skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Modularity is going away, not only in Mac Pros, but even in desktop space.

AMD APUs are integrating the CPU and GPU together. Intel is releasing mainstream chips that cannot be physically separated from the motherboard (See the i7-4770R: it needs to be soldered on).

GDDR5 RAM, the mainstay super-fast graphics RAM, is assumed to be soldered onto a board. DDR4 will only support one RAM per lane.

Modularity is almost the opposite of market forces right now... as unfortunate as it sounds.
I don't know the exact plan since I'm not working on this, but it would be relatively easy for us to do:

1. Insist that the exact build configurations used by Cisco be open-sourced along with the rest of the code.
2. Require that every binary distributed by Cisco by tagged with the revision control revision ID.
3. Internally at Mozilla, build that revision of the code and compare the result to the binary blob that we would download from Cisco. Note we'd never distribute the outputs of our internal builds; we'd use those builds only to verify that the source code matches what we'd download.
4a: When we verify that the outputs match exactly, update some embedded hashes within Firefox to approve those versions of the binary blob for download/install, or
4b: Cisco could ask Mozilla to sign these blobs for them, and Mozilla would sign the blobs after doing the above checks. Then, the Firefox client would just verify that the blobs were signed by Mozilla's public key.
The fact that it's considered contrarian to advise people to start with building a profitable and sustainable business model is a sad testament to the "startup culture" that emphasizes hype over substance.
Juicy.
Generally, people can adjust the radio and turn on the wipers without looking down. You just know where the controls are.
Starting point: Lawdingo isn't Rocketlawyer.
The article hits the nail on the head. Engineering for modularity will squeeze out the benefits at some point. It's not some evil conspiracy, but ever-shrinking electronics and tolerances. It's going to be the domain of robots and high res 3d printers because we just won't be able to see or touch things at this scale.
It really startled me that the comparison was the Pro vs the Ara, and not the Pro and the Ara. The Pro is very much in the spirit of modularity. True, everything written demonstrates the different level of granularity of modularity between the Ara and the Pro. But to the consumer, the forward facing arguments are exactly the same: "Buy what you need, each separately, and link them all, as needed rather than a huge AIO - one size fits all".

The Mac Pro is requires you to bring your own HDs, bring your own expansion cards, bring your own network gear. Which centers the Pro itself at the core of a modular computing center.
This looks like one of the ideas that could be patented all over. Have you guys done any due diligence on that front?
Deploy API: Github JSON to API
I've published some code and articles about this concept. My idea is to have something like:

friends <- [user.alice, user.bob, user.carol] # array of friends
friends_movies <- apply(friends, movies)

When a friend updates its movies everything is recalculated like in a spreadsheet. The core idea behind this is to end with emergent behaviour from the small scripts of millions of people.

To simplify the programming language everything can be written as an s-expression. I've published the parser (using o-meta) with an article here: http://blog.databigbang.com/parsing-s-expressions-in-c-using... more food for thought in:

i) Egont, A Web Orchestration Language: http://blog.databigbang.com/ideas-egont-a-web-orchestration-...

ii) Egont Part II: http://blog.databigbang.com/egont-part-ii/
Your interpretation is completely wrong.
A previous app (now defunct) named ChatSquare would group people together based on the nearest Foursquare location.
Her conclusion is that when she follows the standard advice to get out there and talk to people, the men she talks to think that she's flirting with them. Whereas when you or I talk to men, they very rarely think we're flirting with them.

A subtext that you may have missed is that it's very awkward and uncomfortable to have only one party to a conversation think that the conversation is sexually charged, and the possibility of that happening is a disincentive to circulating and socializing.

