skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This is an over-simplication.

Yes, PCs aren't ageing as fast as they used to.

But they are obsolete beyond 'not being portable'.

Here is why tablets are winning:

1. Instant on. I can keep my thoughts in tact and act on them immediately. No booting, no memory lags, no millions of tabs open in a browser.

2. Focus. Desktop interfaces seem to be desperate to put everything onto one screen. I have a PC and a Mac (both laptops). I prefer the PC to the Mac; better memory management for photoshop and browsing, and I love Snap. But that's where the usefulness stops. With an ipad, I have no distractions on the screen.

3. Bigger isn't better. That includes screens. Steve Jobs was wrong. The iPad Mini is better than the bigger variants. Hands down. Same goes for desktop screens. I want a big TV, because I'm watching with loads of people. I don't need a big screen for a PC because the resolution isn't better than an ipad and I'm using it solo. Google Glass could quite possibly be the next advancement in this theme.

4. Build quality. PCs look and feel cheap. Including my beloved Sony Vaio Z. The ipad in my hand could never be criticised for build quality.

5. Price. The ipad doesn't do more than 10% of what I need to do. But, I do those 10% of things 90% of the time. So why pay more for a PC when the ipad has no performance issues and takes care of me 90% of the time.

I used to think shoehorning a full desktop OS into a tablet is what I wanted. Seeing Surface, I can happily say I was wrong. I don't want to do the 90% of things I do 10% of the time. That's inefficient and frankly boring. PCs and Macs are boring. Tablets are fun. There's one last point why tablets are winning:

6. Always connected. It strikes me as absurd seeing laptops on the trains with dongles sticking out. It takes ages for those dongles to boot up. I used to spend 5-10 minutes of a train journey waiting for the laptop to be ready. My ipad mini with LTE is ever ready. And cheaper. And built better. And more fun.

The PC isn't dead, but it will have next to no investment going forward, so will suffer a mediocre retirement in homes and offices across the world.

Note: I love my PC. I just love my ipad mini more.
Beer does not benefit from always staying cold. If you get bored, it is relatively easy to do a double-blind test.

...but if you have a bottle conditioned ale, sometimes you can tell the difference because the 'warm' one can reactivate the yeasts and change the flavor slightly.
And those users are overwhelmingly the ones that tablets suit just fine.

That's the problem in this type of "PCs are fine, people just don't have to upgrade" argument. (And I've made it myself, before I really worked it through and took stock of just how far tablets have already come.)

The use cases satisfied by an old PC could all be satisfied just as well by today's tablets. Yes, the software support for keyboards, external displays and server-type services isn't quite there. But that's solely a software limitation. Not a limitation of the hardware platform. It will be addressed and more PC sales will disappear.

And the actual remaining PC-justifying use cases are precisely those where an old core2duo isn't "good enough" and simply buying some more RAM or even an SSD isn't going to obviate the need for new hardware for 5+ years.

So inasmuch as people still need PCs, they have to show up in the sales charts. And inasmuch as we don't, mobile devices are going to eat that market as the software evolves.

There's really no way around it.

Frankly, I think android and/or iOS are one good upgrade-cycle away from decimating laptop sales. If either or both really focus on the 'docked' use case -- better support for external displays and keyboard support to facilitate top-flight bulk text entry/editing -- laptops are dead to the general public.

If a student can so much as use a keyboard case and tablet to write a term paper or code up some homework as easily as on a laptop, it's over. And there's no hardware preventing that. It's software. If Microsoft wasn't so inept, they'd have been way out ahead on this.

And, frankly, between the potential of the docked use case and "BYOD" policies, mobile devices could seriously eat into the enterprise desktop market as well.

You build a device cradle, that connects to an external display, power and a keyboard/trackpad, and enables the OS and apps to automatically sense that connection and shift their interfaces accordingly and you'll see how few people truly need a PC anymore.
Precisely. If Southwest's banner hit for "cheap airfare" or something similar, this would indeed be outrageous. But this just seems like useful (and sponsored) info being offered without needing to click-through.

