skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Yeah, I need to check out powershell. I've heard that it has some pretty neat tricks up its sleeve regarding typed output. I won't expect more than "two steps back, one step forward" wrt the UNIX command line, but I should check it out.

Anything on my new "gripes" list that you have advice for?

---------- More Misc Gripes --------

* No emacs-like cursor movement shortcuts in GUI text fields

* No emacs-like cursor movement shortcuts in DOS

* Copy+paste is broken and/or inconsistent in terminal windows

* Can't jump to a document's location from the document's GUI

* The 2nd type of file open/save dialog (you know, the one makes you start from root, makes you scroll through every folder, and doesn't support copy+paste of paths, favorites, or any other civilized feature?)

* No equivalent of "Spin Control.app" (now spindump, Instruments.app) that automatically traces hung apps

* Can't take time profiles (function call trees weighted by # hits over a 5s interval) from the built-in process viewer

* NTFS wants to spend 8 hours (I let it go and timed it once) checking the disk after every crash, which amounts to every other time I restart.

* No "screenshot region to clipboard" shortcut. I have to printscreen and crop in paint every time.

* No "look up the word under the mouse in a dictionary" shortcut

---------- More Misc Small Victories --------

* The utility that profiles startup times and identifies boot-slowing apps is awesome
wow... integrated OAuth and ACL to the site or database... and code hot swaps while the site is running...
I love my X1 Carbon.
Built-in sandboxing with user-defineable data flow policies.
Wow, beautiful space!!
Plus, if I recall correctly, Thinkpads are the only brand certified for use in space by NASA.
Given that I just spent a good chunk of the evening dissatisfied with my ability to play double bass with superior intonation, I'd really like to see more data on these claims. It would be super useful if the study's initial claims were born out in larger studies, though I am not super eager to start experimenting on myself.
Here is a great one: http://www.amazon.com/Introduction-Graph-Theory-Dover-Mathem...

"A stimulating excursion into pure mathematics aimed at "the mathematically traumatized," but great fun for mathematical hobbyists and serious mathematicians as well. Requiring only high school algebra as mathematical background, the book leads the reader from simple graphs through planar graphs, Euler's formula, Platonic graphs, coloring, the genus of a graph, Euler walks, Hamilton walks, and a discussion of The Seven Bridges of Konigsberg."
Perhaps an OS that is built over distributed components. A process you run, or even a "thread", can execute in an AWS instance. Applications can be shared between multiple devices. Storage can be anywhere. A distributed web service is just an "application" under this OS.
Regarding point 3, I should have worded it differently. What I mean is that Agile is inherently adversarial to what are generally considered the tactics of management, which include being able to replace workers, to move production to different locations, to increase the pace of work, and generally have flexibility. I didn't mean that the programmers and management are going to fight or feel at odds with each other.

They will have a conflict if management decides to use those tactics, but there are other ways to increase productivity.

If workers and managers can generally find alignment with, and achieve, the goals of the company, the conflicts are avoided.
Unfortunately there's no multithreaded option for the standard xz uncompression tools (xzcat, unxz). However I wrote (as a quick hack) a parallel xzcat:

http://git.annexia.org/?p=pxzcat.git;a=summary

I also wrote a random access program for xz files:

https://github.com/libguestfs/nbdkit

(in the plugins/xz subdirectory)
I agree with your sentiment regarding innovation is driven by a fee individuals. the good news is that its not about how high the bar is. you Don't need to compete on legacy metrics, you just need to do something that that the other system could never ( or at least with great difficulty ) do. another great thing about os's is they are really not that big once you take out all the vendor fragmentation from different device drivers.

you could really narrow things down by just targeting a specific hardware set set ( like a raspberryPi ). Actually now that I said it, that's the only hw I would target . reduced footprint , experimental user group , arm architecture. its the perfect platform to launch a 'different ' kind of os.
Most laptops come with 8GB RAM. Anyone know of a light laptop which can be upgraded to more then 8GB?
The reason I brought https://github.com/SheetJS/js-xls to python is precisely because xlrd couldn't handle many of my XLS files
So, every time a story like this comes up, it makes me wonder... Does anyone offer services like this for non-millionaires and non-billionaires?
Do you get the same battery life with Linux as you had with OS X?
Rather than a supercapacitor, the Crucial M500 uses a small array of capacitors:

