skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You compare the battery life, but not the screen to the macbook air? The screen is higher resolution, has a better coating, and is touch. Other than that, it's smaller and lighter (around 20%, actually), and comparably priced ($1299 for 256GB/8GB surface, $1299 for 256GB/8GB Air). It also has a micro SD card slot, to add further provisions.

This isn't a tablet competitor, it's an ultraportable competitor.

e: made a bit more concrete
Well I guess moving to Finland is out of the question for the author...
Duplicate item: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6629204
That's weird. Right now, yahoo is telling me AAPL is at $537, up $7. After hours is bullshit.
Thanks for the fix. It was clear that the ichnaea docs were intended to be generic, but there's also this bit: "More information about the specific instance hosted by Mozilla can be found at https://wiki.mozilla.org/Services/Location" which leads to a page that also doesn't list the endpoint API.
Pen support should translate into large traction in the education market - any reasons why you think this is not happening?
Is it the same result using cellular vs. using wifi?
I didn't look closely at the actual equations of motion, but clicking around in a sort of periodic fashion makes patterns that remind me of chaotic advection (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaotic_mixing). Always very cool to see interesting patterns from relatively simple dynamics.
> Material things are tools for happiness, not happiness itself.

Absolutely.

> We all go to work for 40 hours a week so that we don't have to live in a tent, cook on a travel stove, and hunt/grow our own food

You can ensure that by only going to work 20-30 hours a week.

> Many people would rather work 40 hour workweeks for (essentially) guaranteed food, water, shelter, and leftover purchasing power

But they're not getting that grantee. McDonald's just told it's full-time employees to go on food stamps. Wal-Mart has tens of thousands of employees working full-time equivalent hours with no health care and being forced to get a second and third job to make ends meet. Hundreds of millions of Americans have crushing debt, and still go to work full time. This just out today: most Americans are accumulating debt faster than they're saving for retirement[1]. What does that say about the future?

[1] http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/many-american...
Shares trading up 1% in AH.
As someone who has to buy Apple devices for work, I'm hoping they get some pressure to drop their prices, especially on MBPros. My next one will probably cost a bomb since the new ones don't let you stick in third party ram - though the SSD is replacable (with considerable effort)
Google Glass 2 is coming, finally compatible with prescription glasses
Breaking RULES,BOUNDARIES&NORMS/Come out of your Shell-Why It Can't Be?
Haha. This is the best comment in this thread.
Would you agree that "very low food security" translates to "hunger"? If so then the number is close to 1 in 18. In my opinion this is still a high number.

http://www.ers.usda.gov/publications/err-economic-research-r...

From your link, of those that reported "very low food security":

96 percent reported that an adult had cut the size of meals or skipped meals because there was not enough money for food.

89 percent reported that this had occurred in 3 or more months.

95 percent of respondents reported that they had eaten less than they felt they should because there was not enough money for food.

68 percent of respondents reported that they had been hungry but did not eat because they could not afford enough food.

47 percent of respondents reported having lost weight because they did not have enough money for food.

29 percent reported that an adult did not eat for a whole day because there was not enough money for food.

23 percent reported that this had occurred in 3 or more months.

*Edited for formatting of percent breakdown
Another option that seems to offer the same thing: http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/126495570/bitlock-turnin...
TL;DR Overall I’m impressed with the Pro 2. They fixed the big problems I had and didn’t change any of the shit I loved. It’s for creating not consuming.
> Again, Tucker made his argument from first principles, in a non-hindsight fashion (he was writing when Lenin was a teen). So it would be hard to argue that it's not inevitable

The conclusion does not follow from the premise. That an argument was made "from first principles" doesn't make it hard to argue against.

