skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I have run either Linux or FreeBSD (briefly) on every laptop I have owned since my first one in 2002. I have never once booted into Windows since the first thing I do is wipe the disk. However, despite switching vendors several times, every one of those machines has had Windows preinstalled because it ended up being included with the hardware I wanted. Even when I was quite poor, I didn't care so much about getting a refund for the Windows Tax (after all, I was willing to pay the price with Windows included), but I hated the fact that I was subsidizing a company whose product I don't use and who is actively working against my user experience. I'd be happy with paying the same retail price, but with a simple way to donate what would have gone to Microsoft to the Linux Foundation or to pay an employee working on drivers, open standards, or anything else that ultimately improves my experience.
Why Advertising Won't Save Online Dating Sites (2011)
Mentions Lenovo, UK based, but does not feature the Linux Emporium, strange.

I personally do not need exceptional speed, so using refurbished Thinkpads off ebay.

"This would enable you to wipe the hard drive and install Debian while retaining the option to load either Windows 7 Pro (which includes an XP mode) or Windows 8 Pro if you need them."

I would always suggest making an image of the hard drive using CloneZilla and using the Windows tool to make a restore DVD before wiping. Should you decide to flog the beast in a year or so, you can restore to factory state.
Scored below these, bumped from the front page, does not even have NSA in the name for NSA penalty. Is it because the submitter is green, or some other valid reason?

27.
DataStickies: USB drives as sticky notes (datastickies.com) 120 points by JeanSebTr 18 hours ago | 89 comments

28.
Best Firefox Add-ons of 2013 (mozilla.org)
106 points by yeukhon 21 hours ago | 50 comments

34.
Inverted totalitarianism (wikipedia.org)
211 points by pikachu_is_cool 10 hours ago | 124 comments
Two wrongs does not make one right ... arguments like "they started" may be heard in a kindergartens playground but I think it's reasonable to hold USA to higher standards than that.

And as for the conditions at Guantanamo, I hope that "enhanced interrogation techniques", water boarding and similar, isn't used all that frequently in the US penal system.
We ask all the startups we fund to come to SV Jan through March. Whether they stay afterward depends on whether they want to, and whether the government lets them. Some are making things for their local market (e.g. Glio, in the last batch), and for those it makes sense to go back to their home countries afterward even if they can get US visas.
Large-scale JavaScript: A monolithic service layer
Horrifying undercover video shows DiGiorno pizza suppliers abusing dairy cows
Dogs are also stupid enough to jump into someone and break the person's leg while catching a frisbee, as happened to a friend of mine who had just gone off health insurance.
> People like you are why my Air is sitting in my closet and why I'm still using a PowerBook G4 in 2013.

How does that in any way follow from what you said, and what do you even mean?
Mandatory SMBC reference: http://www.smbc-comics.com/index.php?db=comics&id=1733#comic
Suspend works fine now in my experience, it's mainly hibernate where the remaining issues are.
Wait, you have both a MacBook Air and a PowerBook and you're using the PowerBook?

But that aside, I think the ThinkPad is great. I might try that for my next purchase, if the specs are comparable by the time my current laptop becomes obsolete.
No. :(

This will eliminate other languages in the US.

Chance to japan's school systems, make high school
where you have to apply, and have it specialized.

[edit: wrong country.]
What does this post even mean? You bought an Air but won't use it, instead using 8+ year old computer, because random people on the internet talk trash about PC laptops? I don't get it.
What, why?

Are you saying there's inherently something "immoral" about covering your tracks, using other passwords, or hacking firewalls? On what basis?

If the guy is already copying documents he's not allowed to have access to, what difference does it make using passwords he's not allowed to have access to?
shameless plug for RqbQuant.js (my lib for color quantization) which can be used for the same purpose by changing the output palette size from 256 to 16 or whatever, try it here:

demo: http://o-0.me/RgbQuant/

repo: https://github.com/leeoniya/RgbQuant.js
Very reasonable list there.

1. Campaign finance reform. I actually would like to see some steps towards a return to the older party boss systems. Think Tammany Hall. These systems were incredibly corrupt but very efficient. Moreover, the base of each party wasn't the radical fringe. This isn't ideal, but at times it worked reasonably well.

2. Electoral reform. I would like to see instant-runoff voting. I say this with the caveat that there really needs to be more than 2 major competitive parties, so I'm lumping that into this bullet point as well.

3. Patent and copyright reform.

4. Single-payer healthcare

5. Prison reform. Rehabilitation instead of Punishment. Abolition of private prisons and an overhaul of the criminal code. Could add points onto this topic for hours.

6. Tax reform. Specifically a single tax system using Land Value Tax.
the real question is, does it work with WebP?
The fees, listed on the website, are mostly transparent but complex.