Somewhat sensationalist.
I am getting sick of hot women, or even average women dressed like hot women, taking advantage of us nerdy men. It is simply degrading and dangerous to prey upon our one weakness.
Sure. It's not money itself, per se, but the concurrent corruption it brings.
I am following you, but cannot make myself comfortable with non-elastic screen size. I like my tablet to be 8", while anything less than 12 is not good for a laptop (I tried with UMPCs and Netbooks). However, I certainly can imagine myself plugging 8" inch tablet into 27" monitor and keyboard/mouse combo for comfortable work at office.
Original discussion, still on the front page and with nearly 200 comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6605312

Another submission, but with no real discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6604925

However, that original now has so many comments any additional thoughts will get lost in the noise. I suspect that's why there's another one shooting up the front page:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6606662

People see that one and upvote it to make sure their comments get seen.

<rambling rant>

I wish there were a more sensible way to organize discussions like this, so that well-thought out, comprehensive and useful contributions were easier to find. Instead, the discussions become so sprawling that anything after the first few comments and replies are lost, so when something is popular we get split discussions with significant replication and duplication.

Feels like such a waste of time and effort - the engineer/hacker/problem-solver in me is offended, even though others think there's really nothing wrong with it.

Maybe it's just me.

</rambling rant>
They used to have something like this in Canadian liquor commissions back in the day because they were no allowed to refrigerate beer and wine (archaic liquor laws in Canada). Super cold swirling water, you stick you shit in for 5 mins while you browse around, worked pretty well.
Recalling the AUTODIN
No, the coefficients of the Taylor series are the exact derivatives, assuming the actual arithmetic were exact (it's not, because IEEE 754). There's no loss of precision there.
A tangental question (and not meant to be a critique):
Is this a parable? It too closely mirrors reality and there is no openended quality (ie Talmudic writings or Jesus parables).
Neither is it an allegory.

What do you refer to a story like this? An Epitome? ANecdote? Vignette?
Right, I read 'naively' as 'natively'. Carry on!
The exact part struck me the most. I was expecting some technique that tries to figure out the maximal error during the calculations and provides enough space for an exact floating point presentation in advance to avoid the usual problem of continually increasing memory demands that you usually get with exact numbers. Such techniques can be used while calculating delaunay triangulations and maybe they are applicable here as well.
That may be so, but this is the sort of mentality that was responsible for IE6 being maintained after the release of IE8.

In the long run, switching to python3 will be better.
Using Google's search results takes a lot of computing power and could be abused by competitors.

Having robust messaging increases the value of Google's Android platform.
>>Note that their diets are poor, by choice. They are making bad choices, which they're not being forced into. Not by money shortage, at least. You can say education, but I'm willing to bet that these people were in fact instructed in balanced diets (in high school, not at a very high level, but still).

Anecdotal time: This is going to make me look like a fool, but I'll tell this story anyway. I sorta knew hamburgers and fast-food were bad for you, but it wasn't until after I earned my BS CompSci that I realized just how bad. And I only realized it because of a game called Dance Dance Revolution. As you can see in my youtube channel on my HN profile, I was kinda hardcore about that game. One day, I didn't have time to eat my usual meal containing mostly rice. I went to BurgerKing and got a Double Whopper with cheese and fries. Ate all of it, waiting about 1 hr, then went to the arcade to play. I ran out of energy so fast I couldn't believe it and my day was ruined. After that I went home and did research on what athletes eat & general balanced diet for energy.... then I saw Food Inc. That was how I learned what to eat and is the only reason I'm not 300lbs+ today.

School does not stress these points nearly enough. In fact, I had this discussion with co-workers less than a month ago. We concluded that American schools purposely avoid effectively teaching 3 things so that most will fall into the trap of the credit-debt, junkfood & diet fads and easy manipulation by the media.

