skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I can't disagree more. I converted my gaming machine to a hackintosh several years ago. My hardware is now a few years behind but it still runs great. It sat unused for months after I built it originally because using Windows was just painful. It's been my primary machine since changing.

Mind you the I didn't select the hardware with the intention of putting Mac OS on it. Doing system updates is pretty easy process. The only issues I have are with sound kexts but it's an easy fix. Most updates pose no problems.

The process is much much easier than I used to be.
I wish there were a site for subjective opinions. I often want to know what is a better library for a specific task.
>Now the only way to make your machine faster and cost less is to write more efficient software.

Were still a long way away from that. Switching over to SSDs represents a huge speed boost, and given how young SSDs are, I suspect that there is still room for improvement in their speed. Also, there is likely improvements to be made in CPU architecture. We are still using x86, which has been improving incrementally with backwards compatible changes since the 70s. I'm not fammiliar with CPU architecture, but I suspect this means that there is room for significant improvements in terms of per transistor efficiency with the use of a novel CPU architecture. We could also see a drop in prices due to economical, not technological forces. For example, the price of a CPU is significantly higher than the cost to produce one. This is because you are paying for the development of the CPU. Without continuing fundamental improvements, we would expect to see the cost of CPUs fall to their marginal cost as development would no longer be necessary.
I love Linux, but GNU is the important part. If Linus had gone into housepainting or commercial fishing, I'd gladly be using Debian GNU/FreeBSD or Debian GNU/Minix or whatever.
Please don't link to articles behind paywalls.
"Hooked" is a fantastic guide for developing habit-forming products. It brings together design and psychology in an actionable, applicable way, providing great insights into getting your users hooked on your product. Great read!
This concept really is the holy grail of people who like to talk about startups.

I think there are some mis-perceptions about the idea. Here is how I how found the concept useful, in my company.

Startups who focus on revenue rather than growth can use this technique as a success metric (duh). Rather than using active users, etc., as proxy metrics for success, this method is a very direct one to measure how marketable your idea is. Get one success banked, then you can start to optimize -- pretty neat!

However, it's also incredibly difficult to do. So the second purpose becomes this: a proxy to evaluate the importance (in your customers' eyes) of the problem you solve. If you're solving a problem that everyone in the banking industry desperately needs solved, they will be more willing to try something that isn't feature-complete (or in existence).

So while few people will actually buy your product before it exists, using that as the goal can help you in your business development. You can figure out the problem's importance (and, believe me, it's better to solve a hair on fire problem than to solve a minor inconvenience). You can get feedback from people who are actually willing to pay -- this signals they are probably your customer! (So it helps you prioritize feedback, and sort people you talk to into actual / window-shopper type customers).

What the gurus don't tell you is this is very difficult to actually accomplish, at first. But after several iterations, you can get valuable feedback from people who are closer to having skin in the game.

And, of course, there is the chance that someone will have such a big problem that they want to pay you to solve it right now. If you can find that big fish, and their problem is similar enough (or uses core technology sufficiently similar to your "productized" version), then you can partially pay to make the product. (This comes with the caveats about how you don't want to be a slave to a single customer, etc. But we're having luck developing our core technology in the process for the big customer, and will re-use it for our product.)
All opinions are political in some sense. However the author is a very well-known writer in the field of computer programming - as opposed to a political figure or someone of an unknown provenance. If you wish to dismiss his writing as fake grass roots rather than genuine, the burden of proof is on you.
Bankruptcy was specifically created to handle such situations.
The one on managing a remote team is still my personal favorite, 6 months later:

https://zapier.com/blog/how-manage-remote-team/

It's a great primer on workflow in general, not just remote teams. I must've referred to it a dozen times at my previous gig and kept trying to model our process after theirs when I decided to just join the real thing instead.
If you're dropping that kind of money on a Chromebook Pixel, why not get a Retina MacBook or one of the high res Ultrabooks like the Yoga 2 Pro and have a bigger choice of OSes including ChromiumOS? About the only thing I can see is the 4:3 screen.
People who buy D700's don't want Titans. The Titan is a gaming card not a workstation card.