> because it was empirically shown

I would disagree with the claim that what Tucker actually predicted was empirically shown, but this whole discussion is widely afield from the point.
Is there one of those snazzy four letter codes like "TLDR" which means "This was a video with insufficient information to determine if it was applicable to my interest, so I didn't watch any of it"?
I've had a Dell XPS 12 and been really happy with it, so the XPS 11 is on my list along with the 11" version of the Yoga 1 when that comes out. Oh, and of course the Surface Pro.
Samsung to Developers: Come Play for the Biggest Team
That government is elected by the people. It's not a foreign occupier. So I guess that the people of Germany have chosen to make businesses not just about maximizing profit.
No the $6.3B is from the mobile division alone. Their chip sales also saw profits of about $1.9B which is double than same time last year, but the phone sales are still their #1 business.
Polarization is never realistic; you've got to find a balance.
Aren't those pretty much the exact same conditions as last year's quarter? iPhone 5 release: September 21, 2012. iPhone 5s/5c: September 20, 2013. And both had supply issues at launch. It seems fair to compare the quarters and draw some tentative conclusions.
> Luckily, in this world of "skyrocketing" poverty, surely only the top 1% can afford such indulgences, right? It's not as if innovation and a growing economy have put them in the hands of more than a hundred million Americans.

Way to go on the ethnocentrism.
Any job will allow that, if you reduce your financial obligations sufficiently.

Don't look for ways to earn more, looks for ways to spend less.
actually fish works with ansi-term under emacs without issue
In Search of the Superconductor Holy Grail
And it didn't really have a point. Unless your intention was to refute the message of mine through ad-hominem-via-rap-lyrics.
I've noticed complaints about the price, but isn't it a good idea for MSFT to avoid completely alienating their OEM partners by leaving room for them to compete with lower cost models?

If MSFT were more aggressive in pricing the Surface units then those Chromebook "experiments" (dare I say "hobbies"?) the big OEMs are running might also get more aggressive..
A few underplayed pieces from the archive
Do you really think he is simply out to 'piss people off'? I'm genuinely interested in your answer. I personally don't think there are many people like that. I think the word 'troll' is overused, very, very few people out there are trolls. When I think 'troll' I think about people who join multi-player games only to cause havoc, people who join IRC channels to paste nazi ascii's. I think people who have unorthodox, or radical beliefs often mistakenly appear intentionally inflammatory, but they really aren't. So, I really don't think Umair is a troll in the traditional way. He's probably (at least in his mind) making a good faith effort to explain something, he's clearly misguided in his ways of elucidation of complicated ideas, but reducing him to a 'troll' just takes the direction of discussion down a confrontational and unproductive path.

Yes, he is ignoring the long history of beards in Europe, instead focusing how beards are viewed today by specific subsets of people, and I think that's probably the source of his errors.
Or a little more parameterized: http://www.cydeweys.com/blog/2008/07/02/better-fizzbuzz-solu...
IMO the retina screen is a big reason to upgrade from the 2 (and is the reason I waited for the 3rd gen model). I pretty much use my iPad exclusively for reading text of some format--web pages, text-based services like Facebook and Reddit, books, etc. (with the occasional YouTube or Netflix video thrown in)--and having that extra clarity as compared to the first two versions is crucial for me.

It's now that I don't really feel any compelling reason to upgrade -- even with iOS7 the interface is plenty fast enough, and I don't use it for games so any increases in performance wouldn't really matter to me.
This weekend when I checked out the SP2, I also looked at the 11" Yoga and the 13" Yoga 2. The screen on the Yoga 2 was just spectacular. I'd really like something similar on the 11 (I think the Yoga 11" I tried this weekend was a 3rd gen intel, though).
Apple mindshare dominance?

(Apple has a very long history in the education space, and now that is paired up with some truly exceptional products. It's a potent mix, at least in theory. In practice, well, you get the LA school district iPad catastrophe...)
First startup failure
I don't think it would be appropriate at this point in the discussion. There are numerous articles and books about Wall Street culture; some of them are very true to life.
Salk never patented the vaccine
This is so trivial!