You must pay at least $10 in commissions each month or they charge you the difference. Depending on how much you trade this might be a deal breaker. There is also a minimum initial deposit.

Virtualbrokers is another option with more choice of fee structure. I don't think they have a minimum monthly fee but they charge you for data.
I had to check the date of the post to check this wasn't dated 2003 or something - his answer seems very dated. Really it's not as hard as he makes out to make this stuff work, popular distros are being updated every 6-months, Intel, Nvidia & AMD get their stuff supported from day one.
The Rise of .io Domain Names for APIs:
http://blog.programmableweb.com/2013/08/28/the-rise-of-io-do...

.io domains are very popular in a ton of different areas, though!
Signal processing advance: even faster Fourier Transforms
Boston Police indefinitely suspends license plate reader program
It's rather subjective to say that's a "significant step up". "Dereferencing a null" indicates a potentially serious underlying issue that the "do nothing" hand-holding you describe masks.
It appears that Teton County Wyoming is the county that pays the most on average at 67k.

Does anybody have any insight into why that is? For the most part i understand that high taxes in the more populous and economically prosperous zones but why a county in Wyoming?

edit: From the nested link

> "In addition, some counties that host popular ski resorts—such as Pitkin County, CO (which contains the city of Aspen) and Teton County, WY (which contains Jackson Hole)—also have notably high income tax burdens."

http://www.brookings.edu/blogs/up-front/posts/2013/12/13-inc...
You also have to consider the possibility that that is a lie. One of Snowden's comments was that many individuals had access to what he released (as in most standard NSA employees), discrediting that statement is in the governments best interest.
People like him are why you are using a slow crappy computer all the while you have a $1200 fast, well built computer in your closet? What?
Clever. How does it actually extract the dominant color? What kind of mathematics involved in this kind of stuff? From an architect point of view, does it make sense to do this on the client side?
"People like you are why my Air is sitting in my closet and why I'm still using a PowerBook G4 in 2013."

I'm all for recycled hardware, but what a strange thing to do to leave a newer machine with current vendor supported OS in the cupboard.
For the most part not so strong that it's hard to understand what they're saying, which is the critical threshold. There are a few I'm worried about though.
Couldn't stop myself from trying to use tab-completion.
Talk about the riots that would cause.
Unlikely but possible. Much like the creation of a universe, perhaps.

Given infinite time, you might flip heads a million times in a row.
Anyone know which steaming music station he is listening to?
Caring for family.
Interestingly muy suspend/resume worked always for 3 different computers, but failed on one desktop.
Wikipedia

"Teton County contains the affluent Jackson Hole skiing area. In addition, the county contains all of Grand Teton National Park and 40.4% of Yellowstone National Park's total area, including over 96.6% of its water area (largely in Yellowstone Lake).

It has the highest personal per capita income in the U.S. at $132,728, surpassing Manhattan with $120,790."
The article shows that buying Windows with a laptop doesn't cost you much more than no Windows at all. Based on this and my experience, I suggest to get a Windows first and install whatever Linux you like as dual-boot. The reasons are:

1) Having a Windows installed strongly guarantees that you are going to have a functional machine no matter what. Depending on your experience with Linux you might screw things up. If it happens you still have Windows as a back-up.

2) If your aim is to communicate research results, it is very likely that you are going to need to use Office at some point, to interact with your supervisor, colleagues, that don't care about OS and just run Windows (the majority of people). You can use Office within Linux but I find it much easier to use directly from Windows (reduces the pipework and focus on the science).

3) It maybe no longer holds, but a few years ago it was really frustrating to use and connect machines running Linux on a projector. For instance let's say you have to give a talk at a conference, you want to be 100% sure that it will work out of the box and that you don't have to fiddle around to show your slides. Windows does that really well (drivers are primarily developed for it I guess) and allows you to focus on the presentation only (stressful enough). I've witnessed numerous times good science being badly communicated because of this issue, where people try to tune the resolution for 10 minutes before starting and the slides end-up being half-cropped.

In summary, dual-boots guarantees compatibility with the outside world (science research perspective), and you can use your Linux the rest of the time :-)
Forget Guantanamo. He's dealing with a government that has killed U.S. citizens with drone-fired missiles without due process. If I were Snowden, I'd be concerned that if I came anywhere near the reach of the U.S. government, I'd be secretly declared an "enemy combatant" and an "unfortunate accident" would happen to me.
I have wondered about Zareason laptops (http://zareason.com/shop/Laptops/). Anybody tried them?
It is important to acknowledge that. It's also important to know that many people consider this a fine use of their work.
Can you elaborate? Every company I've ever encountered is looking to fill a position because it has a problem to be solved that needs someone in that position to help solve it -- they can't develop their new product without three new programmers, for instance. Strategy is executed via tactics, they're not mutually exclusive.