All of the M500 line includes hardware AES 256-bit encryption, and Micron showed us an array of small capacitors on one of the M.2 form factor drives that supported flushing of all data to the NAND in the event of a power loss--not a super capacitor as seen in enterprise class SSDs, but there's no RAM cache to flush so it's just an extra precaution to ensure all of the data writes complete. http://www.anandtech.com/show/6614/microncrucial-announces-m...

Other features that set the M500 apart also center on optimizations that are clearly holdovers from the enterprise version of the SSD. Power hold-up is provided by a small row of capacitors that will flush all data in transit to the NAND in the event of a power loss. This feature is not standard with any other consumer SSD on the market, and in enterprise SSDs power capacitors typically command a much higher price structure. Finding power loss protection on the consumer M500 is a nice surprise, and one that users will need more often than they think. http://www.hardocp.com/article/2013/05/28/crucial_m500_480gb...
Sounds like a good strategy. If I had so much money I would hire some of the smartest people in the world to save my taxes whatever way possible as long as the government (read as legal extortion gang) cant put me behind bars for it.
The article considers the rule against perpetuities to be an obviously good thing, but I have my doubt. Consider this argument for example:

http://www.overcomingbias.com/2010/03/parable-of-the-multipl...
> Best yet: have an API for for check whether or not an SSD has a supercap, whether or not the supercap still holds charge, and policy for honouring cache flush requests. Let the OS decide based on a policy I set.

I'm sure there's some SMART flag that shows it. No idea which though, not one of them is properly documented.
Atari 2600 - games from the archive
My experience:

Broken motherboard AND screen on my Macbook air.

Apple replaced both for free, with no AppleCare.

I have a few other stories just like this one.
mbuf chains [1] (or something like them) are the canonical way of receiving data from the network. You basically "tag" every incoming chunk of data as an mbuf, and keep the data as linked lists of said mbufs (hence the mubf "chain"). Some key properties of incoming network data are that it's:

1) Arriving asynchronously, at arbitrary time points (actually the OS code gets to handle the incoming data in interrupt processing routines)

2) Arriving in arbitrary quantities in each new chunk(as opposed to, say, reading nice, aligned, blocks from the disk)

3) Possibly arriving out of order.

Now if you consider the requirements that you have this uncertain sized chunks of data that you (the network stack code) need to parse into (and possibly reorder into) one of many possible protocols then deliver it in a nicely packaged form to a user process (which may or may not be ready to receive this data at this moment) --- and, additionally, there's a lot of pressure to avoid unnecessary memory copies -- you'll be inevitably led towards an architecture that looks somewhat like mbuf chains.

The cited writeup and accompanying code has some crucial details hiding in the following snippet

"the Packets go in 'pbufs' which are, in general, the property of a particular device."

The point I think is that it's special purpose code written for a narrow use/demo case. Not meant to be taken seriously for an actual, general purpose OS.

tl;dr mbuf chains are inevitable for general purpose networking. Resistance is futile.

[1] https://developer.apple.com/library/mac/documentation/darwin...
How to rank 2nd + 3rd in a keyword (Wenyard) in 3 days with Google+ posts
You might enjoy one of the many books that exist for undergraduates to ease the transition into higher math classes, where there is a shift from the strong calculation-focus and rote-learning of most math teaching through calculus, to the more proof-centric and understanding-based approach that one finds in classes like abstract algebra, real and complex analysis, and other post-calculus math courses.

Here are some examples of the kinds of books I mean, and you can find others by following Amazon recommendations from those:

http://www.amazon.com/Nuts-Bolts-Proofs-Fourth-Edition/dp/01...
http://www.amazon.com/Mathematical-Proofs-Transition-Advance...

With math textbooks especially, it pays to look for a previous edition, as the current edition can be ridiculously expensive, and the previous edition might be only 20% of the price, with no significant differences between the two.

