skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
In my experience being taken seriously is as much about confidence and attitude as it is about ability. For some people even more so.

One of the footnotes at the bottom is a big giveaway. "Yes, I did start my footnotes from a zero-index. I like zero-based arrays over one-based arrays." Drawing attention to how programmer-like you are doesn't convey that confidence.

Fortunately for this kid confidence is something that usually comes with age. I know it did for me.
> I think the original Bitcoin paper said it well: "small casual payments."

You can see this with the tipping culture on Reddit. It's helped Dogecoin really take off, because it's pretty trivial to send a small, casual payment to someone.
I like Anandtech but they have come into criticism recently, from some of their long-time readers, for fawning over Apple products.
How does "median income" drop for "everybody"?

At any rate, it depends on the timescale. The upper quintile (and decile, and percentile) took a really huge hit in the 2008 recession, but before and since that, they've been doing a lot better than the middle deciles.
Thanks! I was interested in seeing the list of "best papers" just to see what the most interesting or innovative research over the years has been, but this is all good stuff too.
Webfaction! You can't go wrong. It's screaming fast with it's fine tuned nginx servers, 512MB so it's more than most shared hosting environments will give you for applications.

I'm a big Wordpress blogger and run http://winthecustomer.com. I've been offered several free VPS accounts from various hosting companies in exchange for a plug for their services but after testing them out, I end up sticking with my PAID shared hosting account with Webfaction.

I've been a HUGE fan for 4+ years now. $7 mo. is the best $7 of hosting you can buy and better than others that cost $20+ per month.

NOTE: Webfaction doesn't gimmick you with "unlimited" crap with their hosting accounts. When others offer "unlimited" they really should included about a million * next to that. I used to work in Web hosting and know for a fact that after several gigs of space or bandwidth usage, they'll kick you out and force you to upgrade or find another host.
If I got that question, I'd probably spend most of my time worrying about whether or not I should count solutions that are rotations/reflections of other solutions as unique.
> So why do some people route around GPL?

Because they can't use it in their commercially or BSD/MIT/Apache licensed code. It's not a mystery, it's the GPL doing what it was intended to do.
Just how one woman feels.
Nothing is perfect, Stack Overflow is a great resource online. Of course it has a few quirks and problems, but why try to bring it down by publicly quitting it and seemingly trying to bring others with you. Quietly leave. Making a noise like this leads me to believe the problem is more with you than SO.

Arguments could be made against contributing to...
Helping the homeless,
Open source,
Hacker News discussions,
?
ETC
You've described a few small cities plus New York.

London has that kind of connectivity if you're prepared to pay - at which point the cost savings of chromebook start to fail. Especially with the increased uk cost of the device.
The person best in the position to apply pricing pressure is the person paying the bills. Since individuals do not pay the bills, of course they haven't been put pricing pressure on hospitals.

The ACA pretty much doubles down on employer-provided health insurance that covers many routine costs, which doesn't address that issue.
I was going to mention it, but I haven't found anyone using it or a usable implementation.
The employer as paternal unit paradigm needs to die. If the employee wants to take a risk they are an adult and should judge the merits of the scheme for themselves.
This is why you should encrypt your DNS.
"Imagine if [...] plugs changed every few months, with appliancemakers all adopting the newest backwards-incompatible version"

like apple?
I would not consider 80% white Western European to be as diverse as the US. I don't think the Canadian French thing contributes a whole lot to diversity.
A Short Primer on Erlang and OTP
Would You Shoot Your Neighbor’s Drone?
I don't agree that inflation has been mild.

http://www.shadowstats.com/alternate_data/inflation-charts

It's only mild if you use their fraudulent CPI accounting, and only if you use the latest version of it, designed solely to hide inflation. If you use the 1980 CPI we're running at 9% inflation, which is not mild at all. In fact, Volcker would have raised rates long ago to fight that level of inflation.