Could you give some more concrete examples, or something? Are you talking about ongoing maintenance jobs (like your time will be spent mostly bugfixing) vs building-new-product jobs? I'm really curious what you mean.
Could "using passwords" be PR-speak for the su command?
I've been wondering about this for a while given I currently work for a community college. Skipping the "robot engineer" degree I would expect to show up, what the heck kind of training would be needed for a "robot technician and repair" vocational program?
Twitter vulnerability lets apps send DMs without user permission
>Only defining it in terms of Nazi Germany might be too narrow, but the word still has specific meaning (total state control over most/all aspects of society). And while it's easy to see how that meaning applies to Nazi Germany, it's much less obvious how the United States fits that definition...

Well, not that hard. For one, there's a humongous legal framework, criminalizing and turning almost all aspects of everyday life, from speech to nutrition, into a legally mediated issue.

Second, a way over the top (compared to regular liberal western democracies) use of police force (and incarceration).

Third, devising of new ways of tranfering powers to the state (from extended no-rights zones around airports to the Patriot Act).

Fourth, total surveillance over society.

Political scientists and philosophers have read totalitarianism in these (and other aspects) for ages. Putting them in constast to the relative freedoms of 1960 or 1880 paints a bleak picture.

It's like slowly boiling the frog while it watches Miley Cyrus twerk.
AngularJS 1.3: a new release approaches
I find that covering up the next letter with the arrow makes this very difficult.
I had the same question. They have a small population (~20,000), and 65% of the county's income is derived from capital gains, not wages. I'd guess the county is an enclave that wealthy people move to after they've made their money elsewhere. Wyoming has no personal or business income tax.

http://www.jhnewsandguide.com/news/top_stories/irs-county-is...

http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/news/nation/2004-04-17-wyomin...
Geddy.JS: A No-Brainer MVC Node.js Framework | DigitalOcean
Why build quality of a laptop is important, for nothing but heat? It is not a car, or a house. It would be nice if it would be durable, but it shouldn't cost you so much extra cash. I have used many plastic body laptops and the only issue I had is that the painting on one of them got scratched easily. The build quality requirement is over-concerned. For mostly immoving use (unlike cell phones) I don't really understand why it matters so much.
How Twelve South does great customer service
Indeed very nice....which is the colorscheme on the site BTW?
Correct me if I am wrong, but Godwin's law does not apply.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Godwin's_law

"Godwin's law applies especially to inappropriate, inordinate, or hyperbolic comparisons of other situations (or one's opponent) with Nazis – often referred to as "playing the Hitler card". The law and its corollaries would not apply to discussions covering known mainstays of Nazi Germany such as genocide, eugenics, or racial superiority, nor, more debatably, to a discussion of other totalitarian regimes or ideologies,..."
Mandela and Tolstoy
Really...Is This What We Want?
Tips on changes parents must make based on Obama's leadership.
The Selling of Attention Deficit Disorder
Not very intelligent for an intelligence agency, missing something so close to home -- literally within their own walls. If they can't figure out what people they vetted and hired, why would anyone expect them to do better with someone whose resume they didn't have.

Not that anyone in D.C. is holding the accountable, but if someone hypothetically did want to hold them accountable, how high would their threshold for failure have to be for outcomes like this?

> Mr. Snowden’s disclosures set off a national debate about the expansion of the N.S.A.’s powers to spy both at home and abroad, and have left the Obama administration trying frantically to mend relations with allies after his revelations about American eavesdropping on foreign leaders.

Mending relations is probably hard to do while continuing the programs and their secrecy. It probably wouldn't be that hard to mend them if they shut down the program.

It would save money and stop breaking the Constitution too.
There appears to be a bug in Safari 7.0 that's causing every annotation to have doubled text. Thus a comment like this:

"Pro Rata Rights mean that the investor will be able to maintain his or her percentage in subsequent financing rounds by investing additional capital."

Actually appears in the DOM as:

"Pro Rata Rights mean that the investor will be able to maintain his or her percentage in subsequent financing rounds by investing additional capital.Pro Rata Rights mean that the investor will be able to maintain his or her percentage in subsequent financing rounds by investing additional capital."

Note the repeat, without any spacing, following the first .

Even more oddly, this pattern seems to occur for each paragraph of the original, so:

"
Paragraph 1 blah blah blah. Blah blah blah blah.

Paragraph 2 blah blah blah. Wat.
"
shows up as:
"
Paragraph 1 blah blah blah. Blah blah blah blah.Paragraph 1 blah blah blah. Blah blah blah blah.

Paragraph 2 blah blah blah. Wat.Paragraph 2 blah blah blah. Wat.
"
>Well one of the applications that used a highly idiosyncratic feature that was impossible to emulate was Microsoft Word.

Do you know which feature that was?
A psychiatrist thinks some patients are better off without antipsychotic drugs
Agree with this wholeheartedly. I started learning C++ back in 1997 with "Learn C++ in 21 days" and other books. I quickly got burned out with building simple print out programs and over the past 16 years have started different languages in fits and starts.