One could say your comparison is apples and... nevermind.
Using crouton you don't need to wipe it to run Linux. It installs Debian or Ubuntu into a chroot.

I agree with the SSH sentiment though.
We use DynDNS and couldn't be happier. We were tossing up between using then and Zerigo, glad we went with Dyn now!
I, on the other hand, have been using Linux on the desktop/laptop for over a decade and it's worked fine for me.

Granted, the last Windows version I used was Windows XP (pre SP 1), but I also got a SantaRosa MacBook several years ago and found OS X's WM to be fairly outdated at the time.

That being said, I am seriously considering buying a new MacBook Pro since I need a new laptop with lots of RAM.
>Or maybe the D700 is equivalent to a 7970.

The 300 - 500 dollar range consumer cards seem to crush all over the $4,000 cards for anything I might use. Are there popular apps that are locked to the Pro series cards or something? Vegas rendering, Autocad, Folding@Home, Unity Dev, etc.

Why would I want the >$3,000 D700 in the Mac over a 290x, even if the 290x wasn't 1/6th the price, since the 290x is faster? What's the market for these cards?
Check out the caret text editor. It's like STT.
I'm also not an EECS person, so I do not know if we are here yet, but at some point you will have to deal with quantum effects.
Microsoft joins FIDO group to replace passwords with public key cryptography
Canada is larger, more geographically dispersed and less homogeneous than the United States, and yet manages to have a functioning single-payer medical system.
We'll see this year when the new process pricing comes out. The specific claim was not that the cost of the wafer is higher but that the $/transistor price is the same or worse for the new processes. If that holds true, then you're done with scaling by process shrinks. (Intel doesn't publish those costs of course but both Global Foundries and TSMC do)

> But: This has been going on for more than a decade.
> The technology did not fall off a cliff and it will
> not do so in the near future.

If by this you mean that the $/transistor has been going down more slowly over the past decade, then I agree with that. The question is if that number will stop going down, and/or go up this year. That isn't a 'cliff' that is an inflection point, or perhaps a global minimum.

When that minimum is reached, the economics of the 'computer' business (scare quotes because I'm specifically referring to what is known as the PC laptop/desktop business) will change fairly dramatically.
> In this case, the original poster is clearly toeing the legal line.

If he was clearly toeing the legal line, he would have no legal risk. (Toeing the line means "conforming to the rules".)
Feedback Wanted on Python Build System
After being a bit frustrated with both command line tools such as Fabric as well as build utilities like SCons, I thought I'd spend a bit of time thinking about what would make an awesome build utility for Python. I modeled a lot of it after Rake, due to its immense popularity. However, I distinctly tried to make things more explicit and more Pythonic. I created an example script that would be fed to this new tool.

http://pastebin.com/8j8FUYSd

I'd like to hear any feedback you might have on this. Would you like a tool such as this? What do you like or dislike about this format? What features do you really like from Fabric, SConstruct, or Rake?
It was a breakdown of various ways the incredibly distorted healthcare market fails. The word 'free' is so politically overloaded that using it in multiple ways isn't a contradiction, although you could call it sloppy if you wanted.

The post does make reference to politics, but it also has cogent argument about why market conditions lead to a downward spiral of gametheory when it comes to insurance and something you only have one of, like your body.

So that's the thesis. I think he feels better because, as a free-lancer, he finally has the ability to shop for providers, instead of being locked into one because he's terrified about what 'pre-existing conditions' have come into existence since the last time he shopped.
The NSA's recommended guide for creating a secure phone (fishbowl) lists supply chain compromise as a threat. Probably because they themselves manage to infiltrate manufacturing and distribution
>Yes, because people did when copyright terms were shorter than that, and virtually all of the income from most things subject to copyright is derived in the first decade or so.

