skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
<rant>

The computer was a great invention. The Internet also is a big enabler. But the latest computers and phones are hardly innovative: Compared to what you got 5 years ago, they might be smaller and have better power efficiency. But on the grand scale, how does that matter?

If you see the latest Macbooks being introduced, you probably want to get one. It's very shiny and the Retina screen will allow you to experience computing in a great way. People try to become happy by spending money for experiences. Tourism, iPhones, hipster coffee shops. They don't do it because it's the universal recipe for happiness and living your life, but because it's what capitalist societies expect you to do. Most "innovation" and "disruption" only leads to zero-sum money shifts inside this system. If you think that a retina screen is innovative, i think you need to get some perspective.

The same goes for cars. The Germans (where I come from) think that they're innovative because we have a few luxury car makers here. Cars in general are great, they provide mobility and that's useful. But how are the new cars better than what was available 30 years ago? They're not even more fuel efficient.

Bill Gates seems to have got it when he stopped working full-time at Microsoft. All over the world people are using their software, but if we were using OS/2 and Lotus instead of Windows and Office nothing would change. It went very well for him and his company, but nothing they ever did was as important for humankind as what Bill Gates is doing now: giving life to millions by completely eliminating malaria and polio from the planet and supporting AIDS and TB research with huge sums.

</rant>
Twitter plans to raise up to $1.4bn in IPO
$400M in Surface revenues. At even a generous $400 unit price, that's only 1M sold this quarter. Probably closer to 700K if you consider some of them being Surface 2 priced up to $900.
To celebrate this, I removed LinkedIn apps from my devices.
Here is another reason: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6608049
> As Farrell implies, the problem is that European governments engage in the exact same hypocrisy, just with fewer intelligence capabilities. The substantive effect of these revelations in France or Mexico to date have been surprisingly muted. So far, the biggest policy blowback has been Rousseff's cancelling of the state visit to the United States.

The bigger their own surveillance system, the less they will squawk. However, as you get to smaller nations, some of them conclude that the only way to win is to not play the game, and provide a secure communications environment for their people and businesses.
This was probably a tactic by Marissa to push Microsoft to modify the terms of the contract to be more favorable. Remember she was not the one who signed it.
> What's the difference between this and using an app such as Mailbox?

IMHO, for what it's worth, this is why I would never use Mailbox.

On the HN thread for the blog post announcement yesterday, tptacek said "I don't care who the company is, or how trustworthy you think they are: avoid giving third parties credentials to your inbox."[0]

I would agree with that above statement - whether it's a company with a good reputation for security or a bad one (or even a nonexistent one), that's way too much power to give to any third party.

Remember that when we talk about security being about trust, it's not only about trusting their intentions, but also their power and ability. Mailbox has access to inboxes of thousands of people, some of whom have incredibly valuable emails in their inbox. Combine that with the number of services that use email as a means for authentication, and you have an incredibly attractive target for an attacker.

For what it's worth, I should mention that I've been working on a self-hosted product that provides the functionality of Mailbox/Boomerang, but without the privacy and security implications of using a third-party: https://github.com/ChimeraCoder/go-yo

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6600879
"...the iPad Mini probably somewhat reduced the demand for the Touch"

The $229 / $299 price reduced the demand for the Touch. I'm surprised they haven't found a way to get a sub-$200 Touch.
Poe's Law strikes the Atlantic's lame Digital First model.
CTO/Founder--What's my job again?
Actually, I felt like it was like what most other companies do. I couldn't put words to it, but Marco did.

> It's an incredible standard we rate them against.

I think that's fair. It's the standard they've set for themselves.
On a semi-related topic, is it really possible for an app to properly replace the Android lockscreen? I haven't found any way to do it. As far as I can tell, all the "lock screen" apps use a hack where they disable the stock lock screen and then emulate a lock screen by asking you to make the lockscreen app your default home screen and then launching your "real" home screen when you "unlock" them. I've seen it said that they do this because it isn't truly possible to replace the lock screen. The problem is, of course, that this hack sometimes doesn't work or produces weird results often enough to discourage me from using any custom lock screen.
I always liked the ECC segment of a Purdue crypto course: https://engineering.purdue.edu/kak/compsec/NewLectures/Lectu...
Thanks for the insight! It's interesting to read a mathematician's more formal take on this -- I'm from an engineering background, and I've often seen the problem in control theory, where we approximate signals using observers and then differentiate the observed signal.