There are so few one language projects that are worth using, that the single language approach seems really outdated.

To me a much better approach would be to have learning structured around a specific project type. In general projects fall into only a handful of categories so I don't think it would be terribly hard to structure. For example "Web commerce" (Javascript, CSS, HTML5, mySQL), "Machine learning" (Python, Java) etc... You wouldn't learn all the details of a language up front but you would get to your goal more quickly and have a framework/template for future projects.
Almost all the refunds I process are due to people getting busy, no longer using my service [1], and forgetting to cancel their subscription. When somebody sends me a cancellation request right after they've been billed, I volunteer to refund the payment. Perhaps half of them take me up on it.

Even with this proactive approach, my refund rate is only about 1%. It's not affecting my profitability in any significant way.

The benefit is harder to measure. I typically get a warm thank you from offering and, as I said, about half decide to stay subscribed for the remaining month. I've also had people tell me how much they appreciate my "no DRM" policy. So I'd say that my general attitude of trusting and respecting my customers pays off, but it's impossible to say how much.

[1] I sell a subscription-based programming screencast called Let's Code: Test-Driven JavaScript, http://www.letscodejavascript.com
My point, which is pretty obvious, is that it "reading like the Blub conceit" doesn't mean anything at all with regards to its correctness.

Might as well say "your argument reads a lot as something that an unbeliever in the flying spaghetti monster would say".
There's two more near the bottom of the author (James Mickens)'s Microsoft Research page[1]. The page itself is also funny.

1: http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/people/mickens/
I've been exploring both Alt. 2 and Alt. 3. 2 with AngularJS and 3 with Backbone+Marionette. Evental communication within Models, which are entities, to views and controllers is easy and fun. A model is essentially a service anyway, so methods are more intuitive to name.
The biggest complaint I have by far is power management. It seems to be better with recent kernels but still almost 50% of what I would get with Windows.
Not in the mythos I'm familiar with; he robbed anyone who came past who had sufficient money, and redistributed it.

Taxation in the 12th century was also pretty much limited to the landowning few.
> 2) If your aim is to communicate research results, it is very likely that you are going to need to use Office at some point

Given that I work in a research department, math/scientific research papers are typically written in Latex - Microsoft's support for formulae is pretty bad from what I hear. Also, it's quite likely that your supervisor will have a Mac, those are extremely popular with academics.

> 3) Windows does that really well (drivers are primarily developed for it I guess)

PowerPoint can really mess that up, you adjust the the screen so it's just right, then hit full screen and PowerPoint changes it a completely different resolution!

Also, I've seen tons of people struggle to connect to projectors, this is far from Linux-only problem, typical problems are not knowing the hot key to switch outputs, using the wrong resolution, extend vs. clone and not having an adaptor (typically mac, but not always).
You're right. They discerned ability already present in the more primitive and ancient regions of the brain--for them the capabilities associated with more recent evolutionary developments were a distraction. I was subjected to a surprise quiz, in which one of the answers, dredged from a primal race memory, was "mdadm."
>But humor is insight

Not really. Most of the time is just the mental analogue of fart jokes.

>and brevity is the soul of wit

No, that's just a cliche.
Document for the Impatient
The Casascius coin is just fine to communicate the idea. Either that or just the bitcoin logo.
Why is this still such a pain point?
> our Roadmap conference in November, Om asked GE CMO Beth Comstock why a young person would want to work at GE when there are hot companies like Facebook out there. If there’s one compelling reason why anyone would want to, it’s because a company like GE can invest in R&D and tackle some of these massive, basic science, infrastructure and manufacturing problems. Because who’s more likely to deliver a jetpack, GE or Facebook?

It's a little sad that this even needs to be pointed out. VC's don't have either the money or the time to fund huge, capital-intensive projects. If you think about the really big projects going on right now, most are backed by the government or big public corporations. Google's self-driving cars. Tesla's electric cars,[1] Space X's low-cost launch vehicles,[2] etc.

The article mentions that VC works when Moore's law is in operation. Ironically, the actual operation of Moore's law at semi-conductor fabs isn't funded by VC, but massive capital investment from Intel, IBM, TSMC, etc. To put things into perspective: Intel's annual capital expenditures of $10-12 billion alone are roughly comparable to all VC investment in Silicon Valley combined (which is 40% of all VC investment in the U.S. as a whole).

[1] While Tesla paid off its federal loans early, it took $465 million for four years in order to build the factory that produces that Model S, arguably one of the most crucial turning points in the development of the company. Also, Tesla benefits enormously from the electric vehicle tax credit.

[2] Subsidized both by historical NASA research and NASA prepayments on launch contracts amounting to about half the money Space X has thus far raised.