skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Well, really, it doesn't. Sorry for not making my point as clear as it should have been.

Essentially, this whole point that Windows laptops have no good ideas to be gleaned from and that Apple is God is making computers worse. I don't use the Air because it represents everything I hate about Apple: locked-down, stripped-down, un-customizable, unconfigurable, and untenable. Yes, it's damn pretty, but I don't just want pretty. I want pretty, fast, and functional. The PowerBook, and later, the 2006/7/8-era MacBook Pros, represent everything I love about Apple: well-designed, comfortable, functional, easy to use, and post-purchase upgradable.

Apple used to produce machines that were like that, but ever since Ive's been at the omnipresent helm of hardware design, everything I used to love about Apple's machines has gone down the river, so to speak. Yes, the new Mac Pro is exceptionally beautiful on a desk next to a huge 30" 4K monitor, but it doesn't have the functionality necessary to be called a Mac Pro. Studios need the expandability provided by PCI-e. TB still has too much latency to be able to be considered against true internal slot expansion. The Retina MacBook Pro is gorgeous, but it doesn't have an optical drive, so putting your high-quality lossless media on it gets to be a pain. It also doesn't have upgradable memory, or even a user-replaceable battery, two things that would be easily engineered if this "0.02mm thinner is better" mentality would die.

But, hey, you can't please everyone. I bet I'm going to be that guy with a 20-year-old computer who's running nothing but a shell and complaining about how the transparent, glass-screened, ultra-thin tablets of the future don't have user-replaceable hard drives.
No: those antibacterial soaps are advertising a number that is the same as regular soap. They're no better in getting rid of bacteria, and may contribute to antibacterial resistance. http://health.howstuffworks.com/skin-care/cleansing/myths/qu... (but a quick search will net you plenty of other refs)
Uhh... If you don't sign and follow the conventions, I thought you weren't protected by them?

And for the US prison system, Google stop prison rape.
Citation, please. (Contra: Genesis 1:1.)
> The Internet itself was a DARPA funded, as was GPS and they can both be seen as tools in war at least as this was there initial intent.

Which started back when they were still just ARPA, the "Advanced Research Projects Agency".

It's a bit aggravating that they had to tack on "Defense", as if their achievements weren't justification enough, but I suppose dissuading Congress from killing your budget is an important pragmatic concern.
I was involved in some Windows Refund stuff in California. Many manufacturers later added language to their marketing and packaging claiming that bundled software was an integral part of their product and could not be returned separately, nor resold separately. If you tried to return it separately for a refund (as the Windows EULA text seemed to suggest), they would say that that was only an option if you returned the entire product.

So, my impression is that it's actually become dramatically more difficult for most manufacturers because they're specifically trying to prevent customers from getting a refund just for bundled copies of Windows.

I've imagined that some of these policies might violate (or be unenforceable because of) antitrust, consumer protection, or copyright laws in some jurisdictions, but I don't know of specific cases where they've been challenged on these bases or what the results were. I still look forward to a future in which the price of proprietary operating systems is actually able to operate as a disincentive for people to buy them.
> (meh)

I don't get what you mean by that last part. Is it supposed to make your "2014 year of the gnu/linux desktop" remark sarcastic?

Sorry English is not my first language.
Very true although using robots in a combat situations is not necessarily bad. One nice thing about robot soldiers is that they can afford to ask questions, then shoot later if necessary unlike humans who shoot first then ask questions.

Here is a great presentation on the subject:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ASDkNdhUvuU&nofeather=True

You are right that we should however acknowledge that robotics work does have military applications and that some ethical lines will have to be draw as we are reaching a point where we cannot ignore them any more.
Before looking into Macbooks you should check out Thinkpad X1 Carbon, works flawlessly on Ubuntu, superb build quality and performance. Speaking from my own experience.
Are we living in a hologram universe? New findings.
> Comparing America with France and Germany you get a different picture of freedom of speech imho.

Germany is a terrible example of free speech. So is France. The parent is right, US is still way ahead on this specific point.

