skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> And why do you suppose people decide to stand in line without anyone actually forcing them to do so? It must be...

This doesn't follow intrinsically. The threat of violence is absolutely present in line-standing scenarios (imagine starving people in a bread-line; the biggest reason not to cheat is that fellow line-standers would kick your ass).

> But people are forced to use USD.

Sort of, in the same sense that one is "forced" to engage in voluntary labor in order to survive. If one were to go live in the woods, they could hunt and forage without ever touching a greenback. However, to nearly everybody, the benefits of USD (and labor) outweigh the costs, or at least they act that way.

Obviously, many of our existing social structures are backed by centralized violence, both at the nation-state and community levels. But my point is that this is just as true of gold or BitCoin as it is of USD and taxes. While common decency will prevent most people from taking your stuff, at the end of the day, the threat of violence is what keeps someone from stealing your gold, or beating you with a wrench until you give up your BTC encryption key. There is no reality in which there is not an incentive to use violence, even if only to stop other violence.

Clearly, "social contract" is a broken metaphor: none of us signed a goddamn thing simply from being born. It bothers me as well that I effectively have no say in the matter, and that I am tacitly complicit in the various injustices of the state. I would vastly prefer opt-in distributed nation-tribes, such as Neal Stephenson's "phyles".

But at the same time, there is a strong possibility that if governments were to evaporate tomorrow, we would revert first to "nature red in tooth and claw", eventually giving way to networks of feudalistic allegiances, in both cases, backed by extreme violence. Should we invent new post-national social structures (perhaps with actual social contracts that people choose voluntarily)? Of course, the sooner the better! But in the meantime, we all get 30% (or whatever) stolen in order to not have to worry about 100% getting stolen. It sucks, but it could be a lot, lot worse.

Civilization is a non-trivial problem.
WebP does not offer immediate benefits by our measurement:

http://people.mozilla.org/~josh/lossy_compressed_image_study...

https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/mozilla.dev.platform...

If you work at Google, please point out errors in our methods or data, give us better metrics, or otherwise correct us.

> This Cisco blog, what if...

"What if?" What if Google fails to get VP9 codecs into h/w? (See my response above; half-way [decoder only] does not count.)

Lots of what-ifs here, but I believe OpenH264 is Cisco's best s/w codec. Let's see, shall we, and not speculate idly.

/be
I felt exactly the same way when I first got a keyboard without a numpad. Then I realized that I should just get used to touch typing on the number row instead. Though I still prefer a numpad (old habits die hard), using the num-row really isn't that bad once you get the hang of it.
From that perspective, you are right. However I think Christensen's perspective still holds if you go back further.

When the first semi-mainstream GUI-based PC (the 128k Mac) came out, the limitations of hardware at the time meant the thing was a mass of clever (perhaps genius) hacks to get the whole OS to run in with such limited RAM and CPU constraints.

Apple simply needed to be making the hardware and software to tweak them enough in tandem to work together.

As CPUs and memory improved, you had enough leeway so everything didn't have to be custom-engineered down to every 1 and 0 and bit of silicon to work well enough, and so the PC market entered the "modularized" phase.
so, most people don't key in numbers with the number pad then? i only use the number pad for numbers. the number row seems like a really annoying way to enter numbers. it probably causes health problems, i suspect.
What about a startup idea(s) startup ? where non-devs can create startups just by submitting an idea?
Why do 100 push-ups when you can do 10?
The Nokia phones with four or five week battery lives used a single backlight for a 120x120 or so pixel monochromatic LCD screen.

Don't get me wrong, I love the one that I have and still use as an alarm clock, but it'll never replace a high pixel density colour screen in anyone's books.
The quoted comment was not the best one I could have picked - I just wanted to clarify that the thing about isolating the US was just to illustrate my feelings but nothing to consider seriously.
I think the linkage was appropriate. While reading the title I immediately thought about the way a housefly repeatedly rams itself into windows (while not seriously damaging itself) to try and find a way out.