It's exactly the same way they commit fraud in obscuring the real unemployment rate - the U6 - while referring only to the U3 anytime they want to talk about the economy. 14% vs. 6.8% is a dramatic difference, and it only works because they hide the people that have fallen out of the labor force.
Well that's silly. "Anandtech does great reviews unless it's favorable to something I'm not, so then those reviews must be biased". Either you trust Anandtech or you don't. And if you do, then you shouldn't call the reviews that go against your views as biased.

By "you", I don't mean you, yapcguy. Just in general towards those that are criticizing Anandtech.
iOS is insecure, Mavericks buggy as hell, iCloud can't keep the lights on.

One has to wonder what all their engineers are actually working on.
I have basically the exact same experience with SO as the author. I was in the beta group, I currently have moderator permission levels, and I hardly ever use the site.

It's great finding specific answers to highly specific questions that a large number of devs can help with. It's terrible at keeping many of the most experienced devs interested in answering questions. And it's not great as a general learning resource either. The site just stalls out at a low to moderate level of sophistication in terms of the level of knowledge that can be found there, for all of the reasons the author described.

Edit: after some reflection, here is a stronger critique of SO:

SO leverages a huge amount of effort from developers for very little real benefit. Some of the site has value but a lot of it boils down to moderately experienced devs spoon feeding answers to beginning devs, which I think could be more detrimental than helpful. By doing so such beginning devs avoid the hurdle of having to RTFM, which stunts their growth. They avoid having to level up their skillset and they know that they can just return to SO when they have their next problem, so they are discouraged from acquiring the skills to solve their own problems, they will stall out at a beginning skill level forever. Meanwhile, as many people have pointed out the true point of crisis in skill/project development lies not at the beginning but after the initial hump, after years of work. And here devs are not well served by SO because they need more than just an answer to a specific question, they need guidance, they need mentoring, they need encouragement. SO's nearly pathalogical lack of community makes it a very poor place to seek out assistance during that phase of personal development.

In short: SO may be helping the wrong people and discouraging folks who are more in need of assistance and for whom being helped would have a vastly greater positive benefit on the industry as a whole.
Only because of the workstation GPUs. You can get better performance for much less if you don't need the special labeling.
Desktop, laser-based 3d printer for under $2000
This also shows a weakness in DNS. There is currently no
way to validate the DNS record you’re being served is what
the person hosting the website intended.

That's what DNSSEC is for, but it hasn't become pervasive enough yet to be able to depend on it.
"The percentages you cite show this is a problem in many industries" No it's not a problem. This is where you and people like you, differ from me and people like me. You see "differences" as a problem, I see "differences" as a reality and not something that we need to play God with in order to equalize.

So the reason why I'm not on the football team isn't because I'm 5'8" and 125 pounds and can't compete with the other players but because football has a bias against my kind? So instead of me trying to bulk up, gain muscle, gain weight, and try to better compete with the other players I should instead blame the recruiters and coaches for discrimination? Maybe if they lower their standards and we implement some sort of forced quota more little guys like me will feel more welcome in the NFL.
Facebook Is Using Your Profile to Track Global Urban Migration Trends
How could you possibly know what the status of any given motor vehicle accident victim's insurance or financial state is at the point of impact? I suppose I can break it down further. What if I were walking across the street and hit by an uninsured motorist (an illegal immigrant, perhaps)? That is a catastrophic injury that could certainly result in a long-term hospital stay with potentially multiple life-saving surgeries required (head, neck, spine), plus physical therapy and likely long-term care needed to manage the aftermath. Tell me again, why is it that the act of crossing the street should ruin me physically and financially?
Do you have a link to a usable encrypted DNS solution? I searched but didn't find anything actively used, but a lot of proposals.
Interesting they compared the new Mac to a workstation.

Older workstations these days are a lot more affordable and can easily be upgraded. Most MACS you're stuck with what you get.