I thought it was a pretty straightforward observation, but hopefully my summary helps you. Translating basic human experience to nerd-ese --- all part of the service we provide!
Halloween Costumes For Programmers And IT People (comic strip)
AngularJS Directives: Using HTML5 Web Speech
The focus was one of the main things we found to be a differentiator in this business model. Down the road, we'd love to look in to a variety of customers, but we know for a fact that restaurant owners alone could use this. Thanks for the comments.
Because some users do not have the privilege of doing even such rudimentary tasks, without the danger of being persecuted, prosecuted or worse by the tyrant regime they happen to be living under.
Twitter IPO: Sued for $124m over allegations of an ‘artificial private market‘
I'm curious about how this actually works, geometrically. Example:

A <----> B <----> C

Those are three people. Imagine each segment is 1 mile long. So A can see B; B can see C; but A can't see C. If B and C are having a conversation, does A see B talking to someone who effectively does not exist?
Microsoft Research uses Kinect to translate between spoken and sign languages
I'm afraid you may have missed the point that Apple makes with creating "walled gardens" with their products, and also what it means that Motorola is releasing a phone with modularity. Apple provides its customers focus. Rather than worrying about how they can modify their machine to improve performance and functionality, Apple's customers can be fairly confident that their machine will be reasonably fast, feature rich, relatively safe, and aesthetically pleasing while sacrificing a higher monetary cost and faith that the previously mentioned qualities will be fulfilled. You are very right that modularity on a mobile phone is going to involve sacrifices due to space constraints, and this is what we will see with the Ara. Interestingly though, while almost all mobile phones I've been exposed to in the past, this one will have swappable options. Basically I think this is saying that mobile phone technology is at the point where we can make some of the sacrifices but still end up with a useful device with options. It will be really cool to see how this plays out and if 3rd party add-ons will cause Motorola to pull back with this offering.

I'd like to point out that you highlight the benefits of modularity as improvements for speed, power consumption, size, and cost, but the use case you give is that you are writing an article on this custom machine that you've built. What else does your custome-made computer let you do that you couldn't do otherwise? And why do you think that the majority of consumers don't go down the custom route?

On a side note, I feel that I have to refer this article from the Harvard Law Review. It is a bit of a philosophical discussion on the "generative" aspect of computers compared to other devices/appliances. It's headlined "The Generative Internet" by Jonathan L. Zittrain.

http://dash.harvard.edu/bitstream/handle/1/9385626/Zittrain_...
For the reference: http://xiphmont.livejournal.com/61927.html

And an interesting part: http://blogs.cisco.com/collaboration/open-source-h-264-remov...
No guarantee, but the same team was successful at getting Opus (audio codec) adopted as MTI for WebRTC. http://www.ietf.org/proceedings/84/slides/slides-84-rtcweb-6...

On a purely technical level, Opus' performance blew the pants off the other options, which surely helped. If Daala can repeat that performance I think they have a good chance.
...or the carpet that you can build out of cars, considering the Ringojs.
"Dark Mail" reminds me of Chrono Trigger...
It might take some time, but I have to agree after working in Meteor for a few months, the developer experience is much better than trying to do Rails/Backbone Rails/Ember or Rails/Angular.
It's a "move" but not a solution. Just a temporary workaround. The solution is work on Daala.

See http://xiphmont.livejournal.com/61927.html
People deal with risk every single day in various forms. How can you expect a person to care about the risks a lack of privacy theoretically provides, when they're already not caring about the risks texting and driving pose? It takes laws to get people to stop texting while driving, and even then they don't really stop.
I use en_UK, dollars, miles and Fahrenheit (and Rankine) degrees.
She's a mini-Hitler. That's the company I'll avoid seeking employment at.
This is really going to be more of a cache-flush issue, considering how quickly it will recover.

Bouncing the front-end is likely to expose the backend (say, a php site) to the traffic load usually handled by varnish. This is likely to bring that (and its db, etc) down very quickly.

But the good news is that all you need to do is ship a new vcl file and there's no need to patch/rebuild varnishd binaries.
It's my understanding that most major appliances (washer, fridge, etc) are less repairable than they were 50 years ago. I think it's because of several contributing factors:

* Cheaper manufacturing with simultaneous increase in quality control and reliability.