Granted, insects don't fly in bucky-ball-esque gyro cages, but are there any other types of flying organisms that fly in a similar manner? Definitely not birds -- as windex commercials have demonstrated.
Oh yeah. I don't know what the market size is but it's definitely a thing. Pink and White Productions is a good example.
http://pinkwhite.biz/
There is also http://geospot.meteor.com with auto purge.
Freedom \ Liberty \ Patriot \ Constitution Mail would be very effective in blocking political speeches and biased headlines from cheap attacks.
My personal favorite is Lincoln Mail... Seems highly appropriate on many levels and should be FOX News proof.
I assume these things would then be connected by some sort of hyperlocal area network (personal area network? PAN?) around you, with one cellular hub to be connecting them to the cloud?

If so, sounds rad.
> Mozilla has been resisting Googles libre codecs even though they come with full source code and a patent pledge. Google has already even paid to eliminate potential threat from the evil MPEG LA. It is as free(libre) as you can get in this space.

But Firefox supports WebM. I don't speak for Mozilla, of course, but I totally think you should use WebM over H.264. :)
Meet The Company Tracking More Phones Than Google Or Facebook
Love this, had never heard of it before. My generation drives me mad. 20-30 year olds whose major pursuit in life is frivolity, who complain when they don't have the jobs necessary for them to pursue their frivolity.

We're beyond this: "I must study politics and war, that our sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy. Our sons ought to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history and naval architecture, navigation, commerce and agriculture in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry and porcelain." And have reached a point where the majority of people spend their time in bread and circuses. God damn it.
Anti-virus endpoint software is essentially (and necessarily) a rootkit. Businesses installing antivirus software are placing an incredible amount of trust in the antivirus vendor.

Without trust, the antivirus vendor has no business whatsoever. As a result, they are (or jolly well should be) ultra-careful to earn that trust. This includes subjecting their employees to a certain degree of vetting.

In the age of cloud computing, the same relationship dynamics are observed between businesses and the cloud vendors to whom they entrust their data.

See? There it is again: Trust.

Important stuff.
I believe that microsoft's design of minimal and flat UI is revolutionizing designs today. You can see Google, Apple and every other startup going with flat UI.
The really stupid trend in laptop (and most portables) design is non-user replaceable batteries!! What can be at most a 10 USD, 30 second affair is now a drive to the service centre, a two week (if lucky) wait and a 100 USD bill ...
Hoskins must have some plumbing fetish.
you should not actually form the covariance matrix to get there...

In case anyone's wondering why: it's not only because it takes extra time. The main reason is that computing X*X^T can bring numerical instability, where a direct SVD(X) would work just fine.
WebMD Acquires Avado For $20-$30M To Help Drive Its Evolution From Media Company
As I said, I hop back and forth between GUI and command line; I haven't personally needed to deal with a folder diff with 1000+ files with one line changed each, but if I did, command line seems like a reasonable option.

Beyond Compare (linked above) lets you set patterns to ignore, which has been incredibly useful for when an autogenerated time/date stamp is changed in 1000+ files; I can say "ignore that change; tell me what changed that DOESN'T match the pattern".

You can do the same thing with grep on the command line of course. But then you lose out on all the GUI awesomeness.

I've used Araxis, and it's Even More Awesome, but 5x the cost (last I checked) as Beyond Compare, and I didn't think it was 5x as awesome. BC has gotten much cooler since then too (with comparison plug-ins, and bitmap compare -- let's see diff compare two bitmaps and tell me which pixels have changed! -- and DOC file compare, and normalized XML file compare, and so on ;).
Are you aware of any vaguely practical systems for a variant of keyword search that just returns whether the keyword was found (e.g. 1 for found, 0 for not found) but with the added requirement that the result must itself be encrypted? I suspect it degenerates to fully homomorphic encryption though.
With computer music, the act of composition and the act of playing it are one and the same. It's like writing a piece, having an orchestra play it, then going back to the score sheet and changing something, over and over. Usually at some point time, patience and/or inspiration run out, long before the song is really good -- but that's a limitation of the state of the art(ists), not of music made with computers in general, IMHO.
Silicon Valley Bank says no to Bitcoin businesses
> What really pisses me of is this sentiment of thinking of non-US citizens as second class humans.