Case in point, I just purchased an HP 8400 workstation for a friend. $320 for a dual proc 2.6GHz quad core Xeon, 16GB RAM, Two 320GB SAS drives in RAID config and ATI Fire V7350 1GB video card. Sure its a pig and isn't the quietest PC in the room, but it completely shreds anything I could find in a retail setting.
I call it the "Boarding Pass Pattern." I modeled it after the typical airplane boarding pass where everyone has the same data structure yet is going to different places/doing different things. :)
That's a very detailed hypothetical in which there is clear liability so talking to a hypothetical lawyer would be the best course of action.

The point is that we don't pay for the bandages and bedpans, we pay deductibles and premiums (if that) so of course costs are out of whack.
The fairest idea I've come across concerning protecting copyrighted works from falling into the public domain is actually pretty simple: tax exclusivity after the initial 30 years has elapsed. If this tax is non-negligible, companies will be obliged to keep only their best IPs protected and will let everything else fall into the public domain.

The government taxes every other kind of property, so why not IP? Additionally, keeping created works out of the public domain is essentially a tax on the public; this intellectual levy placed on everyone should be balanced by a reinvestment in favor of public interests.

If Disney wants to keep Mickey Mouse out of the public domain, they should pay a yearly fee to prevent it from becoming public property. They'd more than make up for it with the revenue they garner.

I think that this would also encourage less wasteful use of copyrighted properties.
Republicans and democrats differ in evolution
MSR attracts some of the best researchers and makes it easy to get research done. No teaching requirements, grant applications or scrambling for funding. Just research. I sincerely hope tomorrow's Microsoft keeps MSR well-funded, it's a benefit to the whole community.
One a slightly related note, in Chrome extensions, it's possible to redirect DNS requests on a per-URL basis. This is how Media Hint works to allow non-US Netflix users access the US version of the site.

I'm surprised we haven't seen similar behaviour from Chrome extensions. I'm sure it would be caught eventually, but this isn't exactly something that people tend to look for, so it would take a while for people to catch it.
Sorry for the confusion;I was rather simply stating that I had done some work in the 6-7th grade;however, in my comment it was meant to be, I don't make a thread about it;on that note, you should very well simply push yourself into doing something, a good way to start with this new era of technology is to learn how to program and learn the new tools that are being developed each day.
Really? $320 for a new machine with that spec? That graphics card alone costed more than that when it was new, did the CPU/storage/power supply come at negative price?

If this was true, it would really explain HP's financial situation /s

EDIT: that graphics card despite being old, still sells for $300 on Amazon:
http://www.amazon.com/ATI-100-505143-FireGL-512-bit-Express/...
Another vote for Webfaction from me. Their support is excellent.
> The Linux desktop has no more difficulties than the MS desktop (which is also endless "poor UX, drivers, audio services, file system snafus, [...] upgrades gone wrong, bad advice on forums compounding problems.")

Not in my experience, at least...I use Windows, Linux, OS X regularly these days, in increasing order of usage, with Linux and OS X being almost equal. On average, Linux has given me more trouble than the other two combined.

And there is a billion dollar marketing budget for Linux, and it does sell. Except it's only the kernel that's Linux, and the OS is called Android, and it sells because it has a completely different UX, one that was created with another billion dollars of investment from Google. This unfortunately has no bearing on the quality of the Linux UX on PCs.
Could you elaborate on this? How would encryption help? The DNS server would need to decrypt the request in order to service it.
Properly-functionioning spinning disks haven't had issues with random data loss on power failure for at least a decade now.

Source?

And your impression of cheap SSDs is dead, flat wrong. They're cheap - every unnecessary part is left off to save money. And we've all (all of us who pay attention) known for years that SSDs (even some with power fail protection) will lose data (even bits which it has reported to have sync'd) on power loss.

I think you misread what I wrote. I wrote that I would expect cheap SSDs to "survive a power loss event without being bricked." I did not write that they would retain all data, which seems to be what you are arguing against.

I have heard rumors that some cheap SSDs do not honor the SATA SYNC command. Unfortunately I do not have a reliable source for this theory, do you?