1. Finances
2. Health & Fitness
3. Critical Thinking

Also, note my comment below about how it's not necessarily their choice when they're almost forced out of any other option - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6604235

I don't think it's as simple as "Well, they choose it. They're fools". Nobody wants to be in poor health.... nobody wants to be poor & suffering...
Cool idea but this sounds a lot like design by committee. For end-user apps, there's nothing like focused design leadership to drive cohesive product decisions.
I've been following these posts and they've been really helpful, so thanks for writing them up. But when A/B testing your pricing model, what are you supposed to do for the customers that signed up for the now-defunct service prices?
Fukushima readies for dangerous operation to remove 400 tons of spent fuel
The point is that when you're considering the Taylor series for a dual number argument, you don't lose any precision, because higher powers of the "imaginary" part of the dual number vanish. The example he gives is

f(a + be) = f(a) + f'(a)be + 0.5 * f''(a) b^2 e^2 + O(e^3)
= f(a) + f'(a)be

because e^n=0 for all n>1. This isn't an approximation - it's an exact relationship for dual numbers!

You will lose some precision by using floating point numbers instead of an arbitrary-precision real number type, but this is a limitation of the machine you're working on. The method is exact.
This doesn't seem to be a very fair comparison. You cant compare a search for "maps" with a search for an actual company in this case "Southwest Airlines." I would expect that a search for a company even earlier in googles history would have been links mainly to southwest owned pages.
It turns out that politicians aren't actually divided along "good/evil" lines, no matter how much we'd like to paint them that way.
> There's a reason why banks and states trade and store USD, instead of gold.

Suppose you accumulate a lot of debt in a currency backed by gold. Further suppose that you control that currency, and have the power to change or remove the gold backing. It becomes very tempting to, say, issue some new currency with lower or zero gold backing to wipe out your debt.
Mac mini has fans but is basically silent.
This seems to be essentially the same thing as "power series arithmetic" (first-order "dual arithmetic" is equivalent to arithmetic in the ring of formal power series modulo x^2, but you can make that x^n).

Encoding power series as matrices is sometimes convenient for theoretical analysis (or, as here, educational purposes), but it's not very efficient. The space and time complexities with matrices are O(n^2) and O(n^3), versus O(n) and O(n^2) (or even O(n log n) using FFT) using the straightforward polynomial representation (in which working with hundreds of thousands of derivatives is feasible). In fact some of my current research focuses on doing this efficiently with huge-precision numbers, and with transcendental functions involved.
There is a difference between building a network that is built to pass a PCI Compliance test and building a network that can pass PCI's SAQ.
Enough people have already complained about the title that I'd say the author made a stupid choice. It was confusing until reading the article, and I'd say it was link-bait for suggesting some kind of new physics technology.
You're right, there's only O(n) information in these particular n x n matrices, so you can multiply them in O(n^2).

The code provided memoizes cell values using the key (r - c), so only O(n^2) work is required to read off the top row of the matrix. I'm planning to make that more explicit in a follow-up post.
my silent PC solution from 2008. Still the best value for money if architecture of your house supports it :) http://solnyshok.blogspot.com/2008/03/my-silent-pc-solution....
Regular users don't know or care about memory management, they don't even close old windows or tabs, its about convenience.

Why should they? If a tab's "dormant", the browser can just quiesce JS timeouts and let the tab's memory get swapped out. Not a problem anymore.

That most (all?) web browsers don't do this currently isn't the user's fault.
Very true. That's the reason I've personally stuck with Pages for document editing. The ability to collaborate easily is going to be really, really great.
2010? If you got an i5-2500K and a 580, you'd probably get a PC that came in around $1200-$1300. If you could reuse components like cases, hard drives, PSUs etc. you could easily get that in under $1000. That should still run 90% of modern games maxed out at 1080p, with the exceptions being pretty much just Metro 2033 and Planetside 2.

If you're doing multi-monitor or >1080p resolutions, then you might need to get something better than the 580 however.
> "southwest probably sees it different since they're paying for ad words but that's a different conversation"

Fair enough :)
Heroku's early history
There seems to be a typo at the beginning of the "Implementing dual numbers" section. It says:

The number a+bd can be encoded as...