* More complicated objects lead to more costly repairs, mechanics have to be more skilled, so wages go up.

Because it's simultaneously cheaper to something and more expensive to fix something, it makes much more sense to replace than to repair. These effects feed off of each other, too. To make something more reliable and cheaper, manufacturers seal off more and more parts, making it more and more expensive to repair, and so on.
Lavabit To Release Code As Open Source
No they weren't lying, as there is no evidence that Google had knowledge that the NSA had been tapping their dark fiber. What everyone assumed after the Guardian story was that Google had built some kind of firehose feed or portal for the NSA to just login and get whatever they wanted, never in any of those stories did they say the NSA was taking data against Google's knowledge or will.

For example, there was a famous slide showing when each company "joined the PRISM program", but the actual slide merely says "Dates when PRISM collection started for each provider". The reporter inserted the terminology "joined" which implies a partnership that didn't exist.

What these revelations reveal is that the NSA supplemented the data they got on a case-by-case basis through NSLs by outside-the-datacenter fiber taps of traffic, as well as upstream unencrypted HTTP and SMTP/IMAP traffic.
New Hilarious Music Video About Awkward Gym Moments
Non-Newtonian locomotion is the only viable form of manned Interstellar travel.
I'd love to check this out, maybe set up a site to gather emails?
Because people compartmentalise and so for engineers this is most probably not a political thing but just an interesting difficult problem that is fun to work hard on.
I am being pedantic, but that would be a function and not an alias.

This one is simple enough to be defined as an alias:

alias gitdiff='git diff --patience --ignore-space-at-eol -b -w --ignore-blank-lines'

This[1] discusses aliases vs functions (just to make my reply a bit more useful [may be not for you, but in general] and to me feel less guilty.)

[1] http://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/30925/in-bash-when-t...
Obviously Ara and iPhone fill different niches and take different sets of compromises. Neither of these is better than the other by all parameters, but each offers unique advantages.

Possibly the niche of Ara will be narrower, because the connectors are going to add noticeable cost. OTOH the ability to add an entirely different functional block right into the phone can be very valuable in some circumstances.

Of course, CPU and RAM need tight integration; I suppose these will come as one module. But the periphery, like radios, storage, cameras, etc need much less tight coupling and can use physically narrow high-frequency serial connections. If a connector is only 4 contacts wide (like USB) or even 6 contacts (like USB3), it can be reasonably cheap an compact.

Most probably a real Ara phone will have far fewer detachable blocks than currently pictured: a CPU/GPU/RAM block, a radio block, a camera block, probably an extra extension block for new devices (finger scanner? second camera for a stereo pair? projector?), and, of course, traditional detachable flash storage and battery.
If you are not angry at the GHCQ for tapping Google and Yahoo then I don't know what to tell you.
Mozilla can't stay relevant catering only to users willing to make that compromise, because they are so few.
100% agree after a few months of hardcore work and then being forced back into rails.
As usual. Regardless of political party corporate wins and citizens lose. Guessing unbundled cable and cheaper internet are not a priority.
People seem to have certain tastes for what sort of mark they'd want to leave. How many people want the mark they leave on the world to be a scar - and if your answer to that is quite a few, how do you explain the relative absence of scars on the world?

Of course one can argue that wanting to leave a positive memory is just as selfish as wanting to leave a negative one, but that would seem to me to be arguing in the same sense that wanting to donate to charity is an act of selfishness.
I think that in both cases, Usenet serves as an example (and an old one) of how the problem might be solved. At worst, what happens is that messages arrive in a different order than they were posted, hence the importance of "References" headers and quoting posts (the rest becomes a UI problem). Digital signing defeats forgery (if the network fractures, then your signed messages will only appear in one of the pieces of the network until the fracture is resolved), and encryption and mix-nets protect privacy.