Edit: I should clarify that it's cool to read a mathematician's insight into the problem as seen by engineers, written in a way that engineers can understand.
What do you mean by 'avoid Bing'?
Ask HN: How old is your computer that you use regularly?
A recent post (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6606056) about using a 6 year old laptop as the developement machine.

I have just retired an old Compaq with an Intel Celeron running WindowsXP with 4Gb of RAM just last year, it was a couple of years after Compaq was acquired by HP. I bought the Compaq computer is 2004. It lasted 8 years before it died. My development setup was through a terminal session and editing code with Vim.

So I am asking how old is your regular computer and what is that computer and its configuration

It will be interesting to see what is the oldest machine and its configuration.

Edit: corrected the typo with the Memory config.
> 1. Attorney-client privilege.

Really? I guess you better have your own SMTP server set up then, or hope your email provider is willing to go to bat for your rights...

> 8. If I were the NSA…

Yeah, it sounds like they definitely have needed it so far...

5 other of the things are basically the same point, remade in 5 different ways. This is a really weak list. There are certainly concerns, but most of these problems are symptomatic of our email system as it is. And have we all forgotten how crazy everyone went when we found out google was going to start advertising in Gmail?
Fractional reserve banking effectively creates more money. Assume you have to keep 20% available, you can lend out 80% of your deposits. You lend that out, but your depositors still have access to "spend" their money, so you've increased the money supply by 80%. Now suppose the borrowors repeat this process at a second bank, and that bank loans out 80% of their deposit, we now have 164% extra money in the system, all available for spending.

If you try the same with BTC, it's not possible. You give me 10BTC to hold, I loan out 8 BTC, you can't spend from your 10 anymore (well, 8 of it). The total currency in the system is unchanged, just who can use it has changed.
I tried searching for it on bing :). The only thing that even had an estimate was http://searchengineland.com/microsoft-search-ad-revenue-esti...

Their guess was between 900 million and 1.8 billion, or large but they haven't a clue. 47% should be in the ballpark of a few hundred million.
this makes no sense, you say "I have never found a use for a tablet" yet go on to say "The Surface is the best of those devices and the only one I can see myself continuing to use going forward."

which is it? you use a tablet or not?

to anyone that's actually used a surface and ipad it's really really easy to see why Marco said that Microsoft's tablets suck. They do, Surface is a joke compared to the iPad.
Assuming you keep it when you get a new one. Apple products hold their resale value quite well.
http://telework.dcma.mil/installroot.cfm
readline also seems to have a "kill ring":

$ aaa ^U
# now "aaa" is the only thing in the kill ring
$ bbb ^U
# now kill ring is ["aaa", "bbb"]
$ ccc ^U
# now kill ring is ["aaa", "bbb", "ccc"]
$ ^Y
$ ccc
# alt+y cycles through the kill ring
$ bbb Alt+Y
$ aaa Alt+Y
$ ccc Alt+Y
$ bbb

etc. This likely feels completely natural if you're an emacs user. I don't know what the equivalent vi thing is.
7 Eastern Europeans Indicted in Multimillion-Dollar eBay Fraud Scheme
Oddly enough, your response is basically the same sort of overly-narrow literalism that gojomo was complaining about, just from the other direction.
Help us build a better marketplace – Listia (YC S09) is hiring engineers
I accidentally purchased a $5 app not too long ago (it was in the group of apps that were free for the 5th anniversary of the App Store). I selected the "Didn't mean to purchase this item" option in iTunes and got a refund immediately. No problem.