When a group puts a draws a line of Us and them, they are making enemies. With this approach the NSA is declaring the USA as the enemies of all those being spied upon. The more similar news spread the more this mentality that "The USA is the enemy" will spread and its only a matter of time that more countries turn a blind eye or even facilitate terrorist actions against the USA.
Barnes & Noble Outs The $119 Nook GlowLight, We Go Hands-On
Chromium and Opera are not major browsers.
There are so many laptop options without number-pads – usually cheaper, even. No one is being fooled or forced to accept a numpad. A few naive or first-time buyers might not yet know what they want... they'll either return/exchange their mistake or fix their choice next time.
May not really help, since OpenBSD doesn't distribute binary blobs.
Two Financial Advisers Accuse Twitter of Secondary Market Fraud
Or you know, renders the system completely worthless because no one can sort through that much spam.

Which also makes it completely trivial to DDoS into oblivion. And the problem gets worse then that: the more anonymous it is, the less it's possible to stop someone from spamming.

Though I suppose you could attack this problem from the email address side: make it computationally expensive to general an email address, to make address-hopping as a spammer more difficult.
Except the RAM is upgradeable:
http://reviews.cnet.com/8301-13727_7-57588607-263/how-upgrad...

...and the GPU may be upgradeable:
http://www.macrumors.com/2013/10/25/graphics-cards-in-new-ma...
My argument that it's "not a professional photographer's tool blah blah" was intended to prevent exactly what you have just said. Yes, you can make a baroque, twisted set of circumstances in which the item might be made use of in a professional manner, but that's not how it's going to be used.

You could say the same thing of a craft knife: it's not a surgical tool. Sure, in a very particular set of circumstances, a surgeon will use one, but that's 'blah blah'. It's not the way the items is used by the vast bulk of its users.
I'm guessing that the cop wrote "Driving with Monitor visible to Driver" using that language because there's a law specifically against that. If so, she might as well just pay the ticket.
I wonder if there's a "gimbal lock" equivalent where impacts in certain alignments relative to the gimbal mechanism still transmit a fairly large moment to the central unit.

If you have to take care of that situation, maybe it would be better to take care of all the impact compensation in software, and save the weight of the gimbal mechanism.
Then again, plausible deniability. Google is of less use to the NSA if they have fewer customers.
IANAL, but you can use it if you build it yourself, and even up to some small-ish scale (100k users? check with the MPEG LA). Do get your own legal advice.

As someone tweeted at me, BSD is a free/libre license, but it lacks an explicit patent clause, so BSD-licensed code may well not be free as in speech. Hence my use of gratis to describe what Cisco will release, both source and binaries.

/be
True. Money and life are brutally efficient: but also stochastic processes. Value might exist, but it's utility waxes, wanes and sometimes waxes again. Hence the principle of letting go totally willingly... Having that much confidence in the value when it's needed again. ;)
There have been reports going back to the Echelon days that the NSA and GCHQ collaborate to evade each nation's laws.

The ideas is that US agencies supply the UK with technology and training, the UK collects sigint in the US with US knowledge, then shares intelligence with US agencies.

The US reciprocates by spying on UK citizens and sharing the intelligence with UK agencies.

That way US agencies can say they don't spy on innocent Americans on US soil. But it's just another elaborate deception.
That article was way too conventional for my taste. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alcubierre_drive is my dark horse tech in this field.
John Siracusa: About My Mavericks Review
I think that, in today's world, everyone, particularly public people of interest to other countries, should reasonably expect to have foreign countries gather information about them, up to and including spying.