Actually, if you use lazy data structures, then sorting the list lazily and taking i-th element will give you the best possible complexity: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Selection_algorithm#Language_su...

In Haskell, it is nothing more than "ithSmallest xs i = sort xs !! i".
This argument would explain slower sales or lower revenues, but I'm not sure this has much validity in explaining the lower net profit or gross profit margins.

Lower gross profit margins are probably better explained by either downward pressure on prices or upward pressures on costs of manufacture. It can also be driven by changes in product mix (e.g., higher sales of the lower margin iPad Mini). It's not unreasonable to attribute this to greater competition from lower margin Android products.
An interview with Alan Greenspan
Borrowing to pay for welfare is one problem, borrowing to smooth out fluctuations in production is another. If the robots are to be efficient, they'll produce exactly what is demanded for equilibrium, but the economy cannot be in equilibrium, because people's demands are constantly changing. If for example, there's a revolutionary new product, suddenly the factories tooled to produce the old product need to be converted to make the new product. So, either the people must suffer shortages in supply, or the robots borrow to expand, meet demand, and then pay back the borrowed capacity.

And in fact, if you arrange things right, the robots who have the product that is no longer in demand can lend their unused capacity to robots making a product that is in higher demand.

My point is, borrowing from the future isn't always wrong, it depends on the context. If Western civilization had never invented banking or finance, we would have been far worse off.
I think he's out to get attention, and one way to do that is to be controversial, something which he seems to have honed to a fine art. I think he must be bright to have gotten so good at it, but it does not strike me as being all that productive, either.
> Capitalism is not some sort of natural law

Capitalism is based on trade, which IS a natural law. It seems pretty natural to me that people want to trade what they have for other things they need (for example, a musician trades their music for food&shelter).
Building Multiplayer HTML5 Games with Cloak
And has a (certainly decent for a tablet but) awful keyboard and trackpad compared to other ultra-portables. There are clear trade-offs here (there always are and there is nothing wrong with making clear and opinionated trade-offs) and I’m not sure whether the Surface Pro makes the right ones. No doubt Microsoft made all the right trade-offs for some people, the question is only whether those some people are more than a niche.
> It's supposed to be the art of taking away until nothing unnecessary left.

Except if I can't understand your use case, none of the complexity related to it is needed, so it's all excess and must be removed. After all, we have a Model T, so why do we need a Ford Focus? They both move you along under engine power.

In other words, a lot of engineers seem to have a Procrustean Bed and a deep need to cut problems down to size in the name of cutting solutions down to size.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Procrustes
I assure you it had a point, and I apologize if it was obscured by way of the quote. The point being that, well, perhaps your point would be better expressed through non-sarcastic means.

No ad hominem was intended, it was more of a critique of the general idea of forming rebuttals that consist of sarcastic remarks.
> Capitalism is based on trade, which IS a natural law.

All economic systems are "based on trade", since they are all mechanisms of arranging trade.

That doesn't make capitalism at all special among the universe of all actual (or possible) economic systems.
I'm curious what portion of Apple's customers actually anticipate new versions of products and hold off on purchasing until they're released.

I imagine it's common among the Hacker News segment, but what about the average person?
That's crap. If you can't support your products at the price point you set, your price point is too low. This Apple Care business is like extended warranties at rip off electronics stores.

(Edit: Not that you're wrong, just that it sucks.)
"The pro 2 comes with 200gb of Skydrive space so I went ahead and created an account. Now I’ve got my phone set up so that every time I take a picture it sends a copy to Skydrive."

Just make sure you don't take any naughty pics or you might get your Live account banned.
We have what we call "Liberté d'expression" http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libert%C3%A9_d'expression but it's limitated by the law. For example you can't say racists things in public.
How I deal with users who steal
Five Years of Gensim
That's kind of what I'm trying to do with a project I'm working on [1]. Everything is backed by git repositories, and the interface allows you to work with git (branch, commit, fork, merge, etc) without actually knowing any git commands. Essentially, git is masked beneath the surface, but you get all of the power of git for versioning and collaborating.