Also, don't get them for the Kindle, as Amazon doesn't seem capable of publishing a math book with lots of notation that doesn't also have tons of errors where symbols get incorrectly imported. I've bought at least 20 and yet have to see one that didn't have lots of incorrect symbols.
people have a lot of kids in tiny houses all over the world.
The rich may be reducing their tax, but look how the government spends their own tax revenue, not much will change when the government spends trillions on their war effort.
Half of these things aren't really operating system features in the narrow sense – which is what I think the OP meant. X11 isn't part of the Linux kernel, but part of your GNU/Linux system. Likewise for notification, bundled applications, etc.
It's neither prior art (though it was started prior to the recent patent publicity), nor a re-implementation (as stated in the readme, it's just a wrapper around OS X's NSLinguisticTagger).

Why can't it just be a useful tool? I'm looking forward to using it while writing project documentation and will be working on editor plugins using the JSON formatted output (https://github.com/stephencelis/syn/commit/d2d36473f7295c6cf...).
It's really stupid of me, but everytime I read about taxes, I am always "re"-amazed at how much money get spent on protecting money.
I'm sure public infrastructure, public schooling, police and fire departments, national defense, etc etc had absolutely nothing to do with your success, and society as a whole does not deserve a single cent back.

"Fuck you, I got mine" at its finest.
Microsoft has a RDP client for OS X that works great.
Plan 9 certainly has some cool ideas, but I have a really hard time believing that a project that originated in the 80s and has yet to "make it" in any meaningful sense is really the way of the future.
The Atlantic isn't quite as high browed as the New Yorker, but they're both literary magazines and so the prose style is somewhat to be expected. :P

(The Atlantic is one of my favorite magazines)
Is it really 60% for residents of California?

Excluding sales tax since that's consumption based and not income based, how much money would a person have to earn, and under what conditions, to hit a 60% marginal rate?
Scheme and Pharo Smalltalk; Spanish.
On the other end, would be cool if all of your devices were aware of each other and syncronised apps in realtime. For example the browser on your phone has the same tabs open as your desktop. The image you're photoshopping on your desktop is viewable on your mobile in a mobile specific version of photoshop (so all apps have multiple views for each different device).
That's only outrageous to Americans who are used to bowing down before the wealthy and worshipping financial success as some sort of moral ideal.
Apple's closed-ness is mostly about protecting the user experience.

- OSX is only available on relatively expensive Apple hardware because Apple sets (high) minimum standards on quality and "official" OSX on shitty hardware would pollute the brand.

- iOS apps are sandboxed and the App Store is curated to protect users from scammy/spammy/malicious apps.

- OSX enforces code signing, again, to protect users from malware. It can be switched off by users who demonstrate clear intent and understanding of the consequences.

- Parts that are non-user-serviceable are usually that way to achieve smaller form factor and higher capacities. The reason for non-user-serviceable batteries, for example, is that batteries are bags of dangerous chemicals inside of heavy and thick protective cases. Making the entire laptop the "case" for the battery lets them get larger batteries in less space and weight. That it cannot be safely removed by a nontechnical user is a side-effect.

Your comment attributes a sort of "inverse FSF" religious sentiment to Apple, as if they make things closed and locked down just for the hell of it, because they believe in closedness the way Stallman believes in freedom.

Reality indicates that most of their restrictions are about protecting users who don't know better.... you're not going to "accidentally" replace your CPU. There's no legitimate problem that would be solved by whitelisting processors. Could they do it? Yes, but only if they exhibited some sort of fanatic obsession with preventing users from achieving what they want even when it serves no other purpose. Which would be stupid. Hence, it's as likely as Microsoft being run by lizard people :).
Like Linux distributions have done since 1997? <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Package_management_system>

Am I misunderstanding you?
> national defense

Yup, definitely couldn't have gotten to where we are without that well-used defense budget in going to war with Iraq and having the NSA monitoring all our communications.
Yeah, port system is fantastic. It takes longer, but just works. The whole system is designed to be robust, there's no broken shit if it's done successfully. *It reports error on failure at least.