For example, if I was doing important security research, I would fully expect to have the Russians, Chinese, Israelis, etc, looking into my work.

I don't believe the US is exceptional. I expect other countries to have interests in US citizens and to carry out their interests to advance their national interest.

This expectation is entirely separate from my opinion of the morality of said act.
Design isn't all about looks.
Kim is also an outstanding reviewer of all kinds of gadgets (phones, headphones, cars, camera's, heck, even coffee grinders) paired with great photography -> http://minimallyminimal.com
..and you somehow forget the most important feature, bar none:

p { max-width: 30em; }
> I did get the model with cursor keys though.

Do you mean the HHKB Pro JP? Don't the tiny spacebar and vertical enter key bother you? Not to mention a bunch of symbols being in different places.
> This project at least provides the potential for people like myself who have existing Java projects with longstanding functioning methods that I don't want to rewrite in Node.js

In this case, wouldn't a java-to-js translator be more efficient than rewriting the whole jvm for Node.js?
People want cameras in their phones not because their cameras lack connectivity but so that they don't have to carry a separate camera.

Of course, there will always be a niche for cameras with lots of manual controls, possibly with big lenses, and they'll work as you say. DSLRs with wireless networking are already on the market, such as the Nikon D5300.
If your work consists of single text from one corner of the screen to the opposite, then I guess your complaint makes sense. But for most people you'll have all sorts of things open, and widescreen enables throwing that all to the sides. There are plenty of examples: Photoshop (and GIMP, Illustrator, InDesign, Inkscape etc) having tool palettes in the sides, IDEs with all sorts of tools and document trees and whatnot, or if you are more of a text-editor guy then still you can have eg documentation and code side-by-side, etc.

And of course for laptops, especially smaller ones, widescreen provides the unique advantage of maximizing keyboard size to total body size as keyboards are wide by nature. Admittedly this is less of a concern for 15"+ models, but I've never been a fan of those.
This sacrifices a number of portability bonuses that laptops usually bring. Try finding a place to put a USB laptop on a flight, or finding space to put it on one of those small student desks that has less surface area than the laptop itself.
Well I think you need to articulate the business case. For example:

Using Rails will save us '$x' over time and use 'y' less engineers.

On the flip side, you do have to calculate the ramp up time of learning the technology.

To make a convincing argument, try to understand the other person's value system.
The price of labor has gone up also, and that likely plays a role.

To wit: I lived in India for 2 years and my apartment had a window air conditioner that I'm pretty sure has been on this earth for longer than I have. During those 2 years, my air conditioner broke several times (including one time where it caught on fire). I would have thought at some point the landlord would have replaced it, but he kept sending people out to come to my apartment and repair it. In India, half a dozen house calls to repair something (most definitely not under warranty) were less than the cost of purchasing a new unit. If that happened in America, a single repair visit (parts, labor etc) would have been within striking distance of "oh I'll just go buy a new one"

<generalization>India offered a glimpse into a parallel world where capital is expensive and labor is abundant.</ generalization>
Google+ vanity URLs make me like Google+ less
MPEG-LA is unlikely to sue small open source users due to the regulatory environment, but i'd rather not rely that.

BSD lacks a patent clause, but the vast majority of open source lawyers believe there is an implied patent license, so this is normally not an issue.

It is in this case, sadly.

I agree that your terminology is probably a better description of what is happening here.
I don't see how the two are mutually-exclusive.
> It is illegal in the US but who cares about the rest of the world?

I think it's entirely justifiable to give the NSA more latitude abroad than domestically. To turn reverse the scenario, as an American, I would far rather have the French or the Germans conducting surveillance on the United States than the US government. People keep comparisons to the Stasi, too often they forget what the Stasi's purpose was: to suppress political opposition. Here in the US, surveillance was used for the same purpose, on a much smaller scale, during the J. Edgar Hoover era. Political opponents of the government were spied on with the intent of blackmail or embarassment.

