that choice. But, as least for the author, that was the comparison.

[1] Which I'd argue they shouldn't be...
Years later, I am still learning new things about emacs regularly.
This is really bad advice.

He's suggesting that we make our CSS selectors more complex while simplifying our HTML to make it more semantic.

While semantic HTML is a nice idea, it's not worth doing at the expense of well, basically anything else. It doesn't affect search engine ranking and there are easier ways to support assistive technologies (ARIA).

Making your selectors more complex comes with a great cost. Suddenly changes that would normally be simple cause cascading changes throughout your stylesheet and document because CSS is not very modular and complex selectors tightly couple multiple rules to your document structure.

This isn't an opinion or a matter of style. It is a simple, fundamental fact of computer science: that increasing coupling tends to make maintainability harder due to the number of cascading changes since multiple components depend on one another. And advocating Heydon Pickering's technique tightly couples your selectors to your particular document structure. Worse, it does so implicitly -- if you at least use class selectors this coupling is explicit and easier to reason about.

If he instead advocated something like SMACSS you'd have much more maintainable code.
I second this. The author provided a comparison between the two system anyway. Though I think he is more likely talking about this topic from an Android user's perspective. I wrote my thoughts regarding iOS 7's UX almost 2 months ago: http://mattzlw.wordpress.com/2013/07/24/ios-7-beta-ux-thinki...
Moreover, flat itself is just a name we call on graphic design. It is just one of many elements of UX design. Everything starts from a bar with a large screen on our palms.
Finally he started to hit my hand with a ruler when I would lift it up.

The Pai Mei school of teaching. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fCbf4DjlHuM#t=0m31s
Cookiecutter - A CLI for creating projects from project templates.
yes, firmware upgrading has a chance it will brick the phone. That didn't stop me doing it 10 times, after the nerves of the 1st time go away it's easy.

What do you mean "branched" version of Ace? nothing comes up on google :s
Effortless Design - RandomDesigner.js
As a parent of young kids, I can attest that many parents in my peer group are constantly reminding their kids not to be careful NOT due to a fear of risk -- but rather from wanting to avoid an injury that's going inconvenience everyone.

If your child crashes his bike and gets a bloody knee on the playground, your relaxing afternoon at the park is most likely over and now you have a crying child, bloody clothes, a damaged bike wheel, and potentially another child who is now screaming because you have to leave the park to go find bandages. If your child breaks her arm, it's even worse -- off to the hospital you go, followed by a child who can't take a bath or get dressed by herself for a month.

Do some parents take this to an extreme and deny their kids some fun? Sure. But a lot of times, it's just about trying to maintain a level of mindfulness so that everyone can continue having fun for the afternoon.
Flagging this post; he apparently totally got things wrong.

Let's hope an erudite and correct analysis gets posted sometime.
It's good to see some of the first findings out from new, more research-based studies of primary and secondary education in the United States.

"The findings could be transformative, researchers say. For example, one conclusion from the new research is that the choice of instructional materials — textbooks, curriculum guides, homework, quizzes — can affect achievement as profoundly as teachers themselves; a poor choice of materials is at least as bad as a terrible teacher, and a good choice can help offset a bad teacher’s deficiencies."

The idea that instructional materials are important is intuitive to a lot of homeschooling families who homeschool so that their children can receive more academic challenge. (I know a large support network of such families here in Minnesota, and have online interaction with a national network of such families, who met one another through the Young Scholars program[1] of the Davidson Institute for Talent Development.) Certainly, our oldest son far exceeds in mathematics achievement what either of his two parents can provide in mathematics teaching, but we used good programs as homeschooling parents to start him out in his mathematics instruction. We begin with Miquon Math[2], then transition to the Singapore Primary Mathematics series[3], then to a mixture of EPGY online mathematics[4], ALEKS[5], Khan Academy[6], the Art of Problem Solving[7], and other programs. There is probably a lot of "ceiling" above what is currently achieved by instruction in United States K-12 schools that could be more closely approached if only United States schools used better instructional materials.

[1] http://www.davidsongifted.org/youngscholars/

[2] http://miquonmath.com/

[3] http://www.singaporemath.com/Primary_Mathematics_Stds_Ed_s/1...

[4] http://ecae.net/epgy/

[5] http://www.aleks.com/

[6] https://www.khanacademy.org/

[7] http://www.artofproblemsolving.com/School/index.php?
>Constant reputation management. If I post anything, I need to be vigilant for a few days to make sure no stupid highschool friends post anything.

Now that I've added my parents/grandparents on Facebook (Why did I do that?) I'm constantly doing this. I have college buddies that will post the most immature things on my status/wall.
Oh that's a great idea, very educational and I'd love reading stuff like that while playing this game!

(Especially since you have to wait quite a bit before the next sample loads. Which, as some others have pointed out, shouldn't have to be that slow. How many minutes of audio does this game have in total? I think using a modern codec (say OGG or AAC, not MP3) you could go with a pretty low bitrate (VBR), would it be feasible to just load all the clips in one chunk and play slices of that?)

Another idea for extra information: show on a world/continent map where this language is spoken. I expected to do really bad at this game since I am awfully bad at geography. But it turns out I'm doing pretty good (15/15, still got 3 lives, but I'm taking a break), since I'm pretty good with language I guess (even though I only speak NL/EN/DE and a bit FR), I know enough about others to make an educated guess. And of course you don't need to know where something is to guess the language :) Seriously, ask me to point those places on a map and I'd fail miserably--hence showing the location(s) where it's spoken would be a welcome training for me :)

To the maker of this game: great work! Love it!
This is an experiment with genetic algorithms, and real-time user choices which replaces the fitness function.
Going through comments, Guys don't u think INDIA has bigger things to think for ?
It's all text, you can copy paste it into notepad or something. Or just override the styling on the page.
GNU Linux-libre
Interview With The Founders Of Hubski
I'm personally bothered that I haven't seen Mandarin, even though I've seen Cantonese a few times. :P
The Surface sums up for me why Microsoft is a disappointment

Completely agree. Microsoft can't win for losing. They have some great products and the cash to really make a dent, then they completely flub the opportunity. I feel like they're trying to cast too wide of a net and in doing so miss the important details.

They have almost the polar opposite approach of Apple, who will happily give up features in order to have other features work solidly (in my opinion). A former boss of mine once said that users will forgive a lack of features, but not a lack of stability/usability. I agree with that. I'd rather have a limited set of features that WORK than a larger set of features that "sort of" work. I don't know if this comes from Microsoft's background of working with corporate partners (and delivery dates are important to fulfill a contract, bugs or not) or what.