skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This is really great. I love any kind of "how it is made" type series and given how difficult it is to promote an app, this is a really good idea.

Has anyone else done this sort of thing to much success?
It's not just the US government that has crazy, weird, inefficient technology. I'd be surprised if every government wasn't like this. The biggest IT failure in the world was the UK's attempt at healthcare computing that cost 12Bn GBP and didn't deliver a functioning system.

I work as a contractor for the Australian government. I personally know of multiple project failures in the 10s of millions of AUD range and a few in the hundreds of millions. These stories don't even make the news.

I've worked at small companies, research institutes, universities and now in government. I've not worked big corporate but have heard that it is similar, although more efficient than government. Size means you get less feedback on what is really useful.

Government fundamentally lacks feedback on what really matters. In the US the department of health cannot be driven out of business by another department that does what is important 10% better. In private industry that discipline and feedback makes things work.

If you build a widget X and it isn't something that people want you go under. That doesn't happen in government. If you build a donkey but it's the donkey they paid for it could be in service for 20 years.

It's hard to see how to make it all better. Perhaps trying to keep components small and having multiple groups build them and select the best might help. Then at least 2+ groups would have to compete to build a better system.
While I like their opposition to Flash[1], IMO you will eventually just end up more advanced HTML ads that are harder to detect.

[1] primarily because there are no viable competing implementations to what Adobe puts out
AirParrot has done this for a while. Nice additional feature not included in Mavericks: you can send just one specific application window to the appletv.
I would be just happy if it would be possible to upgrade, but I've tried 3 times the downloading keep crashing. I don't understand why they just don't make it so the updates would roll out on bittorrent like network. Its 5.29GB after all and every time it stops I would have like 1.6 - 3GB downloaded. And that is not to mention the download speeds that are just awful right now...
> The start-up also gets data on 75 million patients’ health conditions and prescriptions, which it de-identifies and then makes available to analysts, pharma companies, and market research types, who also pay.

How the hell is this allowed?

Has anyone tried to de-de-identify the data?
They also did not list the 8-core configuration pricing. There appear to be a current total of 4 available core configurations:

1: 4-core 3.7GHz for $2,999

2: 6-core 3.5GHz for $3,999

3: 8-core 3.0GHz for ?

4: 12-core 2.7GHz for ?
look at you make me hate my job so much! :@
Have a look at what's happening in the UK:

https://www.gov.uk/transformation
(fully responsive design pages together with new service backends delivered with Agile / Scrum)

and the teams doing it: http://digital.cabinetoffice.gov.uk/
(they are hiring more than a dozen people in the moment)
I think you just strawmanned his argument...
Xeon E3s have half the memory bandwidth, only 40% of the peripheral bandwidth, and at best 80% of the cache of the low-end E5s. A Xeon E3 is just a consumer CPU with ECC support. A Xeon E5 is a pro part.
They have. It's called when the 2014 Mac Pro model ships the 2013 one will be marked down to about that price.
Probably setting the stage for the iPad Pro: 12" screen, triple linear pixel density of the original (3072 X 2304), A7X or A8 chip, comes with optional keyboard/battery cover/case, first or second quarter 2014. (I can dream, can't I).
Um, no. According to blockchain.info and this $200 price, there are less than $2.5 billion worth of bitcoins in circulation, total. The idea that this would somehow serve as a hedge against an economy a thousand times larger is laughable.
I don't case my Mini, and the thin-ness versus a regular iPad is a huge difference when using it as a tablet.
Given how Retina and Lightning went through similar staggered rollouts, I think this is probably just "The Apple Way" to introduce new tech across product lines.
Not to mention that one of the main arguments for using Lisp was "Lisp programs are less buggy than C programs". That's assuming that you trust your Lisp implementation. All implementing it in Common Lisp does is move some of the potential bugs from the kernel to the Lisp implementation.
Alternately, the new one is indistinguishably lighter / thinner so they tacked on "air" to make it more obvious
Lets pretend paper is the leading technology for communication. The leader in the paper industry thinks you should write/draw with your finger. You have ten of them.

But, some people, need more precision than a human finger allows. They use an object with a finer point than our fingers. But, the rest of us are okay with just finger painting. The paper was designed to be large enough for fingers to use.

It would be nice to sometimes use a different input method on paper when the finger won't cut it. I see nothing wrong with having more than one input method. There is no right or wrong way.
"What often happens when you have these big requirements up front, is the people who are specifying the product are afraid of not getting all their ideas in, so they overscope the project. And then the development team is on the hook for delivering everything, not just the essential elements."

Isn't this the essence of the critique, though? Its not the lack of iteration, but the logic of the spec-formation.

To put this another way, you are right that it has nothing to do with the waterfall model per se. But it has everything to do with accepting the same set of behavioural assumptions. Namely, that the people who spec the model have perfect foresight regarding the spec itself.