Should be:

The number a+b*epsilon can be encoded as...
Every screenshot is blurred. Could fake data not have been used for demonstration purposes?
I agree with the point about keyboard and screen.

I wanted a gaming laptop, but once I got into that category, I'll be honest--the deciding factor for me was keyboard layout. I'm a developer so it's really important to me to have special keys in the right place, and to have them easily distinguishable by touch.

Nothing is worse than arrow keys with no gap separating them, or an F5 that blends in, or page up/down in some unusable position.

Got some Asus model, and it's great.
It would still be inferior to modern fiat currency from a macro-economic perspective, because whatever your rule is going to be, it will not adapt to the development of the economy.

Think of it this way: The abundance of money should somehow correlate with the abundance of real resources. When this correlation breaks down, bad things happen to the economy.

In modern fiat currencies, the supply adapts automatically, without government intervention to the development of the economy, via the mechanism of bank loans. When a bank makes a loan, the money supply grows. When a loan is paid back, the money supply shrinks.

Bitcoin cannot work that way by design, which makes it a bad choice for a common-use currency - at least from the perspective of macro-economic behavior.
OTOH, it seems to have made Arch packagers above-average aware of the problem space. I ship a reasonably popular Linux desktop application that bundles a Python scripting interface and a set of scripts using it (altogether a minor feature of the application), and when we ported that code to Python 3 in a way that keeps it running on 2.7+ back in 2011, the Arch packager dutifully dropped their patch, making Arch the only distro to run it against Python 3. I'm not used to packagers who actually read release changelogs and/or dutifully drop redundant downstream customizations without explicit reminders, so that impressed me positively :).
Questioning the National Security Agency’s Metadata Program
Well, it's exact until you evaluate it at a float — because it's the floats that are inexact, not the technique.

And that limitation is just as true of symbolic algebra. Symbolic algebra is "exact" iff you can do exact evaluation, or if your application doesn't require you to evaluate at all. Automatic differentiation is the same, it's just that the unevaluated forms in symbolic algebra are "nicer".
An Interview with Kevin Novak, Data Scientist at Uber
Whoops, Iulian's correct - I was being imprecise earlier. We have a formal specification in TLA+ that we put through the TLC model checker for several weeks of runtime on the biggest machine we could find, not a machine-checkable proof.

But to the original questioner, yes, we should put the TLA+ spec online instead of requiring someone to copy/paste from the tech report... please hold. :)
but it'll make water pretty carbonated (though not to soda's level). or at least have the same bitter, bubbly flavor (never really looked up if that's actually what happens)
Show HN: Hand-picked Youtube music video API
Hello,

I thought that some of you may find this useful. Around 1.8k hand-picked and categorized (by language, quality, category) Youtube videos with Christian songs.
True, but I don't think Strassen and other efficient algorithms are much used in practice. If you go poke around in the source code for BLAS or LAPACK you'll see that the matrix multiplication algorithm used is an O(N^3) algorithm.

It's not the naive O(N^3) algorithm though - it's a block multiplication algorithm which generally gives faster results than the naive algorithm, because it's able to exploit locality so that you don't need to shift data into and out of the CPU cache all the time.
My guess is so that no one else can get it.

The last thing one of these companies would want is a competitor or some kind of unsavory hanger-on diluting their brand with a different message or viagra ads.
Top Salary Ranges for CS, EE Majors
Speak for yourself, I find the absence of braces to be very unnatural.
CentOS still has python2.6 as the default. Several people I know who use CentOS with python just build their own python2.7 anyway -- at $dayjob, I build python2.7 and package it up with fpm[1] and drop it in our internal repo.

[1]: https://github.com/jordansissel/fpm
PCI-DSS is a great tool to get management to understand what sort of security is required to handle customer's data properly. It's not meant to be a handbook for security experts to tick off a bunch of boxes and act like they are Neo with Kung-Fu.