Yes the terms were shorter, but people were also not investing $200M+ per film. Now you are probably right that any given work, including $200M+ films, are likely to derive all income in the first decade, but the investment for such projects would not happen if they lost protection after a decade and people could simply start reproducing 1 to 1 copies at that point.
Yes, because when discussing the history of healthcare in this country, Mitt Romney and conservative think tanks had nothing to do with the direction of policy. You can't rebut anything he's said, but you're obviously upset that he said it anyway.
I like:

Idea --> Write Paper --> Do Research

It gives me something I can do when I can't work on the research itself (e.g., during meetings, in between interruptions, at home, etc.). And it helps me anticipate obvious questions that might detract from my result. A slide that looks like it doesn't contribute to the impact of the talk might indicate work that doesn't really contribute to the result.
The problem with shedding hardware from the Bitcoin network is that it undermines the core of Bitcoin's security.

Let's imagine that 2025, and we hit the fourth mining-rewards-halving. It's now unprofitable to mine given the existing numbers of miners, and users refuse to accept higher transaction fees, so 50% of miners exit, leaving half the profits to half the miners.

This means that 50% of the Bitcoin hardware is now on the market, being sold on the cheap. What do you need to compromise the security of the Bitcoin network? Why, 51% of the hardware--
One of the biggest disappointments for me about the ACA was that it didn't address one of the most obvious problems with the American healthcare system -- the significant discount for employer-provided healthcare.
If the difference between a sensationalist vs. reaction article is only 45 minutes I think HN is doing fairly well compared to other online communities.
Regardless of Statcounter, counting only the commercial channel sales, that too only preconfigured(most enterprise sales are customized big orders) and not counting retail sales skews the statistics by a lot. Chromebooks may be outselling Macbooks, but looking at only ""US B2B sales using distribution partners." is downright misleading.
Atlas Shrugged doesn't address IP law fully, but Ayn Rand's philosophy respects strong government enforcement of IP rights. The idea that Atlas Shrugged is anti-government is a misunderstanding.
SQL: Select only rows with Max Value on a Column
regarding ELBs, if you have a support contract with AWS you should be able to get them to "pre-warm" them if you are expecting a spike
Perhaps we should look on delivering healthcare more efficiently. Automate what you can, drive down the remaining human costs.
Five Keys to Our Long Term Survival
You'll need some killer heurstics: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halting_Problem
should: 1. Used to express obligation or duty

I see no such suggestion in the post that you are responding to. You seem to have misread it.
Every consumer protection law in existence just called and asked for their money back. Those laws exist precisely to unambiguously defeat the kind of argument you're making.
The Curious Case of Forbes: Does anyone there use something OTHER than Windows?

Seriously, guys. You reek of dad. Your ability to predict and understand the tech market is undercut by the demographic of reporters needed to furnish reporting to your markets. This is why you all understand Burberry a lot better than Blackberry, and that a lot better than any of the devices that have come out since the Bush administration.

I am replacing you with a tiny shell that accepts PayPal from Microsoft.

Thank you.
"... I’m a lifelong Democrat who supported Obama in the last two elections. I think the Federal Reserve plays an important function..."

I stopped reading here.
NASA 'super ball bot' could one day bounce onto Saturn's moon Titan
Hate to break it to you, but China is a world super-power, and they did it by exploiting the US' "free" market.
Top Movies of 2013 Trailer Mashup (according to box office records)
> Also, we should strive to have the best system and I don't think that's possible with single payer (eg Canada/uk vs France/Switzerland/Singapore/japan)

The system in Canada and the system in France are close to each other and both are miles apart from the system in the US. I agree that we should not blindly copy other countries, but if there was a successful system it would look more like the systems in Canada and France, i.e. a system in which a body like the government has a baseline affordable health insurance that average citizens can avail of, and other private companies on top that offer more privileges to those who can afford it.