Linux package managers are fast, but usually broken silently in some ways - which are critical on robustness - and I always discover myself manually doing what port system does.

CentOS packages are relatively more robust, but it's too outdated, and installing new packages nothing different from any other Linux distros.
MOOCs: Inflated Expectations, Early Disappointments
> In the USA ... you're vulnerable to "host is subpoenaed by the NSA", "black box installed on network by NSA" and "insiders work with NSA out of patriotism"

Yep. That's what I mean by "tap into "destination" data centres in the US". e.g. what was going to happen to Lavabit.

I'm not sure why people are having difficulty grasping the whole concept of "US legal power is much lessened outside of the USA". (see also here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6944880 )

> Of course, you're still vulnerable to hacking, physical intrusion, and blackmail or bribery of insiders by the NSA

Yes, or by any other rogue actor. But any government that does that on a mass scale on notionally "friendly" territory is playing a dangerous game if and when they get found out.
Get your facts straight before you go Galt. This story has nothing to do with state income taxes.
Is it ludicrous to expect most people to do that, when most don't and aren't expected to?

Most don't make much money at all. Many more make none at all.
The reason the tax rate is high on the ultra-well-to-do is to help cover the rest.
Taking coding mainstream in 2014
Well, that is certainly a different twist in the plot.
Thank you -- I wanted to write a post regarding that article for the past week, but couldn't do it as well or as eloquently.

"The nature of progress is to move incrementally. The great leaps are exceedingly few and far between."

I have a few buddies working on tech at Apple & MSFT that is crazy cool, but simply because it's not a shiny new product sitting on my desk next to my coffee cup 2013 was a lull in tech?! Give me a break.

(Sidebar: one of my favorite advances in tech this year is the new Kinect. Seriously. Read up on its power and potential use cases sometime and it's f*ing mind-blowing. If MSFT only had the marketing power of Apple...)
Selling $2 for $1 is easy.
Some random (counter and otherwise) points:

- Correctly explaining how large of an improvement the 5S is over the original iPhone is not a valid argument for why 2013 was a "pretty good year" for Apple. Mac Pro was the biggest move Apple made -- for better or for worse -- and I'm surprised to see its omission.

- If you’re not excited by the performance of the A7 SoC or, say, the quality of the iPhone 5S camera, why even bother writing about technology? This is ridiculous in a multitude of ways: the most glaring of which being that some of the best technology writers on the web today don't concern themselves with consumer technology.

- You can't look at raw price point as evidence for iPhone's ability to resist depreciation because their starting value is so much higher than other smartphones -- though I do think Apple hardware ages better than other hardware. To answer his question of What other companies make cell phones that retain any value at all after two years?: Samsung, Google/Motorola.

- The whole arguments of iOS 7 spurring planned obsolescence comes from the theory that the transitions, parallax, etc. etc. were done not only from a design standpoint but from an inferior-hardware-can't-replicate-this standpoint, which I believe Gruber propagated himself (though in reference to Android, rather than older iPhone models.)

- Everything besides the 'jetpacks' line in the final section was great. Technology is something that should be celebrated with wary eyes, rather than blindly castigated.

Ultimately, he seems to be dragging Mims' argument to a greater extreme than it is and attacking it on those grounds: I encourage readers to read the original article -- which, at the very least, is interesting and thought-provoking -- and draw their own conclusions.
Erik Voorhees - The Role of Bitcoin as Money
Gotta love a) this guy's passion for fries, b) that McDonalds gave away their secret recipe (blanching) without which Kenji seemed to be totally stuck, and c) the vinegar trick to make it easier for us to do back at home.

He doesn't mention what's he using to cut the fries?
Say your income is $406,750 (highest federal tax bracket for an individual). Federal income tax is $118,188.75. California income tax is $37,941.45. Effective tax rate is 38%. San Francisco could add 1.5% so now we're at around 40%.