So let's say you wanted to build a social networking system on top of Usenet. Here is one approach:

* Use attribute-based encryption to distribute keys to your friends; this allows you to control who can see the posts you make

* To post, you encrypt, sign, and encrypt again your message; then you send it through a mix-net to alt.anonymous.messages

* Your friends all download from alt.anonymous.messages, decrypting those messages they can decrypt. Your signature tells them who made the post, and ABE ensures that only those who have permission to see the post can decrypt it.

You can imagine extensions for commenting on posts, or creating groups, etc. You can also see that Usenet is not really relevant -- any P2P broadcast system could be used.
The portion of google's operation that NSA is tapping is already tiny. This article claims they got 181 million "records" of all kinds in a month. That's nothing! Google claims that gmail has half a billion active accounts. You think each of those active accounts only sends and receives one mail every other month? of course not.

The NSA is clearly already drowning, or being selective about what they are getting.
Ask HN: Quantum Entanglement Bandwidth Possibilities
Anyone know what are the bandwidth limits might be for data transfer between quantum entangled particles? Also, if we figure how to realistically send network data over one pair of entangled particles, is there any reason why we couldn't have many entangled pairs working in parallel. For instance, if you had 1024 pairs of entangled particles, you would be able to transfer a kilobyte in parallel instantaneously. Feasible?

edit: wording
Why isn't this just an iPhone app?
http://bistro.is/img/bistro-review.jpg <-- "this is a pretty good of your restaurant"
As others have said in answer, it's absolutely the fault of the various Flash embedded players.

It's somewhat easy to prove if you write your own player (not in Flash) to bypass the Flash player of sites like YouTube, Twitch, etc. The experience becomes perfectly smooth (as long as you have the average bandwidth), the video starts quickly, jumping to another point in the video is almost instant.
But do you want things to get done fast?

The Patriot Act was done fast, and we can see what kind of mess that is.
This short film on txting-while-driving by Werner Herzog changed my driving patterns. I'm sorry for your loss.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xk1vCqfYpos‎
Google announces easier recovery and more details for hacked sites
Ah, but one wonders about that comparison for vanilla Rails?
I'm not saying that they need to detail how they get the calls and who/when they managed and who/when failed to intercept.

However, even if the individual interception targets aren't discussed, 100% of them (not 99%) should be according to policy explicitly decided by the lawmakers - not arbitrarily by NSA leadership, but by President and/or Congress.

Should NSA wiretap governments of NATO countries? Should NSA record communications of all americans? The answer may be yes or no, there are all kinds of reasons, but it's definitely not the right of NSA to decide on that answer; they are allowed to do that if and only if the democratically elected policymakers have, well, made policies that allow that. These policies need not be public, but they need to be there - it would be completely understandable if Obama had authorised the wiretapping of Merkel and everyone else but denies it for diplomatic reasons, but it's unforgiveable sabotage if the same thing happened against the direction that president and secretary of state desired.

It's quite likely that the intel coming from German politician phones is more important than the effect of it on German relations, as the scandal will likely wash away soon. However, it's not the job or privilege of mr. Clapper to decide on that compromise; his job is to implement whatever decision the lawmakers and commander in chief come up with, even if he disagrees with that decision. And if the lawmakers ask him to testify under oath, as they had with earlier surveillance questions then his absolute duty is to obey them, not the intelligence community.

The intel committee does know better than to ask for methods and sources, but if they do explicitly ask for some reason and keep up the request after being warned - then he'd damn well give up the real sources, even if it costs lives; if in such a situation he provides a fake source then he deserves (forgive me for some exaggeration) to be executed for treason - it's not 'his' agency or data, it all belongs to the elected representatives of 'we the people'. How would mr. Clapper personally react in his previous USAF position, if one of his subordinate officers had deliberately mislead him to cause a decision that the subordinate wanted? Wouldn't court martial be the obvious, immediate, mandatory response?
http://www.bankrate.com/finance/investing/getting-initial-pu...

I thought this was common knowledge?
It's not quite there yet but it's getting better by the day. There are still some things like UI animations that are possible in Meteor but aren't quite as easy as they are in client side Javascript frameworks.