A UPS is not enough, if you need to have your data, you need multiple layers of backup, and an SSD must have some method of writing out voltatile data (mostly internal metadata, not cache) before it shuts down.

I don't think anyone is arguing that a UPS is a replacement for backups.
Thank you.
I just might do that.
Stay tuned......
Remember how I have over 14,000 points as of this writing? (...) In well over two years I have contributed nothing to StackOverflow: no questions, no answers, nothing. (...) Any scoring system that allows this to happen is simply broken in my opinion.

That's pretty much how our "real world" scoring system works if you think about it. To make it simple, just replace the "internet points" by "money" and your "stackoverflow account" by a "savings account" that pays interest and the analogy is set ;)
Do we know that though? Historically speaking, the Mac Pro doesn't get updated nearly as often as Intel releases a new architecture.
So "flag for moderator attention" means what to you?
zerigo.com spend annual prepay in 2 weeks, demand customers pay again.
4 days ago, I paid $39 for annual DNS hosting by 8x8.com (zerigo.com). Now, they've hiked their rates 19X to $756 and say that my balance is 'upgraded' to cover the next 2 weeks. Is this legal?
It looks like your dislike of Apple somehow means that Anandtech is the one who is biased? Really? Come on now.
> For each of these projects that herald the BSD license as a feature, I ask myself - what's wrong with GPL?

Using the GPL restricts licensees more in the ideological interest of the licensor. If, as a licensor, I'm not interested in restricting licensees to serve my ideological interests (or if my ideological interests don't align with those in the GPL), why would I use it?

> In fact, if it wasn't for GNU and GPL, the world would be a very different place than it is now. I would claim that there would be no such abundance of free software that we find today.

So? That GNU and the GPL were influential in spreading the idea of FOSS, and even that there might have been a time when the GPLs restrictions were necessary to establish critical mindshare for FOSS, does not mean that the GPL -- whether the same version that existed then or the current version, or anything in between -- is the right license for any particular project now.

> So why do some people route around GPL?

Because it doesn't do what those people want.
Yes, it will be a step down - but then again, SV has the strongest tech scene in the world, so pretty much anywhere would be a step down!

That being said, these will likely be of interest to you / get you familiar with who the players are in the startup scene in Canada:

http://www.techvibes.com/toronto/category/start-up-index

http://startupnorth.ca/index/index/

http://www.canadianinnovationexchange.com/

https://uwaterloo.ca/jobmine/employers

https://uwaterloo.ca/hire/

http://waterlootechjobs.com/en/

http://www.techjobswaterloo.com/

http://www.communitech.ca/
The number of defenders coming out of the woodwork may perhaps suggest something. Whenever one writes something critical about pg or one of his articles you get many people making cultish appeals to authority, "what do you know, he's founded x/y/z" though this has nothing to do with his credibility on Q topic.
For tex -> html I use Mathjax to do the hard work, and a hand-rolled script to do the rest. I'm starting to experiment with d3 and AngularJS for features beyond what LaTeX alone can offer.
It's a "forward looking" architecture (to steal the line from the iPhone 5S pitch.) They're betting big on GPU compute. I wouldn't say it is for "niche markets", though perhaps today it is only useful to smaller markets, it's that this computer is going to over time get faster and faster relative to the 2013 iMac and MBPs as more apps take advantage of the GPUs. It's kind of a unique phenomenon and makes the benchmarks misleading. That said, it remains to be seen if this bet will pay off -- we could end up 5 years from now with the same small subset of apps taking advantage of GPUs as there are now.
While I find Stackoverflow and most other Stackexchange sites VERY often helpful and interesting, I thinks as well that it is the child of the "SEO triumphs it all" times.

Additionally it is geared towards STATIC knowledge. Chosen "best" answers (CURRENTLY!) and the fact that most of the time no one is actually updating their votes according to the CURRENT state of the art or current established best practices actually can even drive info seeking users towards out dated answers...