How are you getting to 60%?
probably in a similar spot you would be in without computers or the internet, both of which were derived from defense spending.
Don't worry, you are not the problem...the problem is all these morally, self righteous people doing their best to abide by the intent of the tax code even when they think the system isn't fair (or well managed)....even though you have more control in what is 'collectively decided' then they do...
Excellent question and here is the answer: http://www.cnbc.com/id/100398096
Isn't this pretty much ChromeOS?

* Obviously built with online services in mind

* OS is automatically updated from the web

* All (or most— downloads are sill local) data / config / etc. automatically synced with Google account

* Uses GDrive for managing files/folders
It's funny because you seem to be in exactly my situation, but in reverse (I'm going mac->windows). We have similar types of gripes, maybe we can help each other out.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6973925

A few suggestions:

* Use QuickTime and avoid VLC if possible. QuickTime on mac is awesome. VLC is often worse and seldom better.

* Command+Shift+4 is the only screenshot shortcut you need (toss in ctrl if you want it clipboarded, not in a file). Waaay faster than printscr+paint+paste+crop.

* OSX respects a subset of emacs keyboard movement and editing shortcuts. Ctrl+ae replace home/end. I usually remap capslock to ctrl to make them ergonomic. I like them better (no need to move hands), any way to get them on windows?

* On OSX, the universal installer app lets you list the files installed and view a textual install log. Install scripts are bash scripts. Console.app helps with both system problems and application problems (that's where stdout goes by default). Go there to start your debug journey. Haven't found the equivalent in windows.

* You can debug hangs with a time profile from Activity Monitor (yep, time profile built into the gui) or spindump. Any way to do this on Windows?

* I'm in the opposite situation wrt HFS+ and NTFS but I've had great luck with the commercial solution "Paragon" ($20, worth it). WTF is up with the whole thing where NTFS wants to spend 8 hours checking the disk every time the computer crashes? Apple figured this shit out 16 years ago.

* Command-Shift-T puts TextEdit.app in plain text mode. Hey, it's better than Notepad. What's the killer text editor that's windows only?

How 'bout you list some of those little nitpicky features you like so much from Windows. I've already written my list of things I miss from the mac side (see link, Small Gripes and More Minor Gripes sections). While I'm stuck here I might as well enjoy what it has to offer. Ditto for you, of course.
I agree with Gruber's central argument that innovation happens in small incremental steps, and I don't in any way think that 2013 was a waste of time, but you've got to admit that this has been a light year for Apple. Between November 2012's announcement of the iMac and June 2013's WWDC, there were no product announcements (well, OK, they did announce that the iPad would be available in 128Gb, but you get my meaning).

That's a very long time for them to go with nothing to say. Sure, iOS 7 must have been a substantial amount of work, I'm really liking Mavericks, and the new Mac Pro is an interesting piece of hardware - but it does feel like Apple announced less this year than they have in previous years.

So it's got me speculating on reasons why. Did Forstall's exit result in a rocky few months as jobs were reshuffled? Is there some big product that gets announced in 2014 that's been sucking up all the engineering resources? Is Apple under Tim Cook becoming a company that moves a little more slowly and deliberately?

I don't know, but it's fun to think about.
Nice. Is that O(e^n)?

Out of curiosity, why do you divide the rand() by 100 before applying the mod?
I scaled down to a ~550 sq ft unit a couple of years ago, but had an interesting realization a few months after moving in that the walk-through closet that leads to my bathroom (maybe 175 sq feet together) could theoretically work as its own micro-apartment. I closed the door, and started mentally fitting a bed, mini-fridge, microwave and hot plate, and desk into the space. It all fit, give or take a half a foot here or there, and assuming a bit of custom storage.

Admittedly, though, I must have limits for small living spaces. My favorite part of this exercise was opening the door back out into the rest of the apartment, upon which my studio suddenly felt palatial.
Or it's the risk of failing to account for human behavior...

It's not exactly a moral imperative to obsess over your HN comments, IMO.

Most likely, it's a simple bug, that seems to be fixed now :-) No ethics involved. Nothing to see here.

Btw, in the OP, I was trying to express the effect that the increased startup time affects flow and iteration. It's a similar effect to a comment breaking the layout of the page.

I just learned something new today :-)