Remember, free speech is the ability to voice extremely unpopular views without persecution by the state. Saying something everybody agrees with is not representative.
Yes, if you are fully aware of what your work will be used for then by all means, keep doing what you're doing. I was more taking issue with the fact that he does not consider his company to be a military contractor, when it clearly is.
I noticed one important omission in this article: SSDs. All of the recommended laptops had 500GB hard drives. Modern SSDs are an order of magnitude faster than laptop hard drives in sequential reads/writes and two orders of magnitude faster in random access. Decent SSDs can easily saturate a 6gbps SATA III bus. They have latencies measured in microseconds. They are silent, shock-tolerant, and more energy efficient than hard drives.

Once you've switched to an SSD, any laptop with a hard drive will feel broken. Feel free to skimp on everything else when purchasing a laptop, but make sure you shell out the money for a solid state drive.
Perhaps more aspirational than reality. How many of us would love to write a computer program using a stock trading API just to see if we can beat the market? But the up front fees make that expensive to even try.
(Shrug) I don't care what you're working on, it can be used for evil. It is never rational to fixate on tools and objects. Worry more about actions.
People hardly vote, why would they riot?
Typed a few lines of Javascript, then hit ctrl+d to insert an EOF character (this usually closes my node.js shell). Now I've got this bookmark :/
Entrepreneurship: 33 Takeaways of 2013
This is because they want to obfuscate as much as possible what is being done within the agency. If everything was logged, and you knew exactly who did what, it would be a lot easier to audit the agency, which is what they don't want. So they have a conflict of interest here. Make everything auditable, trackable and searchable, or risk other leaks.
"Robin Hood" seems to be a misnomer for this service.

The character Robin Hood stole from the rich to give to the poor. In contrast robinhood.io encourages every-day folks to compete against the elites in the stock market. Which explains why elite capitalists are funding the robinhood.io venture.

If you're not paying for the product, you are the product.
Sounds fishy to me. It's true that 2D and 3D sets can have the same cardinality, but mathematically, the map from one to the other is not very likely to be continuous!
In this case forever doesn't refer to "all of time" but to "an unbounded past".
The fundamentals seems to be provable by data-mining on gamma Ray bursts.

Funny coincidence, I just started "mining" some BOINC projects again since a week ago, including Einstein@home, because I couldn't stand all the CryptoCoin mining talk lately.

https://boinc.berkeley.edu/wiki/Einstein@Home

http://www.aei.mpg.de/972495/einsteinathome_gammapsrs2013
>> "using the passwords of other security agency employees"

His actions probably put those people under investigation.
I reinstalled Ubuntu on an Asus that shipped with Ubuntu, and wireless randomly doesn't work on boot. Claims that it's disabled by hardware switch (there is no hardware switch.)
I can't speak for hibernate/suspend, as this has worked well for me on every linux laptop I've owned (first one in the mid-2000s).

For WiFi, many (most) vendors simply refuse to provide open source drivers, which hinders inclusion in the kernel. The blame here is almost entirely on the hardware vendors.
Interesting. Something else that I should have included as a con for 3 is that Backbone would then be a requirement for the model-based solution. It sacrifices flexibility for smaller projects that need services.
The theme this time, IMHO, is not very easy to pick a standout idea to work on. Almost everything you can make will fit that theme, and thus, is hard to create a unique or fun one.
What's the motivation behind doing this exactly? Why not actually write some code to practice...writing code.
This is pretty cool. One thing that bugs me is that the code isn't formatted the way I write. For example, my muscle memory does not involve typing a space inside parens - "function ( selector )". I miss those every time.
So far he's been alternating between.. di.fm's Electro House channel: http://www.di.fm/electro .. his own Autechre playlist, and the latest Boards of Canada album.

If it sounds like upbeat ravey house music, it's electro house. If it sounds like a headache waiting to happen, Autechre. If it's pretty dreamy stuff, Boards of Canada.
The default one when you load the site? Its corporation. There is a box on the right hand side that allows you to search and see popular themes. Or did you mean the color scheme of the website itself?
> this guide is great but it doesn't tell me the most thing I need to know: Why should I install SteamOS?