[1] http://www.penflip.com
Announcing the Python Datastore SDK and HTTP API documentation
While I agree that mathematicall ability can very much improve with time and hard work, I still think that there are "math people". However, it's largely a matter of interest, not ability.

I know my case: I'm not a bright person at all, yet I've loved maths since I was... like 4, maybe less. I used to climb to shelves to get my siblings' math books from older courses and read them with passion, resulting in anecdotes like understanding negative numbers at 5 or knowing what a square root was at 6. I hold the firm belief that any child (any without development problems, at least) could understand those concepts, and many others more complex than those, at similar ages. However, very few will do, for the simple reason that they would rather spend time with a few friends and a ball than surrounded by books; I won't blame them.

And just like I was the mathy boy, I was also the clumsy boy at PE, because I used to spend much less time running or playing soccer. It ends being a matter of frequency: most children will prefer playing than reading or doing math, so at those ages the normal boy has developed a much better ability for sports than for maths. Because of that, ability for sports is regarded as normal, and everyone accepts that most people can start exercising at later ages; we all have the required gears. Maths, on the other hand, is still something that few kids develop deeply enough, and because of that, it's regarded as uncommon, which in turns causes most people to believe that it's a matter of innate ability instead of hard work.

That said, teaching maths is tremendously hard, which is another big factor. I developed most, if not all, of my mathematical epiphanies by myself. The task of learning maths is difficult to direct from outside.
Swear Jar – Incentivizing good behavior
Yeah works for me at home on 24 too. Just noting it in case.
Screenshot: http://i.imgur.com/OGGaEBJ.jpg
China’s broken art market
> captialism is valuing the accrual of property as a virtue in and of itself

Accrual: The act or process of accumulating; an increase.

Am I missing something? How is that not "growth"? If someone has more and more, the number of things they own has to keep growing. [I put growth in quotes because I think there is a world of difference between a tree or a person growing, and bank accounts or "places to put stuff" (see Carlin et al.) growing.]

> not necessarily above or even competing with valuing human life

I would argue that even the focus on property - owning things just for the sake of owning them, as opposed to making, using and sustaining things (not just objects, but also ideas and living beings) for the sake of furthering life - goes against the humanity and aliveness of the person subscribing to that view.

Moreover, since we're nowhere near being able to turn energy into matter, to conjure property out of, say, the energy that gets hurled around space by suns and such, property often has to come from somewhere. Not strictly necessarily, but quite often in practice, it means taking things that someone else owned, or could potentially own; wherever we're dealing with finite resources, amassing property must make the rest poorer. Sure, that's not an objective in itself, "just" an unavoidable side-effect. Kinda like alcoholism is "just" wanting to be happy/drunk, not wanting to feel miserable or making others miserable. 10 for noble intentions, 0 for intellectual honesty.

Yes, it is theoretically possible for such an addiction (to own more for the sake of owning more) to at least harm no other beings than the ones suffering from it. We may get there some day. We're not there, at all.
This black market the arbolitos (literally "little trees", a joke on individuals selling "green bills" ergo leaves, you get the point) has existed for decades and comes and goes whether currency exchange controls go up.

The real black market is the hidden one, the one where millions are moved every day. Just because members of government banned currency exchange doesn't means they and their friends can't buy dollars or other foreign currency, and they do, sometimes subsidized by the government given that they buy at the official rate which is near half that of the real market rate.

The only thing keeping this disaster from graduating to hyperinflation is the fact that for the first time in 100 years Argentine exports are back in high demand, back then it was the British and French, now is the Chinese and Indians buying Argentine food products. That source of foreign currency feeds the vaults of the central bank allowing the current government to keep this Jenga-economy from falling apart, let alone stuff their pockets.