In the US, even if you have health insurance there's no guarantee that healthcare costs will not wipe you out.
If you're going to dismiss most/every healthcare discussion for being political then I don't think we will get very far. The guy was apparently a healthcare actuary which gives him a lot more insight than most of us. And I think it's not too controversial that ACA had a lot in common with the Romney/heritage plans.
Wrong to fake happiness?
I wonder if it really is wrong to fake happiness? Or should we change our view of what makes us happy? Then be happy?

Im curious what HN has to say, seeing its the end and beginning of a new year.

':)'
In no particular order.

1) Exercise more

2) Get at least one internship

3) Find and make something people want

4) Make it worth my parent's while to have me home again next Christmas :)

5) Learn a new language (been playing with German on Duolingo)
Is employer-provided healthcare discounted, or merely subsidized by the employer (or both)? The plan through my employer seemed inexpensive, but they were paying a significant portion of the premium.
For starters, at least half of your US tax rates are either wrong or wrongly applied. Beyond that, you'd have to pay me to spend the time to detail all of the inaccuracies. My hourly rate starts at $300.
what do you mean by "pretending that voltage numbers and current numbers cancel out in certain ways"? The problem is certainly not that our mathematical models are insufficient. Transistor I-V characteristics have been quite complicated for several generations now. That's why circuit designers use computer simulations now, not hand-cranked calculus models.

The slow-down in processor speed despite shrinking transistor is due to physical and design limitations. For one, it used to be that you could use more transistors to build more complex pipelines, branch predictors, etc. to allow you to turn up the clock frequency. But now we've reached the point of diminishing returns on this sort of optimization. Also, increasing the frequency increases the power, which causes problems for heat dissipation and chip lifetime. So we've cut back on frequency to lower the power consumption.
So the NSA hacked the iPhone so thoroughly without help? Yikes.
And your IV and key for the AES encryption ... are you going to back that up to the cloud too? :-)
I still think you don't understand. RHEL (and thus CentOS) backports security fixes. An Apache package downloaded today from the CentOS 5 repository will have the security fixes, and many stability related bugfixes, that the latest tarball from apache.org would have, while still being an old version of Apache (and having the same configuration file syntax and working with whatever code you've deployed and tested on that version).

That's what companies are paying Red Hat for: A stable platform on which to build their business. It really is a good thing with quite a lot of value.

If you want bleeding edge versions of software, RHEL or CentOS might not be the right OS for you. But, I happen to love it for servers; I know that what I deployed three years ago is still gonna work after upgrading packages provided by the vendor. That's not something you can count on with faster moving distros, and it's why I always use CentOS (or RHEL or Scientific Linux) on my servers...while I generally use Fedora or Ubuntu on desktops.

Security is a hard thing to quantify, but I really think that a slower moving, but more carefully vetted, platform is going to be more secure. I believe this is why OpenBSD is so solid...moves very slow, but is very carefully constructed and maintained. RHEL/CentOS is somewhere in between OpenBSD and Ubuntu on that continuum, and I strongly suspect CentOS is going to have a better security record than Ubuntu.
A typical day's queue of flags on Stack Overflow is around 1000. If your flag isn't tended to the minute it's raised, it's going to be because of the 900 or so others already there taking up time from having to verify the flag reason is correct in the first place.
M-of-N transactions solve most of the trust problems with online marketplaces without having to cede total authority to the escrow service. If you want to favor the buyer in disputes a la paypal, that's easy, but the worst thing that can happen in the case of a false positive (from the seller's perspective) is the loss of a single transaction, rather than having an entire account frozen.
I made a bunch of little inane things as a precursor to a gargantuan project idea I have that will take me years to complete, and after which flops will inevitably incentivize me to jump off a large cliff.

weeee!

http://helpknow.com/apps/yayapad/
http://helpknow.com/apps/drumapp/
https://github.com/wktdev/soundstones
http://interactiveaudio.wikiaudio.org/
They sure do. We are not a superpower when it comes to how many people we put in prison. We are not a superpower when it comes to how many children die poor on our streets.