Still, most of the time I think it works just fine for the folks just in need for quick "how do I convert x into y in language z" answers.

To tackle the non-static, more dynamic and actually fleeting aspects of "voting for the best" aspects I am working on and experimenting with Sustinion

http://www.sustinion.com/opinions/tagged/usa+
> > It's important to note that [NY already forced insurance companies to cover sick people, so the provision in the ACA that forces everyone else to do the same didn't hit them as hard.]

> Is insurance that vanishes when a patient becomes unprofitable really insurance?

It didn't vanish when the patient became unprofitable; the opportunity to buy it vanished when the patient became sick. That is, if you were covered and became sick, you stayed covered; it was if you were uncovered and became sick that it became almost impossible to buy insurance.

> Social issues aside, it looks like the health care market used to have a defect permitting the sale of fraudulent plans. Now that the defect has been closed, only real plans remain.

No, the plans were not fraudulent, and there was no defect. I don't know why you'd expect to not pay for a service and then receive it.

(There is a side issue, which is that once one became sick, it was common for insurers to try to demonstrate that one had defrauded them, and was therefor ineligible for insurance--but that's a separate issue).
That would be the plan. I was motivated enough to google for you and that particular printer "just worked out of the box" no fooling around for one guy, on one version of Ubuntu, so I would not be overly surprised if it also just worked on the rpi. I have never fooled around with printing on a rpi although I have one, due to lack of need to print.

My personal plan would revolve around installing that software on an existing server which already talks perfectly well to an older model Brother laser printer. So the server to printer link is done, working, rock solid, no problem, I'd only have to debug the headless cloud print interface. Which I've been meaning to do for some time, but I've been busy and unmotivated to set that up.

My plan was foiled by the chromebook I wanted to get being sold out due to christmas. Otherwise I'd be reporting glorious success or failure rather than my vague plans and suspicions.

If I can't get it working headless, well, I'd figure a way to get it working on one of my linux desktops, although I'm not sure the microscopic gain in being able to print exceeds the microscopic increase in electrical use. The cost of wasted toner and paper would likely exceed the cost of the electricity...

My existing desktops all have google drive and printer access so anytime I print something, to pick up the printed sheets I'd have to physically walk past a machine that could do the printing instead of the chromebook. And its kind of a post paper world so I don't print very much. If my printer broke I don't know if I'd bother buying another.
The Specialization Myth
Room in a Box: Transforming Fold-Out Furniture Design
Happy new year Hacker News 
Happy new year folks :)
Funny New Year's video - especially the lat 15 seconds
That's just them being silly, since Apple actually do make fantastic products and care more than the superficial marketing specs wars (GHz race, number of cores race, megapixel race, screen size race, etc).
> I was careful to say "Unix strings"

This is the first time I encounter the idiom Unix strings. I'll map it to array of bytes in my table of idioms.

> I don't think a programming language can take the position that an OS needs to "adopt better encodings".

I do think that programming languages should take a position on things, including but not limited to how data is represented and interpreted in itself. A language is expected to provide some abstractions, and whether a string is an array of bytes or an array of characters is a consideration of a language designer, who will end up designing a language takes one or another of the sides available.

Python has taken the side of language user: enabled Unicode names, defaulted to Unicode strings, defaulted to classes being subclasses of the 'object' class... Unix has taken the side of machine (which was the side at the time of Unix's inception.

> [...] probably a vain hope that Unix strings will vanish [...]

If only we wait for them to vanish, doing nothing to improve.

> Python must live in the environment that the OS actually provides.

Yes, Python must indeed live in the OS' environment. Regardless, one need not be a farmer because they live among all farmers, need they?
[state health insurance]

> they lack perverse incentives to allow costs to rise

But, of course, they also lack incentive to actually provide all that much care, so long as those who are inconvenienced are politically unimportant (e.g. disabled newborns), and they have plenty of incentive to provide more care for the politically connected.