If you're unable to come up with an answer on your own, the answer is you shouldn't.
Thanks, wasn't aware of roboy.

You're absolutely correct re clutching actuators. There are a lot of robotics projects out there that combine small devices with limited mobility to create a larger (multicellular) robot with higher mobility. All of these projects stumble on that particular aspect: maintaining a lock without consuming power. M-Tran, Symbrion, Distributed Flight Array, ...
Also, can you please say 22 out of how many? (that is, what is the total number of accepted startups?)

Additionally: 22 seems like a big number. Almost as if this time around the YC partners sat together and said "hey, let's try to get a lot of overseas startups this time around and see what happens".

I notice that there have been "themes" in different seasons of YC... for example, in one of the previous seasons, you said that when reviewing applications you'd give high preference to startups doing things with electronics, robots, etc. - so, indeed this really seems like a sort of an experiment as if you're curious to see and learn how startups from abroad do things. Two questions in line of this: 1) What are you hoping to learn from this class? 2) What are you expecting to see (any hypotheses?)?
Touch typing is like cursive writing. I want to be able to do it, but I probably never will, and I think that's ok.
Nice UI! For programmers trying to improve their general typing speed I reckon it could help, but for me it creates an almost uncanny experience.

In the JS test I found it incredibly difficult to type out `/^(?:parents|prev(?:Until|All))/`, because my mind interprets it somewhat like its AST -- i.e. I see a delimited regular expression with an uncaptured group nested within another uncaptured group. I focus on the operators then on the contents. But by the time I've done this I end up typing it out slower than if I was just transcribing character by character. And so I started to wonder if this is something it's "okay" to be bad at...? I mean, if I focused on it character by character, word by word, then I may gain speed, but I would be totally ignoring the meaning of the characters -- and I would also stop being a programmer.

Maybe my mind just needs to become more attuned to reading code... maybe this experience reveals that I do not read code often enough. Intriguing.
I feel the same way about closing parens, brackets and braces.
We were scheduled for the last day of interviews and were asked to show up early, so I decided to attend all six days of interviews this batch. I was truly impressed how diverse the startups were.

It's striking to me that there were startup founders from towns and cities around the world where they didn't know any other startups or advisors that could help them. I'm glad that communities like HN exist online to provide a community for everyone.
> I was referring more to atmospheric and thematic authenticity.

I understand what you mean, but the mechanics do detract from any perceived authenticity. It's like having "authentic" weapons and "authentic" unit names in a Rambo movie. At the end of the day, it's more fetishism than anything else.

> Either way, entertainment which utilizes ongoing conflicts has the potential to leave a bad taste in a lot of people's mouths. It comes off as trashy if poorly executed.

CoD is not known for its nuanced approached in this regard.

> Regarding ArmA, although it has vastly more realistic mechanics, it's not really a valid comparison due to a lack of virtually any story or narrative at all. It's more of a simulation sandbox at heart, albeit a sterile one.

I don't know about ArmA, but Operation Flashpoint: Resistance had a decent story. I heard good things about the "episodic" Arma III campaign as well.
Linus Pauling quit Caltech over this, having fought to the highest levels of the government to allow Tsien to visit his dying (father? grandfather?) in China.

The man was accused of being a Communist so harshly, he decided he'd rather actually be one and returned home regardless of the US refusal to grant him a visa to make it a round-trip.

What a waste.

re: http://books.google.com/books?id=NrG7fgW0ybEC&lpg=PA112&ots=...

and http://archives.caltech.edu/news/tsien.html
I wonder what would happen if this was tried with UEFI or ACPI...
LÖVE (2D Game Engine) 0.9 is out
FWIW this has been posted a few times already, nonetheless it's a great app
"last-minute" self-censorship on Facebook
And keep in mind the unique structure of VA counties (especially in NoVA), where cities are carved out from their surrounding counties, which leads to deep pockets of blue (voting) and high income tax rates due to concentrated wealth not being diluted by less affluent areas.
back of the napkin is a saying, you're at the bar having a drink with your friends, you've used the front of the napkin you wipe food off your mouth, then someone mentions some interesting problem and you turn your napkin over and scribble on it to explore the details.