Ironically 100 years ago Argentina used that money to build its industry, fund the arts, providing top-level education to the population and build its infrastructure, all with the best of the best. Today this new money is being squandered by a government so corrupt it dwarfs even the worst of the early 20th century Argentine elite. The irony is that Argentina is building nothing today, in fact most of the country still lives everyday using the (now decrepit due to age and lack of maintenance) infrastructure created in those days (or with the wealth from those days) meaning this time it will not only repeat the same mistake of depending too much on primary exports but it will leave nothing for future generations.
Glenn Greenwald: NSA spying has nothing to do with terrorism
Couldn't agree more. As someone from the area, I have trouble finding anyone who knows anything about linux. Interview questions about basic tools/tasks, such as ssh, grep, ps, vim, etc. are met with blank stares. But they all (claim to) know c#. And on the other hand, I don't see many jobs at all with requirements outside of a MS stack, so we're stuck in a bit of a chicken-egg problem here.
I thought that this was the least interesting speech uploaded from YC2013. Too much tongue-in-cheek activism/"jokes"/etc for me.
Whoops! Does HN really not have a duplicate-checker?
Apple deferred nearly a billion dollars in revenue due to the switch to free software. http://techcrunch.com/2013/10/28/apple-says-future-versions-...
This is a paid article... FTA: "MS did give me this Surface Pro 2"

How is this not getting flagged as spam?
Very smart, I like it.

Gravatar is obviously wrong in its defense of the md5 choice. The md5 of an email is way more significant as we know in advance the structure, and for 80% of the population, we have a strong guess of the domain, the format.
Rainbow tables can be specialized for one domain (*@gmail.com) via the reduce phases or for the "first_name dot last_name" structure... & so on.
Ad hominem is entirely relevant to the portion of the argument which rested on the authority of the speaker.
Heh, I haven't used 11 much I still remember it being in SUNWCXall or whatever that group was.
A Hacker's Guide for the NSA
However Apple's product release schedule being as rigorous as it is tends to make quarters more comparable. Perhaps a better indication here is the drop from 40% gross margins to 37% gross margins. That comes right out of the business.

Generally lower revenues but same margins is a sign so constraints in the supply chain. Higher revenue but lower profits is a sign of margin erosion. Lower revenue and lower profits and lower margins is perhaps one of the most alarming situation.

It is good to push back on folks who thought he tablet was just a fad? You know the ones who said "There isn't a 'tablet' market so much as their is an 'iPad' market." Well those folks have been shown to be mistaken.

I don't own any Apple stock (well I might in my blind 401k but I wouldn't know if I did :-) I've been tempted to pick some up after it dropped from the 700's into the 400's. But the thing that I keep wondering about is their ability to execute in a contested market by a competent opponent. This coming quarter will be an interesting one for everyone I expect.
The UK used to allow people to advertise prices without VAT. But that led to "people being confused" and a "broken free market", so a rule was introduced that if you're selling to end consumers (rather than B2B) you need to include VAT in all advertising to allow easier price comparison.

I've never thought about the hidden aspect of that tax. But then, we have very high tobacco duties and fuel duties and etc etc. People in general in the UK don't have much idea about how much tax they're paying. HN is going to be unrepresentative because of the number of people paying higher tax rates or people who are self employed with accountants.
Apologies, my mistake. Also, when talking about Gandi's pricing I was speaking generally, i.e. they are more expensive than average domain registrars. I've, however, bought domains from them myself and their support and admin are great, so I would totally recommend them.
User-level libraries can't lock up your OS unless they can trigger kernel / driver bugs or make your hardware malfunction. In this case, graphics drivers are the most likely cause.
At first in my mind it's 'Oh, another javascript particle effect' and then I try the demo and it becomes 'holy shit, this is amazing'

Amazing job!
This could equally well have been done to an SHA1 implementation. MD5 is not especially susceptible to brute-force preimage attacks.
Chat Heads for OS X