It makes me feel a little better though that they are trying to be transparent about the flaws by publishing their roadmap:

https://trello.com/b/hjBDflxp/meteor-roadmap
The display is only on for a couple seconds at a time.

I personally fall on the other side; why not extensively test before banning. We live in a society that jumps to conclusions. I believe we should have a proper understanding of something before deciding to make laws relating to it. What about the positive benefits. Also, do you really expect them to do the research after banning it? Look how long it has taken the FAA to even start reducing the ban on mobile devices.
> Why do I sometimes get the feeling that people specifically want to hate on these companies

Because they promote themselves as tech-based companies, yet abdicated their professional duty to design secure systems because insecurity makes for easier monetization.

You would very much blame a car manufacturer when it turned out that all of its cars were keyed the same.
I hate to be that guy, but this already exists as a stand-alone iOS app http://www.imore.com/iphone-proximity-sensor-locks-mac-keyca...
Apple dev team will take care of my PC hassles from now on.
It's the framework I'm most excited about and watching closely. I still think Rails has a place in the back-end (e.g. API) but Meteor is showing a lot of promise.
Precisely! This is especially true with the chaining capabilities of Thunderbolt.

People don't change Mac Pros like they change iPhones, the one you buy today will still be powerful in a couple of years.
I definitely do think you've identified a problem that needs solving, and your app is looking nice so far.

One thing that I've noticed for pick up soccer in the Bay Area is that there are a lot of games listed on meetup.com, but probably way less than 10% of them, since I personally know of a bunch that aren't on meetup. There are also several other websites that I've found on Google over the years that list some pickup games, but still, nothing that is anywhere near exhaustive.

The problem that you guys might have is that your app ends up as just another small subset of the games around. If you could figure out how to become the definitive and nearly exhaustive list, there could potentially be a lot of value in it. Think about how Yelp is useful because it has all the restaurants, and how useless it would be if only 10% of the restaurants were listed.

Reviews of ongoing games might be useful, as would ratings of skill level and information about the playing surface or number of fields/courts that people could search on. Another thing is that some ongoing games are already pretty full, so some sort of status that somebody could set for the game in terms of "need more people" or "near capacity" could be useful.

Lastly, it's been my experience that an ongoing pick up game might have 20-30 people in attendance, but only 1 or 2 actually check in, so you don't want to necessarily count on everyone checking in.
If people are interested in this stuff (and I hope a lot are), the Planetary Society [1] do weekly podcasts and events and talk about this and other areas. The Benford's are always good to hear because they're articulate, clever and so enthusiastic (the Economist cartoon has a Benford present as well I think).

A recent event was recorded in Pasadena "Is this the Starship Century?", a 90 min video with some great discussion about spaceships [2]. A book is out as well. It's good to dream, isn't it?

[1] http://www.planetary.org
[2] http://www.scpr.org/events/2013/09/25/1153/next-the-starship...
If you're on a Mac, try http://www.pixelmator.com/ - $30 for a license, and I believe that gets you free upgrades. I haven't extensively tested it's PSD support but I do know that it can at least open and save them and everything appears to work correctly.
I think you misunderstand what goal government contractors, and the government officials that manage their contracts, are working toward. It's not a full-featured, working product. It's money. The contractors want more contract money. The government workers want visibility and job security. These things "work" in the contracting system by having contractors that play the same game the government workers play: which is needlessly and pointlessly extending contracts, mainly by fucking things up while fulfilling the technical letter of the contract.
Assuming that the fiber end points only touch Google data centers, this would be ok, I guess.
Python Massage:Spa uses Snakes as Masseurs
"Let's be real, Javascript is the #1 language on Github and for good reason - it runs everywhere."

Similarly, anal sex is the best kind because it works on all genital configurations. /snark
> What if you could spend your time in one language
> and one framework?

What if you eat everything with a fork?
"game of probabilities and trade-offs where convenience wins" that is it in a nutshell, well said.