http://www.imore.com/how-request-refund-itunes-or-app-store-...
Impressed by the diversity of revenue streams for Microsoft. Wonder how a one trick pony like Google will be able to handle this should it run into pressure from competitors in future.
Using SCSS Nested Lists
The investing public says otherwise:

https://www.google.com/finance/chart?q=NASDAQ:TSLA&tlf=12&ch...
Is double letter in a brand name the way to success?
No, you need a special program to enable it.
The privacy policy linked upthread suggests that they intend to upload very detailed information about your location and usage.
Not if you resell it. I went a few years buying a new Macbook for ~$1200 then selling it a year later for $800, which works out roughly to $1/day.
A more precise wording would have been "We know Apple thinks Microsoft's tablets suck." He's not hitting Microsoft in that sentence, he's hitting Apple for being predictable and boring.
"the linux desktop never happened." Correct. Because it happened on the phone.
I agree with you that Bitcoin is an expensive ledger to maintain. That said, it's nonsense to say that low transaction costs (that's what efficiency means to the end user) is the sole factor for anyone besides Silkroad users and ideologists.

People pay a lot for security, and the problem with centralized systems is that they grant the organization running them both the means and incentives all the rents it can get away with, not only directly with added fees, but by using abusive tactics to pass the costs of fraud onto the user (see PayPal's infamous freezing policy) and by skimping security as much as it can.

Of course, you can reduce the likelihood of such events by adding external auditing, insurance, regulation, etc, but all of that adds friction which will inevitability result in increased transaction costs (TANSTAAFL).

If risk was irrelevant, nobody would invest in treasury bonds.
I have never heard of Mailbox before, but I have heard of LinkedIn.
There are costs associated with each sale, not everything is revenue.
It has scaled-mode resolutions including 1440x900, 1680x1050, and maybe 1920x1200, which all have noticeable annoyances.
Very cool. This is a nice way to remind myself that I need to use virtualenv more often :-)
I think he/she is referring to the news that Google tried to delay roll out of Bing in some Asian markets.
> The fabled year of the linux desktop never happened.

In the past. But now, MS desktop deteriorates and that process will only grow with Linux finally getting more traction. Valve's push for Linux gaming is one of key factors which will reduce MS grip on the desktop.
Agreed. I can't exactly put my finger on it, but having ads on instagram makes it feel somehow 'cheaper'
I had a fast car sold it and bought another when they re-did the model.

That said it provides no where near the enjoyment that playing with computers does or negotiation (which is fun and a game for me). Both I never get tired of. Had a boat for years but I would get bored if I used it more than every week or two. (Sold that). I'm renting out a vacation place since I only used it twice over the summer. Same thing tired of it at this point.

I get more thrill out of writing a shell script that automates something than from driving the car.

But people who see the car (especially younger guys on the way up) think it's the greatest thing in the world.

The best I can do with it on the local road is say hang at 15mph and take it to 75 which gives perhaps 2 to 2.5 seconds of thrill. (Not going to go from a dead start and burn the clutch or wear tires or anything). Once at 75 you are done. I could take it to a track but that is miles away and well I don't want to put to many miles on the car.

Come to think of it cooking is more fun as well.
Electric fields could optimize combustion inside power plants
> significantly passed them.

Look, I'm an Android fan. But your claims of Apple being surpassed are hot air. Name a single Android phone the size of the iPhone 5s that's even close to its capabilities. You can't. Android phones are laptops, while iPhones are Macbook Airs. Android manufacturers still can't touch the iPhone for what it is. Namely, the best damn phone money can buy in its category (ultra-light and compact). Your complaint about Apple is that they should make larger phones for you--a valid argument--but that doesn't mean Apple is falling behind. They're not even in the game, yet. A Galaxy S4 is so much bigger than an iPhone it's practically a separate category of phone.
This is the whole tech industry...

I realized a few months ago hacker news has become boring. I don't really care much for the incremental updates, which is the entire hardware industry. Even the internet has become pretty boring.