A synonym for informal, "off the cuff", or "in the moment".
Looking at it through your lens: if he stays he's a spy, if he leaves he's a spy.

Any third option?
With Spring you can easily test your empty mocked-out shells. Great!
Show HN: Infinity Calendar - the last calendar you'll ever need
Some ThinkPads are nice, but they are pretty rare. No one at my workplace has one. Around here, people have really nice Macs or really crummy PC laptops. Every year, a few people switch, and this process has now reached the point where there are more Macs than PCs.

Aside from upgrades, most people don't ever install new operating systems onto their computers. (Heck, I've stopped doing that myself.) I don't blame people for choosing things they don't have to futz with just to get to a place where they can get things done. That's why they skip right over Lenovo nowadays.
Author thinks he is being contrarian by defending SQL... huh?
I'm seriously considering to get one from them. Which laptop did you buy? Galago UltraPro? How is it when compared to MacBook or Thinkpads?
Are you a programmer? I wonder what you think of this argument: http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2008/09/programmings-dirties...
The PLANNER system is a similar system that is heavily referenced in the AI literature of the 70s/80s. PLANNER was a tool that let you (handwaving starting) specify a world, transitions for the world state, and then spcify an end goal. PLANNER would find the way to go from start to goal. Prolog is a weakened form of PLANNER, if I understand my AI history correctly. If you rummage around the "Good Old Fashioned AI" history, you'll get a good feel for what it can do.

A technical write-up is available here: http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/6916
Nice web app! One thing though, notify the user when he has Caps Lock on ;)
Is this the countries of which people are citizens (including citizenship inherited from immigrant parents), countries in which people were born (including those who immigrated as children), or countries in which founders are currently resident?

The latter would be most impressive (and the most natural interpretation of "from" in my mind), but I'm guessing it's one of the first two.
Martin Fowler has an interesting article on the subject: http://martinfowler.com/bliki/CannotMeasureProductivity.html
Different classes of vehicles. A robot is much smaller and versatile than a tank.
The problem is that nobody writes code like that (char by char, like prose). You often jump back and forth between statements and parens, and code from inside out.
I've wondered for a while what my WPM is when writing code. It's slower than plain english text, partly because there's so many more characters in code than in plain english. So something like this lets me see the difference between regular typing tests (e.g. typeracer.com) and coding -- and presumably, which languages are either more familiar to me, or more syntactically sluggish.
Off topic kind of: It's a shame that the headlines immediately after Snowden's initial press release turned from, "The government is spying on you" to "Snowden is evading!"

By this I mean, It was unfortunate to see Snowden's punch dissipate with headlines that focussed on his safety and whereabouts, instead of keeping focus on the crimes committed by the US government.

Did anyone else notice that?
Maybe you don't move your laptop around much, but most people do. People use laptops on the couch, in coffee shops, at work, in bed (maybe that's not advisable, but they do it anyway). If it squeaks every time you go somewhere new, and you're used to something that doesn't squeak, you'll notice.
> they claim that you'll "buy and sell at the best possible price"; I'm not sure how they are able to make this claim [...]

My guess: they already advertise that they are constantly getting market prices from multiple sources - so they simply run a Best Price Execution algorithm for every trade and use the current state of their (locally cached) total market state. So a trade may get matched up against multiple bids, where a single bid may not be enough to satisfy the full order amount. So they apply BPE (think of it as a greedy algorithm) and find the next best available price to complete the trade. Iterate until the entire trade is matched and that's it.