What needs to be accepted is "incomplete spec". The problem with this is then the hold-up problem. you get held to ransom to fill in the incompletions. So what is really needed is a capability to execute this more in-house. This would prevent the re-negotiation of the economics (the hold up), because the project manager would just execute properly, directing resources (already paid for) through fiat rather by then re-negotiating vs a modified spec.

One problem with this is accountability. There would need to be more accountability, because execution of the incomplete spec will not be the same as farming responsibility for the spec out to a third party vendor.

Project managers need to get used to the idea of working intensely with a development team rather than asking for a specific thing and then walking away
I haven't used any Apple machine since 2004. Some HN'ers like Apple, so I've been kind of interested to see what Apple machines do that PC's don't. But I don't want to pay premium prices for iGoods.

Does this mean I can run the new OS in a VM to check out the Apple ecosystem? Or is this only free (as in beer) to people who have an existing paid license for a previous Apple operating system?
I'm sure with Bing they make at least $0.25 a year per user.
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They surely do... but at what pace?
The iPad 3 is probably expensive to make.
For me, the emphasis on the GPU is the precisely problem. There are other ways to allocate resources and still keep the price down.

For background, I generally take the time to plug my laptop into a monitor when I'm commuting to an office, but since I like to take my work with me the laptop is my primary device. Working with multiple monitors is nice, but I always gravitate back to my portable workflow.

My use of the old Mac Pro was usually through the terminal, or via web apps, and centered on storage, long running processes, or providing services to others. It was very handy to have the machine physically in my office, for a variety of big-enterprise-nonsense reasons, so quiet operation was appreciated.

So, now it looks like if I wanted a comparable setup I'd be stuck with a Mac Mini, and I guess 3 more Mac Minis with external storage. That sounds fun to me personally, but it really shouldn't be necessary. I also wouldn't look forward to presenting a request for a vanity mini-cluster for myself, and having to compare that on a cost/performance basis to a basic 2U server, even if that wouldn't sit in my office.

If the new Mac Pro were more compute-focused, or provided some flexibility in that regard, then I'd have zero complaints. As it is, I can only imagine being asked to take a break from actual work to to help someone who has one of these machines with an e-mail problem.

Edit: I should mention that I really appreciate the the approach to cooling, and engineering overall. I've had some very loud (60 dB), very hot workstations that I'm thankful to be rid of.
(I'm not a lawyer, but) I doubt they are in the clear. Sounds like they injected a public survey in a communication channel previously reserved for private interaction with their doctor. Perhaps the patient (state privacy law), doctor (business associates agreement), and the government (via HIPPA) have standing.

Under 42 USC § 1320d-5, penalties for wilful neglect are $10k per occurrence, up to 1.5M. There are also criminal penalties for up-to ten years for those who "knowingly" disclose individually identifiable health information for commercial advantage.
>I wish Google and Microsoft would follow suit. Google probably will resist the most due to the entrenched interests of DoubleClick and YouTube.

This has been a feature in Google Chrome for at least a year. It isn't on by default, but you can change the browser to block any plugins until you specifically allow them on the page.

https://support.google.com/chrome/answer/142064?hl=en
Linux Foundation adopts Open Virtualization Alliance and KVM
Thats also why the Ipad1 now crashes on almost every app now - just has 256 megs of ram.
Turbo modes are opportunistic based on temperature and short-term power draw, so you can't be 100% definite about the speed the processor will run at. But generally speaking, when that 6-core processor is only running 4 threads, it will turbo up to the same speed that the 4-core operates at fully loaded, and they'll both hit the same peak for a single-threaded workload.
iWork has potential because of iPads being moved into the enterprise, the OSX release is largely irrelevant (OSX is never going to be popular in the enterprise). Since they are doing iWorks web apps now, this gives people the ability to use iPads while they're on the road and then log into the same document from their Windows Office machine.
Looks very cool, do you all generate source maps?
The internet is just another medium of communication. If my doctor insinuated that I could contact her privately and securely via e-mail, I would be willing to do that - sure beats taking the 45 minutes to get to her office, then waiting another 30 minutes to see her.

Now, it would take a lot to convince you and me that it would be private and secure - but we read HN, we're presumably devs. This is probably someone who is not particularly tech-savvy, and missed the warning signs, and just trusted WhateverFusion to deliver the message in a confidential manner.
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You can create a usb key installer and use it to install everywhere
It's easy, Apple's "mini" products don't have a display, keyboard, or mouse... oh wait.
You can't legally run an OSX VM on a non-Apple computer.
Asking why we should trust a privacy related product from Google is legitimate. You are assuming that everyone will comprehend the trust model at a glance the way you do, but this is not so.

Your argument seems to be that people shouldn't state their opinions, but should instead do silent research until they come to what you think is the obvious conclusion.