We're all excited for the promises of the future, and as usual they're taking a lot longer than we want them to.
Live by the sword, die by the sword. Apple has been lauded for their product messaging for years.
> There is a theory that Apple products are priced at more or less 1$ a day for their expected life span

Using your MBP example, that would put it at $3 a day. You’d have to keep using the MBP for another 7 years for the ‘$1 a day’ rule to be accurate. Let’s not even do the math on Mac Pros, the rule just doesn’t work out for the Pro products.

But let’s try the rule on consumer Macs. I have a 4 year old mid-range Mac mini. It runs Mavericks fine, so I’ll continue using it for another year. That means the computer will have cost me $0.55 a day. I have a top-of-the-line MacBook Air I bought last year. I expect I will use it for 4 years. That will mean it cost me $1.02 a day. My mom has a 5 year old MacBook Alu, which I just upgraded to Mavericks. She won’t buy a new notebook for another year. By then, the MacBook will have cost her $0.50 a day.
Microsoft's ventures are very much dependent on their operating system though, making the entire company like a house of cards. If their operating system monopoly ever goes, the entire company would collapse with it since they're so dependent on it. The only other successful product they have that isn't dependent on windows right now is xbox, and that's a very volatile market.

Google is similar in the fact that a lot of what they do depends on internet ad revenue.
Probably because you have to explicitly enable this. With Facebook changes you don't get the choice.
I, uh, I wrote a bot... to play cookie clicker... at lightning speed.
I wasn't arguing that lobbying is necessarily predictable or consistent, just that it can be very lucrative when successful. It's one thing for Soros or the Kochs to spend millions promoting policies that reflect their view of the world, and another for Monsanto or Lockheed Martin to invest millions in crafting policy which has a non-trivial chance to recoup the costs tenfold or more.
No, it's next year, just as it has always been, just as it will always be.
The new fanless PC's are pretty cool.
There are some other alternatives. HTC had a lockscreen API for a while. Similarly, generic Android has started supporting widgets on the lock screen, basically. One of the evangelists even has a popular widget lockscreen with extensions called DashClock that many people are writing for.

Lastly, I haven't tried it, but I suspect replacing the Android Launcher would also let you do it. This is the method Facebook used for putting their talking heads in every app.
I use a 6 year old Thinkpad. Core 2 Duo, 4GB RAM, 128GB SSD. It's built like a tank, and will probably never stop working. I'm planning to get something smaller soon, though.
I been looking at laptops at System 76 (https://www.system76.com/). Anyone have any experience with them?
set -o vi works in zsh as well.
There's also a huge cost in supporting subscribers. I worked at 2 startups that supported subscriptions, and at least 50% of support was just around that. No subscribers at this point means keeping support costs the same instead of doubling them.
Android-based IDEs already exist. I should know. I was looking for one the moment I bought my ASUS Transformer a couple years ago. I found the only thing I couldn't do with the device was write and compile programs. I would bring it to hacking sessions, but I couldn't test code on it. At the time, the only option was a text editor that could style and check code syntax.

The main downsides of these devices for programming is screen real estate, CPU speed, and support from major IDE/compiler vendors.

Example: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.aide.ui
I agree with this but in a much less snarky way. ;) I have an iPhone 4 and an HTC One. I find the 4 now frustratingly small and I'm sure if it were my only phone I'd use an iPad mini or iPad at home a lot more. With my HTC One I'm rarely frustrated. I'd be interested in a tablet but just don't feel I'd really use it because the HTC One is bigger. So that might be an odd factor driving iPad Mini's/iPad's in an Apple centric customer.
Does that program still work in mavericks?

I'm nearsighted and can see that with little issue.
I'd seriously consider using the Bing search engine more with my chrome browser just to get in their statistics..

This ain't a big deal actually, it's a test to get more from their Adwords when people really search for the companies. But behold the future :( (investors, stocks, it will never be enough).
Businesses will stop needing windows and windows servers eventually.
The scope of Elite was so impressive - and the novella that came with it added so much to how big the universe felt. What sticks in my mind is that the only way to make any real money, quickly - was trading in either narcotics or slaves, and hoping that you could outshoot the police :). Of course, as a 7-year old I didn't really know what narcotics were, only that for some reason they were very cheap on Leesti...
Keep in mind that thanks to the patent system, Microsoft probably makes more on a per-smartphone basis than Google.
Mailbox is part of Dropbox
Late 2012.