And we're not a superpower when it comes to ensuring that our population doesn't die due to lack of health care while driving up the costs for everyone else.

Each one of the issues I bring up occur because of market forces. Prisons are a booming industry (see Arizona's state prisons). Poverty has many ties to health care being market-driven as well as education.

But you don't seem interested in refuting any of my points, so I guess we're done here.
That's probably 1% of their user base if that. I'm guessing because I've only ever visited pinterest by accident and don't actually know what it's for or how it works.
What if I've never heard of Madonna? Does the law actually encode some sort of pop-knowledge into itself?

No, but the fact that the site owner is using these screenshots to advertise his service obligates him to do due diligence on the copyright status of those tracks. Coincidentally picking one of the most popular artists of the last quarter-century to promote your site rings a little hollow.

Your jurisdictional argument also doesn't hold water. First of all, the site owner was operating in the USA, so he's bound by US law. Second, buying a "blanket copyright" in Russia doesn't confer rights to sell content in other countries.
>Any scheme (market- or bureaucracy-based) that guarantees to cover everybody from healthcare costs is a fool's errand because people will spend themselves poor, lie, cheat, and steal to stay alive.

I hear talk of far-off countries, where no one goes bankrupt from medical expenses.
>> "the primary motivator StackOverflow offers to users are those very internet points"

I disagree. The reason I answer questions on SO is because of the incredible help I get from it form my own questions and those already answered. I think a lot of people contribute as a way of giving back and internet points don't encourage them in anyway. Sure there are people who internet points are important to but I would guess (and I admit I have no evidence to back this up) most of the people using SO care very little about points.
They can force you to lie. If not lying would conceivably tip off a subject of an investigation that they are under surveillance, than not lying would be in violation of the NSL. That is the entire point of the gag order.
Hey Rob, distribution is key. Facebook, Pinterest & Instagram are some of the most engaging and sticky platforms out there. If your target market does not even use those, then what chance do you have of that market finding and using what you are planning on building?
> Yes, the risk of fraudulent creation of bitcoins or of double spending of a well-confirmed bitcoin are essentially zero (assuming no major flaw in the current science of cryptography.)

This is a pretty narrow definition of fraud. Credit card fraud isn't caused by double-spending or counterfeit currency. It's caused by people stealing your credit card information. This is akin to people stealing your bitcoin wallet, as has happened many times already and will probably become even more commonplace if bitcoin takes hold.

And while cryptography seems to be strong mathematically, side channels aren't. What are the odds that if you have a mobile bitcoin wallet app, it would be resistant to all the myriad side channel attacks we know of today and so many more that are going to get invented in the future?

> Also, the odds of stolen identities (name/address/birthdate/ssn) would be zero, since those are not needed for sending bitcoins.

On the other hand, due to anonymity and irreversibility, there is nothing you can do about fraudulent transactions involving bitcoins. You probably don't even even know who took your money. So color me unconvinced me again.

tbh, I can't tell if you guys are deceiving yourselves or trying to deceive me in an attempt to keep the bubble going.
It would be cool to write an article explaining this stuff and its expected impact in terms that most software developers could understand. I love reading this stuff but putting it into context would be useful. Your response suggests you know what you are talking about but it is fairly incomprehensible to most everyone else not deep into semiconductor technologies without just looking up each term in Wikipedia.
President Obama claims the NSA has never abused its authority. That's false
The money quote:

NPD’s numbers would have us believe Chromebook’s were nearly 50 times more popular (9.6% of the market vs. 0.2%) in a segment that grew 25% from last year. That’s rather remarkable as it would suggest sales increased perhaps sixtyfold.

What else grew 60x this year, besides bitcoin and chromebooks?