That's the whole reason why government surveillance is so scary. It puts so much information in the hands of an organization with such far-reaching powers in law enforcement and otherwise that the combination is prone to abuse. When the US spies on foreign citizens or vice versa, the potential for abuse is much less. The NSA has neither the interest nor the ability to harass political opponents in Germany and France, and the same goes in the other direction.
Oh great, the typical Lenovo-doesn't-know-what-they're-doing comment. And of course it's completely wrong. Tons of people want 1366x768 screens on their 15" laptops. Otherwise it makes everything too small! That's what they think and that's what they want. And having the 6-row keyboard helps touchpad users, which is the majority of the Thinkpad customer base, have larger touchpads, and a smaller overall chassis with bigger palmrest, especially on the X240 but also on the T440s and T440.
and dust, and sweat, and humidity...
Serious question: is there any point until everyone encrypts their email?
I don't understand. A manual gearbox is far more distracting from the safe piloting of the car than an automatic.
Im assuming to the goal is to keep people using their real names?
If I had to guess, you're exercising too hard. Try 10% of what your routine is and then put in some code. Increase it slowly.

The right exercise regiment is important. There's no need to push yourself hard the first three months if you're starting out. Try a couch to 5k run routine over six months.
That sounds like the problem is that your battery went bad, not that it was a hassle to replace your bad battery.
What kind of company is it? Is it a tech company, services company or other?

That said, I believe he is a bit right in that Rails is no longer the new kid on the block, but you should read Jeff Atwood's post on Ruby (and maybe steal some arguments from him!):

http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2013/03/why-ruby.html

"Ruby isn't cool any more. Yeah, you heard me. It's not cool to write Ruby code any more. All the cool people moved on to slinging Scala and Node.js years ago. Our project isn't cool, it's just a bunch of boring old Ruby code. Personally, I'm thrilled that Ruby is now mature enough that the community no longer needs to bother with the pretense of being the coolest kid on the block. That means the rest of us who just like to Get Shit Done can roll up our sleeves and focus on the mission of building stuff with our peers rather than frantically running around trying to suss out the next shiny thing."
Brazilians are creating interesting content about Squash for beginners
Yeah, I realize the advantages of their design, it just doesn't seem worth it with the added complexity and (I would guess) reduced maneuverability. But I guess maneuverability isn't a huge concern, since it's designed to basically bounce around the environment.
I don't think that most feminists hate men. Most people who identify as feminists are pretty liberal, Hillary-Clinton-esque feminists, or "fun"-feminists of the "Pole dancing is empowering!" sort.

Of the feminists that do hate men, I think most of them do because they have experienced oppression at the hands of men in very direct ways, such as:

* Sexual harassment (probably all of the women you know have been sexually harassed)

* Sexual assault (one in four on average, higher than that for women in the global majority/women of color)

* Overt sexism (being derided as an "affirmative action" placement, told to make sandwiches/get off the Internet, etc.)

* Covert sexism (being assumed to be a subordinate in an office, being assumed to be an assistant/boyfriend at tech conferences, being singled out for "preferential" treatment in a Victorian expression of respect for fragility)

As a man, I think that there are a lot of reasons why women would hate men, and why people of color would hate whites. I think this is mostly justified. Men, and particularly white men, have and continue to do pretty absurdly horrible things, and more than that, refuse to even admit to it! The catcaller on a street doesn't think he's doing something wrong, much less the person who judges a woman more harshly for her efficacy at work (since she seems "cold" if she gets things done).

One of the best defenses of hate I've ever seen is from Butch Slaughter. You can see some of his work here: https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=Butch%20Slaught...

Mr. Slaughter guest lectured at a class I took on domestic violence, and one of the things he said that will always stick with me is that "there are some things you're supposed to hate." Systemic inequality, and the oppression of the majority of humans, is definitely something you're supposed to hate. And I think it's impossible to wholly separate that from the people who are responsible, either by accident or by choice, in supporting such things.
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