Before that I had a 2008 MacBook that I would still use if I hadn't broken it accidentally.
As pointed out below, these images aren't "pushing" anything down anything. They are about the same height as the stuff they replaced.

http://searchengineland.com/figz/wp-content/seloads/2013/10/...
Last year's mini should have been $299, and it's woeful to sell it at that price now.
Static code analysis and runtime inspectors, CodeClimate for php
Using Trello for Project Management
Apple has a very nice product line. No one can deny that. That said, after looking for a new machine for my wife and checking out the Apple lineup, I went with a Dell. For full disclosure I work for Dell Software, but this was a home computer for my wife and I wanted something that would make her happy. You pay a LARGE premium for the name. You get much more hardware for the buck with Dell. You may like the OS better on the Mac side, but honestly - is the Mac OS more stable than Windows 7? In my experience no. Is it easier to use? [hint - try to uninstall a program], in my experience no. Windows, while not as trendy, is a good workhorse that does its job well. My wife needed to do video editing, web surfing and word processing. I got her an 4th gen Intel i7 with 12GB of RAM and a larger display than the iMac for a much better price. If you honestly separate the hype from reality, you'll realize you're paying a significant 'Apple tax'. Of course, if you need to use XCode to develop for iOS or some other reason where only a Mac will do, by all means, buy one. it is great. But if you want to have value for your money and don't use Xcode, I think there is nothing wrong with using a powerful PC.
Don't need to solve the halting problem. There are plenty of well known, fixed points in any program you can attack. Patch the main entry point, patch the exit point, patch the memory allocation point, patch any function entry, etc. All you need is a few bytes of jump instruction to jump to the embedded compromised code. That can further download any specific code tailored to the specific program given its signature.

Since the compiler is in charge of generating the layout of the executable, it's in the perfect position to alter it so slightly to patch in a backdoor.
I am a developer at an investment bank that passed the Level 1 Chartered Financial Analyst exam part of which explicitly tests you on your ability to read accounting statements. If you are a developer without similar training, please realize that you will probably sound as uninformed offering your commentary on this topic as would an equity analyst giving their opinion on pages of C code.
Very cool, James!
That's Marcos hyperbole based on the fact that Android has, according to IDC, a 63% tablet marketshare in 2013 (iOS has 33%), yet, as you stated, only 25% browsing share. So, Android has double the market share, but only a quarter the browsing share. Hence, the comment generalizing that people with Android tablets aren't browsing the web with them.
As has been pointed out, if the patent expired on selling it would obviously have no selling value.

But beyond that I'm really confused by your argument. You seem to think that someone files a patent because they hope to exclude people from its use, which is not what patents are intended to do at all. They are intended to allow an inventor to realize an incentivized value for the public disclosure of their invention.

To that end it doesn't matter when the value is realized, the inventor has done their part by disclosing the invention to the public.
The problem is that hypothetically any tools you use on a computer could be compromised (by their compiler, or otherwise) to not show you truthful results on your screen. IDA Pro (and other tools at your disposal) may recognize certain patterns in binaries and know to show you a transformation of those patterns instead. This transformation would essentially be the reverse of the transformation that the compiler performs.

If you are able to inspect the actual contents of the program, not the output of a program that itself inspects the actual contents of the program, then this problem disappears. You have to examine the machine code without an intermediary program that could lie to you.

(Of course it is very unlikely that IDA Pro, objdump, or even 'od' is compromised in this way, but I would say this class of attack is largely hypothetical and implausible already...)

Edit:

From wikipedia: "What's worse, in Thompson's proof of concept implementation, the subverted compiler also subverted the analysis program (the disassembler), so that anyone who examined the binaries in the usual way would not actually see the real code that was running, but something else instead."
I think I've built the best workout app ever.