That isn't how social discussions work.
And the Mac Pro even looks like a shrunken Cray (minus the included seating).
>Whatever they're planning

You just wait...
FYI:

http://www.lockergnome.com/osx/2012/02/24/are-hackintosh-com...
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The iPad Air is insanely light, which might change the equation. Based on weight, I might pick the Mini over the old full-sized iPad despite preferring a larger display. Now, all bets are off.
You don't need to have an existing paid license(1), but you do need to run it on Apple Mac hardware. Non-Apple hardware and VMs are not supported, don't work without some significant hacking and are forbidden by EULA.

(1) Practically speaking if you have a machine capable of running this legally, you also have an existing paid license for MacOS, so this is mostly a theoretical difference.
At this point, they should be taking down all of the reviews, until they can go back and verify that the patients writing those reviews clearly understood that they were not meant to stay private.
It's interesting that the UK seems to be getting around this by doing stuff in-house. So now we have the open government license (http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/doc/open-government-licen...) and government websites that take pull requests for content.
Most of that is good except for the fuse. The only reason for the fuse is because of the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ring_circuit which was only used during copper shortages.

The fuse makes the plug much much larger than it needs to be.

The American size, with some shrouding, would be better. Newer American plugs already have shutters and everything else you mentioned.
Various banks have programs to collateralize chinese assets and offer a loan based on those assets.

eg. You collateralize $10 million in Chinese assets, you get a $8 million dollar loan from a bank branch in another jurisdiction.

Capital controls have already essentially be thwarted by the market, the second item is that BTC actually provides a great public ledger for amounts that would be unfeasible for the usual controls like FINTRAC.

It shouldn't really be called bitcoin so much as bitledger. You also have to consider that factions within the party may think bitcoin will generate more capital inflows rather than capital outflows.
> I firmly believe that procurement acts this way not because the government is fundamentally incompetent, but because the Public, and thus Congress, BELIEVES we are incompetent

There's almost 3 million federal workers. Many more if you include people who work on government contracts. The Federal Government is by far the biggest enterprise in the US by both employees and revenue.

With such a large organization, there are undoubtedly large swaths of both incompetence and competence.

The challenge with any large organization is that the rules are there to reign in the bad people, but are equally enforced on the good. (For example, most people won't abuse their company's T&E policy, but some will, so everyone has to be treated as suspect.)

Honestly I'm not sure what a good solution would look like, but I don't think it's as simple as "trust us."
Enjoy the specs while they're hot, as I doubt they'll update for another 3 or 4 years.
When companies advertise on TV that they automatically (patient need not request or accept each order) ship replenishment supplies for C-PAP based on eligibility... yeah... HIPPA is a joke.
Are you suggesting that the new Macbook somehow paved the way for the existing laptops of today?
> But can you choose which peer to route through?

Yes.

> Also important: can you choose what to allow to pass through your connection?

It doesn't appear that you can, but don't proxy for people you don't know, then. How on earth do you propose ruling "out the case of someone accessing a child porn site through my connection?" anyways?

As for the rest, it appears to just be a browser extension that proxies your connection, whether HTTPS or no. If you want to ensure that you're only going over HTTPS, install something like HTTPS Everywhere or block all connections that aren't secure.

This is like a VPN service but decentralized, with all the downsides that brings (have to find a peer, trust the peer, etc). It is not Tor, not a replacement for secure connections to sites, etc
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Better tip - 99% of America would without hesitation agree with a statement like "The Democrat party is the main left-wing party in America". (Similar with 'right' and 'Republican').

Would the terms "left" and "right" have the same meaning in all parts of the world at all points in history? Of course not. But when people make a statement without context, you can assume they mean the terms as the majority of their contemporaries use them.
So their 'non-revolutionary' changes have somehow produced a better product for you than their competitors?
You'll need to re-download it from the App Store (it should automatically be flagged as purchased, though, so you shouldn't need to re-buy it: just check the "Purchases" tab).

It'll download as an application: "Install Mac OS X Mountain Lion.app". If the installer automatically launches, just quit out of it. Right-click on the application, select "Show package contents", then navigate to Contents/SharedSupport. In there, you'll see "InstalESD.dmg": that's the Mountain Lion image.

You should be able to use that image directly in Parallels et al, but if you really wanted physical media, you can burn that image to a disc or create a bootable flash drive using Disk Utility. If you go the flash drive route, you'll need to use the GUID partition table.
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I just wish Firefox OS would focus on constructing a system that counters all the other devices that are essentially nothing more than tracking devices for corporations and governments....to a degree that negates anything that any other society has had to deal with in the past. You think {pick your favorite flavor of totalitarianism, authoritarianism, or monarchy} was bad? At least in the past you had a slight chance to move around anonymously. Today it is impossible without an organized network of people willing to risk their lives and livelihood. For all intents and purposes it is impossible to move anonymously anymore, and even if you want to make the case that it is still possible....it will not in short order.
There was an interesting pie chart shown at the Apple special event, which said that 75-80% of tablet usage is on iPad. I.e. iPads are actually used a lot more, even if they're losing in numbers. I'm wondering if there's a source for that graph somewhere.
Sigh. Why does someone have to "win" any of this nonsense?