If you have ever been in a meeting and been face to face with the blank stares of management while you explain why you need to spend time on hardening your servers or software, you would be thankful that PCI exists.
Tests suggest baby born with HIV may be cured
I'm just curious, which type of application are you developing for Minix?
Deflation, meet downward rigidity of wages (and other prices).

Basically, the problem with deflation is that everybody who has only one (or very few) income stream, but at the same time many expenditure streams (especially fixed contract expenditure streams) is going to fight very hard against reduction in that income stream.

And empirical data suggests that that fight tends to be fairly successful, too. This is why deflation is poison for economic activity.
Looking at the Tom's Hardware system builder challenges from a year ago or two years ago, and the comparing them to the $500 and $1000 machines that they have now in their System Builder marathons should showcase the tradeoffs in performance vs price more starkly.
Thanks! fixing...
Maybe so that a competitor doesn't?
Agreed. Imagine if you could have other providers snap into this? It's a shame that they're hacking their way around Apple's walled garden, but a self hosted proxy server is a nifty way to add functionality to email.
I have seen full size ATX cases from Silverstone with passive cooling, where the entire case is machine out of aluminum and acts like an enormous heat sync. Have yet to find a good fanless power supply. The new Mac Pro supposed to be only 12DB. It's hard to beat that, most rooms have ambient noise of at least 18db.
Good comments. A few thoughts...

We only kickoff building one app a month.

1.Community will be attracted / restricted by the platform.

We agree and realize helping the community grow as a core responsibility of assembly.

2. There is too much fatigue out there, as there are so many such "ideas" competing for mind-space.

We've thought a lot about this too. These are just of few of the initial app ideas we received. We curate all the new ideas that come in and work with the submitters on the promising ones before putting them up.

3. SAAS based products for small businesses, freelancers has become a kind of a cottage industry with limited scalability. I am doubtful how much revenue this can generate.

I believe some the current app ideas are attacking larger opportunities, for example support-foo.. its proprietary competition would be a Zendesk. "Zendesk’s fiscal 2012 revenue will be approximately $30 million"[1]

[1] http://www.pehub.com/2012/11/29/zendesk-ready-2013-ipo-sourc...
Are you working in some other country and consulting/freelancing?
Pioneer - A game of lonely space adventure
How does it compare to using Sonar with the JavaScript plugin? (not in a Sonar vs Code Climate way, but specifically for JS)

http://www.sonarsource.com/products/plugins/languages/javasc...
PVS-Studio: Prices Dropping
If they are able to hack the physical box (I assume this is how they did the injection), then it is possible for them to modify the CSP rule too.

If my assumption is correct, then CSP won't help unless we separate the source server and the proxy server from each other.
The article has an interesting discussion of their pricing history, how they developed their current model, and how they found fit. For a very technical tool, it's an interesting story.
Construção da Torre Cenke Arranca em 2014 na China
Book Review of Seth Godin's Permission Marketing
You just picked the most expensive calculation you could, more or less, and asked how a general-purpose PC handles it.

A brand new general-purpose PC handles that situation equally well--unplayable.
Half of nation's foreclosed homes still occupied
Fruit is far healthier than junk food.
The last few times I looked at the desktops available at Targets and Walmarts in the Bay Area, there weren't very many options. Bestbuy and Costco are somewhat better equipped. I think that, with the lower margins on desktops relative to laptops and the amount of space they consume, desktop PCs are well on their way out of being attractive to traditional brick and mortar retailers.

Haswell architecture couldn't have hit the market at a better time for laptop owners, with more powerful integrated graphics and low power use. I'm sure it isn't a coincidence.
I guess you could accomplish the same result, but it's quite a bit less convenient with a bucket of ice.

1. Fill ice cube tray with water
2. Freeze ice cube tray for an hour
3. Take ice cube tray out of freezer
4. Empty ice cube tray into bucket
5. Put drink in bucket
6. Spin drink (with what? your hands?)
7. Take drink out
8. Dump bucket in sink
9. Put the bucket somewhere

As opposed to this device, where it looks like you just put the drink in, press a button, and take it out?