Disclosure: I work for a betting exchange. We do BPE.
I was confused by it as well. It expects you to backspace and fix your mistake before continuing.
11 Effective Ways to Check for Fraud / Scam Companies and Fake Job Offers
Social aspects of teamwork
Great class. But I shed a tear for the TAs who will manage the MOOC process. (Assuming they have to manage something.)
Their pricing page shows that it has what appears to be a nice set of features to actually help you get better (note to site owner: might be an idea to put this on the main page).

Despite that I can't imagine myself typing code just for the sake of typing code. Seems to me this would make more sense as a plugin for an IDE. Watch my every keystroke as I do real work and show where I am constantly having to correct myself, and offer ways to prevent that.
Many of the Thinkpads have easily removeable hard drives, so just take the factory one out, and pop in a SSD. Time to sell, put the factory drive back in.
Probably whitespaces should be ignored (except where they are mandatory, e.g., Python).
A fine argument, but you must realize that same argument has been made by many men from the very inception of the United States.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shays'_Rebellion

Whatever is being suffered now by any minorities, etc. pales in comparison to what they would have been put through in the past. I don't see too many blacks being hosed down by a fire truck nowadays, do you?

So let's keep things in perspective. We have a lot of work on ours hands. But it's a hell of a lot less work than we had in the past.
> Operation Flashpoint/Armed Assault (Arma)--A brilliant series of military simulators, a slight rebranding of which (VBS2) is used to train actual soldiers. The games do a brilliant job of depicting realistic engagement distances, weapons fire, combined arms, the overwhelming superiority of American air power, and how much you will never ever ever want to be an infantryman. Seriously, my biggest impression playing the game was "Man, I hope to hell I never have to wield a rifle for my country, because that life is short." It's not particularly gory, but the impression of just how fragile people are in modern engagements is hard to shake. It's pretty solid.

Funny, my takeaway was "Man, I hope to hell I never have to pilot a helicopter, because the ground is a lot closer than you think."

OFP/ARMA are up there with Rainbow 6/the first Ghost Recon in terms of realism, although they all have very different focus. The SWAT games should get a mention as well.

> One of the interesting messages of CoD (and a message implicit and much better argued by example in Arma) is that you cannot challenge America and win. Nope. Can't be done--look at the overwhelming force.

Haven't played ARMA, but it's not really what I took away from the original OFP. I read it more as a "let's have ourselves Red Storm Rising on a much smaller scale". The big difference as well with the CoD games (at least the recent versions) is that the OFP storyline is not heavily morality-based. Ok, the opposition is not made of nice people, but they're not "evil terrorists who want to blow up the free world and have the wrong religion".
Is there a reason why one would prefer a Das keyboard over a Model M?
Fair enough but it's trickier to demo something that requires more elaborate user action. My reach-bag scenario wasn't so contrived actually we had to develop something that would guess a color palette based on a user uploaded picture at Mozilla.

The end product was never realized in that form but our solution included using a 2d canvas also and doing a count of color segments.
How to travel, co-work and grow your location independent business
That's just basic diversionary and disinfo tactics. Make the story about anything but what it's actually about, because what it's actually about is damaging. Snowden just happened to be convenient, and, for lack of a better word, "exploitable" to that end, having hopped off to Hong Kong and then Russia like that.
Average taxes paid, per what? Per person, per county? It's probably per filer but I wish they would explicitly state that.
Try dependency management instead of dependency injection. Layered, modular, hierarchical design instead of 'anything injected into anything'. Divide and conquer instead of DI spaghetti. Testable independent modules instead of mocked-out stubs...
Agreed with this. It's why I still run Windows as a host and Linux in VirtualBox instance.

If you run it the other way round, the battery life is half.

(that is with powertop optimisations and a fair chunk of other optimisations as well)
If you're Canadian and looking for an online discount brokerage, I've had good luck with VirtualBrokers (https://www.virtualbrokers.com/).

Their website is ugly and old-school, and their online interface - at least the basic one - feels like it's from ten years ago, but it's cheap (and has different pricing plans depending on how you want to trade).
The Real Story of the Homeless Coder
Not a scribd fan , but to be fair, they have been around longer than FF and chrome PDF viewers have.
Drunk on WINE?