Cook just said they've sold 170,000,000 iPads to date. Does it really matter anymore what Apple does here unless you're a shareholder?
No, no, I'm not complaining about the coverage Apple is getting. I understand that people use and like Apple products, and that they want to hear and discuss news about it. I'm complaining that the devices that I do care about, the news I do want to see and discuss, are being removed from the site. The only products announcements that can exist are those from Apple and to a lesser extent, Google.

There are people here who use Microsoft products and like the Nokia phones. I like discussing the news with them, especially news of the magnitude we've seen this morning. However, some people feel that this is not within our rights and having Nokia/Microsoft news on their site is inappropriate. This is a big fucking problem. I like HN, I really do. It's a great platform and there are some great people here. But if you think it would be better if the only products that could be discussed with excitement are Apple products, that's a big problem. This isn't Apple Hacker News. Hackers develop for Windows too; hackers use Windows Phone too. What I'm upset about is that the Nokia/Microsoft news was flagged off the front page, and, just like I predicted, the Apple news (no matter how minor) floods in right on cue.

I know there are other sites talking about Nokia and Microsoft. That's fine, but I really like HN and I really like discussing exciting news with this community. That can't happen if the news that we find exciting is being improperly flagged by a band of anti-Microsoft zealots. You might notice I've commented on a lot of the Apple news today. It's interesting, don't get me wrong. I'm not going to try to get Apple-related articles off the front page, because I'm not a fucking asshole. But don't point me to a different god damned site. I don't hate Apple products. I hate holier-than-thou zealots who feel that anyone who uses a product they don't like is a second-class citizen.

But why am I arguing with you? You've made it perfectly clear that you don't feel that I'm welcome here. You'd rather live in an Apple bubble, pretending that everything they do is better than everything the competition is doing. The world would be better if Apple was the only corporation on the planet, right?
The current MacBook Pro is probably the thinnest and lightest laptop possible with a Retina display. They've already taken out the spinning HD, optical drive, ethernet port, and removable battery, which are what they took out to make the original Air so thin and light.

If they want to make a Retina Air as thin and light as it is now, they need some sort of breakthrough. One option that has been mentioned is to power the Air with ARM instead of Intel--like an iPad. But that would that probably would require a heavy software translation layer to run OS X apps like Office or Photoshop.
I know for a fact there are some (good looking) Canadians working for Automattic.
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Apple announces new iPad Air
Apple announces new iPad Air; 25% thinner than previous device, weighs 1 pound
Well, in this respect it's the same situation the old iPad mini was in a year ago, and I haven't heard of major problems.
Here are a couple (I only took a quick glance), as many articles pop up with a search:

http://www.itworld.com/open-source/372628/microsoft-makes-bi...

http://allthingsd.com/20130718/microsofts-making-more-money-...
This is a case where defaults matter.

Advertisers won't stop using Flash because 0.01% of Chrome users dig into their advanced settings and turn it off.

Apple is working backwards from, "what's best for our customers" here and I think that's great.
Are there other blurs that are cheaper than the Gaussian but look good enough to replace it for this sort of purpose?
All worked fine. ruby 2.0-p247 compiled and install fine using rvm. Postgres backed Rails app worked too (using homebrew installed versions of postgres/mysql).
My MBA is doing everything I need it too, for a fraction of that cost. So I'll totally skip this one.
Of course throwing money at a problem could fix it, but the point is that there shouldn't be a problem here...
Re: how hard, I've been working on it for... a while ;)
https://twitter.com/benjamn/status/331923303767867392

Re: unforeseen edge cases, I'd love to see any failing pull requests for the test suite: https://github.com/facebook/regenerator/blob/master/test/tes...
ex-cgi contractor here and I am not surprised. they did the Massachusetts health care system that cost over millions of dollars and didn't deliver on the first day.
The government had to shell out even more to keep it running bcoz Gov. Patrick didn't want that to fail on his watch.

The way they work is purely in water-fall project management mode. Project managers are gods and spend insane amount of time on ms-office calculating hours per each task that are 2 years out.
then they bring CGI indian sub-par programmers on L1 to save on costs. Technology is least of their concerns since its about shipping code.
Also blame shouldn't be just on CGI, the government is at fault as well. Simple request for information would take about 4 biz days to get it. everything is slow and the Gov IT staff has no clue on how to scale.
Anyway, when I heard CGI won this project, I knew it would fail.
I think the poster meant how the iPhone cannibalized the iPod.